Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (6 page)

The itsy-bitsy spider crawled up the water spout.
Down came the rain, and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.
And the itsy-bitsy spider crawled up the spout again.

Here you have a clear, simple story in four lines. It has a protagonist (spider), conflict (the rain), struggle (being washed out), resolution (crawled back up), and even a moral (the value of perseverence).

Here’s another story:

Once upon a time, there was a handsome young prince who lived in a shining castle. One day he mounted his beautiful white steed and rode out of the castle into the forest. Inside the forest, his horse fell into a hole and they both died.

This story has most of the elements of many stories: the classic “Once upon a time” opening, a handsome prince, a beautiful white horse, a castle, and a forest. In these elements, it’s quite conventional, but the ending is not at all what’s expected. Tell this story to four-year-olds and they’ll cry out, “That’s not a story!” They’d be right. Whatever structural elements this pseudo-story has, it can’t be called a proper story because it violates some fundamental expectations about stories.

Games have never paid much attention to the many structural requirements imposed on stories. The story of the prince riding through the forest could easily be an account of a player’s experience in a game. Players don’t complain when games jerk them through wild dramatic gyrations because they don’t expect games to follow the protocols of storytelling.

Stories are about people. This is such a simple, basic truth that it’s often lost in the high-falutin’ analysis of narrative theory. Sometimes the references to people is indirect or symbolic, as in the case of the itsy-bitsy spider, who isn’t a person but is understood by the audience to represent a person. An extreme example of this indirection is offered by the movie
Koyaanisqatsi
, which lacks a protagonist or dialogue. The people in this movie are all of us, and we are revealed by our works. The movie presents an artful sequence of images of nature contrasted with the world of civilization. Yet the story is strong and clear, and beautifully summarized in the final long, long shot of a rocket ascending higher and higher into the atmosphere and exploding. The camera centers on the largest fragment and follows it down, down, down. The symbolism is intense and powerful; this movie is about what we have become.

Concomitant with exalting the role of
people
in stories is minimizing the role of
things
in stories. You must concentrate your attention on the people in stories and simultaneously reject any significant role for things.

But aren’t there plenty of stories that revolve around things? What about The Maltese Falcon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Lord of the Rings?

No, the objects in the cited stories do not play central roles.
Lord of the Rings
, for example, is not about the ring, but about Frodo’s struggle. Replacing the ring with a magic sock or a hat or eyeglasses would not have changed the story much. Replacing Frodo with, say, Han Solo, Don Quixote, or Huck Finn would have changed the story beyond recognition.

This simple truth—that stories about about people, not things—explains the utter failure of games to incorporate storytelling in any but the most mechanical and forced manner. Games concern themselves with things: things you acquire, things you use, things you destroy, and so on. That’s why they’re so emotionally crippled—when was the last time you gave a damn about a
thing
? Games aren’t antisocial; they’re a-social. They just don’t bother with people other than as walking dolls that perform mechanical functions. The cardboard people in games do for drama what inflatable dolls do for sex.

All stories have some sort of conflict. Sometimes the conflict is direct and violent, as in
Star Wars
or
Lord of the Rings
. The good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. The good guys are handsome and noble, and the bad guys are missing some teeth and have bad breath. Youngsters with their simplistic view of the universe favor such stories. But there are also stories in which the conflict is more indirect. Sometimes the conflict is social, sometimes it’s symbolic, but there’s always conflict of some sort. The second
Jurassic Park
movie illustrates the indirection of conflict. The primary conflict is between the mathematician and the soulless businessman; the conflict is established starkly early in the movie when the mathematician tugs at the businessman’s sleeve and the businessman warns “Careful. This suit cost more than your education.” As the story progresses, dinosaurs rampage with toothy glee, chomping and stomping people in horrifically entertaining ways, but they aren’t the antagonists. Indeed, the dinosaurs are presented as something like “noble savages,” devoid of evil intent, merely acting out their reptilian instincts with dinosaur integrity. The central conflict of the movie is indirect: The businessman gives orders to his minions, and the mathematician opposes him with vain pleas and dark warnings. Spielberg could have moved all the dinosaurs offstage, saving millions of dollars, without compromising the integrity of the story—although it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.

Well, conflict at least is one place where games shine.

Not exactly. It’s true that games have lots of conflict, but it usually takes the simplest and most direct form: violence. Games are deficient in other forms of conflict, such as social conflict. The game designer’s spice shelf has lots of sugar and nothing else.

Stories are not puzzles. It’s true that puzzles often form a part of the story; indeed, puzzles play a large role in mystery stories. The puzzles in a mystery story are primarily about people, however. The bulk of the story is devoted to detailing the sleuth’s machinations in getting people to reveal crucial clues to the mystery.

But there’s also plenty of nonsocial sleuthing going on. Take the television series CSI, for example. It’s about using science to solve crimes, and it has been a big hit.

True, but the science is not what gives the stories their power. The gee-whiz technology is certainly spectacular, but the strong characters and often poignant storylines are the true strengths of the stories. Without those strong character interactions,
CSI
would be a run-of-the-mill whodunit.

A story always contains some kind of problem or challenge: How is the protagonist to resolve the conflict of the story? If this problem is an intellectual one requiring logical solution, it’s called a puzzle, but the exercise of intellectual legerdemain is seldom central to stories. Plenty of great stories do quite well without any puzzle component.

Ultimately, stories concern the choices that characters make. Indeed, the entire point of many stories is revealed through a key choice the protagonist makes. In
Star Wars
, it’s “Trust the force, Luke.” In
Macbeth
, it’s the decision to murder for ambition. In the third
Matrix
movie, it’s Neo’s decision to sacrifice himself. In many versions of the Arthurian legends, it’s Guinevere’s decision to act on her love for Lancelot. In each of these examples, the entire story builds up to or revolves around a key decision.

One of the most direct forms of entertainment is providing novel experiences. Sometimes you try out an exotic food merely for the simple pleasure of tasting something you’ve never tasted before. A great deal of music, especially popular music, relies on including odd new sounds. Rock music especially reveled in unconventional sounds: The electric guitar, feedback effects, the fuzzbox, and other innovative acoustic effects played a large role in rock music.

The visual form of this “pleasure from novelty” is spectacle: providing exotic imagery as a form of entertainment. Spectacle dominates the movies. The very first movies were spectacles without stories—trains crashing and so forth.
Star Wars
in 1977,
Jurassic Park
in 1991, and
The Matrix
in 1999 exemplify the appeal of spectacle. There’s every reason to believe that spectacle will continue to dominate the movies.

Computer games have followed a related course. The earliest computer games offered nothing more than moving squares on a television screen; the evolution of computer games has been dominated by the quest for ever more realistic graphics to provide ever better spectacle. The progress made in the past 25 years is truly astounding. Expect even greater things in the future.

All this fabulous spectacle has engendered in the minds of most younger people an unfortunate confusion between story and spectacle. Many associate spectacle with story so strongly that they believe spectacle is a necessary component of story. But Aristotle, in his classic
Poetics
, ranked spectacle as the least important of the six elements of story. (His priority list was plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle.)

A sad experience of mine forcefully demonstrates the degree to which spectacle has crowded out story in the minds of many. Once upon a time, I acquired a copy of Charlie Chaplin’s classic
The Gold Rush
. After watching it, I enthused about the beauty of the story to a young friend, urging him to come watch it with me. With some reluctance, my friend consented. Barely a quarter of the way into the movie, he stood up to leave the room. Chaplin’s great work bored him. The scenes were all “plain,” the story’s pace was torpid, and the movie had literally no color nor sound. How could I expect him to endure such a boring film? In my friend’s opinion, a movie without spectacle simply wasn’t worth watching.