Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (7 page)

Many observers have noted that our culture is increasingly dominated by the image. Indeed, a recent book was titled
The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word
¹
. No doubt, the image plays a larger role in our culture now than at any time in the past. In many ways, this is good. Glorifying war, for example, is much harder when the news gushes with images of the horrible reality of war. This even applies in fictional representations. Old war movies showed victims clutching their chests and sanitarily falling face down, but a movie like
Saving Private Ryan
shows heads being blown off bodies and people being ripped apart with such graphic realism that a friend of mine, after watching the movie, declared that he could not see how anybody could ever again support a war.

Tremendous effort has gone into improving the quality of images. Computer graphics has absorbed billions of dollars of research and development money and consumed the energies of thousands of our brightest minds. Hundreds of people labor over the computer graphics in a major movie, and their efforts are usually rewarded with bounteous ticket sales. Television is looking forward to the rise of HDTV and the accompanying huge improvement in image quality. Electronic networks are increasing their capacity dramatically, primarily to transmit images. The text you type amounts to a few kilobytes, while images gobble up megabytes.

I won’t condemn the rise of the image in our culture, and I will not bemoan the decline of the word. What I want to concentrate on here is the way in which visual thinking has come to dominate our thinking, to the exclusion of everything else.

When I gaze upon a scene, I imagine that I’m perceiving a tiny fragment of reality—perceiving reality through the narrow window of the visual. I look at a tree and perceive so much more than the visual image. I imagine the fluids slowly creeping through its cambium, the photosynthesis taking place in its leaves, the absorption of nutrients from the soil—all these invisible processes that are central to the life of a tree. My eyes tell me only so much about the tree; there’s much more going on out of my view.

Note that my perception of the tree is informed, indeed driven, by my education. Because I have read about biology and trees and physics, I bring to bear an understanding that allows me to see deeper inside the tree. My perception of the universe is an integration of my knowledge and my senses.

Here’s an analogy: Suppose that you are watching a black-and-white movie. You see an apple presented in shades of gray, but you know that the apple must be red. Your real eyes see a gray apple, but your mind’s eye fills in the color. Now extend that analogy. What if you also perceived the smooth texture of the apple’s skin, the slow oxidation of the apple’s flesh—everything going on in that apple. By living only in the world of the visual, are you “seeing” less of the world than you could?

The Wachowski brothers created a stunning visual analogy to this process in the first
Matrix
movie. At the climax, Neo has returned from the dead and can now see the Matrix for what it is. He looks down the corridor at the three agents and sees not the corridor, but the code behind it. This image communicates the idea of seeing the processes behind reality rather than just the visual skin of reality. Ironic, isn’t it: a visual representation of an idea that attempts to get around visual thinking?

Closely related to visual thinking is spatial thinking. Spatial reasoning is one of the brain’s greatest achievements. When you reach around behind the refrigerator to retrieve the fallen spoon, you’re using spatial reasoning. People often apply spatial reasoning to nonspatial problems, as evidenced by such statements as “Joe and I aren’t very
close
friends” or “Your statement is
wide of the mark
.” Spatial reasoning used metaphorically, as in these examples, works well. The problem comes when people apply it too literally to storytelling. Spatial reasoning is out of place in the universe of drama because drama is about people, not things.

In my designs for interactive storytelling, I have always used a simple arrangement: Space is composed of individual stages with no spatial relationships
whatever between stages. In my definition, a
stage
is simply a location containing actors and props. Actors simply disappear from one stage and reappear on another. Inside a stage, all actors are able to interact with each other without any spatial considerations. It’s a simple, robust model and it closely approximates the way in which space operates in most stories. This broader definition of “stage” can be applied in any storytelling medium: theater, cinema, literature, or interactive storytelling.

Most people react to my claim that stories don’t rely on spatial considerations with incredulity, but consider the interactions between actors on a stage. How many times do the spatial relationships affect those interactions? Don’t think in terms of movies because their visual element automatically includes spatial factors, thereby biasing the analysis. Consider a medium in which spatial factors are not automatically included: literature.

For example, the
Odyssey
is at heart a story of a journey around the Mediterranean. Isn’t that fundamentally spatial? Indeed, the journey motif shows up repeatedly in literature, from the
Odyssey
to
Huckleberry Finn
to
Star Wars
. But are the spatial motions central to the story? Are they not merely transitions from one stage to another, without any genuine spatial content? The best evidence for the chimerical nature of spatial factors in stories is the fact that the actual spatial relationships are never specified. Odysseus traveled for many days and came to the Land of the Lotus Eaters—where is that? How far away is it from Scylla and Charybdis? Is it closer to Troy or to Ithaca? These relationships aren’t specified in the
Odyssey
—because they’re not important.

The same thing goes for other journey stories.
Huckleberry Finn
takes place on a specified river, with specified places that could, I suppose, be established on a map. Yet many of the details just aren’t there. Where was it that Huck saw the body of his father? And how far away was that from the town where they tarred and feathered Huck’s shyster buddies? Or the place where the feud led to the murders of his hosts? The reader doesn’t know because those spatial relationships are irrelevant to the dramatic matters addressed in the story.

Even within a stage, spatial relationships are unimportant. Some people have contested this claim, observing that Cary Grant has to get really close to the actress if he’s going to kiss her. But in literature, authors never write “Overpowered with passion, he walked over to her, seized her in his arms, and
kissed her frantically.” No, the sentence is more like “Overpowered with passion, he seized her in his arms and kissed her frantically.” Look at it from the other extreme: “Overpowered with passion, he walked over to her, seized her in his arms, moved his head directly in front of hers, rotated his head slightly to avoid a collision of noses, then closed the gap between her lips and his and kissed her frantically.” Pretty silly, eh? Spatial factors just aren’t important in drama. If an actor needs to alter a spatial relationship to get something done, he simply does it, and you don’t need to worry about the mechanical details of how that’s carried out. Stories are about the exercise of emotion, not musculature.

Consider the
Star Trek
universe, developed over the course of more than three decades by hundreds of people. Fat encyclopedias define and list all manner of details of the
Star Trek
universe. You can read technical specifications for all kinds of starships and wondrous devices. There are detailed histories of dozens of different species and their homeworlds. Yet this stupefying mountain of data lacks one of the simplest of all documents: a map. Nobody can tell you whether the planet Vulcan is closer to the Klingon homeworld or to Earth. Where is the planet Andorrea? How do you get to Raisa or Cardassia? There are literally hundreds of stories from the
Star Trek
universe, but a map has never been necessary to understand the stories.

Just as stories break up space into discrete chunks called stages, they play havoc with time—breaking it up, jumping backward and forward, and skipping it altogether. Actors are shown embarking on a journey and arriving at their destination; the time the journey itself consumes is simply skipped over. Years are disposed of with the note “Many years later….” Simultaneity is presented sequentially with the simple phrase “Meanwhile, back at the ranch….” Flashbacks jerk you backward in time, and then return you to the present without so much as a by-your-leave. Dramatic time just doesn’t behave like physical time; it follows whatever course the story requires.

Fortunately, temporal reasoning facilities aren’t as unconsciously pervasive as spatial reasoning facilities, so people seldom have difficulty appreciating the liberties storytellers take with time. Nevertheless, computer game designers contemplating the problems of interactive storytelling should disencumber themselves of the old notions of physical time that so dominate games.

This chapter reveals no grand theory of narrative. Instead, it offers a number of separate points about story that are important in considerations of interactive storytelling. Storytelling is so deeply entwined in human nature and cultures that I doubt whether the true essence of stories can ever be nailed down. If you mean to build interactive storytelling systems, however, these few points at least should be clear in your mind before turning to the matter of interactivity.

INTERACTIVITY IS WITHOUT DOUBT
the most grossly misunderstood and callously misused term associated with computers. Everybody has been using the term for so long that people are quite sure of their appreciation of interactivity. The problem is that everybody seems to have a different conception of interactivity, and most descriptions are fuzzy and accompanied with lots of arm-waving.

Here’s a prime example taken from a recent book,
Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
¹
:

Interaction can be described as many things. Catchwords abound: “engaging,” “immersive,” “participatory,” “responsive,” and “reactive.”

Interactivity is a continuing increase in participation. It’s a bidirectional communication conduit. It’s a response to a response. It’s “full-duplex.” Interaction is a relationship. It’s good sex. It’s bad conversation. It’s indeterminate behavior, and it’s redundant result. It’s many things, none of which can be done alone. Interaction is a process that dictates communications. It can also be a communication that dictates process. It provides options, necessitates a change in pace, and changes you as you change it.

Readers who are revolted by this description’s semantic smarminess may skip to the next section. If, however, you did not feel your gorge rising while reading the above, read on!

Engaging:
It’s true that interactivity is engaging, but then, so is a good movie. Movies aren’t interactive, however. (I’ll demonstrate this point a few pages further.) There’s no value in characterizing interactivity by a trait (engagingness) widely shared by other media.

Immersive:
This attribute confuses sensory completeness with interactivity. Immersiveness is an attribute of 3D graphics environments, which immerse the user in a visually complete and consistent space. But 3D graphics are neither necessary nor sufficient for interactivity; indeed, the two have little to do with each other. You can have highly interactive situations with pure text, and you can have truly crappy interactivity with a 3D engine.

Participatory:
This attribute involves a common misunderstanding. A participant plays a part in some event. Being a part of the event does not imply any interaction: You can participate in the music by dancing along with it, but dancing to music is not an interaction. You can participate in pushing a car, but there’s no significant interaction in pushing something. Interaction entails a lot more than simply being a part of something.

Responsive:
This attribute hits on a fragment of the truth, but remains too vague to illuminate the nature of interactivity. Yes, interactivity requires responsiveness, but it’s the character of that responsiveness that conveys the value of interactivity.

Reactive:
Again, this attribute is partially correct—but don’t make the mistake of confusing reaction with interaction. Reaction is a one-way process; interaction is a two-way process. Two people interacting are engaging in a series of reactions to each other. Reaction alone is only a subset of interaction, however. And intense reaction is not the same as interaction; you can’t turn reaction into interaction merely by turning up the volume. Reaction is to interaction as moving your left foot is to dancing.