What's the point of interaction? was: Dialogue

[Kenneth Lu <kenlu@MIT.EDU>]

At 9:16 -0800 1/29/01, Dan Lyke wrote:
>Morbus Iff, of disobey.com and gamegrene.com fame, posted it at least
>to me, and I think here too.

I'm flattered.. It was really just a random ramble.. But I guess 
since the point was to get people to tell me what they think about 
the topic (and to think about it themselves), I'm glad to be 
successful! :)

At 9:16 -0800 1/29/01, Dan Lyke wrote:
>I'd argue that both of those paths have actually been pursued pretty
>thoroughly, they've lead to the current state of gaming, and we're not
>going to make progress until we ask a different set of questions,
>starting with:
>
>    How can interaction make a story more compelling?

Actually, I was pondering over this last night, and that's actually 
precisely the question I'm actually interested in! :)

That is, I thought about my idea about simulated worlds and whatnot 
and so forth.. and it just occurred to me to ask: What's the point?


I mean, no matter what we do, the end goal is to somehow convey our 
message or our feelings, right?  That's pretty much what 
storytelling.. or any narrative.. is all about, when you get down to 
the core.


1) empathy

In a typical FPS, for instance, the author-scripted story may be 
decent (or bad).. and certainly a large part of the point of the game 
is not story-related at all.. but purely "game"-related.  Even so, I 
think that the interaction can contribute to the story element to 
some degree by making the player relate to the main character more.

This is presented especially prominently in the text-based 
pseudo-interactive story Photopia, which I recently discovered: 
http://adamcadre.ac/photopia.html
There, you have a story which is basically linear and not actually 
very interactive.. but even the illusion of interaction makes you 
relate more to the characters you "play", and this has a strong 
dramatic impact.

2) understanding through manipulation

If we consider something like SimCity or Civilization (or presumably 
the Sims, which I haven't played), what's the point?  The message? 
I'd say that the message there is a view of how interactions in the 
world work.  The author imposes their own view of the underlying 
mechanisms of the world when they write the parameters and algorithms 
of the simulation.

When Civ has flying to Alpha Centauri or conquering the world as its 
two ways of winning, that's expressing a form of value system, I 
think...  But that can be done just as well in a non-interactive book.

Where the interaction really comes in is how the simulations act as 
educational tools in helping the player to learn about the nature of 
interactions in the world.  This is a situation where letting the 
player manipulate the variables and whatnot ease understanding... 
Much the same way that we had high school science labs and such.

3) multiple viewpoints

Interaction allows us often to view the story from multiple 
viewpoints, but that's really something that can be done just as well 
at least most of the time through non-interactive non-linear 
storytelling..


So what other things do interaction really bring to storytelling 
aside from empathy with the main character and better understanding 
through manipulation?


At 9:16 -0800 1/29/01, Dan Lyke wrote:
>And we have to ask "how can we make _story_ more compelling" because
>hoping that story is somehow magically going to appear out of
>simulation is utter hogwash and a pipe dream. Heck, how often does
>story appear out of life? How close to reality do "based on a true
>story" movies ever come? Not very, because life, like simulation,
>mostly just isn't all that interesting.

Yeah, I totally agree, actually, but I think that the traditional 
idea of a "story" isn't the only thing that can come out of this.  I 
mean, Civilization doesn't really tell any "story", but it does have 
a lot of messages.


I guess the thing I'm really curious about is whether there's a 
middleground between telling a narrative and expressing your opinion 
through your choice of the setting, background, and the way the 
interactions work.

Am I making sense or am I just a newbie totally on crack?

-ToastyKen

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| Kenneth Lu - kenlu@mit.edu - http://www.mit.edu/~kenlu/ |
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| "Life is far too important to be taken seriously."      |
|                                                         |
|                                          -- Oscar Wilde |
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