FW: Film Noir Simulation

["Laura J. Mixon-Gould" <ljm@digitalnoir.com>]

on 2/6/01 10:46 AM, Dan Lyke at danlyke@flutterby.com wrote:

> WFreitag@aol.com writes:
>> One suggestion: as a player, I'm really sick of being the
>> detective. Detectives don't have any fun, they just clean up
>> everybody else's mess. Can I please, just this once, be one of the
>> mobsters trying to scheme, cheat, and murder my way to the top?
> 
> So having a two-layered system, one the classic lemonade stand
> simulation/game which the player interacts with as they try to build
> their crime empier, and another as the story of the detective as the
> detective interacts with the world that the player is involved in
> (although not necessarily with the player) seems to have some
> conceptual merit. You can extract elements of the simulation play to
> look for cues on how to better pace the storytelling without actually
> having to make the story interactive.


I've been thinking a lot about how to infuse the feeling of _meaning_ that
story gives with interactivity, and I think that in order to get good story,
what you need at the foundation is to let the player build his or her own
story -- but the true emotional impact on others of his or her actions must
be there.

Iow, if you're going to build a crime empire, you have to deal with the fact
that the men you're killing have wives and kids and lovers and moms and dads
who are all grieving and enraged that you've robbed them of their loved one.
Or you have to deal with the fact that the drugs you just helped bring into
the country are ending up in the veins of your cherished son, when he dies
of an overdose, or whatever.  That's why story works.

Storytellers have to walk a very careful line between what is true and what
is real.  We exaggerate, simplify, and distort the features of real life
that cause people worry, pain and anger, and try to help them winnow their
way through to some greater meaning.  The aha! feeling you get from good
fiction can't come from simply figuring out the rules of the game and
winning, but from grokking it at a deeper, unconscious level.  Realizing at
the end that you may have lost when you thought you were winning, or won
when you thought you were losing.

That's what we have to bring to the interactive artform, in some fashion or
another.



-l.
-- 
Laura J. Mixon      *  ljm@digitalnoir.com      *  www.digitalnoir.com