Playability 1b

I borrowed a small pile of books from the library and am now engaged in reading the first couple of chapters of Chris Crawford on interactive storytelling by (oddly enough) one Chris Crawford. The first section was an interesting discussion of the development of storytelling and the story - how they first evolved as a way of communicating complex sequences of knowledge to impart the whole of a macro concept, rather than having to explain each bit, then how they link together in an individual way.

In the chapter called 'Story', he reviews a few vital elements of stories (he doesn't necessarily be differentiating between narrative and game, but between story and game - I'm not sure whether/how there's a difference here - the other readings seem to think there's a pretty big difference, but he seems to be tackling them as essentially the same thing - but where narrative is a formalised version of a story - such as literature.

Anyway, I felt some of Mr Crawford's comments were useful and comprehensible, so here's a summary:

• Strong structure: Stories are complex structures that must meet many hard-to-specify requirements
• People: Stories are about people (not necessarily human people)
• Puzzles: Not a necessary component of stories but may appear in certain genres, such as crime novels. Possibly OuLiPo literature falls into this category - but very much in the minority and not a defining trait, although it probably is for games (is this debatable??)
• Choices: Both stories and games concern the choices made by characters
• Spectacle and visual thinking: Not a requirement. Tends to take over modern movie-making and is very important in games (as a means of creating more and more realistic and interesting game environments, drawing the user more and more into a make-believe world) - Visual thinking should not dominate storytelling
• Spatial thinking - Stories take place on stages, not maps - stories don't need to be too specifc about interaction with spaces - a vaguish "he went from here to there" suffices, without need for explanation of where here and there are in relation to each other and to other places. Distances, orientation etc. are optional
• Temporal discontinuity: Time in stories gets crumpled up and stretched out at will - years leapt in a single bound, slow seconds taking minutes to read about. Game time still largely deals in set increments, although this probably isn't really necessary, and some games allow players to monkey with (a) the overall speed of time passing and (b) to leap ahead in the game to a point in the future.

His definition of interactivity is pretty good too:

A cyclic process between two or more active agents in which each agent alternately listens, thinks and speaks.

He also makes a nice point about the limitations of interactive storytelling:

Movies aren't interactive, and interactive storytelling will never have the highly polished internal structure that movies have.

That is, it would be pretty much impossible to devise a really 'tight' structure for an interactive narrative because there are so many paths it could take - you don't know what's gone before, or what's gone after. The only way to achieve this would be to hugely limit a user's options at each stage and map out every possible variation, which would be time-consuming to the point of idiocy.

Ewwwwww! He's got it all wrong re: "second-person insight" - he claims that every artist worries about how an expression will be perceived by the audience. What complete and utter rubbish. Using his terms, entertainers worry about this - they have to or they starve; artists don't give 2 figs for the audience - only the work matters. What the work is and the style of it may be influenced by decisions relating to popularity, but an artist focuses on the work, its structure and how to make it right not how to make it popular.

Last bit for this book - losing my respect for this author (my respect for his proofreader went about an hour ago). His definition "for videogames as they are actually played"

A form of interactive entertainment involving simple and/or violent themes, relying heavily on cosmetic factors, in which players must exercise precise hand-eye co-ordination, puzzle solution, and resource management skills

This seems to me simplistic and somewhat naiive - certainly it may describe some games, but given the huge diversity of game types and complexity, I think this falls short of the mark for a genre definition.

*sigh* Think I'll hurl this book at the wall and go back to the "official" readings.