I think the main concern should be “reaching to a state of equilibrium” while putting a few more grams of weight on interactivity because that’s what distinguishes a game from a novel, a picture or a video. I love interactivity and i’m not quite sure which draws me to that world; my desires or the story. But probably i wouldn’t even enjoy the story if i didn’t find something to relate to, just like i wouldn’t when i’m reading a novel, unless it is a masterpiece like a painting of Raphael.

We engage in a game with our body and soul. We don’t just lean back and get intoxicated, but we participate and the most importantly we play! And computer is the best tool yet invented because of that =)

Two examples that I used in particular were Wing Commander and Morrowind, which are good examples of strong authorial control and player generated narrative, respectively. In the end, it’s hard to find games where interactivity and narrative are balanced well, and I believe a game which does so well is Indigo Prophecy.

I would be happy to get your feedback on that post of mine, and if you have time you can read it here…

http://mentisworks.blogspot.com/2008/08/game-narrative-internal-struggle.html

In fact, my entire “interaction” with games tends to be on such a phenomenological level. And I love it that you brought this up, because I think I might have given up on the whole thing. That is, the whole nudging people in that direction idea, not on the approach itself though.

So while it remains important to differentiate between interaction, a rather minimal and basic concept, and engagement, I agree with you that the latter is of greater importance in designing a game. Nevertheless, the aspects of interactivity and the basis on which that interactivity is formed serve as a unique attribute to games which present this as a fascinating new medium of creative expression for me.

Riding the coat-tails of your previous post, I must say that Morrowind provided me with the right combination of variables to generate that type of engagement. Though I understand your criticisms of the TES series, Morrowind had me so hooked that I played the game for about two years. Other adventure games have had a similar effect on me, but that’s another tangent.

The point is, that over the years I have noticed a trend in myself to try and experience media such as games and movies without letting myself get in the way. As a result, I have been known to think much more positively of certain works than most of my friends and acquaintances. That’s fine though, because I think I get a lot more out of watching/playing these things, while they just sit there complaining and not having as much fun with it. I think that going about experiencing media this way presents a great deal for us to gain, and nothing to loose.

So thank you for writing this post. Oh and just to clarify, phenomenology remains at the forefront of contemporary philosophy, along side philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy. For one of the most notably philosopher of our time in this vein look up Albert Borgmann (a student of Martin Heidegger’s and the teacher of my philosophy professor ^_^).

@Lewisham - I think you’re bang on with the idea that we need realized ‘games’ not simply ‘worlds’. The only reason I used ‘world’ to describe the experience of engagement is because the word ‘game’ is so encompassing and vague that it’s difficult to be very specific with it. I’m obscenely envious that you’ll be working with Michael Mateas - his ideas are wonderfully creative.

@Michael - I absolutely agree that these aren’t either/or distinctions … I hope that I didn’t argue my point in that way. In fact, my thesis in this article is more that thinking about games as being ‘author-controlled’ and ‘player-controlled’ leads us away from much more crucial questions about games/art in general. If it were really about author control, then reading a book would be considered the ultimate form of authorial power - we can’t change the words on the page. But we know that’s not the case - some authors create worlds (books, novels, games, films, plays, etc) that evoke the audience’s imagination in such a way that the audience feels as if they’re participating in the story. That’s the thesis I’m after here.

I get your comparison with Brecht, I think.. and I suspect that process happens in all of the arts, including games. Ico is a great example of how narrative and dramatic style was interpreted from Eric Chahi’s ‘Another World’ (Out of this World), but in a completely unique way. I just wish I knew more about Brecht - but I’ll have to leave it to you guys to explain him to me!

@Denis - While I can’t comment on Brecht or Handke (but I will read about them while I get a chance!), I find that some of my most enjoyable experiences have been with games, often developed by boutique studios or small teams, that have ‘failed’ because their vision was too grand. I enjoy playing something that takes a radically different vision and runs with it, even if it stumbles along the way due to poor execution. While I can’t think of any perfect example, The Faery Tale Adventure series had something going for it - the game tells the adventure in the past tense while you play it, as if each of your actions are being recorded in a book. Neither are great games to be sure, but they were on to something, I think…

@Justin - I wish I could cut and paste the first paragraph of your comment into my article. I couldn’t agree more with you - “The ability to act and experience the response to that action is incredibly powerful IF we really learn how to use it in a more experiential manner.” That ‘if’ is the crux - if the story told is one that doesn’t engage the player in an ‘experiential’ manner, then all is lost. Rashomon and Citizen Kane aren’t just interesting editing/storytelling exercises - they’re also great stories. Part of that story is the way the narrative is executed.. as a series of flashbacks, changes of perspective .. but the entire thing hinges on telling the kind of story that people can dig their fingers into. And within that, the narrative style transforms the way the story is told and makes it more interesting. And if we take the family idea, which is great (reminds me of American Beauty), telling that story through perspectival switches would be a wonderful way of doing it - but only if the family’s story was worth role-playing at all. If it isn’t, if the family’s characters don’t grab the player, it just becomes an academic exercise or fruitless plot.

Wow! Took me almost an hour to respond. Like I said, I’m not proposing that I’m more knowledgeable than anyone else in the thread - I just wanted to propose my own theory of interactivity and see what it gets us. And from the quality of responses we’ve put together, it’s looking great!

Recently I played (Which seems like an entirely inaccurate word) Masq (http://www.alteraction.com/) on the surface it’s a fairly straightforward branching story made up of discrete scenes; a choose-your-own-adventure. It’s possible to be entertained by a single play through from introduction to conclusions, but as each choice you make leads to a different range of choices in the future, and as each character responds in a consistent manner to your actions, it is much more meaningful to play multiple times. Gradually uncovering more about each character and how they react under different circumstances, there is no single defining truth but a range of potential truths.

I think maybe we should be looking at games to provide narratives that hinge on this multiplicity of truth, through direct interactivity. Where your understanding of the world develops as you experience the consequences of your choices; see how people’s motivations and actions change based on what you do.

It’s not about remaking a choose-your-own-adventure game, but about making a game about exploring the range of potential outcomes from any single decision. Television series spend hours building up webs of character interaction, layers of subtext and hidden motivation but games have a much better format for that, one where we can explore it at our own pace, where we can witness out actions affecting the world around like ripples in a pond. Such games could help us learn more about our place in the world, the consequences of our actions, and our responsibility to others.

Imagine a family gathering handled in such a game, we could take on the role of a family member and through our actions and their consequences we would learn much about the family itself and our place in it. Do we reveal our brother’s homosexuality or our mother’s affair, or do we keep their secrets and if so what does that do to the family dynamics? How does our father react to each of these revelations and what do we learn about his character from those reactions?

These wouldn’t be stories in the traditional sense, though it would still be a narrative of a sort, it would be closer to Rashomon than Citizen Kane, but no less powerful for it.Maybe that’s where we go astray, assuming that established rules still hold for a new medium.

I think what I’m looking for in this games narrative debate is common ground, or at least a few areas where these theories may converge. It’s seems unlikely to me that anyone has a monopoly on good ideas. It’s not so much “why can’t we all get along,” but more “let’s try these ideas and see how they work and what we can learn.” Player-focused constructed narrative is a relatively new idea that will surely have something to offer, even if we ultimately decide author-controlled narrative works better.

What’s intriguing about this example is that Brecht himself probably saw the flaws in his theories of the verfremdungseffekt and Epic theatre–it took someone else who became enamored with his idea to really push the envelope.

I imagine in the gaming world it would take the exact same parallel approach. A larger game would never be able to pull all these ideas off and still function, but a smaller, more boutique game may at least attempt more.

If anything, the attempt would at least show us how it succeeds and fails.

I’m bringing over something I recently posted in the comments at my place, so apologies if you’ve already read this. At the risk of oversimplifying (and a bit of fence-sitting) it seems to me these narrative ideas should be seen as both/and rather than either/or.

It seems to me that if Redding/Hocking and others move in the direction I described in “Narrative manifesto” (a direction I find exciting for what it promises), such an approach does not necessarily invalidate other more authorial-controlled approaches to narrative design. Ultimately, all these ideas will be thrown into the big mix, and the ones that work best will be the ones we build on. It’s possible to see elements of one influencing and being adopted by the other.

This sort of cross-fertilization is one of the best outcomes of “big ideas” in the arts, and that’s why I’m so delighted by the hard thinking so many smart people are applying to game narratives. It’s not a perfect analogue, but if you look at Bertolt Brecht’s influence on the performance arts, I would say roughly 50% of his ideas “stuck” and the rest are still sort of floating around. I don’t agree with some of his ideas myself, but others I have fully embraced and borrowed shamelessly.

I just think it’s very rare for a big movement in the arts to be adsorbed whole cloth. The impact is usually more like a meteor collision, if that makes any sense at all.

Ahhhhh, I see what you were getting at now.

The funny thing is, we don’t really disagree, I just stumbled over the words. I wonder if there’s an academic term that would unambiguously describe things. The vocabulary of ludology is still too small or not permeated gaming circles enough!

In which case, I’m going to say that while we need fully realised *games*, we don’t need full realised *worlds* for this to work. A game like Passage , while deliberately arty, illustrates this beautifully. It’s not a world you believe exists, but it’s one whose agency continues all the way through, and you’re able to engage and extract meanings and feelings from it.

The flipside would be something like Facade, which is a fully realised world, and creates the same environment because of the agency.

Agency is the key thing to this “engagement”, and I think most in the academic narrative research community believes that, so people aren’t really “barking up the wrong tree”. I certainly don’t think that research in this area is blinkered to the issue (on the contrary, Facade would have been a great PhD thesis without the game: the narrative technology would have been more than enough).

Whether a more myopic view is taken during real game dev, I don’t know. I think a lot of these things, particularly pertaining to narrative, are constrained in industry because of the time and money involved in the R&D for very unmarketable features. Academia will find workable solutions now that there are places with the focus for it (such as the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz). Once those start coming out, games built around that technology will begin to appear, and studios can focus efforts on building agency into those games.

DISCLAIMER: I’m off to study, hopefully with Mateas at the EIS, this Fall, so I have a biased view of these things!

I have to admit that The Longest Journey is on a very short list of fully living, breathing, worlds for me. It is not a simulation. It is not fully interactive in terms of player-game control. It is not a sandbox. Yet, it pulls me into the world in a way that few other games ever have. I think you’ve hit on a really important point - that somehow the mythos of the game matters greatly, and without a consistent and rich mythology or cosmology, the dialogue/stories/interactions don’t seem to matter much. The rest of the aspects you mention are equally important - they set the context for the game. All of those things put together, I think, are a ‘world’.

And linearity has become a swear-word in computer/video games for many of the same reasons. If a character is rich, their world is rich, and the story being told is deep and compelling, I’m not sure that not being able to pick which place on the map I go next matters so much. Now, in the context of a game where non-linearity is part of the play specification, like the Ultima series which is predicated upon the idea of exploration and discovery, then yes - it’s going to matter a heck of a lot. But creating a non-linear story for the sake of it is a cheap novelty.

Thanks for the input, and reminding me of The Longest Journey - it’s a powerful world that I should have remembered sooner.

@Roger - My thanks goes to Michael for pointing out the issue in the first place. Glad that it at least made some sense to you!

@Cyranix - I fully agree with you … although I do have to admit that there are many games out there that I can establish a rapport with. Although it’s a little known gem, ‘Heart of Darkness’ for the PS1/PC is a great example of how simple player-game interaction and an enjoyable character/story form a rich dialectic. One of my goals in the last few years has been to go into my collection find and talk about games that do what modern games don’t do. Thanks for the reply.

@Lewisham - I understand your point, I think. I can see how physical interactivity and engagement appear to be different things. But for the sake of clarity, let’s imagine this example: you’re listening to a piece of classical music, and it’s not doing much for you. I say, ‘Try to listen to the story it’s telling’, or ‘Listen to the way the solo flutist makes the piece feel lonely, forlorn’. When you really engage with the music, you start to see (or hear, imagine) things you couldn’t possibly have seen/heard/imagined before. The music starts to evoke a story of a lonely traveler, etc. And the more you invest yourself in that piece, the more you get out of it. That really is a form of interactivity - the piece is giving you something, and you’re using it to transform how you view the piece, and now the piece sounds completely different. And the cycle starts over again. Engaging with anything is an interactive experience because the nature of the thing you’re engaging with changes. If we think about a film or game as an external force that we allow into us, then yes, it’s certainly not engagement.. I agree with you there. That’s consumption. But when we think about it as a dialogue between the viewer and the medium it certainly is interaction, I think. Thanks for the response Lewisham - I think you hit the nail on the head as far as how the vast majority of gamers would see interactivity.

@Denis - I’m looking forward to reading your post. It got me thinking on the drive home because I kept asking myself, ‘Is Denis’s feeling of disconnect different from anyone else’s? Do I find the romantic stories in games compelling either’?

I’m also of the school that sees ‘optionalism’ a growing problem in games, not to mention society in general. If I’m permitted to generalize a bit, players seem to think that a cutscene or a dialogue sequence yank the controls out of their hands. They want the option to skip it completely, or control the entire sequence in every way possible. And I empathize with that in many ways. But when I read a book, I certainly don’t say, “Dostoevsky got this sentence all wrong! If only I could re-write Crime and Punishment, I’d finally be able to enjoy it!” That kind of thinking bothers me, and it’s all-too pervasive in gaming. Games, to me, are totally interactive experiences - but not because I can make the plumber move, as Ben put it

And yes - a novel or enjoyable character does a lot for me also. The relationship between Pey’j and Jade is an interesting one, mostly because it’s got a lot of unspoken tension. The relationship between Yorda and Ico is different, and even more unspoken, and I think that’s part of the appeal for me. It requires me to imagine how they see each other, what their world is like for them now that they’re together, etc. Thanks for the reply Denis - I’ll head over to your blog now!

What I understand by this ‘engagement’ is the sort of feeling I get with The Longest Journey universe, the engagement that drives me and many others to talk endlessly on forums about the plot twists, characters and how the story might continue. And the sort of engagement that prompted me to make notes about Final Fantasy X. The things that engage me about games like these is the fact they have coherent, consistent world models and mythoi (plural of mythos, apparently!). What I mean is that they’re set in completely different universes, have their own world map, place names, races, societies, species, architecture, culture etc etc. Those kinds of game appeal to me most - but that’s a subjective thing, I suppose. For all games, not just fantasies, the characters and their stories and their goals have to engage us in a similar way.

And yes, I agree that this - this engagement - is more important than ‘interactivity’, but then, I’m in a radical minority that doesn’t believe in free will, and therewith, believes that interactivity in games is a farce. I like my stories linear. If a game asks me, “What should the character do?” I just want to say, “It’s your character. You tell me. I’ve only known them a few hours!”