In your sad machines, you’ll forever stay

I will frequently refer to Chris Crawford on this blog, so it is probably important I explain that before things go too far. A few years ago it occurred to me that most of the games I loved as a child were essentially books which you had to work to get to the next page. I fell in love with these games because of the well defined worlds and characters, the humor or wit of the writing, and the thrill of unlocking something new. Even after I knew all the answers I could still replay them over and over simply because I enjoyed being in the worlds depicted so much. I suppose examples would be good here, so I am talking specifically about 1990’s LucasArts adventure games as well as Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory, and Thief (Only the story of Thief is linear, and it hurts me even imply it may be lacking somehow). Other games which I have noted others having similar experiences with are FF7 and Chrono Trigger. Games with higher levels of interactivity, such as Morrowind and (I had said GTA here but I just can’t bring myself to do it, explaining why will be the subject of a post soon.) I have found I never complete. Left unscripted, current games can only allow for a very small range of actions. Most of these involve killing things in various ways. More interesting interactions requires following a script as we cannot fully simulate things like character conflict without over simplification. The more involved the story, the characters, and setting, the more linear the game becomes until you reach a slide show with some rest stops in puzzle land.

Just as a note, here I am talking about interactivity related to the actual narrative. Creating deep levels of interactivity in gameplay and throwing in awesome cutscenes between levels which have no direct relation to the actions of the player does not count as having interactive narrative.

Now I have not gotten around to Mr. Crawford yet, but I wanted to lead up to how I came about reading some of his books. After this revelation about the linear nature of games I began to wonder about a game which held a truly interactive narrative, one where the player was inserted in as a character in what was essentially a virtual world. This, it seemed to me, should be the ultimate goal of gaming and I felt I had been very clever in figuring this out. Then I began to look around online for any research on such an interactive world and came across the idea of interactive storytelling. As anyone who has read a few articles on the subject knows, Chris Crawford comes up a lot. It seems my great idea had already occurred to him, somewhere around the time I was learning the letters of the Alphabet. I refer you now to Wikipedia for an overview of what he has done and some links to current projects. (Link)

He essentially looked at gaming in the late 80’s and predicted the industry would end up where it pretty much has, in an endless stream of games providing the same basic forms of interaction. I recommend reading over what he has to say to anyone interested in game design as he has been thinking about questions the general industry is just beginning to ask for over a decade. The problem, though, is there are few solid answers to these questions. As he has noted, games today are about things, and stories are about people. For us to create interactive stories we don’t need complex physics engines but personality engines. What holds us back here became apparent to me a few weeks into my first A.I. class in college; even our most complex A.I. systems today are really just nested if/else conditions. There are tricks to make the conditions more nature, the product of heuristics or multiple values, but this just makes a binary conditional seem less so to the user, it paints the tunnel on the rock on the train tracks, but a painting has no depth. The other challenge facing interactive storytelling is the lack of natural language parsers. Until we can speak to the characters and they can understand us, there cannot be a truly interactive story, at least in my opinion. People have been trying for sure, the best example I have found is Façade.

I think in the short term we must look to something between the raw action of Space Invaders and the golden dream of a true People Game. Portal proved to the industry that a game without proper guns and a focus on atmosphere could win the hearts of the gaming public. Now we need to move beyond the physical puzzles of Aperture Science start trying to create games about ideas and thought. I am liking my inside the girl’s mind game idea from yesterday right now, but if you want a older example, see Chris Crawford’s own game, Gossip. We have our violence machines, our physics machines; we need to create emotion machines, engines of ideas and feeling.