The Pit & The Pendulum
Or the problem with interactive narrative
In the late 90’s, I signed up for a new MA degree course at Westminster University in something called ‘Hypermedia.’ My motive was to re-skill myself for the coming digital age and, although I achieved a distinction, it singularly failed to do that for me. What it did do was give me a taste of what was on the horizon then: the coming of social media and cyber reality, still an exciting prospect in those days. Most exciting for me, as a writer, was the idea of ‘interactive narrative’ but I quickly discovered that was by no means straightforward. Here is something I wrote shortly after I qualified that tries to get to grips with some of the central issues involved.
Mention the words “interactive narrative” to people involved in digital design and the reaction is interesting. Eyes narrow or glaze over. Faces assume the expression of someone that has just been asked their opinion of life after death.
Alternately you’ll get a knowing half smile, coupled with a slightly condescending shake of the head. It’s one of those ideas generally regarded as a conceptual cul-de-sac or, at best, a quixotic quest. The old hands have seen waves of idealistic newcomers pursue and then abandon their search for this grail and the field is littered with botched or compromised attempts: games, installations, hypertexts – all masquerading as the real thing.
Yet a certain wistfulness underlies even the most sceptical response. Like a fabulous Eldorado, everyone wishes it was a goal that could be reached.
And with good reason: our culture is founded on stories. Narrative in one form or another permeates our lives from birth and shapes the world we live in at every level. A lingering suspicion persists that any cultural artefact which cannot effectively connect with that vast reservoir of human thoughts, feelings and experiences is forever doomed to be shallow and ephemeral. And that is probably a fair description of how most of the population feel about computer games: as things that cater for essentially immature tastes.
But games are the inevitable yard-stick because they provide at this moment in time the most developed models of human-computer interactivity we have. Both in conceptual and commercial terms the games industry has best succeeded in exploiting the full range of powers that digital technology has conferred on us. Any attempt to apply that model to narrative however runs slap bang into the same paradoxes that beset a time traveller. That is because narrative belongs implicitly to the past, it refers to something that has already happened. A game or simulation, in contrast, offers only the potential for narrative, it is a present tense “event” governed by arbitrary rules of play
If you can change the plot of “Hamlet”, it becomes “something else”; it enters a state of flux in which (theoretically) anything can happen. In practice of course the alternatives are limited to choices that are meaningful for the user. Introducing competition into the equation provides that “meaning” and that’s why a recent CD ROM based on Kenneth Branagh’s film turned it into a murder mystery game.
But such solutions are rarely satisfactory. This is not just because a game version of “Hamlet” cannot provide the same kind of aesthetic experience as a performance but because the goal orientated nature of a game produces a completely different kind of emotional involvement. The virtues of games playing are transparently instrumental; they are about getting things done, making things happen. Electronic games were around long before the evolution of the personal computer and the most successful PC games have kept in touch with their roots. The athleticism of the arcade, the testing of reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination, is still the base denominator and the purest pleasure on offer.
Elements of narrative (character and setting for example) are used in this context as correlatives serving instrumental ends. They only fail when they intrude too much upon the game play which is the true reason for interaction. On the other hand, those games that purport to offer a “narrative-type experience” frustrate the user for opposite reasons: the use of puzzles and tests which obstruct the flow of action. The conclusion that there are fundamental and irreconcilable differences between narratives and games is inescapable.
And for most people this is where the quest comes to an end: with an unbridgeable gulf (once famously described as the “pit of hell”) that separates the world of games from that of stories. The unspoken assumption is that games are what computers “do best” and it is coupled with an acceptance of both the limitations of the format and its cultural significance.
The trouble with this conclusion is that it represents a stalemate. That is frustrating enough in itself but it is really only the sharp end of a deeper paradox that anyone encounters if they are drawn to digital design by its potential for creative expression.
Computers as a medium seem to offer so much. The ability to combine the three physical planes with the temporal and to move between them with dizzying plasticity and speed. The possibility of defining completely new relationships between meaning and artistic representation. And lastly, but most uniquely, the potential for meaningful intervention within those representations: so called “interactivity”. At this present time the dark photons of a monitor are the closest thing we have to a pure conceptual space.
Most digital artists grasp the possibilities quickly and a recognisable school has developed characterised by very post-modern sensibilities. Unsurprisingly it turns out to be the natural métier of those whose work tends towards the highly allusive or abstract.
Of course this could also be seen as symptomatic of something else: the contradiction implied in designing for interaction. Granting the freedom to “create” meaning within a construct is one half of a desire to abnegate authorship. Follow this to its logical end and you have the familiar fantasy of an autonomous machine.
One day we are promised unlimited powers of free-will to operate within seamless and immersive environments. The generative power of machines will match or even exceed the limits of human imagination. This “holo-deck” future may be a long way off but the state of mind is with us now – one where the constraints of technology are seen as the only barriers to creativity.
It is an attitude that reflects the schismatic position of the artist in this medium and the conflicting impulses that come into play. The urge to merge with the functionality of the machine is a strong one, particularly in a field where the line is blurred anyway between creative and instrumental roles. But the idea of authorship is equally hard to relinquish; rooted, as it is, in an artistic tradition which asserts the primacy of the special relationship between a creator and an audience.
The impression given by many digital artists is that they hover somewhere between these polarities, not letting the left hand know quite what the right one is doing. If you do grasp the nettle of full authorial responsibility, you incur some fairly radical changes in perspective. From this view-point technology can never be an end in itself but only a means to realising a new kind of “art form”. The problem consists in defining what that form is, or could be, within the parameters set by the medium.
One consequence of following this path is that you shift focus from the machine’s capacity for representation to the content itself; from literal embodiment to the area of structure and metaphor. Digital complexity, the entire multi-sensory “multimedia circus”, is relegated to a secondary place. In fact, by these standards, you could say that text-based interaction is still the most “sophisticated” model we have. But this is actually the true measure of what we aspire to.
If we genuinely believe that this is a new medium, with new modes of perception and artistic expression, the challenge is to find a way to articulate the wholly unprecedented structural and symbolic relationships it makes possible. We are talking in effect about a new “language” with its own “grammar” and “syntax”, one that is able to bear the weight of real meaning.
However refreshing it might be to embrace the individualism of art and the artists need to communicate, sooner or later such recidivism is bound to get you hauled up to answer before the commissariat of instrumentality. Naturally, because interaction (i.e. the possibility for meaningful intervention in a construct) is commonly held to be the raison d’être of digital artefacts and the standard by which they are judged.
Those reckoned to be most truly “of the medium” are also those untranslatable into any other. This was graphically illustrated by the commercial failure of the flood of multimedia CD ROM titles put out by print publishing houses trying to tap into a new market. Although the novelty factor kept sales up initially, ultimately they were just not different enough from the products they were trying to supplant. The reasons seem fairly obvious now.
The public do not want to buy books and videos repackaged for the inferior medium of a computer screen. Adding interactive elements cannot disguise the inert nature of such content. Those that did succeed were mainly reference titles, pointing to where the predominant appeal still lies. Information retrieval, data manipulation, the use of computers as tools for purely instrumental ends; this is still the main attraction for most of us. We look through and beyond the machine for our goals.
Even the hermetically sealed world of games present us with simulacrums of this type of engagement. It is axiomatic to the whole idea of interaction that we need to get something back, a reward for our input. We need to achieve a satisfaction and the only question is: what kind is on offer? Books, films and artworks provide aesthetic satisfaction but on their own seemingly self-sufficient terms. Simulations and games fulfil our instrumental needs but at the price of narrowing our emotional involvement.
We appear to have come full circle again to the intractable differences between narratives and games (read: the vast majority of interactive artefacts). This time however it might be more constructive to look at what, if anything, they have in common.
The general conception of a narrative is as a strategic sequence of events, or moments of change, linked together by causality. It is like a corridor in time which we proceed along. At any given point along this corridor, the meaning we extract is a product of relativity; looking back upon what has happened and anticipating what will occur. This constitutes our experience of the narrative and it is determined by structure, i.e. the strategic arrangement of events.
We tend think of this as a linear construct because that is the form in which we most often encounter it. An author has two hundred pages or two hours of our lives to tell us a story and it will be organised to fit within that. Our innate human conservatism (the intrinsic belief that we live in a rational and meaningful world) also dictates that we tend to like the chain of causality in our narrative to be logical and consistent.
The satisfaction of playing games derives almost exclusively from the logic of perceived cause and effect, where A is a consequence of B and so on. This seems to be the most obvious “link” between a game and a narrative and it is the one most frequently seized upon in attempts to introduce interactivity into stories. Unfortunately it is also the surest way of emphasising the differences between them.
By focusing on the chain of causality in a narrative, we inevitably accent its most linear aspect. Logical complexity is elevated above emotional complexity or any other kind. A multi-linear or branching narrative model is one result of this approach but it is an unhappy hybrid and has generally failed to catch on. (In the case of interactive “movies”, for example, both movie goers and die hard gamers preferred the “real thing”).
A plot is not a story, that is the truism behind this. A story is an idea wrapped in an aesthetic emotion. It is like the difference between a skeleton and a living, breathing body. Successful plotting should be a transparent means towards an end. Once attention is drawn towards it, our intellectual involvement is stimulated but at the price of an increasing detachment.
If a narrative is a corridor, a game by contrast could be said to take place within an arena, a space in which choices are represented and defined by a premise. That premise can be either simple or complicated (“You are a warrior surrounded by flesh-eating zombies”) and the rules governing action implicit or explicit.
Narrative too is built upon a premise which is interpolated and expanded upon to create a “world,” a frame of surrounding reference points. Events in a game take place in an arbitrary order dictated by the will of the user. Events in a narrative are dictated by the form. The ordering of events, as we said earlier, is dictated by a strategic use of time but even within those constraints their structural relationship is paramount.
To state the obvious: not every story begins at the beginning and proceeds in a logical fashion to the end. A sequentially progressive narrative is something of a rarity in literature, cinema and drama these days. Structural models have grown more and more fragmented and allusive to match the post modern gestalt.
Most of us will have started to read a book in the middle or to watch a film half way through. These acts are accompanied by a sense of transgression because we know it is not the way the author or film-maker intended us to experience their work. But isnÕt this just a matter of precedent? Up until now it has only been possible to present narrative in a linear format.
Narrative, we established, belongs to the past but our experience of it is present tense. This is most strongly evident in theatrical performances. There is a frisson about a live event, a sense that things might happen, which is absent from drama committed to celluloid or the screen. It is mostly illusory because events are usually predetermined but it is something that actors and writers exploit. The extreme example is a conjuror, someone who both invites and dares us to disbelieve.
The audience are not given the opportunity to change events in these circumstances, or very rarely, instead they are offered a sensation of spontaneity. The source of the frisson that an audience feels is the knowledge that every performance is different. Each one is, in essence, a tight-rope act where the actors wigs could fall off or the scenery collapse. Each is constituted, “made-up” at some level in front of our eyes.
This article, written in 1999, remains unfinished just as the central problem remains unresolved for me. With “see emma play” (also on this substack), I attempt to describe one possible solution: a kind of ‘storyscape’ approach but it doesn’t really address the technical problems involved. Perhaps that will have to wait for technology to catch up.