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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Drama in IF: Limited?
Message-ID: <G9LE6H.E9C@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 22:51:53 GMT
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:84093

Daryl McCullough <daryl@cogentex.com> wrote:
>buzzard@world.std.com says...
>>There's a separate argument of the form "good IF leverages
>>interactivity by allowing the player to make real decisions
>>of significant consequence, and hence there are certain kinds
>>of drama that are not attainable by good IF",

>Yes, that's what I mean.

>>but I think it's pretty clearly false

>It may be false, but I don't think I would be saying
>it if it were *clearly* false.

The fact that players are not satisfied with a "supposedly
winning" (for the character) ending early in a game but
will instead opt for the "bad move" so as to experience
the full game is a well-known tendency that makes me lean
towards thinking this.

But I say "clearly" because there are far too many counterexamples.
Let's go back to HHGTTG: you may very well knowingly allow "your"
house to get demolished.  I imagine there are even stupider
actions in other games.  In Zelda 64 I knew for sure that the
initial quests I was completing were exactly procuring items
that the villain wanted, and that he would know doubt wrest them
from me and proceed with villainy; I still wanted to play the
game so I did them anyway, when the clear victory for the character
would have been to not do them, and so leave the villain stuck.
If you want to stick to IF, several counterexamples have been
discussed in other threads.  I'm pretty sure if we took the
complete list of potential counterexamples, most people (except
the nuts) would agree that at least one game on the list was
"good IF".

>>(although I believe something quite closely related, but
>>largely irrelevant to this discussion).
>
>If it is closely related, then it's not irrelevant. This
>is just an open-ended discussion about how the medium (IF)
>affects the content.

It's largely irrelevant because it's more a matter of personal
taste than of truth.  Let me quote the bit again:

>>There's a separate argument of the form "good IF leverages
>>interactivity by allowing the player to make real decisions
>>of significant consequence, and hence there are certain kinds
>>of drama that are not attainable by good IF",

The truth I believe is that "the best use of interactive media
is in allowing the player to make real decisions of significant
consequence, and hence there are certain kinds of drama that
will not be attainable."  However, "best" is a quite squirrely
word, not to mention the entirely subjective aspect of this.

But it's a truth that I believe about most media; a great work
in one medium will leverage the unique qualities of that medium,
and adaptations of that work to other media cannot both be true
to the original and best leverage that medium.  One can make
a good movie out of a great stage play; but I think the "art
form" of the movie is better advanced by "Aliens" than such
a stage play; and arguably, even a non-great movie that leverages
the medium of film may be a better use of everyone's time.

So for games, to me, the best use of the medium are games that
significantly leverage interactivity, and that means not just
by making puzzles that are a glorified "press spacebar to go
on"[*] but by making the player the author of a unique, personal
narrative.  Simulation allows the moment-to-moment experience
of each player to be unique.  Even just the rooms & portable
objects simulation of IF enables this significantly more than,
say, Myst, although it depends on the game (e.g. BAP experience
is essentially identical for everyone).  Deeper simulation
enables it more.  Simulating NPCs is a huge unsolved problem,
however, and most traditional drama is based around conflict
relating to other characters, thus throwing a huge barrier at
trying to capture those experiences.

I come from a background of working on commercial computer
games which had a definite simulationist bent of the same kind
normally considered as simulationist IF: an overarching story
and sequence of plot points, but a relatively-freely navigable
space and many "puzzles" which can be solved in arbitrarily
different ways, because the player has been handed a set of
problems to confront and a variety of tools to apply.  As such,
the thing I'd like to see happen is moving more player influence
into the overarching story, instead of just the moment-to-moment
story.

How to do this is a big open question, and it does
lead to the consequence you've expressed concern about in IF,
e.g. that the player will make the choices that are the least
dramatic.  There are ideas for how to address this (after all,
a gamemaster can give players freedom to choose while still
keeping things dramatic), but there's an awful lot of work
to be done, and it's not clear to me how to get there from
here via evolutionary steps, and nobody is willing to fund the
enormous effort needed for an attempt at revolutionary change
that might fail.  (And perhaps the Oz project can be taken
as a signal that this approach is unlikely to pay off right
now, but I haven't followed what they're doing very closely.)

SeanB
[*] Actually, an entirely puzzle game with no narrative (or
a not too relevant one, e.g. 3 in Three or suchlike) is to
me a perfectly valid use of the medium, so I'm guilty of
oversimplifying here.
