Blog - Interactivity Comes in Degrees
Sunday, May 11, 2008I've been thinking for a while on the nature of interactivity, and how it exists on a scale rather than as a binary quality (i.e. something can be more or less interactive, not interactive vs. non-interactive.)
Typically, I think, people think of it in the binary sense. My professor currently for my class "Digital Art and Culture" at least adds a third degree in, what he calls "Reactionary". Whereas one could consider interactivity a continuing, back-and-forth conversation between the user and the program/device, reactionary devices merely involve only one message-response communication. His example was a vending machine: user puts in money and makes his selection, machine reacts by providing the selected snack or beverage. Therefore, his paradigm uses the following scale:
Non-interactive - Reactionary - Fully Interactive.
I've always been kind of intrigued by the idea of, as a fun experiment and programming exercise, doing a work of interactive fiction where the user only does one thing: rolls up a starting character, and hits the "go!" button, then sits back and reads/watches the story that unfolds based on the set of choices he/she made during character creation. The program would make constant checks to the rolled character's statistics and branches the story in wildly different directions in response to them.
At the time I called this level of interactivity "Proto-Interactive" although it is equivalent to what my professor calls reactive media.
Now, I'll fully admit, that's not much of a game (and according to most definitions of games, not actually a game at all). I just thought it would be interesting to see how different that experience was compared to a proper game, and hey, the writer and systems designer in me would love to come up with the branching story algorithms.
Of course, that's a case of the designer having more fun than the player, but again I was going to make it more as an experiment for myself rather than as a commercial project anyhow.
Now, I had always assumed that the resulting product would actually still be rather interesting and fun. My argument was based around my experience with Conway's Game of Life.
Conway's Game of Life is strangely engaging (I think it's fun anyway!), and yet is definitely what I would define as proto-interactive or reactionary: the user sets the starting conditions and then hits the "go!" button and watches what happens as the system reacts (without any further user input) to the starting conditions the user created.
I figured if that program was fun (as I found it) then an interactive fiction work operating under similar principals would be as well.
However, I now have evidence to the contrary. I recently found, download, and started to use Progress Quest. It at first looks like a simple RPG video game, but is, however, again only a reactionary program. You roll up a character and then just watch the game play itself.
Granted, the 'game' plays up the irony of its nature as a game you can't actually have fun playing by basing its design/interface around progress bars (hence the title), evoking imagery of all the excitement that is waiting for a file to download.
We've all had moments of irritation staring at slow moving progress bars, and so Progress Quest mocks us by being a game that consists of nothing BUT an endless series of progress bars.
So, perhaps some of my frustration stems from that little joke in the design.
However, I kept feeling as the game went on how much I just wanted to actually DO something.
It made me really want to actually take control and begin active play with the character I had made.
Now, to potentially address this 'problem' of reactionary software, I bring to you the topic of this entry's title: interactivity comes in degrees.
At one point when reading Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling he mentioned briefly that it would be possible to do such an interactive fiction work as I described above: roll up a character and the program determines what would happen to that character and outputs that story to you. It was but a brief mention of the book honestly, although reading it, an idea occurred to me:
If it is not enough to have players provide input only at the start of the story, then what happens if you let them have input at the end of each chapter as well?
Every chapter break allows the user to level up a few stats in his character, providing just a little bit more agency over the course the story goes.
Again, it's still not much, compared to most games.
But the point of that little thought experiment is to consider where that hypothetical game would exist in the interactivity scale I provided above.
Compared to most games one would describe as "fully interactive" it falls short, yet it is definitely more of a back-and-forth communication than a merely reactionary work. It exists as a new degree between the two. The same logic dictates that you could continue to split the game into smaller and smaller units between player inputs, until you eventually have a game that functions in real-time like an RTS.
All that above was bubbling around in my head when I read Brenda's blog post about frequency of choice she wrote almost a month ago. The extent to which interactivity comes in degrees is very much related to (if not exactly the same as) the frequency with which players are asked to make choices.
After all, the user's mode of 'speech' in the 'back-and-forth communication' that is interactivity as I define it IS the choices he or she makes. A higher frequency of choice means the more communication is traveling between the player and the system.
Video games have interactivity on a very high degree of depth compared to most other media. I have to wonder, however to what extent this phenomena can be used to legitimately judge a game.
As Progress Quest has shown me, a game with such a low frequency of choice can be maddening. Yet, at the same time, I find Conway's Game of Life fun and fascinating, which features only a slightly higher frequency of choice. Admittedly, you can more easily start over to create new starting conditions to experiment with in the latter program than you can with Progress Quest. Is that slight change what makes all the difference? Where then would my chapter-break interaction idea fall in that scale? In between those two, or somewhere beyond Conway's Game of Life? If it falls beyond it, then does that make it somehow better than Conway's Game of Life?
Labels: interactive fiction, interactivity
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:33 PM
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