Blog - Interactivity Comes in Degrees

Sunday, May 11, 2008

I'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?

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:33 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - On Marketing Interactive Fiction

Sunday, March 23, 2008

As he'll be speaking at GDX this year, I decided I should actually finish reading Chris Crawford's book on interactive fiction that I started a while back. I had plenty of time to sit and read as long render-times on one of my projects kept me from using the computer all day anyway.

I'm not quite done with the book, and I admittedly skipped around a bit, but in the book's conclusion, Crawford predicts how interactive fiction is going to come about.

He argues against "true" interactive fiction coming out of the game industry, and fair enough. There's likely quite a bit of truth to that claim, although I certainly feel like the game industry is going to be involved in at least some degree. Even if games and interactive fiction (as Crawford defines them) are different animals, they are certainly similar enough that the developers of each can benefit from feeding off one another. Game developers have already well learned that story can help sell games, and anything to give the player more agency over not only the game play but the story as well is something they're going to drool over and invest in.
I'm fairly sure game developers will hijack story world engines and hack in game mechanics as soon as a suitable story world engine comes along, making hybrids between the two media. I don't think the line between them needs to be so starkly drawn if there even is one at all, much in the same way that there is not much use in the end to arguing over whether a software title is a "game" or a "software toy" like Sim City.

He later goes on to claim that interactive fiction titles can't be marketed in the same way games are. In many ways, I'll agree with his arguments there.
The typical channel of going through producer, distributor, and retailer doesn't seem likely. I'll certainly give him that.
I also agree he's definitely right that if interactive fiction titles appeared on the same shelves as video games, they'd wither out and die, as their market isn't necessarily anything like the market that typically goes to look at those shelves.

However, there's one problem I see with his argument here, and that he's forgetting about the non-hardcore gamers out there. He's forgetting the whole rest of the game industry that doesn't make first person shooters. Sticking with my theme of late: what about the casual game developers and their audience?
From what I gather, this is a much larger industry than the game industry as he defines it (and how many define it, in his defense...)

So what if the interactive fiction market would not define themselves as gamers? Neither do most of the people who play Bejeweled, and that's a hell of a lot of people. Is Bejeweled having a hard time selling, and having trouble finding its market? No.
Granted, Bejeweled is one of the casual titles that have actually made it onto real world store shelves, but the casual industry in general seems to be doing fine without going through traditional distribution chains.

Crawford claims the game industry has too narrowly defined its market, and in some ways, yes, it totally has.
But Crawford has also narrowed his view as to what the game industry is and who the people who play games are as well.
Games are, I believe, a bit more mass-market than people think.

No, we still haven't reached his vision of what games should be right now. That too, I can lament. That is why I was interested in his book and the work he's doing in interactive fiction. Because when the technology for interactive storytelling does arrive in a workable, acceptable form, and game developers adopt the technology in their own way, well that's a day I want to see.
So keep being a pioneer, Chris.

Even if I'd argue with every third thing you claim. ;)

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:53 AM  0 Comments Links to this post