Interactive fiction is a Utopian idea for many reasons. There are two phenomena, each well proven: Narratives, linear and fixed sequences, a chain of events that are claimed to necessarily follow each other; variable speed, skips, and a distance between the time narrated and the time of the reading. The computer game, interactive and non-linear, with smaller elements that can be combined again and again, an interactivity that presupposes a now where the user has influence, and where the time narrated and the time of the reading are identical.
These two are too different to be simply combined. The interactive narrative is not impossible, that is, works can be created that are alternating narrative and interactive. But it does not create something new, something just equal to the sum of its parts. Which means that the critics are partially right: The computer game cannot create the experiences that a good book or movie can create. And they do seem to lack something based more on traditional story themes and less on motor skills and reaction time.
This conclusion is an elaboration of an alternative utopia of interactive fiction, and an elaboration the main points of the thesis.
The dream of interactive fiction is partly - as discussed in the historical chapter - about games with content close to that of the novel, less focused on violence and action (and physical movement). According to my claim that narration combined with interaction is always unsatisfactory, the question is then whether the same dream can be fulfilled without using narration. Meaning: You refrain from controlling an overall sequence or plot, and rather create a game that takes place in a constant now or present tense. Instead of constructing a number of developments with a number of endings, you construct a number of elements capable of interacting, and thus capable of creating interesting patterns.
Such a hypothetical & utopian game should have the following characteristics:
These four points are not especially characteristic of new games, rather most of the development in the first half of the 1990's gradually decreased the player's options in favour of a less and less flexible program and some poor quality video clips. It seems that the technological possibility of creating images that satisfied traditional aesthetic criteria was emphasised over the things that these aesthetics do not understand: the program, the interactivity, the game. The urge to make the computer game a story, has been so strong that the experience of the user/player was forgotten.
In the alternative utopia we can turn our back to the narrative and rather focus on flexibility and possibilities. But this is not without problems either: When we are dealing with people and their relations, the complexity is much larger than what can be readily simulated. It is at all not possible to make the computer perform human reasoning. The problem is, says Marie-Laure Ryan, that computers lack sufficient cognitive skills, and do not have a body:
There are several ways to get around this. The first possibility is often called the Eliza effect, after Joseph Weizenbaum's therapist program Eliza. (Murray 1997 p. 68-74, Hofstadter 1997 p.87-89). The program was to some extent created as a parody of the kind of therapist that answers everything with a new question:
Eliza does very few things and understands even less. The program simply looks for a number of known phrases such as "I am", and then turns the sentence into a question. So "I am X" is typically answered by "How long have you been X" or "Did you come to me because you are X", etc... But this is often sufficient to give humans the impression of intelligence:
You shouldn't overestimate the abilities of Eliza. It takes very little for the program to exhibit its lack of understanding; it only works within the basic question-answer format, and only with very few already defined markers.
Another possibility is to adjust the player's expectations of the character's intelligence, making it fit that the program can actually deliver. Computers are better at some things than at others: It is much easier to make a computer seem mentally ill than sane. This shouldn't mean that every game from now on should take place among the mentally ill, but that what is possible should be part of the design process. There is no point in fantastic ethereal ideas that cannot be satisfyingly implemented.
A third possibility is alienation: The less the player knows of the game environment, the less expectations of what is possible in the game world. That most action games take place in either science fiction- or fantasy worlds is an example of the same ting - the player is unlikely to have extensive experiences with spaceships or demons. The language problem, that the computer is incapable of understanding natural language has been circumvented in a similar way: In part of The Edifice (Smith 1998), the player has to communicate with the inhabitants of the game world using the fictive language nalian. Accordingly the player is not inclined to create complex sentences, and this also explains the character's failure to understand the player.
All these techniques are in a danger being used too frequently, and of leading to narrative frames that are made too openly to cover over a weak program. This alternative utopia is thus not a universal solution. In introduces new problems, but avoids mixing games and narratives directly.
On the other hand, both novels and movies suffer from some basic problems: From where does the narrator get his/her knowledge? But they do seem somehow adjusted to the problem. Some narratives have an explicitly described narrator with potential possibility of actually knowing what is being told. In some cases, the narrator is not described at all. In impressionist literature, the position of the narrator often changes, what is accepted in that genre. On other occasions, texts make unacceptable inconsistencies in the placement of the narrator. The question is then if we might imagine that some of the problems in interactive fiction are not solved, but seen as inexplicable but yet acceptable characteristics of this new computer game? I do not think so, since the combination of game and narrative leads to unsatisfying interaction, and the interaction has to be interesting in a game.
A side effect of this thesis has been that the comparison of games and narratives has pointed to some rarely commented traits of narratives. Narratives are so widely used, both in practice and in the current theoretical climate as source domain for theoretical descriptions, that they are hardly ever compared to other phenomena. It is in itself a surprising that there might be a medium that is not narrative. But the computer game is simply not a medium for translating narratives to and from. There is no translatability between the computer game and other media.
Narrative turns out to be characterised by describing events that are not implemented. Narratives simply do not contain the mechanics or dynamic needed to simulate the events they describe. The psychology of the characters may be described, but it is never there. There are many human, non-productive forms that differ in actually working: Computer games, other kinds of games, sports.
In a way, every novel is interactive to the main character. The novel posits a world that reacts to the main character in a certain way. The main character only can play once. The actions of the main character are integrated into the expression; it is an integrated part of the text. A novel can psychologise the main character, but in the computer game, the reaction patters of the main character are not fixed. So the game risks having a main character with an unconvincing psychology.
Space also works differently in the computer game and in narratives. The computer game is basically about navigating in space, and the goal of the player is to master this. But the narrative only uses space as far as it is meaningful. In the game, the player has to move all the way from A to B, but in narratives the journey is only described if it adds something to the totality of the narrative. Interactive fiction shares this partly since it often splits the world in discrete locations, thus ignoring some of the space used by the action game. Yet interactive fiction still has an internal contradiction in that the player often has to use much energy moving between points even if it is uninteresting within the story that the game tries to tell.
Computer games do not necessarily focus on meaning at all. This is why computer games can be much more abstract (unsemanticised) than narratives. Computer games only need the flow of moving through space, the concentration on geometric patterns, the possibility of getting better.
I have pointed towards some reasons for playing computer games: the desire of understanding the game structure, and the desire to be able to use this knowledge. There are reasons why humans have these desires. Mammals have an evolutionarily developed curiosity and an ability to play. We basically want to master things, and computer games can satisfy this craving.
Even if the computer game has become popular in a historical period often label post-modern, it is hard to fit the computer game under this heading: The American literary theorist Brian McHale (1987) has suggested an interesting (but not especially perfect) distinction between modernist and postmodernist literature: Modernist literature is described as epistemological; oriented towards knowledge and the conditions for our knowing the world, whereas postmodernism is ontological; oriented towards creating fictive worlds. The computer game is kind of hard to place. The player clearly tries to discover how the game is structured - which is epistemological. But creating a game is clearly creating a world, and one that is usually without special reference to anything. According to McHale, the detective novel is the prototypical modernist novel, since it is about gaining knowledge - and as we have seen, many games borrow elements from the detective story. But the prototypical postmodernist novel according to McHale is science fiction, since it creates fictive worlds. A very large amount of all computer games also contain elements of science fiction.
Computer games can thus not simply be described as modernist or postmodernist. At the same time, there aren't really any games with a moral to them. On the other hand, we might imagine a game based on Mozart's Don Giovanni: A game world where the promiscuous Don Giovanni is punished by the stone guest, while a virtuous Don Giovanni escapes the fires of hell. This means that there is no special technological resistance to creating a strongly moral computer game. It is rather the player's reluctance against getting caught in a too limited game universe that leads to the slightly amoral character of many games.
The computer game and the non-linear texts are special objects of study because they in a double movement both match and don't match both structuralism and poststructuralism. Every playing/reading of a non-linear text or a computer game can be unique, and this has made George P. Landow and others proclaim this new field as equivalent to poststructuralism as such. A claim that these new texts are even more unstable and differing that other texts. But these traits do depend on some technological phenomena that are clearly more formal than other texts - the program in a computer game is handled by a causal machine. So the non-linearity of the computer game may on the surface level reminds us of a popularised deconstruction, but this non-linearity is also the product of some formally defined mechanisms, that precisely do not fit under the same heading. And this is why Landow does not discuss the program.
The dualism described between the formal program and the interpretable material demonstrates the double character of the computer game as both more fixed and more evasive than the texts we usually study. Such a dualism is uncommon in the humanities today, but it is very useful since it describes an actually existing phenomenon in the computer game; the potential conflict between the construction of the text/game and the material, used for presenting this construction. This realisation helps us telling the difference between the description and the phenomenon, between the advertising and the game before us.
My examination of computer games and narratives has focused on describing the computer game as such. This has been done strategically, with the purpose of examining interactive fiction. This sketches several areas suitable for further investigation: The fact, for example, that computer games are games. My theory of computer games might suitably be connected with more overall theories on games, even if the computer game most likely differs on several key points. (The most obvious being the possibility of real time and the combination of different media.) It would also be interesting to work more on describing multi player games without defaulting to the sociological.
My overall point about the distance between the game and the narrative has often been met resistance by people presented to it. One reason is that the narrative today is a hopelessly inflated term. Another reason is that many take the self-presentation of the games at face value. They believe that they fight an evil empire in Star Wars. I have tried to create a thesis that didn't simply believe the packaging.
Computer games are often criticised for not telling good stories, and I have pointed to several reasons why this might be so. I am not saying this to devalue computer games, but to point out that the qualities of computer games are based on entirely different factors: In computer games the player is given a liberty to explore and understand the structure of the unreal game world, and to get better at handling it. Adding more story to this inevitably leads to less freedom and less game, and to the player playing the game fewer times: Having completed Myst, there is little reason for playing again, whereas a simple game like Tetris is great for playing again.
The computer game shows us that some parts of the world are not captured in the grand category of "the narrative": Games. Computer games can be explored and challenged in different ways that literature. It is due to the absence of the narrative, that the average player of Quake spends more time with the "text" than the average reader of Moby Dick. This means that there is no point in insisting on computer games with a good story, since they work the way they are. Computer games are not narratives, but phenomena whose qualities are in exploration and repeatability. In a construction that allows the same small elements to be combined and recombined in new and interesting configurations.
I am not saying that you cannot or should not combine the computer game with the narrative. I am saying that the combination of the two leads to a number of conflicts. I will not make the claim that these conflicts necessarily are devoid of aesthetic value. But if not, this value has been repressed rather than used.
It is then the strength of the computer game that it doesn't tell stories.