So who wants interactive drama anyways?

Readings

Janet Murray: From Games-Story to Cyberdrama
Ken Perlin: Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?
Michael Mateas: A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games

In this installment, I aimed my readings towards topics that focused on interactive drama with regards to games, and thus a subject matter that could fall within the realms of narratology. The word to use seems to be “Cyberdrama,” a term coined by Janet Murray to explain the new phenomena of the “story-game”; she recognizes that Espen Aarseth coined the use of “ergodic literature” for ultimately the same purpose without stating much of an opinion with concerns to the latter’s argument. Murray seems to be invested in the production of these cyberdramas to the point of declaring “it does not matter what we call such new artifacts” provided they keep on coming. This seems rather counter-intuitive to me, as defining what they are seems an intrinsic necessity to their study (and demarcating one from another). Further, “Ergodic Literature” and “Cyberdrama” are not the same approach to discussing games-as-text, though they both do demand a certain level of agency – an element that Murray, Perlin, and Mateas all discuss in-depth as an important aspect of the game-story.

Interactivity is a fabulous word that is notoriously difficult to qualify specifically. In the realm of player agency, for a game to afford meaningful experience, it must react to a player’s input, and thus inter-act. Exactly how much a player needs to input and how much the computers needs to react for truly meaningful, interactive experience remains up for debate. Mateas offers an approach based on Aristotelian methods of understanding drama (as does some of Murray’s other writings) to the effect of supporting both “first-person engagement” – the game-player – and “third-person reflection” – the observer, which can also be the game-player after an understanding of game-play has been acquired (usually after participating with the game once-through). The third-person observer can watch a game from afar and realize that a player is being rail-roaded into plot points even if the player proper is sunk deep within the game’s magic circle. Maintaining dramatic force (even for that observer) is a goal that Mateas and Andrew Stern have attempted to display through their creation of the game Façade, of which I’ve seem some reviews.

Façade is an attempt to maintain dramatic force, interest, and stability throughout several game-play experiences. Mateas estimates that the game could be played through perhaps seven or so times, and still provide a meaningful, unimitated experience from the previous run-throughs. From what I’ve seen, the game succeeds in this regard. However, it still seems to suffer from the “sandbox problem,” as I call it, that many MMOs and console games (such as Fallout and Oblivion) continue to experience. Now, “problem” might besomewhat misleading, as this is not necessarily an issue that ruins the Aristotelian immersion so necessary in maintaining dramatic stability, but it does present a situation where possible action becomes enormous, and goal-orientation becomes arguably limited. In Façade, the game is less about the player, and more about Grace and Trip, the co-actors of the piece. While yes, I realize that the game depends on the agency of the player, Grace and Trip will continue to move the dramatic undercurrent of the game forward if the player does not respond in a timely manner. This force successfully circumvents some of the “sandbox problem” I mentioned, by nudging the player in a particular direction, but at the same time, doing so retracts some of the player’s agency, as Gonzalo Frasca argues in his response: “How could you give agency to a player while preventing them from turning peace-loving Gandhi into a Quake-like killing machine?” Mateas responds that the answer is simply to not allow guns or power-ups in said Gandhi game in addition to making weaponry superfluous to the game’s plot; agency is maintained because guns should never be an option, and thus becomes extraneous to the game’s purpose. But is this true interactivity? Is absolute agency really necessary?

Chris Crawford has identified in some of his writings that, at the moment, a game must simply limit itself to certain possibilities to maintain its dramatic fortitude. So in response to the above questions, I posit a difference between “true” interactivity and “efficient” interactivity, where the former implies an impossibly intelligent AI, and the latter implies a system that offers enough to remain interesting. A question worth mulling over, however… how much player agency is really necessary to sustain the game fiction (even beyond the magic circle)? And are players really demanding complete, "true" interactivity? I don't think so. I also don't think conflict (and thus agency to participate) necessitates story, either, but that's an argument for another day.