May 21, 2003
Last semester I taught a course on interactive narrative. One of the challenges in teaching such a course is presenting a unifying framework within which the many computer-based “story-like things” that people have made can be understood as a unity, as all being instances of interactive narrative. (The alternative is to present a hodge-podge of approaches to interactive narrative, but this isn’t nearly as much fun.) My approach was to present a design space organized around four degrees of freedom:
- Interaction – the interactor’s relationship to the narrative. Is she interacting as a first-person character within the story, sitting above the story-world manipulating it from afar, constructing stories out of pieces provided by a story construction kit, etc.?
- Narrativity – in what sense is the interactive experience a story? Is the experience a heroic journey in which the interactor must complete a quest, an ironic commentary on a specific story genre in which interaction is used to expose the limits of the genre, a single situation designed to be experienced multiple times with variation, etc.?
- Segmentation – what are the pieces of the story? Are the fundamental pieces snippets of dialog, dramatic situations, story events constrained by a grammar, pages of text, etc.?
- Representation – the sensory display, what the player actually sees, hears, etc.
While in principle the choices along these dimensions can be made independently, historically the choices are organized by technical genres. A technical genre is a specific computational narrative tradition, with a history of work and criticism, that tends to make a coordinated set of specific design commitments along these dimensions. This can be made clear with some examples.
Interactive fiction (“Zork-like” text-based interactive experiences in which the player types commands and moves around a world) is a technical genre. As a genre of interactive narrative, IF makes the following design commitments:
- Interaction – First-person identification between the player-character and the player. The player takes first-person action within a simulated world.
- Narrativity – A heroic quest in which the player must accomplish some goal. The story-like quality of IF lies in the retelling (the trace) of the player’s actions – an IF is a virtual narrative.
- Segmentation – The fundamental story units are places and objects. The narrative potential of an IF is distributed amongst navigable spaces containing manipulable objects.
- Representation – Descriptive prose.
The “technical” part of technical genre means that the design commitments are embodied in a specific ways of relating to computation, that is, specific technical practices. For example, IF languages such as Inform and TADS make it easy to create places and objects, and to write many snippets of descriptive prose that are appropriately displayed as the player moves around in the world and changes the state of objects.
The IF design commitments above are the canonical commitments – many modern IF works explicitly push against one or more of these canonical commitments, by, for example, changing the role of the player character (making it more than a puppet manipulated by the player), or making the experience feel more story-like during play rather than the storyness being purely a property of the retelling. But the canonical commitments of the technical genre shape what experiments will be tried within the genre precisely by providing a position to push against.
As another example, offered without comment, the technical genre of hypertext makes the following canonical commitments:
- Interaction – Third person, exploring a text.
- Narrativity – Finding/untangling the narrative.
- Segmentation – Lexia (nodes) of text connected by links.
- Representation – Text, prose and poetry (because the segmentation isn’t places and objects, the text tends not to be as purely descriptive as IF text).
Segmentation is the dimension where authorial considerations (narrative design – what are the pieces of my story) most intimately intersects with implementation considerations (code design – what are the pieces of my code). Authoring tools, such as Inform or StorySpace, tend to freeze this relationship by offering a language/tool that makes a specific kind of story piece (e.g. a physical object, a text node) have a clean, one-to-one relationship with code structures (e.g. the object-oriented representation of a physical object in Inform). This is powerful in that the authoring tool itself embodies the design wisdom of a technical genre, but limiting in that the tool inhibits radical movement into other parts of the design space. Different points in the design space require novel architectural elaborations; the process of conceiving of novel story segmentations requires a simultaneous concern with authorial and implementation considerations.
When thinking about the entire space of things that might be called interactive narrative, what approaches have other people found useful?