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It’s just a game, man
People have invented all kinds of names for this mess we’re in: hypertext, interactive fiction, even something called ergodic literature. But there’s one word that doesn’t come up that often is game. This is probably for the same reason people invented the term graphic novel — comic book sounds a little too kidlike and, well, light-hearted. Games imply a certain superficiality… and for good reason. The overall audience for video games has aged a little bit, to the mid-twenties if not early thirties, but the bottom of the demographic is still somewhere around ten years old. Even so, it’s a pretty narrow range. You don’t really think of Dickens as a males 18-24 kind of writer.
But you can’t really deny that video games provide a ton of examples of how interaction can work structurally. When I think about how I want a story to work, it’s games like Silent Hill 2, where what seem like innocuous choices determine how the plot’s resolved, that give me signposts.
(That’s another reason I think there’s a bias against games in serious analysis… you just sound dumb citing something like Metal Gear Solid 3 in what’s supposed to be a serious paper.)
The thing that video games have been consistently terrible at, though, is provoking an emotional response through interaction. Fanboys typically talk about Aeris biting the dust in Final Fantasy VII as a huge emotional moment… but hey, characters have been dying melodramatically since forever! If you compare stuff like that to even an ordinary short story, it comes out looking pretty poor.
One exception I can think of offhand is Ico, which not only managed to move me but also did almost all of its storytelling without language. Which is great… but kind of hard to draw from as a writer. Photopia and Shade would be up there, too, and fortunately they’re both made entirely out of words.
Ironically, I had an aha moment yesterday about how to structure the story I’m working on… but it had nothing to do with video games. Rather it was this Web activity, which was written by an incredibly smart guy I used to work with, that gave me an idea on how to make things work.
2 comments
Co-creation is a nice idea… I see it as more operative in free-form games like The Sims or Grand Theft Auto. When I’m writing these stories, it feels more like I’m posing a question to the reader than I am fully inviting them inside. Again I’m poaching from what I wanted to post about later on down the road, but this essay by John Barth is an interesting peek at the division between the two concepts. Or at least about writers recoiling from co-creation.
The interesting part to me is that the point of most stories is the conflict the characters grapple with, but with these gimcrackd stories, it’s more about creating a conflict within the reader as to what to choose.
The new story is indeed meant for gimcrackd. I think I’ve got like 2.5k words written so far, but it’s not close to being done.
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It seems to me that a key element that games and interactive stories share is the ability of the reader to co-create content, Of course, this ability already exists, if one believes the reader-response people, where a text lives only when negotiated by a thoughtful and mindful reader. It seems to me that games and interactive stories open up this prcess further by allowing people to work with the actual structure of the story line.characters.emphases etc. to create a unique story for themselves.
Will your new story appear here>