a journal about writing, interactive whatsits, and everything else
Posts
Interaction and nonlinearity
No question about it: I’ve been struggling with the piece I have been working on for the last month or so. Part of it has been that the story I’ve been trying to write is a personal one — I’ve been calling it a self-portrait because it isn’t meant to be a biography. Rather it’s meant to be a snapshot of who I am right now; I’m turning 30 at the end of May, and it seemed like an apt time to reflect on who I’ve become. Being honest about yourself is a pretty hard task, though obviously a worthwhile one. So yes, that part has been difficult.
The larger problem, I think, is that I am bad at writing interactivity.
It’s a strange thought to have when this is what, in theory, you’ve been expending all your creative energies on. I even read a handbook on it! (Which, by the way, is an amazing historical artifact of how the multimedia CD-ROM trend of the mid-90s managed to get nearly everything wrong.)
Chris Crawford’s gracious comments on my post on the recent Storytron release, though, have changed my thinking in at least one respect: I now consider interactivity, where a reader changes the final configuration of a story, and nonlinearity, where a reader can traverse a story in several different ways, as two different things.
(I know nonlinearity may not be the right word here, since you could consider Pulp Fiction or Memento nonlinear. But it’s the best one I can think of.)
This was a difficult mental leap for me to take, because it happened that interactivity and nonlinearity were introduced to me simultaneously; I started playing video games around the same time I started reading Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. But when you think about it, there’s no reason that a story needs to be both interactive and nonlinear.
As a result of peeling these two things apart, I am okay with being bad at interactivity. Of all the criticisms the net leveled at “Blue Chairs,” the ones I took most to heart were the ones trashing the puzzles I designed. Honestly… I just don’t know how you go about designing puzzles. I’ve played tons of games that ask you to solve puzzles, but I don’t really know how you start to think about creating them. When I try to do it myself, the results are pretty meh at best. I had the same exact problem in school with mathematical proofs: I could follow them, but I had no idea how to approach creating them, even for basic trig stuff. I wonder if the thought process is similar.
I had added some interactivity to my self-portrait story partly because it was a seductive concept, allowing people to take control of the protagonist of an ostensibly nonfiction story (and in particular… me), but also because I felt it was the equivalent of stage business in an interactive medium — things that do not necessarily affecting the outcome of the plot directly, but build a sense of engagement for the reader. But writing this has turned out to be a massive distraction: I’ve been thinking about things a reader can do and how to manage those interactions instead of what it is, exactly, that my story is about. It’s made for a massive impasse.
I need to re-organize this story; I’m not even sure if it is something I will be able to finish by the time I turn 30 (my original goal), or even if this is a story I can really write now — but at least I have a sense now of what it isn’t working.
3 comments
Write a comment
Chris, do you think that the problem you’re having with this particular story is the fact that it’s based on the personal (more so than others, since every story is based on personal experience so to speak)? Is there a reluctance deep down in your subconscious that is reluctant to give control to others, or perhaps just the fact that you know the correct sequence and ending that all else seems untrue?