Interactive Narratives

In the previous section on narrative and narration, I claimed that the issues arising from the differences between the level of narrativity of a work and the aesthetic quality of that narrativity apply to at least as great an extent to interactive media as they do to non- interactive media. To see why, we can return to Heavy Rain – the story itself is

relatively short, involving a small cast of inter-related characters, but it is quite

compelling. The role-playing game Witcher 2 also involves a fairly small cast of main

characters (if we disregard optional “side quest” characters which serve pragmatic uses with respect to player-character development but which are irrelevant to the central story of the game) but it is considerably longer than Heavy Rain and requires the

completion of many individual quests (perhaps roughly analogous to chapters). Whilst players may find each segment of the story interesting and engaging while they are playing through it and enjoy finding solutions to the problems they encounter,

considered as a whole the story is quite meandering and rather less compelling than that of Heavy Rain. The visibility of these issues may be greater because there are

additional factors that need to be considered when assessing both the level and the success of a game's narrative. Currie's notion of higher- or lower-narrativity is helpful in understanding why: in both of the previous examples there are segments where the level of narrativity switches – it is higher when checkpoints are reached or quests completed, usually occasioning a cut-scene where the player's control over the player- character is greatly reduced or totally suspended, and lower (indeed, where the player's actions can have no effect on the way the storyline progresses, such as in Crysis 2, it is

fair to claim that it is absent altogether) when the player is engaged in completing the next task. In most, if not all, games to date, an increase in interactivity is usually coupled with a decrease in narrativity, and to a degree this is inevitable - the greater control a player has over a character’s actions the greater the scope the player has for having his character act in a way that does little or nothing to advance the story. Heavy

Rain enjoys greater success in managing the transitions between states of narrativity

than Witcher 2, possibly because it is more linear in its style of gameplay. The

achievement of an interactive work's expressive or communicative goal may also be better served by a shorter storyline given that one's focus is often highest when engaged with the problem-solving or decision-making elements of the work – and for video games with high levels of action or which require great concentration in the segments of lower narrativity players may well use overly long segments of high narrativity as a complete break from the game.

In the preceding paragraphs I noted that where interactive works do not provide meaningful choices for players (in the sense that their choices alter the outcome or at the very least the intermediate content of the story) the segments outwith cut-scenes lack any narrativity; in these cases the narratives of the works should be considered non-interactive. For any work to have an interactive narrative the audience engaging with it must be given some sort of collaborative role in the authorship of the work (or, more accurately, the work-instance). In A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Berys Gaut

provides a clear way of understanding how this collaboration can be understood with a description of Jane and her young son Otis47_{: to begin with, Jane repeatedly tells Otis a}

story she has made up called 'Teddy and the Dragon' to which Otis is initially a non- interactive audience. As he becomes bored by the story Otis demands that changes be made, but Jane is not prepared to do this – teddy continues to enter the forest and meet the dragon, and the narrative remains non-interactive. Over time, however, Jane

relents and starts to allow Otis to make decisions on behalf of teddy, improvising new elements of the story as required; at this point Otis is partly responsible for the content of Jane's story, and the narrative has become interactive. Jane goes on to create a video game based on their stories in which a player takes the part of teddy and can fictionally fight dragons or hunt for treasure. Had Jane taken the Crysis 2 approach,

she could have allowed Otis to have teddy wander about the fictional world but refuse to change any of the pertinent details of the story – endlessly repeating “Teddy wanders aimlessly about the beach, but he has a nagging feeling he ought to go back and enter the forest”. Whilst this might be considered to have some highly minimal sense of

interactivity it is clearly not enough to warrant calling it an interactive narrative. When creating her videogame, Jane allows the player to choose between entering the forest and going to the beach, and instead of being able to create just a forest and a dragon she doubles the work she has to do: she now needs to create a beach and some treasure as well. Clearly, as the number of meaningful player choices increases the amount of programming required escalates rapidly, and for modern highly complex video games created with limited resources this seems to suggest that there must be a trade-off between the interactivity and quality of the narrative; whilst there are various strategies to limit this trade-off, to an extent it is inevitable. This variability of content and outcome is a distinguishing feature of interactive media and it is already becoming a generally-accepted criterion in critical reviews of such works as audiences

increasingly look for “replay value” – being able to begin a new instance of a narrative, make different choices and discover the ramifications they have. As creators and consumers of interactive works add more weight to the importance of satisfying player- choices “the object of aesthetic appreciation [will shift] in part to the story tree, not just appreciation of each individual story line”48_.

2.2.3 Conclusions

The more interactive a narrative becomes the less useful the notion of an implicit internal narrator becomes, but explicit internal narration is far more straightforwardly 48 _{Ibid., p. 240.}

understood and realised within video games. Narratives are interactive if they respond to actions the player has taken within the game, but highly interactive narratives are liable to lose the sense of ‘purposeful’ or (directly) ‘goal-driven’ activity that identifies better narratives. It is also likely that the thematic unity of interactive narratives will tend to the more general the more interactive it is. Greater interactivity in narratives also risks expanding the story to such an extent that, taken as a whole, it is less satisfying or communicates the work’s expressive goal less well than narratives lower in interactivity. Replayability is a key factor in assessing the interestingness of interactive narratives and this indicates that both the quantity and the quality of the different branches the story might take are important criteria in judging the aesthetic value of these works.