The problem with Interactive Hyper Narrative

What's the problem with Hyper Narrative in an interactive space?  I'll tell you what he problem is.  It's a great big pain in the ass. That's what the problem is.  I also chose to explore this for my Thesis in Emergent Media. This is what I've been spending the last number of months working on.  I knew it was going to be difficult and I think I'm raising more questions than answering them. Here's a little background for the uninitiated.

I'm currently building a short story that's meant to be read multiple times.  You can read all the way to the end of the story, making choices along the way and come to a (hopefully) satisfying conclusion. If you re-read the story and make different choices you will come away with a more complete picture of the events that transpired.  Nothing earth shattering here.

Where I'm trying to push things is through the notion that the choices you make as you are reading will unknowingly shift the story from one track to another, and that the protagonist appears to be the same person in the same world experiencing a different reality of events.  Where on one track the protagonist is a high-functioning success, another version is struggling. To further complicate matters, it's possible to meet your other selves and through that discover that you all have the same agenda. Ok, it's a little weird, but I'm hoping it at least comes together as an interesting experiment.

I'm a little over half-way done and what I've learned so far should have been obvious to me.  Academically, I knew this was going to be difficult.  Writing one decent story is hard enough.  Writing three at once is clearly more complicated.  Weaving them together so the reader can jump around and still follow what's going on leads to vomit inducing headaches.

To that end, I've come up with a few rules for myself to keep the project on track and in scope:

1. No Dead Ends - The story continues to move forward.  There are no choices that lead to a premature and unsatisfactory ending to the story.
2. As an extension to rule #1, time must continue to move forward. This is a departure from more traditional forms of Interactive Fiction where the player could move back and forth between areas as much as he or she wants.  In this format the story would only progress when the player did the right combination of actions (like finding the key that unlocks a door). This has led to some trouble making sure the choices presented are interesting.
3. If the reader jumps to a different track, the story can and should reference what the reader (and the protagonist) knows from the other track. This is extremely hard to do and difficult to keep track of, but I think it has added a lot of flavor to the story.  In Inklewriter, the tool I'm using to build this, tracking variables is fairly simple and highlights a major difference between Hyper Narrative and something you would experience in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
4. Keep It Short - The interactive nature suggests that choices need to come quickly and regularly.  Too much time reading the prose tends to encourage the reader to skip ahead to the choice.

I don't yet know how all of this is going to pan out.  And now that I'm in the thick of it, it has become very hard to show my progress as anyone reading through it will see less than 1/3 of what I've actually produced and won't have a full picture.  I can only hope that once it's done it will make sense.  I think it will.

You suck at watching television

Dear Hardcore Gamers,

You know I love you guys.  We have had more than our fair share of laughs at the expense of the hordes of Dark Elves and Space Marines who have stood between us and our goal.  We've discussed at length the wonders of games like Shadow of the Colossus, Portal, and Civilization all the while wondering why more people; more non-gamers haven't given a care to play nor even heard of them.  I've got a fair amount of respect for you, my brethren.  But listen, there's something you need to know.  You positively suck at watching television.

I'm not saying it to be cruel. Really I'm not.  I just think that perhaps all that game playing has clouded your perspective of what other media do well.  Let's take a recent example of gamer nerd rage against a popular television series: The Walking Dead.  I'm not here to proclaim that this show is the greatest thing ever, but it's fairly obvious to any moderately intelligent consumer of TV what The Walking Dead is and what it isn't.

The Walking Dead is a character drama about a group of survivors during a zombie apocalypse.  It's about how the people on the show react when everything they know and understand it taken away.  Walking Dead is not actually about the zombies and it is most certainly not about how a group of people will devise some clever way to dispatch said zombies each and every episode.  Even the graphic novel the show is based on focuses less on the zombies themselves and more on the seemingly directionless travels of the survivors.  It's almost like the survivors are actually *GASP* the titular Walking Dead.  Their life is over.  They just don't seem to know it, yet.

It ain't rocket science people.  So why is it we have continued criticism that the show isn't delivering the requisite number of zombie encounters per episode?  Why do people scoff when the survivors don't act rationally and fail to execute a perfect set of plans?  After all, if we encountered a zombie apocalypse, we'd totally have our shit together, right?  Right?

I think what's going on here is a contingent of genre-loving nerds have forgotten that linear drama doesn't play out like a video game.  In a game, players are expected to strategize and execute their plans perfectly in order to progress.  If you fail, it's no big deal. You just start over.  By the time you've gotten well into the game, you understand the rules and the gamespace so well that you can handle anything the game throws at you.  And if the games hasn't prepared you for the challenge and you have to try to figure it out, it's called a bad game.   When a TV show doesn't prepare the characters for the challenge and they have to try to figure it out, it's called drama.

So when gamers watch a show like Walking Dead, they are first looking for concrete examples of how the world works so that they may exploit what they know in order to win the scenario.  Are the zombies slow?  Can they use tools?  Can they climb?  Hey, they weren't fast last episode, but some of them are running in this one.  THAT'S NOT FAIR!  THIS SHOW SUCKS!   Actually, it's completely fair.  Yes, TV shows need a certain amount of internal logic to function, but only so much as needed for the characters to get on with what they are doing.  Everything does not need to be spelled out for the viewers from the get go.  In fact, doing this would be considered very bad television.  The rules will be explained on a need to know basis.

Gamers also tend to dislike characters who don't behave how they would perceive themselves (as the hero of the story/game) as behaving in the same situation.   When Rick's son is shot right in front of him, his reaction is entirely believable precisely because he did not act like a strong heroic type.  He was scared and confused.  He made bad choices.  He abdicated his responsibility to the group.  You could say that up to this point, season two has been about characters who are all about following rules (Rick was a sheriff before the ZA) are learning how to live in a world where the rules no longer apply.  So when an episode or two go by with characters wrestling with these issues, that's not boring my friends, that's riveting television.  That's good character drama.  That's what TV is good at. 
Games on the other hand, are horrible at character development, but decent at plot progression.  It's no wonder gamers can't stomach all that "soap opera" stuff.  They have grow accustomed to moving from set piece to set piece with the belief that all the character stuff in between is complete rubbish.  Well, if they are talking about video games, I would be inclined to agree.  Most characterization in games IS rubbish and you're probably better off skipping whatever the hell Solid Snake is pondering in Metal Gear Solid.

But television is different.  It's those moments where characters wrestle with their reality that carry the real weight.  Yeah, it's fun when the zombies arrive and rip someone apart.   But can you imagine that happening every single episode?  Can you imagine the survivors going from place to place, mowing down hundreds of undead while scarcely muttering more than a phrase or two?  I can.  It's called Left 4 Dead and it's an amazing video game.  But it would make a horrible TV show.

Games communicate what now?

A constant theme in my game design classes is the idea of intent.  What do you, the designer intend to say with your work.  Do you have a point?  Even if "making a kick-ass game with space orcs" was the entirety of your thought process, doesn't that point to your intent?

Looking at a slightly more mature medium like television or film, we see in even the most banal content an attempt communicate to an audience, not just entertain.  Take Happy Days, a popular American sitcom that ran from the mid-seventies through the early eighties.  While primarily a comedy, the show was known for trying to tackle some sensitive issue. In the Fifth season episode "Richie Almost Dies," Richie does indeed almost die.  Due to the popularity of most of the Happy Days characters, especially Fonzie, it allowed the audience to explore the themes of inner strength, faith, and loss... well almost loss.  After all, Richie doesn't die, he almost dies.  Says so right in the title.

Yeah, it's pretty cheesy by today's standards, but addressing dramatic themes in a comedy show was not common in that era although there are some exceptional stand outs. See M*A*S*H or Norman Lear's body of work.

I guess my point is that all creators of media need to understand the power they wield.  Even the purveyors of pedestrian fare like 70s and 80s sitcoms understood that in their own little way, they could try to do some good.

So whither game design?  In future posts, I hope to address where we're making progress and where I think we're falling short.