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[Musenik]

The current thread 'fatalistic railroading' brought some of my stewing thoughts to a boil. This must have been discussed elsewhere and/or long ago, but I'm not familiar with earlier considerations of this idea.

Interactive entertainment is the medium of free will. All other media, previously are fate oriented. Okay, a few exceptions like interactive theater and CYOA books, but they largely did not exist before computer games. They're just shadows of our craft.

Fate oriented media embeds the notion that lives are predetermined. Sure, many individuals disagree that their lives are predetermined, but human culture has been shaped by linear storytelling. Every story turns out the same way, every time. How many times have you seen this plot device, 'it happened because it was fated to happen'  or 'because a particular thing happened previously, the ending was happy or tragic'? These are devices that sell and keep selling. Shakespeare is incredibly popular because he was so good at surprising the audience with clever inevitabilities of fate, and also foretelling fate for characters powerless to prevent it.

Fate devices work just fine in computer games, but one significantly different ending changes everything, when it's a choice the audience can make.

I look forward to a world changed by media of free will. It won't necessarily be better, but if human culture emphasized more responsibility for actions and choices, people might feel that they are individually empowered rather than individually entitled.

Computer game indies could be the leading edge of this change in humanity. My favorite thing about TIGSource is, after the newbie figures out he can't just waltz in with a 'great idea' for someone to make they either disappear or learn how they can make their idea come to life.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'm a determinist but still think interactivity and choice are important; i'd prefer if this were called the medium of choice rather than the medium of free will, because free will implies a supernaturalism that a lot of materialists see as superstitious or imaginary

[Musenik]

I'm not about to start a debate about the difference between 'choice' and 'free will'. I used the term, in the classical sense of Fate vs. Free Will more because it sounds grand than because of any supernaturalism associated with it.

[Evan Balster]

I guess I should clarify that the 'fatalistic' technique was something I admired for its contribution to linear game stories.  I like story branching, for what it's worth.  It's just a lot of work and *ahem* some game developers (Bethesda) spread their story too thin.

[Zaphos]

I made a game that was kind of about choice (called if only) ... it was fun to make, but kind of tiring to think through branches and that's part of the reason it's so short.  Also it seems kind of inevitable that the choose-your-own-adventure approach to choice in games. where the author manually generates the graph of possibilities, is going to feel frustratingly granular; I tried to justify that somewhat by presenting it in the guise of cliche RPG combat options, but in general it's something that bothers me.  It feels even more arbitrary somehow to be given only 3 choices in a game than it does to be given none; it just emphasizes the "what ifs" you could have explored if you actually had control.

The implicit stories of a system, ala sim city, dwarf fortress -- perhaps those are better suited to expressing free will in games without still feeling arbitrarily constrained.  I feel like maybe there's an under-explored space between these two methods though.


Also, this was linked from play this thing -- salman rushdie talking about games, and the first half is related and was interesting: http://bigthink.com/ideas/25129

Here's the text, copy-pasted for convenience:

Question: How are video games influencing linear forms of storytelling?

Salman Rushdie:  That's a very interesting question and I think the answer is we don’t yet know. But I do think that I mean for instance the game that my 13 year-old boy Milan and his friends all seem to be playing right now is this wild west game called "Red Dead Redemption" and one of the things looking over…  I mean I don’t even pretend to understand what is going on really, but one of the things that is interesting about it to me is the much looser structure of the game and the much greater agency that the player has to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for you.  He doesn’t... in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long periods of time.  There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story.  I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end—to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.  

I've always thought of the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” as kind of model of this, that... “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a story, is a book whose author has gone mad because what he has tried to do is to offer every possible variation of every moment.  So, boy meets girl.  They fall in love/they don’t fall in love.  That is the first fork and he wants to tell both those stories and then every variation of every moment down both those lines and of course it’s like nuclear fission.  The possibilities explode into millions and billions of possibilities and it’s impossible to write that book. But it seems to me that in some ways the Internet is the garden of forking paths where you can have myriad variant possibilities offered and at the same level of authority, if you like. So I mean I think that's one of the ways in which storytelling could move. And these games, these more free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of that narrative possibility.

[Musenik]

The implicit stories of a system, ala sim city, dwarf fortress -- perhaps those are better suited to expressing free will in games without still feeling arbitrarily constrained.  I feel like maybe there's an under-explored space between these two methods though.

I wholeheartedly agree. 'arcada mia' will be using a simple method of choice that determines small scope stories. Which of these small stories appear is based on how the game is being played. So your play invokes small stories, and then you make a choice about how they resolve. Sometime this choice will impact later stories, but that is not the common case. It's an experiment that seems to be working well in user testing, but I won't claim any major breakthrough. It's a fun, novel system. Once the whole thing is written, I hope it'll set a small stake in new fertile ground.

[RCIX]

I have to disagree that classic storytelling (books, movies, etc.) implies a lack of choice (other than the obvious in that the reader has no interactivity): Good stories are a bit like a history book: just because you can't change history, does that mean that the people involved had no choice/free will?

[Seth]

I agree with RCIX.  Many great novels and films etc. focus on the choices the characters make and the consequences of those choices.  Even many works about fate deal with how someone's 'fate' comes about precisely through their own actions, albeit usually through unintended consequences.

[Musenik]

Seth and RCIX, excellent points. But my main point isn't that the protagonist in those stories doesn't consider the consequences of their choice. The reader has none. Readers interact with their own perception. Readers are powerless to change media of fate. Turn pages fast or slow. Watch a movie standing on your head. It doesn't change the book or movie.

We all know that people will have individual reactions to a work. That just means an author doesn't have as much control as she thinks she has. The only control authors have is over the fates of characters in that kind of media.

[Captain_404]

Seth and RCIX, excellent points. But my main point isn't that the protagonist in those stories doesn't consider the consequences of their choice. The reader has none. Readers interact with their own perception. Readers are powerless to change media of fate. Turn pages fast or slow. Watch a movie standing on your head. It doesn't change the book or movie.

It does change your perception of the movie though. I imagine a person who was forced to watch a movie whilst suspended upside down and fighting the blood-rush to their head would be more prone to remember the movie negatively than the person watching it from the comfort of their couch. As far as that person is concerned, watching the movie upside down has changed the movie.

Our understanding of things is entirely based on our own perception of them (or to get even more meta, our perception of how other perceive them). Interpretation plays a valuable, even interactive role in any media. So long as an object is being perceived, it is being interacted with. To put it succinctly, "look" is a verb too!

However, it is safe to say that games may be interacted with in a markedly different way than most other narrativistic medias have been in the past, and that is worth discussing. This may be the writing board, but let's not get too caught up in semantics

--

off topic: Every time I see this topic title I read it as "the medium of will," and I think that's a very beautiful way to understand games. Much like sculpture is a media of stone or music is a media of sound, games are a media of will. Inspiring!

[RCIX]

Seth and RCIX, excellent points. But my main point isn't that the protagonist in those stories doesn't consider the consequences of their choice. The reader has none. Readers interact with their own perception. Readers are powerless to change media of fate. Turn pages fast or slow. Watch a movie standing on your head. It doesn't change the book or movie.

We all know that people will have individual reactions to a work. That just means an author doesn't have as much control as she thinks she has. The only control authors have is over the fates of characters in that kind of media.

Well, in the OP, you said:

Fate oriented media embeds the notion that lives are predetermined.

which has to be distinguished from the ability to choose. You can choose something and it be predetermined, since predetermination doesn't necessarily mean a removal of choice (it just means that someone has the knowledge of which choice you'll make). The only difference between the future and the past is that we haven't experienced the future; you can bet that in 2 days, the news of the next day (from now) will be history and unchangeable.

[Musenik]

Well, in the OP, you said:

Fate oriented media embeds the notion that lives are predetermined.

For clarification, here's an example of what I mean. As soon as an editor submits an author's work to be printed, the lives of the work's characters have been determined. Therefore, before the reader can read it, the character's lives has been predetermined. The reader knows this, of course. I believe that knowledge, over centuries has affected culture, as well as specific stories about fate. In the case of a work about choice and consequence, the medium conflicts with the message.

Now, as Captain_404 says, this is a writing board. Let's explore how writing can be crafted with choice and free will supported with underlying gameplay or other interactivity. I've mentioned my current experiment. I'll describe that more as further user testing supports or demolishes my attempt.

[mirosurabu]

I can't see how linear stories imply lack of choice. They happened in the past and they are being retold. They are a history. If stories imply determinism, history implies it too.

I can see how fake branching stories may imply it though, but even then I think the effect is weak if existent at all.

Personally, I find non-linear stories to be unconvincing. I don't know why, but it might related to the increased agency and decreased capacity for expression. As you increase the agency, you're more and more restricting yourself to underlying system as a form of expression.

That said, I love agency and non-linear stories but recognize them as a separate form of entertainment. I might be biased I don't know. My focus used to be simulation before but somehow I ended up preferring linear storytelling.

[gimymblert]

Game are about the player pit against force, he had to made choice under a strict frame impose by the game. Stake define that frame. While linear media are obsess with event as "what have happen" I think game should be define by stake as "what will happen". The difference is a shift of perspective, stake define the force and forewarn consequence of every action. A good "new media story" format would be the player stringing a succession of stake based on his previous action under a thematic subject. A series of vignette. Stake also bridge the gap between linear and interactive media with a common definition, we can see story as game with the main character making a series of choices constrain by stake. Stake define the goals and rules of play, the risk reward agenda and the consequence of actions.