Around some Neolithic campfire, in the age before literacy fixes human imagination: a storyteller leans forward and asks his listeners… “and then what d’ye think happened?”
Probably a rhetorical question, even back then – a hook to drag the listener further down the path of narrative. But what if it wasn’t? What if some listener, wrestling with the tales of her tribe, answered anew? And what if that answer could redirect the course of narrative, imagine new endings? |
A few years back I happened on Fallen London. I saw a website, with testy, icon-ready art and mordant descriptions of a chipper Victorian hell. It was a little inscrutable at first – was this a game? An elaborate advert for some platform? A story, scattered into glittering fragments?
Yes, in fact. London, 1868, has been stolen by bats. The traitor Empress has sold it, apparently, to devils in return for her beloved (dead) consort. That overly familiar character, You (ubiquitous in these texts) are set free from a stalactite prison to wander through this sunless world, and make of it what you can.
Yes, in fact. London, 1868, has been stolen by bats. The traitor Empress has sold it, apparently, to devils in return for her beloved (dead) consort. That overly familiar character, You (ubiquitous in these texts) are set free from a stalactite prison to wander through this sunless world, and make of it what you can.
Interactive fiction! Now there’s a concept native to my age. From “choose your own adventure” books and pre-adolescent D&D marathons to the occasional jag with some new RPG, slipping into some new identity and wandering the constructed pathways of someone else’s imagination has become a pretty familiar activity.
Yup, we’re living through a golden age of such fiction, and we’re clearly going to be spending a lot more time with it. Digital storytelling, Virtual Reality and gaming are all, in one way or another, dependent on this mode of storytelling.
So it makes sense to clarify exactly what it can do, and what it can’t.
Yup, we’re living through a golden age of such fiction, and we’re clearly going to be spending a lot more time with it. Digital storytelling, Virtual Reality and gaming are all, in one way or another, dependent on this mode of storytelling.
So it makes sense to clarify exactly what it can do, and what it can’t.
Ideally, interactive stories are collaborations, between authors and readers/travelers. At least they might be, should choices and possible outcomes be numerous and diverse enough. More typically, however, they are constructed labyrinths, through which the reader wanders. Is the reader collaborating in the writing of a tale by completing the maze, or lingering amidst the dead ends and wrong turns?
What interactive fiction seems best at is world-building. And that makes sense, because without a single narrative thread the only thing holding such a story together is place, and character. The author(s) supply the place, and the reader supplies the character (shoehorned, sometimes rather awkwardly, into circumstance). The world within which an interactive story is set must be appealing enough to spend time in, since there’s no single narrative road out of it. In a multiplayer RPG, for example, players mill about in what is too often a pretty generic fantasy or sci-fi setting, prompted by quests or bosses to make little narrative forays out into the world. To my mind, this sort of world is most interesting when it is shaped by a single imagination; in a game such as LOTRO, place becomes character, as Tolkien’s Middle Earth itself becomes the primary reason to play/read. This is much the same feeling I had as a solitary young reader of The Lord of the Rings: I didn’t want the quest to end, mostly because I wanted to spend more time hanging out in Middle Earth. |
Interactive Fictions: Mazes?
Or Maps?
|
But interesting things can happen, too, when a single world is shaped my multiple imaginations, as it is in Fallen London (as it is in the physical world). The world itself was imagined by Alexis Kennedy, but neighborhoods and alleyways have since been populated by other gifted writers, working in and against the place’s tone. Or, as in Fallen London’s more gamified sequel, Sunless Sea, islands are allotted to guest writers to do with what they will (following the guidelines and geographies of place, much like those serials like The Hardy Boys or The Warriors, in which successive authors don the imagination of an imagined author like Franklin Dixon or Erin Hunter like a (strait) jacket).
A single world shaped by multiple imaginations: this is the platform that our world is constructed on, after all.
A single world shaped by multiple imaginations: this is the platform that our world is constructed on, after all.
I have to say, though: Fallen London and Sunless Sea work brilliantly as generators of interactive stories not just because of their innovations in form and platform. Part of the promise of this sort of story is that these forms and platforms themselves seem to provide incubators for some amazing writers.
Alexis Kennedy has gone on to a career as a writer in the gaming industry, but his gifts remain best realized when he is creating worlds of his own, as in his most recent darkly charming and ridiculous Cultist Simulator. Meg Jayanth is another such writer who flourishes in this genre, creating the Isle of Cats in Sunless Sea and her own alternative 19th century in the insouciantly and interactively-rendered version of Jules Verne’s tale, Eighty Days.
Are the talents of writers like Kennedy and Jayanth native to the interactive form they choose to write in? I don’t know if either of these writers have a novel in ‘em (I’d read it if they did), but it’s safe to say that these particular innovations in storytelling couldn’t have happened in any other form.
Alexis Kennedy has gone on to a career as a writer in the gaming industry, but his gifts remain best realized when he is creating worlds of his own, as in his most recent darkly charming and ridiculous Cultist Simulator. Meg Jayanth is another such writer who flourishes in this genre, creating the Isle of Cats in Sunless Sea and her own alternative 19th century in the insouciantly and interactively-rendered version of Jules Verne’s tale, Eighty Days.
Are the talents of writers like Kennedy and Jayanth native to the interactive form they choose to write in? I don’t know if either of these writers have a novel in ‘em (I’d read it if they did), but it’s safe to say that these particular innovations in storytelling couldn’t have happened in any other form.
Or really in any other medium. It’s a truism by now that the medium shapes not only the stories, but the tellers and readers of them. Lots of writers have identified the many (mostly depressing) ways in which the internet reshapes the neurology of its users. Kennedy seemed to acknowledge that in creating StoryNexus, a platform for the creation of interactive narratives. The success of the fictions generated through StoryNexus varies (check out Meg Jayanth’s Samsara), but as an experiment its success is pretty apparent: Fallen London was created as an exercise to enable the development of the platform, apparently.
An old teller of tales might reverse the causal relationship here, arguing that the story required the creation of the platform, rather than the other way around…
An old teller of tales might reverse the causal relationship here, arguing that the story required the creation of the platform, rather than the other way around…
Like all media, however, interactive fiction has its limitations. The oddest thing about interactive fiction is that, compared to a novel, for instance, one can ultimately end up with a sense of…loneliness. Paradoxically, the bigger and more intricate the work is – the more choices afforded the reader – the more acute this loneliness becomes.
And of course it should be like this. One of the most appealing and singular qualities of the novel (that continuously dying but never dead anachronism) is that it provides what is probably the only opportunity any of us will ever have to experience the world from the vantage point of another being. When you lose yourself in the narrative of a novel, you subordinating your own outlook to the outlook of another – sometimes that of a character, always the outlook of the narrator, whether explicit or implicit.
And of course it should be like this. One of the most appealing and singular qualities of the novel (that continuously dying but never dead anachronism) is that it provides what is probably the only opportunity any of us will ever have to experience the world from the vantage point of another being. When you lose yourself in the narrative of a novel, you subordinating your own outlook to the outlook of another – sometimes that of a character, always the outlook of the narrator, whether explicit or implicit.
This can’t happen in interactive fiction. At every nexus in the story it is you doing the choosing, however intricate or limited that choice is. You might meet others in your world of choices, but they will always be others, looked at from outside. You might role play, but it is always you doing the playing, no matter how many people you’re playing with.
Virtual reality allows us to perceive an other’s world, but it’s still us doing the perceiving.
Novels, on the other hand, allow us to do something radically different. To get lost in a novel is to allow oneself to inhabit (or be inhabited) by another, and it’s the only chance in our brief lives we’ll ever have to really do that. It allows for a kind enforced empathy: it requires us to exercise an aspect of our being – the ability to really feel what it’s like to be someone else, without choices pricking us into self-consciousness. Novels can narrate us into empathy, in a way that other forms cannot.
Virtual reality allows us to perceive an other’s world, but it’s still us doing the perceiving.
Novels, on the other hand, allow us to do something radically different. To get lost in a novel is to allow oneself to inhabit (or be inhabited) by another, and it’s the only chance in our brief lives we’ll ever have to really do that. It allows for a kind enforced empathy: it requires us to exercise an aspect of our being – the ability to really feel what it’s like to be someone else, without choices pricking us into self-consciousness. Novels can narrate us into empathy, in a way that other forms cannot.
Rivers, when meeting the shallows, meander and branch, and the plains become verdant. Rivers that run along a single course deepen with each cloudburst and draw in new waters.
I have enjoyed wandering in the rich and strange worlds that interactive fictions afford, but I have been deepened and broadened by the novels whose courses I’ve followed.
I have enjoyed wandering in the rich and strange worlds that interactive fictions afford, but I have been deepened and broadened by the novels whose courses I’ve followed.