Somewhat relevant link to a discussion between Clive Barker, Roger Ebert, and Arthouse Games, about whether games can aspire to high art:
Quote:
Barker: I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker.
Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would "Romeo and Juliet" have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. "King Lear" was also subjected to rewrites; it's such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's or Barker's, is superior, deeper, more moving, more "artistic"?
Barker: We should be stretching the imaginations of our players and ourselves. Let's invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.
Ebert: If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time, I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?
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I don't agree with Ebert's conclusion about games as art, but I share his sense that the ability for "the audience" to affect events undermines one of the main premises of drama,* namely that characters reveal themselves through their actions. It's often said that you can't understand a story until you know how it ends. Does that mean that for an interactive story you need to know all the ways it can progress before you can understand it? Yeah, I think it does.
As an analogy, imagine a short story where the author leaves some words blank, allowing the reader to fill them in, "mad libs"-style. As the author takes out more and more words, the reader has more and more freedom, and is more and more the co-author of the story. And when the page is blank, the "author" may have created some kind of conceptual art, but certainly is no longer telling a story. OK. But the point is that although mad libs may be an effective literary device for a few stories where it is appropriate, it's really a very limited and intrusive technique. An interactive, non-predetermined story is a lot like that. The only meta-story it can really tell is about the possibility of making different choices.
Not that I'm against non-linearity, gameplay freedom, and emergent stories. Not at all. For one thing, not all games are story-driven. And even in games that are, there should be story beats that are told within the gameplay (after all, if the story and gameplay don't work together, something is fundamentally wrong with the design). Some flexibility may even benefit the gameplay. However, I have yet to see an example of how letting the players affect the path of the story, to produce equally canonical plots, can benefit a game
as a story. Maybe it can be done, but in all honesty I can't really imagine it.
* Given that Mr Barker and I (along with Mr Crawford) share the tendency to fall back on Shakespeare as an example, I hasten to clarify that by "drama" I'm not talking about theater, but about the kind of serious storytelling that, along with poetry, is the narrative mode most often accepted as art.
