An interactive story precursor.

I am playing Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy in the USA), which apparently was the most successful commercial attempt to break the linearity of in-game storytelling. I am yet to prove that your actions have real "consequences" in game, or if the feeling of urgency and real decision making is just created by the "constant" tick of the clock sensation. I still am in the first round but something tells me that the sequence, order, content of the scenes is not affected by what you do in game. Elements of theses scenes are, I already noticed that, but the world doesn't seem as persistent as it is supposed to be.

Failing (Game Over) is a big part of this game, this goes against what I believe would be a rewarding complete story. Having the story to end abruptly when you fail to complete a sequence of action still leaves the story unfinished. In the first scene, if you fail to leave the bathroom in time, you go to jail, and game over is upon you. The character says something like, "This is how my story end, the police found blood on my clothes and I was send to jail for life, boo-hoo".

In my opinion, this is not a satisfactory complete story. Of course, you could could say that "guy kills another guy, goes to jail, end of story". It is complete, but its not satisfactory. You want to know why you want to go forward, you want this to be a complete story, not some news headlines.

In this sense, game over should be completely banned from the game. No matter what you do, you will get the whole of your story, no matter where the story leads you.

Maybe, Crawford is right. Maybe a game is a game, end of story, he says and I quote "computer games are about winning, while Interactive Storytelling is about dramatic resolution".

But I still believe we can use consoles' hardware to create an "interactive storytelling" and ship it in a disc, and sell it as a game. Fahrenheit is almost there. but not quite.

So I'm on David Cage's side "Interactivity is still in its infancy. There is still everything to invent".

So let's get to work

Interactive Drama

I am not going to be presumptuous, and I am not going to assemble a list of the best films of all times, and I am not going to do this with books as well..

And I'm not the one to say what the magic formula for making a great game is, but I am trying to figure out what would make a game a "classic" in all senses.

I'm going to try to find an answer gathering any information I can from industry, scholars, articles.

Gamasutra is a good place to start. But I will also check with some industry veterans like Tim Schafer, Chris Crawford, Ernest Adams.... I'll see what they wrote, and maybe I'll try to get in touch with them if I have further questions.

I was talking to a friend of mine and that made the whole game designing idea a little clearer to me. I like adventures, I loved all the LucasArts adventures, and I like the "action/adventure" genre, however I always thought that most of them lack a more solid storyline, something more serious, more deep, and yet fun to play.

I thought that Tim Schafer was going in the right direction with Grim Fandango but I never saw development on that, and Grim Fandango is still a single plot narrative.

Whenever you put interaction and narrative in the same sentence you make scholars shiver in their chairs. Because those things are supposed to be nearly opposite. There are people that I mentioned before that are trying to come up with a solution for that.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern came up with an interactive Drama called "Façade". It was a bold move in the direction I am trying to go. I still think that there are some problems with "Façade" because it's a limited set, and the "game" can "end" within a short period if you start swearing at the characters and you kinda can't avoid that, because they're both wankers to begin with. And as the characters throw you out of the door you can't help but linger with the feeling that you have "failed" to accomplish you "mission" whatever that was, and no, you didn't fail, you just led the story to an ending because of your behaviour.

The big clash here is due to the fact that games have winners, and narratives not necessarily do. But I think that is more than that. A narrative has a certain dynamic, like music with it's crescendos and diminuendos. It has a climax, and a closure. I think this feeling has to be translated into the "game".

Mateas tries to encapsulate this in the Façade but there is still a long way to go.

You can check GrandTextAuto for updates on the ideas floating around.