Paradigmic Assumptions of Game Play: lets loosen this up!

In a featured article published at Gamasutra today Stephen Dinehart explains his take on narrative and video game design. in brief, he evokes Aristotle’s poetics to describe and explain the direction some video game design is taking. I will state that I support this movement. It is slowly transforming the video game into something more than it is. it is taking mere ludological design of “movement through a system” (e.g. Pac Man, Tetris, any fighting game, ect..) and pushing it into the realm of dramatic narrative.

However, he misappropriates concepts hazardously. This misappropriation  is found in the adoption of the term “interactive narrative”. Until i see an AI that can exceed the Turing inelegance test substantially the idea of interactive narrative in a digital environment will be nothing more than a rail upon which the user must ride to get to the end of the narration train. I say user because an interactor cannot truly be a reader if interactive media until true dynamic and adaptive choice in digital narrative can be implemented.

Dinehart is not exactly wrong, but he is not right in his assumptions and sentiments either. This is rooted in the fact that he, and most other video game designers adhere to the precepts of narratology rather than narration. Narratology is a systemic ‘function’ employed as an equation very much in the same way code is. Code is a language that tells a computer what to do through mathematical computations. The result is, in the case of a videogame, images that react to physical input via human interface devices. The code is allows a user to “move through a system” designed for reactive response, not interactive response. The reaction is to the physical action of the user.

Narratological structures are the same. They are a code that sets up a meted out structure of revealing predetermined narremes. The reaction is to the user arrival to a point in the “narrative code” achieved by physical response. Interactive narrative, in my mind, is defined by not the arrival at a narreme but the spontaneous generation of a narreme through not just physical interaction but purely cognitive interaction.

One could argue that physical response in game play is cognitive interaction. This is not true. If a ‘narrative code’ is in place it is not interaction, it is reaction. In such choice, if it is beyond ‘play or don’t play’ something more must be present. I’m talking about choice beyond that of on or off, yes or no, or imposed ideological moral fabrications such as good and bad/evil. I’m talking about something beyond the conception of the sand box (even thinking about being ‘outside the box’ acknowledges the box therefore in or outside the box is still being bound to the box).

Until AI can allow for true moral ambiguity, until code of any kind goes beyond something akin to ethical firmware, interactive narrative is simply imposable. Don’t get me wrong, I loves me some Fallout (of any kind), Sims 3, Assassin’s Creed, Arcanum, Neverwinter Nights, and SWG (both the SOE and Emu). A video game is a video game weather they be an RPG or an arcade game wrapped in an engaging reactive narrative wrapper. But, when it comes to declarations of interactivity or approaching interactivity in a hard-coded system I will pick nits.