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Constraining Interaction to Create Emergent Narrative
Tuesday, 4th October 2005 Greg Costikyan, Game designer, Manifesto Games From the inception of digital media, there has been constant tension between those fascinated with the idea of interactive story-telling, and those who believe that the idea is an oxymoron, that stories are inherently linear in nature (in terms of audience experience, if not always in terms of timeline). And indeed, in games at least, when stories are integrated, they tend to be quite linear, the usual metaphor being "beads on a string" - a high degree of interaction is permitted within a "bead," but the beads are experienced in a constrained, linear order. In non-digital media, however, particularly on the wilder shores of experimental roleplaying games, we're starting to see games that are indeed highly narrative in nature, and highly interactive; the trick, it seems, is to constrain the interaction in such a way that a narrative is forced to emerge. And more generally, it seems clear that shaping an interactive experience to produce a narrative requires carefully conceived constraints on player behavior. |