Do you believe it is possible to create a satisfactory interactive story that is not a game? Why or why not?
Video games are, in comparison to film and music, an
immature medium. As Eric said in his Genres and Subtext lecture, many genres
and gameplay models have yet to be discovered. The definition of a video game
warps with every game released. In the early days of gaming, there was a vast
emphasis on gameplay over story. Pong? Hell,
it doesn’t even have a story. Other
games, like Super Mario Bros. use
story as a context for the world you’re playing in, as well as the motivation
of the main characters. That's about it. King Koopa has captured the Princess, and it’s up to
Mario and Luigi to save them. Not only that, but the King's used his Koopa magic to
turn most of the Mushroom People into bricks, plants, and stones. Now,
games like Bioshock Infinite have
expansive stories, those that can’t be easily summarized in instruction
manuals. While games of old want you to simply have fun, games of today want the gameplay to be a vehicle for the story
(Not to say this wasn’t the case before. Ninja
Gaiden was the first game on the Nintendo Entertainment System to have
cutscenes, telling an elaborate story, for the time). Playing a game like Galatea, however, is completely
different. It relies almost completely on story. Yet, it does rely on the same
mechanics used by other text adventure games. You type commands into the
program, which responds. This process repeats ad nauseam. Unlike most works of
fiction, Galatea isn’t linear. You
choose what you want to say or do. Through these choices, you can attain one of
multiple endings. Despite the fact that Carolyn Handler Miller doesn’t classify
it as a game, Galatea does have gaming elements, such as decision-making, multiple endings, and non-linearity.
As I discussed in my critique of The Walking Dead, so many different types of games exist that it’s
harder than ever to define what a game truly is. The creator of Dys4ia describes her work as a game, but
what you end up playing is an introspective experience of what it feels like to
undergo hormone replacement therapy. But you interact with it, so it’s a game,
right? Zork is an adventure that’s
played just like Galatea. You can
win, you can lose, you make choices and you have a score. So Zork is a game too, right? Really,
there’s no widely accepted definition, a checklist of what makes a game. Is
asking if you can make an interactive story that’s not a game the right
question to ask? Just like any form of art, it is up to the artist to decide
whether or not their work is a work of art. Can you make an interactive story that's not a game? There's no right answer. Just like beauty, art is in the eye of the beholder.
Dys4ia is an online Flash game that can be played here.
Galatea can be downloaded for free through this link.
