Say we have 5 events that we wish to narrate:
1. Man waking up.2. Woman walking down a flight of stairs.
3. Man hearing a sound.
4. Woman dropping her handbag.
5. Man opening the door in a hurry.
Mathematically, we would have 5! = 120 different possibilities. As Chatman rightly observes, although so many possibilities exist, only a certain number are possible. He also notes that events whose relevance is not immediate may be inserted although their relevance must be made known at some point in time. In order for this sequence to make sense, all the activities of the man must generally begin with him waking up. Actually it may not be so, but, due to our personal experience in the manner in which we experience our own day (from the time we wake up) we impose such a constraint on the narrative.
This brings me right smack into the debate on self-regulation and its place in the design of interactive narrative. But first, let us talk about regulation in general. In a virtual game world, the regulation is simply that you can’t do things that the software does not support. All “play” happens with a certain boundary and that is the regulation for you. Self-regulation is a second layer of regulation, not imposed by the game designers or the software, but the user’s personal need for there to be relevance between the various events depicted.
My view is that it is because interactive media offers choice and control that it would be less likely to fail by becoming an “ill-formed” narrative. Works that are considered not very well-formed, which would be torn to shreds if they appeared in non-interactive media, have the ability to succeed in interactive media because it’s not just a case of one-way traffic in that the author has to convince the reader but rather that both parties want to be convinced that the narrative “makes sense”. This need to self-regulate or “make sense” of the narrative by the reader makes lives a whole lot easier for designers of interactive narratives.
1 comment:
Self-regulation makes things somewhat easier, but I think also somewhat harder. If you play an adventure game, for example, self-regulation tends to encourage players (in my experience) to assume that everything they encounter has some relevance to the story. So they grab everything and put it in their inventory... If the world consists of a very realistic simulation, with many "unrelated" objects, ie. things which don't directly relate to the story, it becomes very difficult for the player to figure out what they should do. I think this highlights the tension between a non-interactive, carefully crafted narrative, and an interactive world where the player is given choice, but perhaps not much guidance as to how to move the story forward. Striking the "right" balance is a very difficult task, as you'll all find out as you go through the assignments... :)
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