The way we use the adjective INTERACTIVE in the general context of Computer Science (and specifically game development), has come to mean something “involving the actions or input of a user”. This implies that anything that is affected by user action of any kind is interactive, which is a serious corruption of this word, rendering its attributive power all but useless.

For something to be INTERACTIVE in the classical sense, it needs to be “mutually or reciprocally active” [1]. That’s the original meaning of this compound word made by sticking the word “inter” (mutually, reciprocally) in front of the word “active”.

What have been the consequences of this semantic corruption? Well, describing something as interactive in our domain essentially says nothing. In the “corrupted” sense — everything is interactive! A book is interactive. A movie is. You are interactively reading this text!

How so? You can choose to stop at any moment; you can choose to resume at any moment; you can skip a few paragraphs; you can try reading cross-eyed for added difficulty… All these actions constitute “input from a user”. You can stop reading after this sentence, but while I still have your attention — let me just say that you may miss the best parts.

Still with me? You have made the right choice.

The misconception is that because an interactive experience affords you SOME (or rather ANY KIND OF) choice, it automatically affords you agency as well. But that’s not true if the only thing you can choose is to continue or not, because the activity only goes one way. For a player to have REAL agency within a game, the game has to “act back” at the player.

What then, constitutes a game “acting back” at the player? Sure, the state of the game changes with every player input, sometimes more and sometimes less. But at what point does a game become PLAYABLE, in a way that no book or movie could ever hope to be? To be playable, an experience has to have a choice, the consequences of which are something other than making it more difficult to continue, or outright preventing you from continuing. More specifically, the change in game state has to be unexpected, it must be different for different players, directly consequential to the player’s previous actions, and it has to permanently alter the experience going forward.

Let’s call that kind of choice: “METAMORPHIC CHOICE”. Because it induces a metamorphosis, instead of a simple change, in the game state, and also because it sounds cool.

The majority of games don’t have metamorphic choice. Your favorite shooter doesn’t. Sure, you may die in combat before you reach the next checkpoint (or story beat), but that simply pauses your progress towards the end. You may have held on to the wrong weapon, or you may have low ammo, but how you play has no effect on what happens next, it only determines whether it happens or not!

Death is the pause button in shooter games.

There are some games that do have metamorphic choice, but only in a mechanical sense. Strategies, simulations, survival games, pure multiplayer games — in general games that model a system of some sort. In those games, your success is directly correlated to the quality of your performance, but the entire experience in those kinds of games is expressed purely through their mechanics. No one is trying to tell a compelling story outside of the game mechanics — you are expected to build your own story out of your mechanical experience: a triumph against the odds, an elegant defense etc.

We simply haven’t developed a language of communication with players that will allow us to create metamorphic choice in the STORIES that we tell. We are quick to sacrifice interactivity and borrow narrative language from books and movies when story is important in a game — but we lose the uniqueness of our medium in the process.

Shouldn’t there be a unique way to tell a story inside a game, and allow player agency in its narration?

There is a whole genre of games that foray into this space — we call them interactive narrative games. But if they aren’t completely experimental pieces, they usually limit the effect of player choice to a very few, discrete outcomes. They also build up towards a limited amount of critical choices, effectively making the act of choosing an integral part of the story they are trying to tell.

Others try to devise a set of “story mechanics”, a sort of machine-for-stories, where you don’t only interact with the story of the game through a set of rules, but you are actually constructing it from your interaction with the mechanics. The depth of story achievable in this way is severely limited by the afforded set of game mechanics, so this end of the spectrum is highly experimental at this point — for an extreme example check out Chris Crawford’s Storytron.

The principal divide when it comes to PLAYING A STORY seems to be: hand-craft everything the player can influence or have the game *generate* a story from a set of pre-made components? The first approach is very time consuming, difficult to QA and completely incompatible with the entirety of our linear experience so far, while the second one lacks the control and finesse required to have the player emotionally invest in a story. Good stories are hard to create, even harder to tell — so my money is in handcrafting the experience.

More importantly, we need to devise a distinct narrative language specifically for PLAYABLE STORIES. They will be different to traditionally linear stories, they will require new methods of interaction and the tools to make their creation commercially viable — but damn that is an exciting prospect!

It means we have to ween ourselves (and our audience) off linear stories, and expand the boundaries of storytelling into the interactive. An experience that allows the player to EXPLORE the story, not just witness it — effectively affording the STORY INTERACTIVITY between game and player that goes beyond simple mechanics.

Next time, I will describe one specific attempt at providing a solution to problem described here.

[1] Definition of “interactive” at Merriam-Webster