Excerpts from Marie-Laure Ryan’s
“Peeling the Onion: Layers of Interactivity in Digital Narrative Texts”
(entire article can be found at http://lamar.colostate.edu/~pwryan/onion.htm)
Is there such a thing as an interactive story? It all depends on who you ask. In the years 2003 and 2004, four books have been published on the topic of interactive narrative. Two of them—by Carolyn Handler Miller and Mark Meadows—regard the existence of interactive narratives as an indisputable fact. To make their case they crow about the existence, both on the Internet and elsewhere, of a wide variety of interactive texts that involve a story. For instance: computer games, interactive TV, interactive movies, smart toys (like talking dolls), augmented reality gaming, interactive cartoons, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, Web sites devoted to history, people putting together digital autobiographies or family histories that combine pictures and text, even news stories on Google and CNN that let the user click and choose between audio, visual and written documents pertaining to the story. Since interactive narrative is everywhere, Miller and Meadows do not regard the combination of narrativity and interactivity as a problem at all, and their books limit themselves to rather superficial advice on how to improve the design of digital stories.
Another author, Andrew Glassner, believes that the purpose of interactive narrative is to be entertaining, and he finds that the only type of product that truly fulfills this goal is computer games. Hypertext, by contrast, only kills the narrative pleasure that we find in novels and movies. Glassner recognizes that there is ample room for improvement of game stories, but he concludes his book on an optimistic note: “One of the pleasures of thinking about story environments is that everything is still open: we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible” (2004, 469).
The fourth author, Chris Crawford, is much more pessimistic about both the past and the future. He claims that to date, “not a single interactive storyworld that commands wide respect has been created” (2003, 259) and he complains that narrative is generally treated by game designers as “just another tacked-on feature,” like animation, sound effects and music, instead of forming the defining aspect of games (2004, 69). After a successful career as a computer game designer, Crawford became dejected with the triteness and lack of variety of the stories found in computer games. Almost all of them are variations of the same archetypal pattern, the quest of the hero to conquer a desired object or to save the world by defeating the forces of evil (though some recent computer games have inverted this pattern by making the hero a bad guy). Crawford retired from the computer game business and has devoted the past 13 years to designing a computer program, the Erasmatron that generates interactive stories. But in a recent post to Grand Text Auto (March 23, 2005), he expressed deep frustration with the project. The Erasmatron is still in the development stage and has yet to produce a single story that meets Crawford’s criteria of narrative excellence. But even if the program met its goals, Crawford believes it would be a commercial failure, because the game industry does not like to take risks. Why bother to experiment with narrative content, when there will be millions of people ready to buy the next shooter, as the huge success of the new installments of Doom and Half-Life have shown?
Who is right? The optimists or the pessimists? It all depends on what we mean by “interactive story” [ . . . ]
[FOUR LEVELS OF INTERACTIVITY:]
Level 1. Peripheral Interactivity
Here the story is framed by an interactive interface, but this interactivity affects neither the story itself, nor the order of its presentation. [. . . ] Sometimes we can read it, sometimes we cannot, but we cannot stop it, we cannot skip any of its parts, and we cannot change its internal order.
Figure 2. Screenshot from “Marginal ” by Stuart Moulthrop
The viewing of the text is turned into a more challenging operation in my next example of interactive interface, Marginal by Stuart Moulthrop (figure 2). The text consist of a collage of story fragments that seem to be cut out from newspaper columns—an obvious allusion to the cutout technique of William Burroughs. But the text is hidden by an opaque cover. A hole in this cover travels on the screen, revealing parts of the stories, but without allowing the user to read them, because it moves too fast and too randomly. The interactivity of the text depends on a second hole whose movement can be fully controlled. By walking this hole slowly over the screen, the user will be able to choose which part of the hidden text to expose, and by moving it from left to right over a fragment, she will be able to read it. When the controllable hole passes over a certain hot spot, the page is replaced by another, but since the user does not know where the hot spot is located, she has only indirect control over this event. Sometimes the text is instantly replaced, before the user can read anything, sometimes it stubbornly refuses to give way to the next page. The effect is like reading a book with a magnifying glass, except that in this case the user is not free to turn the pages.
[. . . ] This idea of surrounding a story with interactive documents that offer opportunities for play has also been implemented in interactive TV. For instance, the BBC series Spooks (a standard, non-interactive spy story) is accompanied by game-like documents that the user can download after each show. During the first five weeks of the series, these documents are training sessions that teach the user how to become a spy. Then the user accesses an “interactive mission” that places him in the (repurposed) world of the series. This enrichment of the world of shows through supplementary activities is the major strategy of interactive TV. Despite the hype that has surrounded the technology and the amount of money sunk into it by the industry, interactive TV hasn’t yet broken the surface skin of the onion. The interactivity of its narrative shows has been restricted so far to: providing peripheral documents on demand, giving access to chat groups, offering quizzes related to the content of the show, inviting viewers to vote on issues, linking shows to interactive Web sites (an approach that requires a dual screen) or letting the spectator select one of the many cameras that record a scene, in order to choose which character to watch.
Level 2. Interactivity affecting narrative discourse and the presentation of the story
On this level, the materials that constitute the story are still fully predetermined, but thanks to the text’s interactive mechanisms, their presentation to the user is highly variable. Narratologists would say that interactivity operates here on the level of narrative discourse, as opposed to the level of story. This type of interactivity requires a collection of documents interconnected by digital links, so that, when the user selects a link, a new document comes to the screen. This type of structure is widely known as hypertext. But the narrative forms of hypertext can rely on different configurations of links and nodes that embody different philosophies.
Figure 3. A sea anemone and a maze structure. (On the sea anemone, all nodes are connected to the central one through one link) 
[ . . . ] My second example of discourse-level interactivity is classical hypertext fiction—by this I mean a text based on a network or maze structures that looks like figure 3 (right). The best examples of this structure are the hypertext produced in the early nineties with the program Storyspace, for instance afternoon by Michael Joyce or Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop. (By contrast, more recent hypertexts, such as Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and M.D. Coverley’ s Califia have been influenced by the idea of the searchable archive, and they adopt the radiating design of the sea anemone, at least on the top level.) The formal characteristic of the network structure is the existence of loops that offer several different ways to get to the same node. These loops make it possible to circle forever in the network. This explains why the image of the labyrinth and the notion of “book without end” play such an important role in hypertext theory. To reinforce the reader’s experience of being lost in a labyrinth, classical hypertext favors opaque links, which lead to random selection and blind navigation. In Michael Joyce’s afternoon, links are not visible at all. In other texts, they are signaled by underlined words, but in contrast to the links of a database, the words themselves have no evident informational value, and the relation between the words that anchor the links and the text that comes to the screen is treated as a puzzle to be solved by the reader. Hypertext aesthetics favors the serendipitous emergence of meaning over a goal oriented, deliberate retrieval of information. But is it possible to respect narrative logic under these conditions? Early hypertext theorists thought so. They presented hypertext as a storytelling machine that generates a different narrative with every run of the program. As Michael Joyce put it: “Every reading … becomes a new text…Hypertext narratives become virtual storytellers” (193). Since there is an infinite number of different paths through a network, this means that hypertext can produce an infinite number of stories. If this claim were tenable, hypertext fiction would implement the type of interactivity that affects the inner layers of the onion: an interactivity that creates stories on the fly, rather than disclosing a preexisting story. For this to happen, the order in which the reader encounters the lexia would have to correspond rigidly to the chronological order of the events narrated in the lexias; for if the lexia could be mentally rearranged by the reader, different paths through the network could be read as the same story. But the loops of the network structure of classical hypertext prevent the interpretation of the sequence of lexia as a faithful image of chronological order.
Level 3. Interactivity creating variations in a partly pre-defined story
On this level the user play the role of a member of the storyworld, and the system grants him some freedom of action, but the purpose of the user’s agency is to progress along a fixed storyline, and the system remains in firm control of the narrative trajectory. This type of interactivity is typical of computer game, such as: adventure games, shooters, mystery-solving games.
In the texts discussed so far, participation was external and exploratory. Here it is internal, and either ontological or exploratory. Internal participation means that the user has a body, or avatar, in the fictional world, and that the actions available to him are not merely abstract ways to see more of the text, but represent a physical engagement of the avatar with the surrounding world, such as moving, jumping, building, shooting, killing, picking up objects and looking around. When the actions available to the user consist merely of moving around the world and looking at objects, participation is exploratory; when they have the power to change the world or to affect the destiny of the avatar, participation is ontological. Internal-exploratory participation in found in those games in which the mission of the player consists of solving a mystery, such as a murder case. These games connect two narrative levels: the level of the story being investigated by the player’s avatar, which is written into the game, and the level of the investigation, which is variable, since it is created by the actions of the player. But by far the most common form of participation in videogames is ontological. We find it whenever the life of the avatar is at stake. In this case we can say that each run of the game creates a new life story for the avatar and a new history for the fictional world. [ . . . ]
The main problem with current game design is its inability (or is it unwillingness?) to diversify the repertory of actions available to the player. Games of progression along a fixed script are very similar to each other on the level of the archetypal deep structure—the quest of the hero--; reasonably varied on the level of the motifs that concretize the deep structure; but very similar again on the levels of the actions available to the player. For instance, Doom, Harry Potter and Morrowind create vastly different storyworlds, but the actions available to the player are virtually the same: fighting, moving, dodging attackers, renewing ones’ health in order to fight more, and solving puzzles to gain access to more spaces within the gameworld. In these games, the user’s actions connect the various points on the trajectory of the story in all-too-predictable fashion, rather than making a significant contribution to the development of narrative meaning. Games won’t be worth playing for the sake of the story until they introduce actions that engage the player into strategic relations with other characters and require a construction of the character’s mind: actions such as asking for help, forming alliances, betraying, deceiving, pursuing, breaking up with, threatening, flattering, seeking revenge, promising and breaking promises, convincing or dissuading. For what is narrative, if not the evolution of a network of relations between intelligent agents?
Level 4. Real time story generation
On level 4, stories are not pre-determined, but rather, generated on the fly out of data that comes in part from the system, and in part from the user. Every run of the program should result in a different story, and the program should therefore be replayable. But to this day, we do not really have a story-generating system sufficiently sophisticated to produce a wide variety of interesting stories out of data internal to the system. Integrating the user’s input in the generating process only raises the difficulty to a higher power.
What makes the project appear so daunting is the utopian model proposed by Janet Murray in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck. This title refers to a technology that exists only in science fiction. The Holodeck is a VR installation in the TV series Star Trek that provides rest and entertainment to the crew of the starship Voyager. In the Holodeck, a computer runs a three-dimensional simulation of a fictional world, and the interactor becomes in make-believe a character in a digital novel. The plot of this novel is generated live, through the interaction between the human participant and the computer-created virtual characters. The technical and phenomenological characteristics of the Holodeck are as follows:
1. The user acts in the virtual world through language and gestures. He has total freedom of behavior.
2. Characters are driven by AI modules and respond intelligently to the user’s actions.
3. Each different action of the user creates a different response from the system and consequently generates a different story. The system is able to construct an infinite number of appropriate responses.
4. The Holodeck creates three forms of immersion: spatial (thanks to the 3D environment), temporal (the action takes place in real time), and emotional (the user deeply cares for his avatar).
Needless to say, most of the features of the Holodeck are way beyond the capability of current AI and VR systems. But the most problematic aspect of the Holodeck—or of any system of interactive narrative-- is logical and artistic rather than technological. How can the freedom of the user be reconciled with the need to produce a well-formed, aesthetically satisfactory story? VR researchers Ruth Aylett and Sandy Louchart refer to this problem as the “narrative paradox”: “On one hand the author seeks control over the direction of a narrative in order to give it a satisfactory structure. On the other hand a participating user demands the autonomy to act and react without explicit authorial constraint.”
Another way to formulate the paradox is in terms of the discrepancy between the goals of authors and the goals of people engaged in living their own life. This discrepancy is captured by the formula: “Life is lived looking forwards, but it is told looking backwards.” When we live our life we ask: what action can I take to solve my problems and reach a more satisfactory state of affairs in the future? But when we tell a story, we start from a situation that we find interesting, and we ask: what course of events led to this situation? The visitors of an interactive narrative system plays the role of a character in a virtual world, and they adopt the forward-looking perspective of life. When we are faced with a problem in real life, we want to resolve it as quickly and as efficiently as possible. But the author who creates a story is more interested in actions that produce opportunities for interesting plot developments than in efficient problem solving.
A particularly telling example of the conflict between character goals and authorial goals is the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood. When the hungry wolf meets the little girl in the forest, why doesn’t he eat her on the spot, rather than waiting until she reaches the house of the grandmother? He is taking the risk that Little Red Riding Hood will never find the grandmother’s house, or that another wolf will eat her in the meantime. But from the perspective of the storyteller, the plan of the wolf is infinitely superior to the practical solution, because it prepares the highly dramatic episode of the wolf tricking the heroine by taking the place of the grandmother in bed and the climactic event of their confrontation.
Little Red Riding Hood is not a very promising scheme for interactive narrative, because the other options that offer themselves to the wolf or to the little girl are vastly inferior in terms of dramatic interest and tellability to the actual tale. The most sophisticated AI and VR technology will not help conquer the inner layer of the onion if designers do not come up with stories that truly benefit from active user participation. Aristotle has written the rules for traditional drama, but there is to this day no poetics and no set of guidelines for interactive drama. [ . . . ]
Meta-interactivity.
In addition to the four layers of interactivity internal to the onion, I would like to briefly mention a fifth type of user involvement: meta-interactivity. On this level, the interactor is not consuming the onion, but rather, preparing new ways to cook it for other users, such as designing a new level for a computer game, creating new costumes for the avatar, introducing new objects, associating existent objects with new behaviors, and generally expanding the possibilities of action offered by the storyworld. To constitute a genuinely “meta” interactivity, this must be done by writing code and patching up the source, rather than by using tools internal to the game, such as the house-building module of The Sims. It is on this level that the idea of the user as co-author becomes more than a hyperbolic cliché, but the two roles do not merge, since users cannot simultaneously immerse themselves in a storyworld and write the code that brings this world to life.
The inner layers of the onion are much harder to conquer than the outer layers, but we should not confuse problem-solving difficulty with aesthetic value. There is a tendency in digital culture to evaluate a work as a feat of programming virtuosity. I call this the anti-WYSIGYG aesthetics, because you have to imagine the code that lies behind the screen to appreciate the text. By these standards, a work of level 4 is automatically superior to a work of level 1, regardless of its narrative quality, because it requires much more elaborate and original coding. If we applied the same aesthetics to print literature, a palindrome story or a novel written without the letter “e” (such as Georges Perec’s La disparition) would automatically represents a greater artwork than a novel like Marcel Proust’s A La recherche du temps perdu, which was written without stringent formal constraints (though certainly not without form). Another aesthetic criterion popular in digital culture that favors the works of the inner layer is the idea of emergence and self-renewability. Façade can be replayed half a dozen times with different results, and The Sims virtually endlessly, while the texts of level 3 will rarely be replayed once the game has been beaten. And while it is possible to fiddle for a long time with a hypertext of level 2 like afternoon, the works of level 1 quickly yield all of their substance. But for the reader who truly cares for the story, an interactive work that produces a relatively fixed plot but gives intense pleasure during its unique run is not inherently inferior to a system that creates a wide variety of mediocre stories. I am not saying that diversity of output does not contribute positively to aesthetic value, but rather, that a work can compensate for lack replayability with other qualities. There are consequently good and bad solutions, success and failure, entertainment and boredom on all the layers of the interactive onion.
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