Omaha, Nebraska, August 12, 1986. Mr. Jerome Hendricks of Omaha has been awarded the Variations Prize this year for his adaptive book version of the classic movie Star Wars. Mr. Hendricks’s on-line book has available 575 distinctive plot variations from which readers can choose dynamically as they read the book. For those with graphic terminals, Mr. Hendricks has included automated space battles.
Some critics have claimed that because this book treats the reader as a character of his or her choice, there is some difficulty in distinguishing the book from a computer game, and it therefore should not have been eligible for the prize. The award committee, however, has decided that books with game-oriented characteristics and automatic graphics are still books…
– Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff, The Network Nation
“Reality isn’t enough anymore!”
– John Walker, Autodesk
More Than Just A Smart Box
“Surely, we can offer experiences that are more than point-and-click-and-wait (and wait some more) and then watch TV. I envision interactive games that sense who you are or what your mood is and tailor experiences that are always unique… Most of all, I await the maverick multimedia visionary who will shift the paradigm for all of us by demonstrating a whole new way of communicating.” [188]
To this point, I have looked at only one aspect of how computers can affect the telling of stories – by exploiting their ability to quickly access information stored in different areas of memory, which makes it possible to offer the user a choice of narrative paths. While this is new to a lot of people, it has precedents in traditional narrative. However, as Robert Gelman suggests above, the computer offers possibilities for esthetic experiences which are unlike anything traditional media had to offer.
Designer Joy Mountford, in referring to a CD-ROM project by musician Thomas Dolby, mentions one such possibility. “Thomas Dolby has been trying to do [something unique] with his product Avery,” she says, “which works such that whichever pictures you click on, you get a different sound source, at different tempos, faded in or fading out, based on how fast you move the mouse. So, it’s truly interactive to you versus me. That’s a very rare thing.” [189] The astonishing thing about Dolby’s project, even more than the fact that the esthetic experience is partially determined by the input of the participant, is that he or she need not be aware that his or her input is affecting the experience.
In this section, I will look at other ways in which the computer can uniquely affect the way we tell stories.
Cas: Interactive Science Fiction Project
“The Facility Administrator’s outer office was much like every other office in the complex; all hard metal and bright, smooth plastics. The molded chairs wouldn’t have looked out of place on a public bus or in the waiting lounge of the local spaceport. It wouldn’t be fair to say that the designers of the chairs had gone out of their way to make them uncomfortable; that would imply that money and effort had been expended. No, Cas reflected, it was far more likely that this particular design was simply the cheapest to produce and ship to government offices throughout the Federation. The design and materials were also durable; Cas could find no more than a few slight scuff marks on his chair despite the fact that it had probably been installed when the facility was constructed over a century before. The only clue that this office was special, that it was the office of the man in charge of the entire sprawling facility, was the thin brown carpet on the floor.” [190]
Collaborative fiction is by no means a new phenomenon. [191] However, the computer offers new opportunities – as well as new challenges – to those who would initiate collaborative works. One such work, the Interactive Science Fiction Project started by John Atchley, is currently being written. Atchley wrote the first chapter of Cas, the name of the work, and developed the method by which others could contribute subsequent chapters.
Cas exploits some aspects of the World Wide Web, which uses links from pictures or phrases to connect various kinds of information stored on different computers around the world. At the end of each chapter, the reader is given a clear choice of where the story will go next; at the end of Atchley’s first chapter, for instance, the main character is given the choice of whether to continue his military career at a naval academy or to go directly into the marines. Using hypertext links, the reader can choose to follow either branch of the story with a simple click of his or her mouse. Each chapter will be maintained on the Web page of the person who wrote it, and each chapter writer is responsible for choosing the two branching chapters which will follow.
When complete, this story will have a simple branching structure leading to a large variety of stories. “If successful,” Atchley wrote, “this project will result in hundreds of completely different stories starting from a common point. Many of them will no doubt be real ‘stinkers.’ If we end up with even a few gems the effort will have been worth it.” [192]
Writing a small part of a much larger story which will be continued by other writers poses unique problems. Writers must be aware, for instance, not to tell too much of the story, which would effectively limit what those who come after them would be able to do. As Atchley observed: “I found it most difficult to build a framework in which we know a lot about what has happened to the main character without really developing much insight to the character himself. We know much of what has shaped Cas, but we can’t quite see that shape.” [193]
Designer Gareth Rees put his finger on another problem, common to all collaborative writing efforts: “Writers who participate in ‘shared world’ series have long recognized the necessity of tight editorial control to avoid a multitude of continuity errors as each collaborator makes up their own locations, histories, customs, technologies and so on… Collaborators will not be aware of each others’ hidden assumptions and, especially in the distributed style envisaged by some, may not even take the trouble to read all existing continuations in order to make sure theirs is consistent with what has gone before.” [194] Continuity errors are not merely an annoyance in interactive fiction, but a problem which can destroy the rationale for the working in the medium: “A choice is not a choice unless there is some permanent background against which to examine it.” [195]
Atchley is aware of this possibility, suggesting in his writer’s guidelines that “while I anticipate that the project will result in any number of completely different stories, each must progress logically from the preceding events. Therefore, it is most important that contributing authors be familiar with the story line in the story thread they are contributing to. [196] However, rather than keep tight control of each developing story thread himself, Atchley’s requires each contributor to become the editor of the links following his or her contribution. How this will affect the continuity of the story will be interesting to watch.
There has been a lot of hype about the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web, holding out the possibility that every reader could also become a writer; Cas, in allowing anybody who wants to take the time to write a chapter to submit it for publication, seems to offer this possibility. Because every writer is responsible for choosing the subsequent links to his or her chapter, he or she also becomes an editor; moreover, because each writer maintains the chapter and its links on his or her own home page, it can be argued that each is a publisher (although, curiously, Atchley intends to maintain the copyright over the whole work himself).
Although this example of a collaborative work is text-based, there is no reason to believe the principles involved could not be extended to other media. A dozen different versions of a painting could be created, with different artists contributing different brushstrokes to the work. Any would-be rock star could add his or her vocals to an existing song (virtual karoake), or a variety of musicians could jam from wherever they are via computer network in real time (as happened at Interactive 96). Even film offers the possibility for new forms of collaboration, with different people contributing different scenes or even elements of scenes (such as dialogue or special effects), and every participant editing the various elements to his or her satisfaction.
As always, the limit is the human imagination.
“The administrator wasted no time on pleasantries, ‘You were expecting to report for marine training in a few weeks. We’ve just received news that you have another option. The admissions board of the naval academy reviews all cadet’s records and they’ve recommended you as a candidate. That doesn’t mean that you’ve been accepted to the academy, only that you’re being offered the chance to attend a six-month prep-school and compete with others for the discretionary billets at the academy. It is your right, and no disgrace, to decline. Frankly, I think you’d be happier as a marine, with five years of cadet training you’d have a leg up on most of the inductees and stand an excellent chance of rapid advancement. I’ll need your decision by this evening. Do you have any questions?’
It’s decision time…” [197]
Gingerbread Man
Although we have been looking at interactive multimedia as a medium in itself, there are works which start in a more traditional medium to which interactivity and additional media are added. Enhanced CDs, for instance, are basically music compact discs which are supplemented by images and interactivity. Ion’s Gingerbread Man (1995) is one example with one or two noteworthy features.
Gingerbread Man is a collection of nine songs by avant garde musical group The Residents, each of which tells the story of a different character. We begin with an image of a gingerbread man in the middle of the screen, surrounded by nine pairs of eyes. “As the Gingerbread Man spins, each set of eyes lights up. Click and you’re able to explore the inner thoughts of the disc’s nine characters.” [198] By choosing a set of eyes, you are taken to the song about that person.
While the song is playing, images related to the main character in the song are displayed onscreen. The participant has some control over these images: “The effect is like ‘playing’ the video, because the computer keyboard and mouse allow you to trigger optical effects, change images, fire audio samples, and experience hidden surprises.” [199] However, as designer Bill Schulze explains, many of the work’s effects are beyond the control of the participant:
there’s a very high degree of randomness in the selection of the graphic objects that are displayed at any one time during the song. So, if you play the same song…you would find that although the keyboard maps to some of the elements, you know Q through T works just backgrounds, there’s a lot of mixing and matching from a little database of objects that are available. I’d go so far as to say you could actually quit Gingerbread Man, come back to it the next day, start it up, go back to the exact same song that you played the day before, and you’d see an entirely new set of graphics that you hadn’t seen before. [200]
This potential for random effects is a unique aspect of computer media.
If that were all there was to it, Gingerbread Man would be an interesting novelty. However, according to Schulze, the randomness of the images is an important aspect of the esthetic experience of the enhanced CD: “it not only would be part visual instrument, but part clue. Part of the mystery game where every time through the song you get more familiar with the music, you hear statements that you hadn’t heard before, and after repeated playings, you see images that you hadn’t seen before, and after repeated playings, you could have a much better understanding of the plight of the character than if you just used it once and threw it away.” [201]
Telecommunication Breakdown
Another enhanced CD is Telecommunication Breakdown (1996), created by EBN, the Emergency Broadcast Network, and produced by TVT Records. Although the music and videos are mostly traditional (that is, not interactive), the CD begins with a highly interactive segment:
As the presentation loads, a test tone blares and the seconds count down against a flashing test pattern on the screen. Then the wall appears: 16 separate video fields that run simultaneously accompanied by looped audio fragments from the album. As rapid-fire found-object images cycle at varying rates, you can click on text fields marked TELECOMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN, EBN INFO, LIVE SHOW and TECHNOLOGY. The first transforms the wall into a shimmering interactive lyric sheet for selections on the album. (Lyrics isn’t quite right; most of the words are spoken fragments sampled from television.) The other fields yield additional information, new audio loops, and altered visuals, though never in a predictable way. In fact, it’s rarely obvious just what clicking in a given place at a given moment will do. Meanwhile the 16 videos continue to mutate and click.
For the more standardised navigation, a simple panel appears in the lower left corner. Along with PREVIOUS [screen], MAIN [menu], QUIT
and HELP buttons, the panel offers two labelled EFFECTS A and EFFECTS B. When you press on one of these, the entire wall freaks out in a double-time barrage of color and imagery. [202]
As well as initiating effects by clicking on text, the participant can change the experience by interacting directly with any of the video images on the wall: “Each of the 16 [images] is live: click on one to trigger a video spasm or summon EBN background info.” [203] The participant is supposed to be able to sample video images the way a rap singer samples sound bites.
As with Gingerbread Man, the effects are largely random, determined by the point or points at which the participant intervenes, and what intervention the participant chooses to make. And, again, the producers of the enhanced CD are using the medium for a specific esthetic purpose: “EBN’s disc snarls with po-mo-attitude as it combines, distorts, and recontextualizes the media-saturated environment…” [204]
In both Gingerbread Man and Telecommunications Breakdown, the artist creates a potential and the participant triggers events but neither has complete control over the experience. In a real sense, artist and participant collaborate to create the experience. In a way, this is similar to a simulation structure, but with two important differences: no existing process or event is actually being recreated; and, although the participant can trigger events, he or she cannot be said to be in control of them because of their random nature.
Finally, computer experiences based on random effects offer a different kind of esthetic experience. Traditional media (and interactive media which are structured along traditional lines) generally offer causal relationships between their elements; scene 27 follows logically through a chain from scene one to scene 26, and leads logically to scene 28 and all of the scenes which logically follow after it. Many forms of interactive media, by way of contrast, offer associational relationships; scenes or images do not necessarily follow each other by logical necessity, but in such a way that the participant can draw meaning out of their juxtaposition. Thus, where artists in traditional media tried to create specific meanings with their work, interactive media artists will be creating opportunities for participants to find their own meaning in a work. Associational relationships between elements (as a function of the nature of the medium, not merely the esthetic preferences of a single artist) is one of the prominent features which differentiates interactive media from all media which came before it.
Some will object that this violates traditional ideas of narrative where actions cannot be arbitrary, but must flow out of necessity (take that, Flying Wedge!). It is true that, while narratives may emerge out of Gingerbread Man or Telecommunications Breakdown, that need not be where their primary esthetic effect is experienced. As long as they, and other random effects based interactive experiences, manage to offer participants surprise and delight, they will still give pleasure associated with traditional media.
Tender Loving Care
A woman’s young child has died, but she refuses to accept this fact, trying to maintain the illusion that the child still lives. This puts a lot of strain on the woman’s relationship with her husband, who hires a nurse to look after her. Unfortunately, the wife begins to suspect the husband and nurse are having an affair, which increases the tension in the household. This is the basic story of Trilobyte’s Tender Loving Care (not yet released), one of the first examples of a dramatic interactive CD-ROM.
Tender Loving Care contains filmed sequences between the three main characters and a psychiatrist who is treating the wife (and who also acts as the story’s narrator, although because he is a character in the drama, his narration isn’t necessarily objective). After the sequences, the participant can explore the environments in which they took place, uncovering more information about what is going on. According to director David Wheeler: “…maybe a scene ends in the upstairs hallway. There will be some kind of transition, but you’re still in the hallway and you can move, go into a room, encounter one of the characters from the story… The character will confront you directly, so you can discover more about the characters – what they’re thinking, you’ll read their diaries, you’ll find out things they wouldn’t like you to know…” [205] It is possible to interact on a very basic level with the work and still see a complete story, but the more one explores, the deeper the drama becomes. Interestingly, Wheeler doesn’t compare the work to a film: “It’s more like a novel.” [206]
The work has a basic cul-de-sac structure where many of the branches are actually world environments which can be explored. However, complicating this structure is the fact that after each major scene, a psychological test is offered to the participant. How the next scene is played is determined by the answers the participant gives to the questions. For instance, if the participant’s answers about how he or she felt about the previous scene suggest that he or she was sympathetic toward the wife, the next scene may be told from the point of view of the husband, showing the wife in a less flattering light and complicating the viewer’s experience. This is an arena type of cul-de-sac, where the participant chooses (albeit, in this case, not consciously) from alternative versions of the same scene.
The computer also keeps track of the answers you give to the different sets of questions. In this way, the computer is constantly changing the shading of the story based on your cumulative input. “The way it works is like biofeedback,” Wheeler claims. “You go through this experience and you don’t know what you’re doing. But the computer is logging what you’re doing, how you’ve responded to things…creating a psychological profile of you.” [207] Tender Loving Care has multiple endings; which one you experience is determined by how you answered all the preceding questions: “In this particular story we have four different endings. But you don’t choose. You don’t consciously choose. The ending will be provided based on what you’ve done.” [208]
Although the tests in Tender Loving Care are more intrusive than the way the participant employs a mouse, the aim is essentially the same: to have the artistic experience be partially determined by the interaction between the participant and the computer. Tender Loving Care allows the story to respond to the participant! As Wheeler puts it: “…we don’t really approach interactivity from a point of ‘You see a character going down the hall; does he go left or right?’ That’s not our idea of interactivity. We’re trying to make how you react to what you’re seeing affect what you’re seeing as opposed to physically clicking on something.” [209]
Interactivity is often seen as a simple process of breaking a traditional story into small bits and making links between them. But, as Trilobyte co-founder Rob Lanteros observes: “Instead of taking a linear story and breaking it up, you’re enhancing it in various ways.” [210]
Narrabases
One form of web structure employed for fictional ends by Judy Malloy is the “narrabase” (a conflation of the terms narrative and database) or “narrative data structure.” As she describes it: “A database is a collection of computer-stored, -organised, and -retrieved information. Instead of baseball statistics or information on the migratory habits of fresh water fish, narrabases contain fictional, narrative information. They are read by asking the computer to display information about the people, places and things that make up the story. Rather than following one path that leads to a series of battles or buried treasure, the reader dives repeatedly into a pool of information, emerging each time with a handful of narrative detail.” [211]
Uncle Roger (1988), one of Malloy’s experiments with narrabases, contains 250 records (which combine text and graphics), divided into three files (a collection of related records). Attached to each record are one to eight keywords; to access a new record, the participant types in one or more of the keywords. In this way, “The reader ‘unfolds’ the story by making multiple searches through the database. Like a guest at a real party, the reader hears snatches of conversation, observes what strangers are wearing and meets old friends. No single reader experiences the evening in the same way.” [212]
Another of Malloy’s narrabases, Its Name Was Penelope (1990), contains 400 records in 6 files. Participants navigate through menus to get to the specific record they wanted to access; in addition, records were randomly accessed by the computer. “Menu searching is easier to use and less intrusive than keyword searching,” Malloy explained. “Random record production causes screens of text to come and go, sometimes repeating (like memories do) in a natural, non-sequential way.” [213] Because it’s menu-driven, Its Name Was Penelope resembles a tree structure more than a web, which made easier to navigate.
Narrabases are more literary than dramatic; the esthetic effect they strive to achieve is in the accumulation of detail about their subject(s) rather than the forward movement of a story. As Malloy states: “Narrative data structures utilise the computer screen’s potential for gradual, fluid build up of text layers and levels of meaning.” [214] It should be clear that, with most forms of web, we have to essentially abandon Aristotle’s dramatic theories. Interactive art forms can certainly provide esthetic pleasure (otherwise nobody would be interested in experiencing them), but it is not the pleasure of following a strong dramatic narrative.
MUDs, MOOs and Other Artificial Environments
“In circles where people are trying to invent the future of interactive media there seems to be a great divide. Will the player of the games of the future be in a more complex world than is offered by today’s games, but still in a world that is created by somebody else? Or will the player be the designer of his or her own game? In other words, will players continue to be ‘users’ of someone else’s program or will they be programmers in their own right? Will they be able to create new characters and change the rules of the game? Both strategies are being pursued, and surely both will bear fruit. One leads to an image of an
interactive Gone With the Wind (1939), the other to children building computer worlds as today’s children build Ferris wheels with Tinkertoys.” [215]
To this point, I have looked at closed interactive structures which, are Sherry Turkle writes, are created by somebody else. The only system which was open, where people other than the original creator could contribute, was Cal, the interactive novel, but the amount of input the story could handle was limited; only a small number of readers would have the opportunity to become writers. A better example of an open system would be an interactive encyclopedia which would allow any user to store a thread of connections or add his or her own notes for later use.
Many people reject closed systems, claiming that they are not truly interactive. Theodore Nelson, for instance, has written that “Tomorrow’s nonsequential movie media – hypermovies and ‘interactive videodiscs’ – require new depths of access by users. Though interactive videodiscs have begun to proliferate, it is only as closed systems to which others may not add or make variations. This is unacceptable in the long term.” [216] This suggests that interested participants in interactive movies should be allowed to film their own scenes which they can then add to the work for the pleasure of subsequent participants. In this way, unlike closed interactive works which have finite boundaries, open interactive works are cumulative; over time they can grow indefinitely.
We are not at a point where we can have open interactive film and video projects. However, open interactive structures do exist at present on computer networks: they are called MUDs. “In 1978, Roy Trubshaw wrote an electronic role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons while he was in his final undergraduate year at Essex College in England. The following year, his classmate Richard Bartle took over the game, expanding the number of potential players and their options for action. Trubshaw and Bartle called the game MUD, for Multi-User Dungeon.” [217]
In a MUD, you take on a character before the action begins; when you enter the virtual space, you are supposed to act as that character, not yourself. The creator of the place provides descriptions of all of the different areas of the world, which are yours to discover (in a fashion similar to a Dungeonmaster in D&D). Many MUDs are also created with potential storylines which unfold as the environments are explored. Until recently, all of this was done with text; descriptions of environments were in text, as were your instructions for what your character said or did.
As Kevin Kelly writes, MUDs were significantly different from previous role playing games:
MUD and its many improved offspring (known generically as MUDs, MUSEs, TinyMUDs, etc.) are very similar to classic 1970s-style adventure games but with two powerful improvements. First, MUDs can handle up to 100 other human players immersed in the dungeon along with you. This is the distributed, parallel characteristic of MUDs. The others can be playing alongside you as jolly partners, or against you as wicked adversaries, or above you as capricious gods creating miracles and spells.
Secondly, and most significantly, the other players (and yourself) can be at work adding rooms, modifying passages, or inventing new and magical objects…the players invent the world as they live in it. The game is to create a cooler world than you had yesterday. [218]
Being able to interact in an unstructured way with other characters and to modify the environment are two indicators of an open interactive work.
Narratives are created in interactive environments such as MUDs, where “virtual characters converse with each other, exchange gestures, express emotions, win and lose virtual money, and rise and fall in social status. A virtual character can also die. Some die of ‘natural’ causes (a player decides to close them down), or they can have their virtual lives snuffed out.” [219] However, unlike the interactive narratives we have looked at to this point, the creator does not direct the participants. The creator does not create the story – the participants do through their interactions with each other. They can play the games or solve the mysteries that the creator has set up for them, or they can simply explore the environment and interact with each other, or they can set up their own games or mysteries if they so desire. Brad de Graf, creator of virtual characters called woggles, expresses the new creative circumstance nicely: “It’s a different medium we are making. Instead of creating a story, I’m creating a world. Instead of creating a character’s dialogue and action, I’m creating a personality.” [220]
In the past few years, as computers have become more powerful, where appropriate text has been replaced by graphics. This has led to a much richer experience, for, as Robert Rossney correctly states, “Text-only worlds shut out an entire sphere of communication… The ability to gesture brings the nonverbal channel back to the online world.” [221] One of the earliest, Habitat, offers a lot of useful information to would-be creators of narrative-based virtual environments.
“The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat”
Habitat was created in the mid-1980s for film director George Lucas’ company, Lucasfilm. As Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, two of Habitat’s creators, describe it, “Lucasfilm’s Habitat was one of the first attempts to create a very large-scale, commercial, many-user, graphical virtual environment… The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presents its users with a real-time animated view into an on-line simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.” [222]
Participants in Habitat accessed the virtual world from their home computers via telephone lines and modems. They were represented in the environment by “avatars,” graphical representations of their characters which were controlled by joysticks. If they wanted their characters to speak, they typed the dialogue in on their keyboards; it was displayed in a balloon above the heads of their characters. Avatars were able to “move around, pick up, put down, and manipulate objects, talk to each other, and gesture, each under the control of an individual player.” [223]
As Rossney, who experienced a few different graphical interactive environments discovered, avatars could be highly colorful. “In Worlds Chat, I’ve talked with leather-clad Asian women, chess pieces, blowfish, and butterflies. In The Palace, I’ve chatted with Frank Sinatra, Gumby, and the Pillsbury Doughboy. And in Microsoft’s V-Chat, while manifesting myself as a flamingo with a cigar clutched in its beak, I’ve stood in a fishbowl speaking broken French with a purple-robed wizard who, in real life, was a fellow somewhere in Luxembourg. The language barrier was devastating, but we managed to entertain each other nonetheless: I flapped my wings frantically, and he exploded, transforming himself into a toad.” [224]
Habitat was made up of 20,000 distinct areas, each joined to as many as four others. By directing your avatar towards the exit of one area, you would find yourself entering the adjacent area. Hundreds of different object types were distributed throughout the world, creating a rich environment to explore.
Early in the creation of Habitat, Farmer and Morningstar realised that the environment had a complexity threshold, that it would soon grow larger than any single
person, or group of people, could control. However, they seriously underestimated what that threshold was: “Our original, contractual specification for Habitat called for us to create a world capable of supporting a population of 20,000 Avatars, with expansion plans for up to 50,000. By any reckoning this was a large undertaking and complexity problems would certainly be expected. However, in practice we exceeded the complexity threshold very early in development. By the time the population of our on-line community had reached around 50 we were in over our heads…” [225]
If they really were to accommodate 20,000 avatars, they would have to have that many houses, organized into towns and cities, with all their complexity, wilderness areas between the towns and enough interesting places and activities for people to experience. While this was daunting enough, an even bigger problem was that each of the 20,000 participants had his or her own interests and would, therefore, be looking for a unique experience: “For the designer of an ordinary game or simulation, human diversity is not a major problem, since he or she gets to establish the goals and motivations on the participant’s behalf, and to specify the activities available to them in order to channel events in the preferred direction. Habitat, however, was deliberately open-ended and pluralistic. The idea behind our world was precisely that it did not come with a fixed set of objectives for its inhabitants, but rather provided a broad palette of possible activities from which the players could choose, driven by their own internal inclinations.” [226]
In this way, Farmer and Morningstar came upon the first rule of interactive virtual worlds creation, which they repeat constantly, early on: “[D]etailed central planning is impossible, so don’t even try.” [227] This flies in the face of traditional ideas of constructing narratives, but it was reinforced time and again by their experience: “The first goal-directed event planned for Habitat was a rather involved treasure hunt called the ‘D’nalsi Island Adventure.’ It took us hours to design, weeks to build (including a 100 region island), and days to coordinate the actors involved. It was designed much like the puzzles in an adventure game. We thought it would occupy our players for days. In fact, the puzzle was solved in about 8 hours by a person who had figured out the critical clue in the first 15 minutes.” [228] Some of the participants were bewildered it was over so quickly, and most never even got the chance to become involved.
“The more people we involved in something,” Farmer and Morningstar found, “the less in control we were.” [229] This meant taking on a role which few artists have even considered: “We became facilitators as much as designers and implementors.” [230] When the direction of the narrative is determined by the participants, the creator’s role shifts from giving a fixed experience to guiding an unfixed experience.
While this seems to limit the role of traditional artists, it also opens up the possibility of giving the participants in such work a much broader creative role than they have had in traditional narratives. “The astonishing vitality of the Net comes from the people who are using it. Putting tools into the hands of as many people as possible – whether the tool is Usenet or gopher or HTML – is a wellspring from which unimaginable creativity flows.” [231] Rossney adds that it can be the source of “tedium, outrage, and mediocrity;” [232] but, then again, so can traditional media.
Virtual Reality
“Virtual reality is all about illusion. It’s about computer graphics in the theater of the mind. It’s about the use of high technology to convince yourself that you’re in another reality, experiencing some event that doesn’t physically exist in the world in front of you.” [233]
In the early 1990s, the public seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about a new medium of communication: virtual reality. Some people, having seen the film Lawnmower Man (1992), thought it would be the gateway to surreal adventures. Others fell in love with the romance of “jacking into cyberspace,” connecting to virtual reality by plugging your brain directly into a computer network, an idea made popular by the novels of William Gibson. Many more people were looking forward to the kind of interactive, 3-D, photo-realistic simulations portrayed by Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s holodeck.
Most of these people were disappointed by the – ahem – reality of virtual reality. The equipment was bulky and intrusive. The animation was crude, blocky. The refresh rate (the frequency with which new images seen by the participant are projected onto his or her monitors) was, in many cases, so low that there was a disconcertingly noticeable lag between the time a participant moved his or her head and the time the scenery in the virtual world changed to reflect the movement. Most of the commercially available virtual experiences were shoot-em-up games which were simplistic and involved repetitive actions. Learning to maneuver virtual worlds was not natural and took many participants a long time. Given this gap between hype (and there was a lot of hype) and reality, it should come as no surprise that public interest in virtual reality soon waned.
Yet research goes on. Virtual worlds are a seductive goal.
Unfortunately, at the height of the hype, the term “virtual” was applied to every product imaginable, confusing what virtual reality is in the minds of the public. VR refers to a completely artificial environment made possible through the application of computer technology. In one sense, a theme park like Disneyland or a shopping mall are completely artificial environments, but, because they are not created by computers, they do not fit the definition of virtual worlds I am using here.
According to author Howard Rheingold, “The idea of immersion – using stereoscopy, gaze-tracking, and other technologies to create the illusion of being inside a computer-generated scene – is one of the two foundations of VR technology. The idea of navigation – creating a computer model of a molecule or a city enabling the user to move around, as if inside it – is the other fundamental element.” [234] This definition is not tied to a specific technology, but the experience which a number of different technologies can deliver.
The virtual reality technology most people are familiar with is the combination of goggles which allow the participant to see the virtual world (and also track where he or she is looking) and the glove with which the person can navigate (by pointing to where he or she wants to) through and interact (by “grasping and holding” virtual objects) with the environment. A representation of the gloved hand exists in the virtual world – the first virtual body part. Eventually, with the use of some form of wired clothing, it will be possible to project an entire body into a virtual world, interacting with it with our full bodies in a way similar to the one by which we interact with the real world.
There is a second form of virtual reality where the participant stands in front of a screen on which a virtual, computer-generated world is projected. A camera next to the screen feeds your image to the computer, which projects you into the virtual world and allows you to interact with it. I have seen demonstrations of Mandala, created by Vincent John Vincent’s Vivid group, in which this system allowed people to be play hockey as a goaltender and to play a set of drums.
Both systems offer forms of immersion and navigation. Both employ a computer grandiosely called a reality engine to store models of the virtual world and constantly update it taking into account how the participant has acted. And both virtual reality systems have drawbacks. The goggles and glove system requires expensive technology which is also highly artificial and cumbersome to use, going against the belief that “the medium must become transparent for the represented world to emerge as real…” [235] As the technology is enhanced and, most important, miniaturized, it is possible that wearing a virtual reality interface will be as simple and comfortable as putting on a fresh change of clothing and a pair of comfy glasses.
The Mandala system, on the other hand, will never be able to give tactile feedback, an important part of an immersive experience which gloves and body suits may some day achieve. In addition, the Mandala system seems to concentrate on stationary events; it is unclear if it will allow for exploration in larger environments.
A third virtual reality system exists: a small number of participants (usually four to eight) work as a team in an enclosed environment (often referred to as a “pod”). They get their information about the world outside the pod from displays on computer screens and what they can see through the windows of the pod; in both cases, the participants see computer-generated images which make them seem immersed in a virtual world. By manipulating controls within the pod, they can explore the virtual world and even interact with it. If the pod is a space craft, for instance, they can fly between worlds and engage other craft in aerial combat. If the pod is a submarine, they can battle giant sea creatures. The pod is mounted on hydraulics so that when they turn, the cabin they are in actually tilts to one side, and when they are battered by fire from another craft, their cabin shudders; in this way, what they see on their screens is reinforced by crude tactile sensations.
This form of virtual reality is very effective for certain kinds of virtual adventures and has the advantage of not required participants to wear uncomfortable equipment. However, the number of applications to which it can be applied seems limited; in particular, it does not seem capable of allowing individual exploration of virtual worlds. [236]
Marshall McLuhan claimed that each medium of communication took, as its content, the medium before it; because of the versatility of the digital computer technology which drives it, virtual reality, by way of contrast, contains all previous media. If, as I believe, the history of the arts shows a movement towards greater and greater fidelity to the experience of our five senses, virtual reality is the most logical final medium of communications. (When I commented to Sara Diamond, New Media Director of the Banff Centre for the Arts, that I couldn’t imagine an art form which would logically follow after virtual reality, she jokingly offered, “Pottery.”) It is also the most logical end-point of a technological society which increasingly bends the natural world to its will: virtual reality is an environment which is under complete human control.
The role of the artist in this brave new virtual world is uncertain. You might expect that, at the very least, designers will be needed to create the worlds, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Lanier’s company, VPL Research, has been looking into creating tools which would allow any participant in a virtual environment to help create the environment. “To me, musical instruments are the most eloquent user interfaces that have ever been developed…” VR pioneer Jaron Lanier explained, “you might have something like a saxophone, but aside from music, it’s actually spawning skyscrapers and mountains and weird spiders and all sorts of things.” [237] Programmers will have to create these tools, of course, but using them to design virtual worlds would be possible for any participant.
And what of writer/creators? Will their talents be necessary to create virtual narratives in which people can take on characters? It seems to me that the answer is unequivocal: “Sometimes.” Some virtual environments will work like Habitat, where participants are free to explore the environment and interact with each other, creating their own adventures. Other virtual environments will be more structured, with experiences provided for the participants.
These latter virtual environments will require artists to employ all that we have learned about storytelling. They will likely evolve extremely complex story structures, possibly using expert systems to create virtual adventures from a database of narrative fragments in real time. (According to Disney Imagineering’s Senior Show Director Jon Snoddy, “It may be some day, but for right now VR is not a great way of telling a long, linear narrative. That’s just not what it does best.” [238] Only time, and the development of far more sophisticated tools will tell if this assessment is accurate.) Human and artificial characters will interact, both moving the story forward. The unique properties of the medium will likely result in narrative forms at which, at the present time, we can only guess.
Marie-Laure Ryan cites three factors which will affect people’s virtual experiences: speed (the time it takes for a computer to respond to user’s input); range (how many choices the participant has to act on at any given moment), and; mapping (the imposition of constraints on what can happen in VR by ensuring activity isn’t arbitrary): “If the user of a virtual golf system hits a golf ball he wants it to land on the ground, and not turn into a bird and disappear in the sky. On the other hand, the predictability of moves should be relative, otherwise there would be no challenge nor point in using the system. Even in real life, we cannot calculate all the consequences of our actions.” [239] In fact, there may be virtual worlds in which it will be completely logical for golf balls to turn into birds and fly off – the important thing, as Aristotle might say, is to ensure that the world has an internal logic in which all events are necessary. I expect this tension between what we know is possible in the real world and what can be imagined in a virtual world will be a source of creativity in the new medium.
Virtual reality can offer artists additional possibilities for creative self-expression. “At the centre of every VR system is human experience – the experience of being in an unnatural or remote world. Attention is the instrument in cyberspace. Painters, poets, therapists, teachers, shamans, and playwrights might have something to contribute to our knowledge about the experiential side of VR, and much will be learned only by inventing new art forms. Just as the Impressionists began a perceptual revolution in the medium of oil painting at the height of the Industrial Revolution partially in reaction to the mechanical world-view engendered by the introduction of the camera, future artists will have to wield VR engines as brushes or bassoons, and paint the silence with the kind of possibilities only artists can show us. If art is about seeing the world in new ways, and VR is an instrument for creating worlds, artists might furnish a clue to a key question: If our technology ever allows us to create any experience we want, what kinds of experience should we want to create?” [240]
Throughout this thesis we have looked at the kinds of experiences I believe people want: stories which they can actually live.