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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Defining "Interactivity" (was Re: [Comp2k] Results)
Message-ID: <G46yB5.6Ip@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:54:41 GMT
References: <slrn91bafp.ku.tril@miranda.igs.net>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:58593

Suzanne Britton <tril@igs.net> wrote:
>Sean T Barrett <buzzard@world.std.com> wrote:
>> Can you offer some other definition of "interactivity" in the
>> sense of IF?
>
>Here's a brief demo that should illustrate what I mean.
>
>This is, clearly, interactive:
>
>     >get up
>     I get up out of bed.
>
>     >wake wayne
>     I wake him up.
>
>But this (from Rameses) is also interactive. In fact, I would argue that it
>is *equally* interactive:
>
>     >get up
>     But I don't want to get out of bed. It's a cold day outside, and it's
>     nice and warm here.
>
>     >wake wayne
>     I'd prefer to leave the bastard sleeping as long as possible.
>
>This, however, is not:
>
>     I yawn and get out of bed. I consider waking the others up, but I'd
>     prefer to leave the bastards sleeping as long as possible.

But what about

      I consider getting up.
      [press any key to continue.]
      But I don't want to get out of bed.  It's a cold day outside,
      and it's nice and warm here.

      I consider waking Wayne up.
      [press any key to continue.]
      But I'd prefer to leave the bastard sleeping as long as possible.

which was the analogy I explicitly called out?

Ok, I guess it's tomAYto tomAHto; I perceive the above as the
"closer" analogy to Rameses, and you perceive your first
transcript as the closer analogy.  But, nonetheless, I offer
my version above to explain what I mean by "it's technically
interactive according in the computer jargon sense, but not
in the sense of what I thought we meant by IF"... see next
paragraph.

>In other words, interactivity is about...interaction, specifically,
>interaction which somehow engages the player. It's not necessarily
>about control.

Ok, I can see your point here.  I don't agree, but I'm not
coming up with a term that nails what I think of the distinction
(e.g. "engage" vs. "control").

Well, maybe to me it's about the player's ability to change
things.  Not to be *in control*, but to be *effective*.
CYOA are only weakly interactive, despite the player being
in total control, because the sort of effect the player
can have on the "game world" is very small.  A traditional
text adventure may not have a branching plot, but it has
a huge number of low-level branches in terms of the game
state (hey, 256^N states for N bytes of RAM).  These may
not be very meaningfully distinct states, and not affect
the long-term outcome, but the player can have effect in
the short term.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe engagement is all that
matters and the difference is just that I wasn't engaged.

>PC which we control via a (hopefully) transparent parser. This is
>standard. "Rameses" is rather different. The star of the show there is the
>interaction *between player and PC*. This is what I fear many people missed, or
>did not appreciate.

Yes, I certainly missed it at first.  The notion that the player
is a voice inside the PC's head is not one that ever came to my
mind, and it seems to be the only one that makes this viewpoint
sensible--in other words, I took the refusal of the PC to carry out the
player's wishes in the same general vein as parser error messages.
Thus I did not perceive the unfolding story as me suggesting something
to the PC meaning the PC pondering to himself that he might do
such a thing, and then denying it.  And I never considered myself
a voice in his head.

Thus, I was simply the standard mysterious
godlike master over a puppet, and the puppet was mysteriously
WILLFUL--the PC brutally, and uncharacteristically, refused to
go along with my demands, instead resisting me at every turn--exactly
the opposite effect of the desired "not willing to rock the boat"
aspect of the character himself.

If you fire it up, the first conversation (t gordon), two of
the responses ("hello sailor" and "hi gordon") don't use either
first- or second- person pronouns and really are hard to judge
the tone of in the terms I raised above.  And after those two,
you get the "You'll meet Declan later"--is that a misstep or
is that supposed to be the voice of the PC speaking to the
voice of the player in his head?  I suppose part of the problem
there is that at this point I've hardly adapted to the first-person
view of the main text.

My experience might have been different had I retried conversation
steps and realized that they were *all* ineffectual, and stopped
and stepped out meta for a moment and wondered WHY the author
would only provide me with ineffectual actions; but instead I
simply thought I was being forced along very tight and boring
rails.  Since the scenario didn't interest me in any way, none
of this was engaging (to return to the previous comment).

SeanB
