Blog 7: Interactive Fiction

It's interesting to see the many examples of games in which the incorporation of strong narrative elements were attempted. For example, Glass by Emily Short presents an interesting, well-knitted and coherent storyline. And there is an element of interactivity in it as the action that the user inputs influences the outcome of the game, leading to multiple conclusions. Thus, the user would want to replay the game to achieve a conclusion of his/her choice. In my opinon, this type of narrative is game-like: in game, the goal is to win the game or achieve the highest point, whereas in narrative, the goal is to achieve one's desired conclusion. In the try-out during the class session, it is discernible that many dislike the first ending, and wanted to replay the interactive fiction to arrive at their desired endings.

In a game, it is very important for the user to want to play it again and again. I would consider a game to be not successful if users do not want to play the game again. In this context, I feel that Glass has rather successfully incorporated narrative element into the game or vice versa. The flaw which I observed is that it is not fully interactive, although there is a certain amount of interactivity in the game. The action that the user inputs does not necessarily corresponds to the progress of the story. Sometimes, it feels as though our action do not have direct control on the story. For example, if we keyed in some commands that the system could not recognise, the story still proceeds.

Besides that, there is also not enough play in the part of the user: Glass is a rather short game which does not allow much decision points on the part of the user. Weighing the balance between interactivity and narrative elements in Glass, the narrative elements seems to outweighs the game elements.

All in all, I would say that interactivity and narrative can co-exist. Glass is a rather successful interactive fiction and can still be improved upon to achieve a good balance between interactivity and narrative elements. It has good narrative elements already. It just needs to improve on its interactivity. Perhaps, more decision points should be made available for the users and the storyline should corresponds to the actions the users input.

It is interesting to make comparisons between Glass and Shade. In Shade, the level of interactivity outweighs the narrative elements. The story is not really interesting and I feel that there are too much restrictions. The user are confined in his small apartment. In many occasions, the reply we get from the command we input is "that's not a verb I recognise". Perhaps this game is for those who knows the type of acceptable commands well. However, if we get this reply a lot of times, we will get frustrated and might just quit. In this case, I said that the level of interactivity is higher because the users were given a lot of chances to decide on the next action and the progress of the narrative actually corresponds to the action the users input. However, the story is not interesting.

Comparing both Glass and Shade, we can see that both did not achieve a well balance between interactivity and narrative. But if the good narrative of Glass were to combine with the good interactivity of Shade, then, a game in which both interactivity and narrative structure can co-exist well can be formed.