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              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC">volume 
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              <p>  <p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><font color="#339900" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Today 
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        <p align="LEFT"><img src="../images/guest.jpg" width="195" height="232" align="RIGHT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0022A8"><b><a target="" href="../corner/index.html"><font size="-1">Guest 
          Editorial</font></a><font size="-1">:</font></b></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+3" color="#0022A8"><br>
          Thoughts on Interactivity and the Question of Content</font></p>
        <p align="RIGHT">&nbsp;</p>
        <p align="RIGHT"><font color="#804000"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 
          Austin Grossman</font></b></font></p>
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        <p align="right">&nbsp;</p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1"><i>This 
          essay was inspired by my work on <b>Trespasser</b> and my play-through 
          of the <b>Half-Life</b> demo, brought up for me some basic issues in 
          game design and engine design. I feel we're all still grasping for ways 
          of understanding our emerging medium, so these are some thoughts of 
          mine, an effort to pick apart a few of them. </i></font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+1" color="#0022A8">A. 
          Interactivity</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+1"></font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Suppose we take 
          up a limited definition of interactivity, as follows: an interactive 
          work is a system with internal parameters that the user can set or influence. 

          </font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">To set out some examples:</font></p>
        <ul>
          <li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> A printed book is non-interactive 
            -- yes, you can read the pages in different orders, but you can't 
            change the content on the page. </font></li>
          <li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> A bit is interactive 
            - the system has a parameter you can set </font></li>
          <li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Most web pages are not 
            -- it works the same as a book, you can choose what you read or view, 
            but not alter its content or state </font></li>
          <li><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>Quake</b> is interactive. 
            You can change your character's position, orientation on the map, 
            kill monsters who themselves can change your character's state, etc. 
            Your ability to change state is limited (your POV has to move through 
            space linearly, have only certain types of weapons, ammo, etc.), and 
            therein lies the fun.</font></li>
        </ul>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">It's not a final or maybe 
          particularly well-thought-out definition, but let's explore it as far 
          as it will take us.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So to build on this definition, 
          gameplay takes place as you use the game interface to change the state 
          of the system, usually with a goal in mind. Gameplay is the act of changing 
          the game-state through the interface.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The reason I like this definition 
          is that it immediately asks the question, what are you <i>doing</i> 
          when you play the game? Does the game have interesting, varied, nuanced 
          states? Does the interface give you a powerful, interestingly limited 
          access to, influence on those states?</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">It accounts for the brittleness, 
          the sense of shallowness, one can get from a lot of bad games. The game 
          may be telling you that you are having a conversation with a prince, 
          but you can immediately feel you are traversing a very shallow decision 
          tree. </font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Experienced gamers tend to 
          cut straight through this -- they can feel when they have a cool dynamic 
          in front of them, a rich world where they can think, improvise, calculate 
          variables and positions against each other (whether in a simple system 
          like <b>Tetris</b>, or a complex one, like <b>Nethack</b>). It's this 
          rich world, a world they can reason about, that people are asking for 
          when they say, "Couldn't I just pick up the chair and throw it at the 
          window, instead of solving puzzles X and Y?"</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Or, conversely they can tell 
          when, despite a lot of fancy art, their final battle against Cthulhu 
          is nothing more than a game of rock-paper-scissors.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">(It's sometimes said that 
          the best computer game of all is computer programming, and perhaps there 
          is some justice in that -- it's a big system to hack, with powerful 
          tools. Perhaps some of the better computer games are simplified, fictionalized, 
          spatialized versions of programming tasks -- conquering nations, instead 
          of just setting up a database handler.)</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So for me this is the gamer's 
          definition, the definition that cuts through production values, lovely 
          as they are. </font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">There is always this question 
          when you're dealing with a game or simulation, what is my range of action? 
          What can I touch, what is dynamically modifiable, and what is just artwork? 
          It is the touchable stuff, the interactive elements, that forms the 
          system that you hack, the gameplay. I would never claim that a game 
          is good just because it has a lot of modifiable stuff; but rather, it 
          is that stuff, however simple or complex, that is the meat of the game.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+1" color="#0022A8">B. 
          The Question of Content</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">One of the many criticisms 
          leveled at computer games since time immemorial (i.e. 1977 or so), is 
          that there is no content. When you finish playing <b>Space Invaders</b>, 
          you've just flushed 35 minutes, and $1.25 down the toilet, as far as 
          the critics are concerned. In the enlightened mid-late '90's, everyone's 
          now concerned -- it's the "New Media" now, and everyone has to have 
          "content," in the officially recognized form of story, character, plot.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Back in the day, <b>Wing 
          Commander 1</b> had a fix for this. You fly missions, which alternate 
          with dramatic animated scenes, which filled out the world, gave the 
          missions a narrative context, gave you a character ("Bluehair"). Certainly 


          this had been done before (<b>Ms. Pac-Man</b> is said to have been first), 
          but this is the first occasion I know of that really seemed to have 
          a cinematic characters and scenes.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Just as importantly, it is 
          content delivered in a familiar context, with familiar conventions: 
          passive viewing, identification with a hero shown in the 3rd person. 
          On one level, the previously available interactive world goes numb to 
          us, the controls go dead. On the other, it is a relief -- the familiar 
          process of passive playback. We understand how to receive content and 
          follow story in this context. This and similar strategies for story 
          delivery have ruled the day.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The "content" of a game and 
          its gameplay have often had an uneasy relationship -- the delivery of 
          story, and the creation of an interesting, hackable system are not things 
          we combine easily. Commonly they are kept rigidly separate. Genuine 
          interactivity ends, or simplifies drastically, where story or story 
          direction begins.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">These are familiar points, 
          and everyone is still struggling with them. Almost each new game out 
          there has a new or modified way of presenting story and character. The 
          market is a fascinating laboratory for experiments in narrative and 
          interactivity. I just thought I would take a little space to pick apart 
          two new treatments of story in the FPS genre: <b>Half-Life</b> and <b>Trespasser</b>.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">I'll repeat right off that 
          I have only played the <b>Half-Life: Day One</b> OEM demo, so I am totally 
          unqualified to say anything about the real product -- I'm just talking 
          about what I saw.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>Half-Life </b>pulls off 
          story in an enormously sophisticated way, just way better than anything 
          else out there. It is quite stunning. The playback, any canned stuff, 
          happen in the game-world, and are woven seamlessly into it to an extraordinary 
          degree. You can't do everything -- you can't have conversations with 
          the characters -- but you don't seem to miss it. Events happen around 
          you, and you gather story, and your own identity, from them; a genuinely 
          different experience from having them presented to you cinematically. 
          The world you inhabit changes, talks to you, you discover more of it, 
          and from these things story emerges. Very complicated, very elegant. 
          As a designer, I plan to play the game and chart out every single thing 
          they did.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The interactivity of the 
          world, the way you can change the state, advances little; but then again, 
          it was already set to something that everyone likes, which is <b>Quake</b>.</font></p>
        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>Trespasser</b> pushes 
          the envelope in other ways. It advances the interactivity of the world 
          -- it is a more interactive system -- it has more bits to flip, more 
          elements to calculate and move around, different kinds of relations 
          between them. It has far fewer "dead" spots -- things you can see in 
          the world but can't move, improvise with, treat as part of the interactive 
          reality. Whereas in its purely interactive elements a <b>Quake</b> level 
          would be mapped as a set of walls, beasties, and traps, <b>Trespasser</b> 
          is much more complex. I don't think people would disagree that it advances 
          the state of the art in 3D reality. It lets you do more things you <i>should</i> 
          be able to do in that reality, and it gives you new, interesting ways 
          to hack around in 3space.</font></p>

        <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Its story elements are built 
          so as not to introduce non-interactive, or inappropriately interactive 
          elements into the story. In a way it functions as an archive -- as you 
          beat the puzzles, advance through the world, learn about the island, 
          you gain more information, and this information completes your sense 
          of the island's past. The other story, which is the story of nearly 
          every computer game ever made, is one of increases in skill, triumph, 
          and ultimately mastery over the virtual realm.</font></p>
        <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font> 
        <p align="RIGHT"><i><font size="-1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">- 
          Austin Grossman is a game designer on the game <b>Trespasser</b> for 
          <a target="_self" href="http://www.dreamworksgames.com">DreamWorks Interactive</a>.</font></i></p>
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    <td height="22"><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><b>Credits:</b> 
      Guest Editorial logo illustrated and is &copy; 1998 Dan Zalkus. This Guest 
      Editorial is &copy; 1998 Austin Grossman. All other content is &copy; 1998 
      <a target="_self" href="http://www.loonyboi.com">loonyboi productions</a>. 
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