This is the first in Playing Between The Lines, a series of expeditions into the evolving space of interactive storytelling, its praxes and practical benefits.

Alexander Ocias describes his brief, open-ended browser-based game Loved as “A short story in the form of a flash platformer.”

“What’s this?” you cry.  Perhaps your narrative sensibilities have been outraged. “Platformers?  Like that Super Mario?  Where can a story possibly exist in something like that?”  As we shall see, the answer is: everywhere and nowhere.

“JUMP OVER THAT PIT OF BARBS.”

On first glance, Loved does resemble, superficially at least, some of the red-capped plumber’s more famous adventures.  Although the ambient, melancholy music track and stark palette scream “art game,” you’ll spend much of the five to ten minutes it takes to “win” this “short story” jumping gaps and avoiding obstacles or enemies.  Where was that story again?

Ocias answers this question with his own statement of intent: “to build something confrontational, that would engage players to give thought to what they are doing both in and out of game.”  In other words, Loved treads a fine, ambiguous storyline that spurs heated debates as to whether it’s an allegory for abusive spousal, human-animal, or parent-child relationships, and about the extent to which a parent / guardian / government’s seemingly cruel, arbitrary commands ultimately benefit the child / ward / citizen.  Despite the ambiguity and sparseness of the apparent narrative, Loved still successfully engages the player as an interactive story by explicitly dealing with its own form and means of production.

“WILL I TEACH YOU HOW TO PLAY?  OR NOT?”

When seeking a better understanding of interactive storytelling, it’s useful to examine those interactive stories that are both overtly self-referential and overtly game-like.  Being games, they necessarily include a set of rules and goals.  When content mirrors form, and vice versa, we get a glimpse into both the rules that govern a game and the rules that govern the creation of a game.  And once we grasp these rules, we can begin to formulate a sort of player’s manual for the writing and reading of interactive storytelling, its inherent strengths and weaknesses, and insight into what interactive and static narrative–the ergodic and the nonergodic, if you prefer–offer one another.

Gaming is rife with extradiagetic or metatextual statements.  The classic and pervasive command “Press Start to Begin,” for example, makes no sense in the context of the game world (“Who is pressing start to begin what and why?”), and therefore exists only on the level of metafiction.  From control tutorials to Game Over screens and pleas to “Insert More Tokens,” this tendency arises as a matter of course from the interactive nature of the medium.  Gaming necessitates a constant re-education of the audience for two reasons: one, it is still a relatively new medium, reaching virgin audiences (no jokes, please) on a daily basis; and two, new games advertise themselves by flaunting innovations in methods of interaction.  Therefore, if an audience is to interact with the work in a meaningful way, electronic games must provide a set of instructions to facilitate unfamiliar interactions.

In your “typical” electronic games, the disembodied, authoritative voice speaking above the story quickly ceases to faze its audience, and thereby ceases to be meta at all. The “Press Start” screen can be likened the title page of a book; in both instances, the omnipresence of extradiagetic information does not detract in any important way from the story itself.

In a strange twist, interactive games like Loved that integrate things like “Press Start” seamlessly into the narrative on an intradiagetic level, i.e. within the world of the story, draw more attention to the story’s construction, and consequently to the narrative techniques that drew attention in the first place. An early example is Konami’s 1987 Metal Gear, an espionage game in which the protagonist has a specific radio frequency for saving his data and the game’s villain, appropriately named Big Boss, sends him messages imploring him to turn off his computer and walk away.(1)

The metafiction in Loved functions on a similar level.  When play begins, the unseen narrator asks “Will I teach you how to play?  Or not?”–a variation on a common method of toggling tutorial messages for new or veteran audiences.  The statement that follows, however, jettisons convention and cements the identity of the narrator / guide as a character within the story: “You do not deserve it” the faceless voice coldly informs us, proceeding somewhat paradoxically to issue a series of commands, some more helpful than others, which may be read as goals or missions or even a form of tutorial: “Jump over that pit of barbs,” “Touch the statue,” and later contrary or redundant commands such as “Do not move” or “Do not fail.”

“YOU ARE WRONG.”

Now, interactive stories achieve their interactivity by building feedback between the audience and the story: one could technically interact with, say, a painting in various ways, by touching it or reciting incantations before it, but it will never react meaningfully; there is no feedback.  In contrast, Loved provides feedback on two primary levels: there is the genre-standard navigation of basic hazards, failure in which will undo some of the player-character’s progress, and there is also the way the game-world reacts, textually and visually, to the player’s responses to the aforementioned commands.  Obedience adds detail and definition to the visuals: it is only after jumping over the barbs, for example, that they are recognizable as such.  Disobedience produces a visually confounding effect: fat, rainbow-colored pixels obscure elements of the interface, reminiscent of the “corrupted environments” often caused by programming glitches.

This corruption, more blatantly than the corrupt affection of the disembodied voice, forms the basis of Loved’s metafiction.  The interactive story deals implicitly and explicitly with the basic dilemma of the interactive storyteller: the balance between a guided narrative and the illusion of choice.  A well-formed story should take the audience by surprise, either emotionally or intellectually; otherwise, it devolves into an exercise in self-congratulation, at best.  However, interactive storytelling by its very nature must offer the player, and provide feedback for, some degree of control over narrative progression.  Hence the storyteller’s dilemma: a game in which the player exercises complete control over the narrative offers no opportunity for narrative surprise, but if the author exerts too obvious a pull, the player feels cheated and the interactive effect, a crucial element of the medium’s immersive and empathetic capabilities, is lost.

A more concrete example might be helpful here.  Let’s imagine for a moment that the story of Oedipus: The Game(2) hinges on the reveal that the grunt the player killed in the level 1 was actually the player-character’s father.  If the player doesn’t kill the grunt in level 1, the narrative ceases to function; it literally becomes corrupted.  However, unless the player willfully kills the grunt by choice, the impact of the latter revelation becomes softened to the point of impotence.  The author cannot simply wrest control away from the player and dispatch the grunt in a cinematic, or report his death second-hand.  A simple and common work-around would introduce an impediment, lifted by the grunt’s death, that literally arrests the narrative until the desired action has been performed: the unmanned chariot crashes through a roadblock, allowing poor Oedipus access to Thebes.  However, this trick has the danger of becoming obvious with repeated use, and the more blatant it appears the less the action feels like a true choice.  This inherent dissatisfaction drives the player to “trick” the system, to find that marginal, glitch-inducing alternative route to Thebes.  This is known as sequence breaking.

Loved plays with this concept of pushing at the edges of a structured narrative.  When the player follows the arbitrary script set by the disembodied author / narrator / guide / voice, he or she is rewarded with a defined, clearly delineated game-world: by playing the story the way the author intended, the world–and the narrative that unfolds within it, for story and setting are never far removed in electronic games–take on some degree of depth.  The temptation always exists, however, to do things differently: when the voice commands “Travel the lower path,” and yet a higher one devoid of obstacles is so clearly visible, it betrays the arbitrariness of the player-character’s proscribed actions.  Why must we take the lower path?  Because the obstacles within it provide the conflict that shapes the story.

In other words, Loved illustrates that place where an author’s authority becomes authoritarian.  When the voice commands “Throw yourself into the barbs,” we do so because the story demands a sacrifice, the sacrifice of choice and freedom for the glory of a meaningful narrative.  When the game denies our claims of manhood, and instead insists that “You are a girl,” or vice versa if we claim femininity, we acquiesce because this is, after all, the story of a girl, isn’t it?  When our manhood–or womanhood–is later restored, we feel victorious, forgetting that the same voice now rewarding once denied.  Our ennoblement can only take place after we’ve been degraded, and both moves are equally calculated to serve the caprices of the narrative.

“YOU WILL FAIL.”

Things only begin to fall apart when the player takes the high road rather than the low.  Although providing the illusion of a fully realized narrative space, Loved, like all narrative, is only as wide as it has been written.  Push beyond the pixel-thin borders at your peril: there you will find naught but chaos and madness.

And yet it chafes, this higher road denied us.  Why?  Nobody questioned Scout’s double-X chromosomes when Harper Lee told us it was so.  Nobody looked for a workaround to Oedipus’s inevitable self-blinding.  There is an authorial power that we passively accept in static storytelling: the construction of paragraphs or the framing of shots are much more constrictive than the arbitrary edges of an interactive narrative, the higher path left totally occluded from view.  Sequence breaking only exists in literature insofar as one could, conceivably, skip to the last chapter to find out whodunit.

Why should this be so?  As readers, shouldn’t we have the right, the desire to re-cast Scout as boy rather than tom-boy, and explore the narrative from those darkened, corrupted corridors?  As writers, shouldn’t we remain open to the possibility that some may travel avenues in our narrative that we never realized were there?  What could be more exciting, more terrifying and exhilarating, than a space within a narrative where even the author daren’t venture?

In the spirit of Loved’s abrupt, ambiguous ending, I conclude less with a solid declaration than with an open-ended question, or a rallying-cry for writers and readers: Where do the edges of our fictions lie, and who among us can claim to have braved the frontiers beyond?

(1) The Metal Gear series has since become famous, or infamous, for this particular style of breaking the fourth wall.  A non-exhaustive list can be found at Metal Gear Wiki.
(2) Although this example was intended somewhat farcically, it should be noted that a few attempts have been made to turn Sophocles’s play into a game, the most successful of these being Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Labs’ Seer.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity