The Tale that Tells Itself

Comparing interactive fiction and tales old-style

Interactive Tales

Interactive fiction is a tale that starts off like a traditional tale, but when it reaches a turning point or a point of choice in the story, it offers the reader the power to choose what should happen. Usually the reader must pick from a short list of options. The reader’s choice then lets him read on from that choice through a passage told like a traditional tale, until the next turning point or point of choice comes up. The reader then gets to choose the path again, and this process continues until a final end is reached.

Is this really a ‘tale’? How does it compare to traditional tales?

First we must note the present limitations of the form of interactive fiction. Any interactive fiction created by a man must have severe limitations, because every choice point increases the amount the ‘writer’ must write. If each choice list is limited to the minimal 2 choices, then every choice point doubles the amount of prose that will follow it. This means that 10 choice points, with each choice list containing only 2 options, will lead to 1,024 endings the writer must write! (2 to the 10th power = 1024)

Needless to say, a tale with only 10 turning points is rather slim, unless these turning points be limited to only the major turning points, in which case the ‘interactivity’ of the tale is rather weak. And a mere two choices at each point seems too few. And yet even so, look at how many endings the writer must come up with! If each ending is only one page long, he must write more than a thousand pages just for the end of what for the reader will become a 40-page story. What these writers often do, of course, is to lead different options to an early close, or have different choices come to the same end, but these alternatives are also weak; it means the reader might end up with a story that is only 14 pages long one time, 20 pages another, and 40 a third. Forty pages is slender, but 14 is downright scant. And when different choices lead to the same ending, written exactly the same way, it seems to undermine the very nature of the interactive world. Sometimes this might be the point (the ineluctability of Fate, and the real limits on our apparent power to affect the outcome of our lives), but most of us bourgeois readers will just look on it as a bit of a cheat.

These limits can be overcome with the ‘tale that writes itself’ which is interactive fiction not ‘written’ by a man, but where the man only provides the setup: the first act, or the ‘givens’ of the tale, are written out: what the setting is, who the hero and main characters are, and what the first intimation of the problem is. From this point on, the tale will be ‘written’ by an artificial intelligence (AI) that can offer the reader (who will become also a co-writer) many choices at many points, and generate prose that tells what are the consequences of the choice, and what the next choice is. The short menu of possible choices can even be replaced by a question, ‘What will he do next?’ or ‘What happens now?’ to which the reader types in whatever he pleases, and the AI takes it from there.

The day when AI is powerful enough to create such a multifarious story are not so far in the future that we can dismiss it as science-fantasy.

Tales Told By Talesmen

By contrast, the traditional tale treats the audience as passive recipient. In the start of it all, the tale was ‘true’ in some way, so of course it had already all taken place, and no choice over the events was even possible. The tale had been written backwards from its end by reality and the memory of the talesmen; he told you the tale of the victorious battle after victory had been won, and he arranged the events of what he told with that victory in mind, choosing to highlight those events that seemed to him to have contributed most to the ending. The audience was invited to lean back, and be guided through the highlights of the tale, and the talesman tried to entertain his audience by his art.

This is a very different view of what the audience is and what it wants from the tale.

Games

Today, the most advanced interactive fiction comes to us in the form of video games. The reader or ‘player’ is invited to become the hero of the conflict, to solve the puzzle, to fight the battles, to gain the victory for himself. He is not merely getting choices, he is actively participating, and the AI is responding according to the rules the game designers have set forth as to what is possible and likely. The player’s own skills help decide the outcome of each step, and the interactivity is a constant flow or mesh between player and AI. In multiplayer games, the many players increase the ‘noise’ or randomness of the outcomes, and add to the illusion of reality.

There is some question as to whether we ought to call video games ‘tales’ at all.

Video games seem more like animated movies than tales told by words.

My Take

It seems to me that interactive tales told with words alone will not go far, and come to be as the result of experiments to see how far AI can be pushed, but that they will remain curios only, and never achieve widespread popularity. Instead, AI might come to tell traditional tales by itself under the guidance of the tale-designer who sets forth the setting, the circumstances, and the characters involved in the tale. The ‘reader’ would then choose what genre of tale he wished, and he might get even a choice of the setting, the circumstances, and the hero from a menu. The AI would then spin a tale for him, much as talesmen today write genre fiction from formulas. (For example, the reader might tell the AI, ‘I want a tale of the Shadow, set it in San Francisco Chinatown, and let the villain be Wu-Ting,’ or else, ‘I want Sherlock Holmes to battle wits with Professor Moriarity in Edinburgh on the eve of the Great War.’ The AI would spin the tale from there. These characters and settings would have to be known by the AI, as well as what sort of things they do, of course.)

Interactive video games are already far beyond traditional animation in the realism with which they can paint the imagined worlds, so it seems that these games pose a real rivalry with movies and television as entertainment. I think that the traditionally-told movie and television tales will still appeal to many, for certain types of tales or types of moods; the two will coexist.

Traditional tales, to the extent that they can become interactive, seem less likely; giving the reader an infinite series of choices (such as are offered to the video game player) will have him work almost as hard as if he wrote the tale himself. It would in the end come to no difference, and those of this bent will end up as talesmen themselves. Indeed, to judge by the sheer abundance of novels and stories being written today, it seems this has already begun to happen.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, March 29, 2008)