Interactive “Show, Don’t Tell”:

Fundamental Principles of Interactive Entertainment

© Copyright 1996 by Noah Falstein

Interactive entertainment is a fairly new form. But it’s a form that is struggling with issues of maturity, not one still lost in infancy. Consequently some basic rules have been discovered, rules that grow out of the underlying principles of interactivity. Like other creative forms, it’s possible to transcend these basic principles. But like those forms, creators who don’t bother to learn the underlying rules before boldly setting out discover new territories are more likely to find themselves repeating old mistakes.

Teachers of creative writing courses focus on a few basic principles. “Show, don’t tell” is a common one. It exhorts students to show their characters experiencing events rather than telling about what happened to them. “Write what you know” is another fundamental, warning aspiring writers to focus on familiar things. “Conflict is the essence of drama” is another, showing that all dramatic situations have conflict at their core.

Some basic principles appear to be universal. For example, it’s difficult to imagine true drama without conflict of some sort, no matter whether it’s in a novel, a screenplay, or a computer game. Other principles apply only to a specific format, as in film where a tracking shot with characters walking towards the camera has more intensity than one where they walk alongside it. Still others are good rules for beginners to follow, but can be restrictive once real mastery is achieved. With interactive titles, it often pays to assume that rules may carry over from a different medium, but the likelihood of a rule being relevant is inversely proportional to how interactivity affects it.

Other principles apply to specific sub-disciplines, such as all puzzle games, or educational titles, or interactive stories that use video, or multiplayer games. If you wish to commission a mystery novel, you go to someone who’s written in that genre. You would be unlikely to hire a writer that has only written non-fiction about investment banking. You’d be even less likely to hire a singer who’s never written prose, just because you admire their singing.

Please forgive a brief excursion into the world of scientific theory. In Science, there’s a principle used to test new theories. To paraphrase, it states that newly discovered theories should reduce down to currently accepted theories as they approach the realm of those theories. For example, relativity helped explain why classical Newtonian physics broke down when considering things moving near the speed of light, but relativistic equations reduced to Newtonian equations as speeds dropped to the range that Victorian era scientists were comfortable with. Similarly, quantum mechanics explains non-intuitive behavior of subatomic particles, but when considered as a whole in the billions and trillions of atoms we’re used to dealing with, they behave just as we have grown to expect them to.

What does this have to do with interactive entertainment? Just that when an interactive software title treads into realms more closely resembling other linear (i.e. non-interactive) forms, the rules of those forms should still apply. For example, the old Infocom text adventure games had many descriptive passages of text. The efficacy of those passages could be measured by standards of prose, for that’s what they were. Well-written descriptions in a text adventure were well-written by the standards of a novelist. The exception was that they often included descriptions of the entrances and exits to the area described, the one feature critical to the interactive function of the description.

A common failure of interactive titles produced by people familiar with other forms of entertainment is to take this equivalency too far. For example, a good filmmaker might assume that making a good film and adding some plot branches at one or two key points of the narrative could produce a high quality interactive title. Unfortunately, this is like those classical physicists assuming their equations will still work as they apply them to a spaceship travelling at 99.9% of the speed of light.

Rules can apply from one form of entertainment to another, as long as they’re similar. But the greater the differences between the forms, the more the rules change. Interactivity requires a fundamental change, more so than theater to prose, or even film to theater. The marketplace provides a rigorous test of this premise. If an interactive title is essentially another form of entertainment (like a movie or a novel) stuck on a CD, what incentive does the consumer have to buy it? The best novel can be read more easily in printed form, is cheaper and more portable than its PC equivalent, and will still be readable thirty years later if kept on a shelf. The best film had ten to a hundred times the production budget of its interactive equivalent, costs about $7 to see on a much larger screen, or about $3 to rent, and benefits from nearly 100 years of experience in production. So why buy an interactive version? There’s only one good reason. The interactivity itself must be compelling.

The single most important principle of interactivity is as fundamental as the water a fish swims in, and as easily overlooked. An interactive entertainment title has to be entertaining because of, not in spite of, its interactivity. The only exception to this is the multimedia aspect of the interactive format, which can provide an added value not found in other forms. Interactive entertainment can provide video, text, and audio all linked together, and that has some value. But as is seen by the very limited market for books on CD with some added illustrations and sound effects, or for audio CD’s with some pictures of the band and lyrics, it’s still undeniably the interactivity itself that is the fundamental feature of an interactive product. That one fact helps explain why so many interactive titles have failed. They started with a screenplay, or a picture, or some other basic concept, and interactivity was added in as an afterthought farther down the line.

What is interactivity? It’s about making choices. A simple capsule description of a good computer game is “A series of meaningful choices to reach a clear goal”. The choices must be meaningful for the interactivity to be enjoyable. That’s why simple branching plotlines just aren’t interesting (another favorite mistake of linear storytellers new to interactivity). Branches that fold back into the main storyline aren’t really branches, and the player will catch on quickly to the fact and become bored. The standard old-style adventure game format of “make the right choice and proceed, make the wrong choice and die” was a first-pass way of making the choices seem more meaningful. Unfortunately the necessity of continuing on past death robs that death of meaning, but at least it is a step in the right direction.

A psychological study was once conducted with very young kittens. Half of the kittens were allowed to explore a strange area on their own, the other half were “driven” through the same area in little carts. The kittens that explored interactively learned their way around much faster than the other kittens. The same principal applies to humans -- most of us have learned that we remember directions much better when we’ve driven a car to a new place than if we were merely passengers on the same journey.

In order to give meaning to choices, the player must have a goal in mind. At first, for the first few minutes of a console or PC game, exploration and discovery is goal enough. But quite soon, if the player is not given a specific goal, the choices cease to have meaning, and the title becomes boring, or worse, frustrating. Exploration is good, it’s a fundamental human, even mammalian habit, as was seen with the kittens. But exploration becomes even more exciting, and certainly more satisfying, when we have a goal. To make an interactive title more fun, give the player a clear goal and make the choices along the way relevant to achieving the goal.

This is an important rule for anyone trying to break into a brand new field of interactive entertainment (or even one that is just new to their experience). There’s little difference in designing interactive entertainment for the Saturn and the Playstation. There’s a larger difference in designing for the Playstation and the PC. And there’s a wide gulf between the Playstation and an online world. The field of interactive entertainment covers a wide range of economic models, and many a company has gone belly-up ignoring that fact. At the heart of all of them is a basic equation of hours of entertainment per consumer dollar spent. The way those dollars (or tokens, or electronic debits) are spent strongly affects the viability of different interactive structures. It’s a subject worthy of an entire book, so suffice it for now to say that new economic structures demand rethinking interactive design.

One principle that carries over from other forms of entertainment is the use of illusion. When you’re entertaining, it’s more important to give your audience the illusion of reality than it is to give them reality itself. That’s why a piece of burning driftwood in a film gives off enough light for the hero to see and fend off the zombies. It doesn’t matter that a real piece of wood would just smolder, or at best burn dimly. That wouldn’t be fun!

This principle is particularly important with simulation games of all sorts. Although there’s a market for ultra-realistic flight simulators, there’s a larger one for airplanes that fly more easily and work better than in real life. People still want to think that their simulated experience is realistic, but they’re measuring the experience against their internal perception of reality, which has been shaped by countless hours of TV and films. An extreme example of this was the relative failure of a popular PC flight simulator when brought to the arcade market. Players complained it was unrealistic, citing the very features that distinguished it from earlier generations of arcade flying games. The new game was in fact more realistic, but to the twelve-year-old boys dropping their tokens in, it wasn’t their idea of flying.

If we take the time to learn the basic principles of interactivity, to see how they apply to different genres and interactive venues, we can avoid common mistakes and create quality titles. Only by learning from the errors of the past can we avoid repeating them.