On Feb 4, 9:19 pm, James Mitchelhill <j...@disorderfeed.net> wrote:

No, not directly; but letting the player participate in the story,
even in subtle ways, is I think a tremendously useful and powerful
tool of interactive stories. One example is allowing the player to
project some of himself into the protagonist, by leaving gender or age
unspecified, for example. The "Myst" series does this. Another example
is games with sandboxes: "Oblivion" has a plot, but lets you ignore it
entirely to create your own adventures; Grand Theft Auto does
something similar. In The Sims there's no story at all, but in the
playing you often create very story-like tales complete with true
love, rags to riches, and untimely deaths. In most MMOs you're usually
given only the brief introduction of a story, and explicitly told that
"the rest is up to you."

This is certainly a lot different than the holodeck, but I think the
success of these games is a sign that people do enjoy being allowed to
participate in the storytelling process, even tangentially. To bring
this back to the original post, the white game, by being permissive
about allowable actions to ridiculous fault, in some ways emulates the
failure of Oblivion to complain if you decide to stack a mound of
fruits and vegetables in your house, or the way Grand Theft Auto will
happily allow you to obey the speed limit, if you prefer. This is
explored less in IF, probably because it's tricky to create situations
complex enough for interesting emergent behavior with a one-man team.
It's also possible that this sort of thing is less suited to a medium
based on text.

Ah, okay, I see what you mean now. The IF player recognizes that "It's
too dark to see anything in here!" probably indicates they need to
find a light source, in much the same way the reader of a romance
novels recognizes that the introduction of a muscular shirtless
gardener is likely to be an important development. Both are learned
behaviors on the part of the audience. Fair enough.

I suppose the distinction I see is that if you've never read a romance
novel before you might just miss a bit of foreshadowing, whereas if
you've never played IF you might get stuck and be completely unable to
continue with the game. It doesn't just help the player to be familiar
with conventions, it's usually *required* of him. That's why the IF
author has to be more of a magician, in my view. Your point is taken,
though.