nteractive Fiction…

When I first got online it was to write in a form of Interactive Fiction, unlike what is described in the reading. It was my first time through college and the internet was just starting it’s first boom outside of AOL. Nintendo had made a updated site and opened up their BBS (Bulletin Board Service) to everyone and not just AOL members. And on their website they hosted Interactive Stories featuring their worlds, like Hyrule from Zelda, and Corneria and the Lylat System from Star Fox. In the BBS I and a bunch of other Nintendo fans would create our own characters and interact within the setting provided. At some point if people liked your idea/story they would try to interact with you via story or actually contact you and try to write something together. Today this would be more like Fan Fiction mixed with Collaborative Writing. Once Nintendo started changing the way they did things on their website people moved onward to make their own Interactive Story (what we called these types of stories then) sites. Granted a few different sites spawned from this but in the end, like most things on the internet, it eventually died, or changed into something else, like the previous mentioned Fan Fiction.

Of course I bring up all this personal history because this article focuses a lot on narrative and story and the act of interacting within it. The best example of these would be Adventure Games be it text or point and click. I disagree with the writers view that the Adventure Game was dead because, as recent research has shown this is not the case. In fact the Adventure Game has shown a huge resurgence in the last few years thanks largely in part to TellTale Games, who made sequels to The Monkey Island series and Sam and Max, two of which were major Adventure Games of the past. But really Adventure Games never died in the first place due to sites like adventuregamers.com where they discussed and sold many adventure games. In fact the Nancy Drew series, which has always been an Adventure Game, is one of the most prolific and also most profitable series created.Admittedly there was a huge decline in Adventure games during the last decade though they never really died. I really feel what happened as the graphics improved games focused on more what they could see rather story points, as current tech gets more closer and closer to reality visually we have gotten to the point where we want more depth in the games we play.

Why harp on one small statement from this article, well this was the one portion that really focused on a certain aspect of gameplay and wasn’t just a definition of certain types of narrative in games. By focusing on the definitions the writers overlook the deeper problems in the games itself and why stories and games haven’t melded. One of the main things I think is the issue is the act of interacting in general. The form of interacting with the narrative is contrived at times, meaning it’s difficult at best. You get introduced to characters minor or not who basically say the same things over and over. For instance, in Skyrim every person you pass tells you their story every time, after passing them five or six times to get achieve certain goals you’ve heard the same dialog from these characters all those five or six times. The guards are a little better only because they have a list of things to say, but after having the billionth guard tell you that he took an arrow to the knee it gets tiresome. Naturally this is still better than some older games but they haven’t changed much.