May 30, 2008
Storygaming
The latest panel at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference featured fascinating talks about metafiction and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and one about interactive fiction: Jimmy Maher’s talk “A New Approach to the Storygame: Blending the Crossword with the Narrative,” based on his paper “Toward Games that Matter: The Promise and Problems of the Storygame.” The concept of “storygame” as Maher discusses it is broader than “interactive fiction,” in that it includes computer games that have narrative aspects, but computational simulation of some sort is required for a storygame. Maher distinguishes “three-dimensional” works that present a world (you can get lost in a good book) with the “two-dimensional” work in which the qualities of the text are foregrounded; related to Burgess’s type 1 and type 2 authors. Genre literature is often the previous; literary fiction the latter – but great literature can do both. The idea can be extended to games: Chess is two-dimensional, in that we don’t imagine battlefields and everything happens on its surface. War games through D&D and Adventure are three-dimensional.
May 30th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
I would argue that you have to take into account multiple dimensions of time. Text is one dimensional, visual art is two dimensional, film is three dimensional (including time), as is Tetris (two spatial dimensions over time, like film). D&D wargames are four dimensional, two spatial dimensions, two temporal/causal dimensions (time and probability). A five dimensional game would be resonant of what he’s describing, three spatial dimensions and the above two. A robust content-creation engine that builds scenes dynamically based on player metrics would be six dimensional, three spatial, time, probability and the variation in what is explored. The design space of such engines would be seven dimensional, where you’ve got a lineation of complexity, and reality in it’s transcendtal whatever would be 8++ dimensional.
I recommend “Prometheus Rising” by RAW, or just Google “8-Circuit Model” to see where I’m coming from here.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
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