On Tuesday, July 31, 2001, at 09:46 AM, Laurence Rozier wrote:

She uses the term "participatory narrative" which I prefer over interactive fiction but I don't think interactive fiction is an oxymoron any more than human-in-the-loop or other forms of "simulation" which mix real world inputs with simulated ones. Whether "simulation-with-a-bit-o-story", or "story-with-a-bit-o-simulation" as Andrew put it, this mixed thing exists and we have to call it something right?

Clearly, I assault the term as oxymoronic primarily as a rhetorical tool to make the point: there is an inherent conflict between the quality of a story-telling and the quality of a simulation. I do find the genre of quasi-storytelling-quasi-simulations difficult to describe in a might better be characterized as a mere "game." Games can have incidental themes, as these do, and can also be serious works of art. But to exalt these non-literary exercises to the level of fiction or narrative that is true literature seems, at least to me, problematic.

Make no mistake -- I'm one of the pretentious people who likes to think of my game designs as species of an art form. I believe that they are. However, I do not pretend that they are literature although I'd like to think (at least at one time) we were getting close. I say this, noting that one of my games was accompanied by more than 700 pages of printed prose in support of a story element. I only got as close as I did, I will advise those who are interested in doing this sort of thing, precisely by recognizing the present limitations of the medium, both from the narrative perspective and from the simulation perspective. It may not have been great storytelling, but it sure hung together well as a game -- and it shared some of the elements of great storytelling.

Huge strides have been made in 10 years concerning the quality of simulation. Virtually nothing, IMHO, has been done to improve story-telling. If anything, it has gotten much, much worse since the days of Infocom. We have a long way to go with the sciences (classical sense) of what you call "participatory narrative," and until we get there, I suggest we eschew these dangerous labels. They lead us to think that merely be putting words and characters and little pieces of plot together that we are actually engaging in storytelling. I, for one, can tell you that commercial success and rave reviews can be stultifying to an artist -- I was told I made great interactive literature, and so I believed it. And the quality of my products festered for years, until I matured to the point of understanding the difference. It is a trap I advise others to avoid.

To the extent Laurence is merely observing that a shitty novel is nevertheless still a novel, even though it may share all the flaws of a great interactive game, I don't disagree with his point. But I'm not sure that the observation either weakens or dilutes mine.

Drama in its origins was very much a participartory form and I agree with many of the points made by Murray and Laurel. My Participant-Activity-Scenario-Stage(PASS) system(see Morphic Joules docs for a description) is a model-based development approach founded on the premise that object-oriented software systems consist of Participants that engage in the Activities of a Scenario which is played out on a Stage. Scenarios(paths thru a use case) are simulations which can benefit from storytelling. They seem like a form of participatory narrative to me but, perhaps there is no one single term that is appropriate. Do folks prefer one?

My criticism was not directed to the functionality or social utility of adding themes to simulations -- just to point out that what simulations and games do with their story elements don't amount to storytelling. Poetics was not directed to the functionality of the works, but rather to their efficacy in achieving that functionality -- the science (classical sense) of writing. It is what makes a story catch our breath, and makes it worthwhile the read. We aren't doing much of that in role-playing games these days. Indeed, not much at all.