What Is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books
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What Is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books
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Overview
One of the earliest models for this new way of telling stories was the adventure game, the kind of game centered on quests in which the characters must overcome obstacles and puzzles. After they fell out of fashion in the 1990s, fans made strenuous efforts to keep them alive and to create new games in the genre. Such activities highlight both the convergence of game and story and the collapsing distinction between reader and author. Continually defying the forces of obsolescence, fans return abandoned games to a playable state and treat stories as ever-evolving narratives. Similarly, players of massive multiplayer games become co-creators of the game experience, building characters and creating social networks that recombine a reading and gaming community.
The interactions between storytellers and readers, between programmers and creators, and among fans turned world-builders are essential to the development of innovative ways of telling stories. And at the same time that fan activities foster the convergence of digital gaming and storytelling, new and increasingly accessible tools and models for interactive narrative empower a broadening range of storytellers. It is precisely this interactivity among a range of users surrounding these new platforms that is radically reshaping both e-books and games and those who read and play with them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609382988 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 202 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
What Is Your Quest?
From Adventure Games to Interactive Books
By Anastasia Salter
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-298-8
CHAPTER 1
Early Digital Narratives
NO GENRE CAN BE considered in a vacuum, particularly when the convergence of media is involved. I begin by positioning the adventure game as an heir to earlier forms of both digital and nondigital interactive narratives, some of which resemble the traditional printed book far more than the "magical books" previously discussed. Examining the predigital roots of interactive narrative offers an opportunity to consider the changing nature of text, particularly as some of the first games as books (and books as games) hit the market. I trace three stages of these early interactive narratives: structured collective oral storytelling (Dungeons & Dragons) gamebooks and Choose Your Own Adventure stories; and interactive fiction and text-based games.
With each variant on interactive storytelling, there is not only a tension between game and book but also a tension between orality and literacy. The well-worn cliché of the storyteller around the campfire clearly demonstrates the participatory nature of early storytelling, as listeners could chime in and together reinvent a story around a familiar framework. Walter Ong's seminal study Orality and Literacy chronicled the difference between the isolation of print and the immediacy of orality: "the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups ... the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker" (73). Certainly, the many versions of tales born from the oral storytelling tradition bear the mark of individual and collective reimaginings—just follow the history of any fairy tale across national borders and to its inevitable reinterpretation in a Disney studio or retold with a sardonic twist in The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show's "Fractured Fairy Tales" (1959–1964, television) feature.
In some ways, the printing press and its descendants are among the least participatory of narrative forms, inviting no immediate feedback and allowing only those with access to the press and distribution methods to participate fully in the production of narrative. Ong noted that the very form of print brought with it the "linearly plotted lengthy story line," with the text as the final version—"for print is comfortable only with finality ... the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts" (130). This finality might be an illusion, as the story is transformed through the hands of the reader. The reader interprets, reimagines, and even rewrites through adaptation, parody, or the creation of fan works. The digital networks that have followed in the wake of print promise to restore immediacy of connection between reader and writer, re-creating the "campfire" on a global scale. But more important, they have erased the finality of print and challenge the image of the printed book as unchanging or lacking the potential for interactivity and dialogue after the type is set. This apparent favoring of orality is echoed in Marshall McLuhan's examination of the impact of the electronic platform on the written word: "electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word" (Understanding Media 82). While McLuhan—writing in the 1960s—was reacting to television and radio, his words seem particularly prescient given the role of the participatory oral tradition in shaping the examples to follow.
PLAYING STORIES AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE
Even during the emergence of computer platforms, interactive storytelling thrived in models not too far removed from the campfire. The Dungeons & Dragons (1974, print) system was invented to provide a structure for the telling of group stories run by one person, the Dungeon Master (Gygax and Sutherland). The Dungeon Master is as much a player as the rest of the group, and the players always have the ability to defy the Dungeon Master's narrative and rewrite the story. Collective storytelling in a Dungeons & Dragons game appears to the outsider as a group of people talking around a table, illustrating their words with simple props in the form of game manuals and sheets and sheets of paper describing monsters, characters, items, and environments within the game. Otherwise, the stories and worlds exist only in the imagination of the players. As a role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons relies on the players serving as actors in a rules-based drama with narrative merging from action. Each player takes on a character that exists in no real form other than as a list of attributes, abilities, and equipment, which the player creates according to the rules in the manual and embodies based on his or her own vision of the character's personality. Dungeons & Dragons, which is still played today even with the countless multimedia options for interactive fantasy, suggests that the idea of group storytelling continues to hold an appeal that flashy graphics and complicated interfaces need not necessarily replace. Dungeons & Dragons offers a model where complex fantasy can be modeled systematically based on rules established in the manual, with the modules provided heavily focused on medieval highfantasy and combat. A video role-playing game, in contrast, provides a specific visual world with particular characters to interact with following a set of rules. The game cannot deal with any interactions it is not programmed to handle, unlike a Dungeon Master.
The relationship between Dungeons & Dragons and traditional books was clear, as players bought the print manual guides to the worlds and rule-sets—a model also seen in other tabletop role-playing game systems that followed, including the more flexible Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS) published by Steve Jackson Games in 1986, which substituted the more general "game master" for "Dungeon Master." The game worlds also spawned novels, including large series that last to this day. Of these, one of the most notable is the Dragonlance series, which began with the Chronicles trilogy (1984, print). When the trilogy was re-released in an annotated edition, it included side notes that offered insight into the game sessions that brought the characters to life. The text owes its characters in part to the players. As Tracy Hickman observed in his annotation to the text:
We played the first module of the Dragonlance series as I was writing it, occasionally convening in our apartment after work.... My friend, Terry Phillips, took the Raistlin character—only roughly defined at that time. When I first turned to him to ask him a question, he answered me in character—with a rasping, whispered voice filled with cynicism.... Raistlin as we know him today, was born. (Weis and Hickman 24)
The Dragonlance novels exist both as complete stories and as game modules waiting for players to take their own journey through the same conflict. The best play sessions are thoroughly cocreative, with players building from a Dungeon Master's vision with the same unexpected consequences as Terry Phillips's portrayal of Raistlin that night—a mage haunted by a dark heart and a tense relationship with a strong and handsome twin brother overshadowing him. While Terry Phillips is not credited on the novel's cover, and he is not acknowledged as an "author" of the text, would the world of Dragonlance have been the same without his contribution? Consider Raistlin's legacy—another trilogy, the Legends series, and two prequels known as the Raistlin Chronicles written entirely to satisfy fans of the complexity of this one dark character. This set of results from game play recalls Ong's model of the "audience" and "speaker" as united in storytelling, a relationship very different from that of the final printed book and the presumed (if not actually) passive audience as receptacle for the text (Ong 72–74). But the text novels are also more than a transcription of play: they provide motivations and perspectives from multiple characters, encompassing a more complete story than any one player experiences in Dungeons & Dragons.
Tracy Hickman also observed another difference between these games and the finished novels: "Novels, unlike games, require proper foundation for their characters" (14). This is a claim worth revisiting, as Dragonlance is far from the only example of a game-to-book transition—and vice versa, as a number of book series would move their narratives formally in the opposite direction. The differences between book and game in these cases can be particularly revealing, as the construction of story is moved from a clearly cocreative, open-ended space like Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's gaming nights to a single- (or in this case double-) authored, linear, and complete format. These distinctions can appear to reproduce the reader and player binary, as a player at the original gaming night helped shape the story that a reader consumes. How does this compare to the experience of a player who picks up the published Dragonlance modules, with the story of the novels and guidelines for the quest at their center in place? Perhaps his or her experience is found somewhere in between, with reading (the module's content and prewritten quest text) coexisting with play (the interactivity between scenes that moves the players through the quest). And certainly the book was in no way the final text in the gaming world, however complete in format—it served as a starting point for dialogue.
GAMEBOOKS
The Choose Your Own Adventure (hereafter CYOA) gamebooks first appeared in 1976 and were at their most popular during the 1980s and 1990s—not coincidentally the same time as digital narratives were taking off on the computer and video game consoles. But the books owe a debt to experiments with interactivity within the boundaries of the printed book that began even earlier. For instance, Raymond Queneau's One Hundred Trillion Poems (1961, print) is a kind of adult "gamebook." It consists of ten sonnets, sliced into fragments and bound in a book. The reader is supposed to "discover" or "write" his or her own new sonnet by assembling some of the strips. This method of writing poetry calls into question the authorship of the sonnets: although each individual sonnet appears to have depth of meaning, it was not itself written in the traditional mode, thus challenging the usual understanding of authorial intent. Queneau created the content, the reader has the power to arrange it, and the system determines the limits of what is possible. Thus the question of who "creates" the sonnet blurs.
This type of experimentation is typical of Oulipo, which Daniel Levin Becker described in his study on potential literature as "the laboratory in which some of modernity's most inventive, challenging, and flat-out baffling textual experiments have been undertaken" (6). By contrast, CYOA gamebooks offered a more limited range of possibilities. The books begin with an explanation of the genre: "This book is different from other books. You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story" (Montgomery). But the reader's control over the story was limited to making a series of choices among those options the book presented. The narrative split into many paths throughout the pages of a printed book, so that the player's central activity was reading a section of narrative and making a choice. Upon making the choice, the player could turn to the indicated page to find the outcome. Thus CYOA gamebooks often incorporated several endings, although most of them were unsatisfactory. A typical example occurs in the surreal Choose Your Own Adventure 15: House of Danger (1982, print), in which the player takes the role of a young detective entering a house built on the site of a Civil War prison. If the reader makes the wrong choices, the detective can end up dead at the hands of ghosts, aliens, and other evildoers:
"You refuse, do you?" shouts the creature. "Well, we have another use for humans. In fact, it is our main use for humans."
With that, he takes out a small device from his pocket and aims it at the three of you. A beam of incredibly cold light—its temperature hundreds of degrees below zero—freezes you, Lis, and Ricardo into solid blocks of ice.
Then the man takes out a rubber stamp from his other pocket and stamps your forehead: "HUMAN MEAT—GALACTIC PRIME/SOURCE—PLANET EARTH—GRADE A." (Montgomery 88)
All such macabre fates are followed by the words "The End," indicating not the end of the book but of the player's opportunity to make choices in the story.
While the CYOA gamebooks use a fairly straightforward model of decision making, other gamebooks emerged drawing upon more complex mechanics, including those of Dungeons & Dragons. Remember Terry Phillips, the player responsible for bringing Raistlin Majere to life in Dragonlance? Fittingly, his time with the character did not end with that series, and as part of the Dungeons & Dragons creative team he continued to write stories about Raistlin's identity. In 1985 he wrote his own entry in a series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Gamebooks called The Soulforge. The book offered the reader-player the chance to fill the shoes of Raistlin Majere prior to the Dragonlance Chronicles, as he headed for the test all mages must pass to fully reach their power. The Soulforge gamebook was part of the "Endless Quests" initiative from TSR, the corporate creators of Dungeons & Dragons, capitalizing on the similarity between the game and these choice-driven nonlinear novels. One such "Super Endless Quest Adventure Gamebook," The Ghost Tower, promised the reader "All the thrills of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game in an exciting new Gamebook!" Unlike the CYOA series, these gamebooks added additional mechanics, including the use of character stats and dice rolls to determine success or failure. The promise of Dungeons & Dragons thrills also communicated the intention of the series to function as a "solo" version of a quest-driven game, with the book rather than a Dungeon Master evaluating success or failure for each of the player's choices. Raistlin's identity card replaced the character sheet and allowed the player to grow his or her skills through play. Years later Margaret Weis would revisit this story in a new Dragonlance novel—also entitled The Soulforge, but including the authoritative account of Raistlin's test, with all decision making now in the hands of the author and character.
Like graphic adventures, books in the CYOA style faded for some time—the seminal CYOA series went out of print in 1998, only to return when relaunched in 2006 with rebranding accompanying the same familiar premise: "the interactive, multiple-choice multiple-ending series is among the most popular series for children ever published, with more than 250 million copies sold in 38 languages" (Chooseco, LLC). By this time, the original audience for the CYOA novels had grown up and seen the genre age with them, as smaller releases such as 2008's You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero by Bob Powers parodied the movement from the optimistic decision making of youth to the paralysis of adulthood. Others, like the "Do-Over" novels by Heather McElhatton, offered a glimpse of the broad potential of grown-up life to a teenager who had just graduated from high school by offering the reader a series of possible mistakes and a wide variety of endings. Some authors mined literary sources for inspiration, as in Emma Campbell Webster's Lost in Austen (2007, print), which invited the reader to step into the shoes of an Austen heroine and navigate the many possible fates for a woman in that world, while keeping track of each decision's impact on accomplishments, fortune, connections, intelligence, and confidence in an Austen-appropriate version of Dungeons & Dragons–style stats. And others, like Jason Shiga's Meanwhile (2010, comic), reinvented the form as a graphic novel. (I revisit Shiga's Meanwhile later, as it also became a striking example of interactive storytelling on the iPad.)
FROM DUNGEONS & DRAGONS TO COMPUTER GAMES
As a relatively new entry in the history of media, the tradition of interactive storytelling through the means of computer gaming technology has a short but fast-paced history. The same type of rules-based system that Dungeons & Dragons was based on could translate into the technical worlds emerging alongside these imagination-powered games. Players of Dungeons & Dragons were often the same people designing computer games in these early stages, which John Borland and Brad King describe as a time of highly independent, noncorporate creation. Players of games were at this time quickly switching roles to become creators; at this point, one programmer could master the limited available technology and build a game relatively quickly (Borland and King 41). The idea of a store dedicated to selling computer games was still rare, so games circulated among the small community of players mostly through established connections and friendships before any organized efforts to sell the works were made. While Dungeons & Dragons manuals could easily be integrated into the shelves of a bookstore, often housed near other hybrid forms such as graphic novels and gamebooks, computer games were still finding their space.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Is Your Quest? by Anastasia Salter. Copyright © 2014 The University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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