Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
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Role Playing Games as Interactive Fiction / John Miller
Abstract: This chapter compares the experience of gaming and the experience of reading, and explores what that comparison might tell us about each. More specifically, it applies methods of literary analysis to the study of two narrative activities situated near the border of reading and gaming: Electronic hyperfictions and role-playing games. Miller first reviews literary theories of reader response and interactivity and notes how these have informed recent critical discussions of literary hyperfiction. He then critiques these discussions and the claims made for hyperfiction's liberating or empowering effect on readers: Contrary to the claims of some critics, such narratives generally fail to fulfill these promises and are, in fact, in many ways less interactive than traditional print fictions. The author then approaches the border between gaming and reading from the other direction, by examining a form of gaming that resembles reading in interesting ways: Role-playing games. Miller explores how reader response theories apply to analyzing the effects and meanings of such games, concluding that role-playing games provide a better model for the reification of reader response theories, albeit in a medium which is more oral than written, than do the hyperfictions which have received more serious attention from literary theorists. As such, role-playing games offer a potential medium for more truly interactive fiction that "serious" authors have yet to explore. Raising questions of textuality and its relation to games, Miller argues for the inclusion of games in contemporary literary studies and shows how fruitful such studies may be for our understanding of "new media" possibilities.
Introduction
<1> The advent of the personal computer has revolutionized the ways in which games are played and sold, making possible an explosion of games and gaming environments that allow players to interact with incredibly rich and complex game settings, either alone or with other players. At the same time, in a smaller corner of the computer revolution, a small group of literary critics has been arguing that the computer is also revolutionizing the way literature is written and read. Hypertext and hypermedia applications have given rise to new forms of storytelling that allow readers hands-on opportunities to participate in the construction of the stories they read. Such narrative experiences, these critics argue, offer readers a new, empowered role in the relationship between reader, author, and work. The following essay will explore the narrowing border between these two activities, the former often dismissed by scholars as mere popular entertainment, the latter generally ignored outside of the academy. After looking at the claims made by advocates of hypertext fiction--or "hyperfiction"--it will argue, however, that it is in the interactions of game players, rather than in the experience of reading hypertext, that the hopes of these literary theorists are most likely to be realized. The medium of hypertext, as we will see, in many ways subverts its own ambitions, creating narrative experiences that are in fact less interactive and liberating than those of print fiction. The interplay of collaboration and competition between game players, however, has the potential to create new forms of narrative that are at once genuinely interactive, satisfying as story, and meaningful as literature.
The Act of Reading
<2> Before Marshall McLuhan and the rise of post-structuralism, reading was generally regarded as a spectator sport, and the study of literature was conducted something like post-game discussions of strategies and key plays. The real action remained on the field--that is, on the page; the reader, student and critic merely observed it and tried to understand and explain it. Starting in the 1960s, however, this approach to reading and studying literature found itself challenged as part of a general critique of conventional hierarchies of authority underway both within and without academia. A renewed interest in the reader's personal experience and response to literature flourished in such an environment. (Such interest was not new: both Plato and Aristotle had seen it as the most important question to ask about literature, though they disagreed about the answer.) As a reaction to the New Criticism's dismissal of the individual reader's response as meaningless, this approach promised to empower, even liberate readers long oppressed by the monolithic authority of the literary text. Not only was the reader's experience now considered valuable and worthy of study, but readers were recognized as making a necessary contribution of their own to the working of the text. In S/Z, his revolutionary book-length study of a single Balzac short story that helped define the transition between "structuralist" and "post-structuralist" approaches to the study of literary, Roland Barthes drew a distinction between the "work," which is what the author wrote, the words on the page, and the "text," which is composed by the reader's interaction with the text. The "text," according to Barthes, is where meaning, effect, and value are created, where "the rubber hits the road."
<3>The cliché is pertinent: in one of the most carefully elaborated and influential theories of the interaction between reader and the literary work, Wolfgang Iser begins by describing the reader's experience as a journey that takes place over time. As the reader moves through the work, he or she observes the developing narrative and, if attentive, begins to develop both expectations and questions about where the story is going. For example, early in the work a reader may be introduced to a character and certain dilemmas faced by that character. Based on the information provided and the creation of suspense, the reader is encouraged to anticipate the character's behavior and the resolution of those dilemmas. As the reading progresses and new information is gathered, the reader may adjust his or her judgments of characters and events. As events unfold in unexpected ways, the reader may re-evaluate his or her expectations and perhaps even begin to examine the process by which those judgments were made.
<4>To allow readers to make such judgments, literary works contain "gaps" in the narrative, places where the reader must interpret, explain, or rationalize events in order to make sense of them. The "act of reading" becomes a process of what Iser calls "consistency-building": readers interpret a suggestive but ultimately incomplete set of data to make it into a consistent and meaningful whole. Some critics of Iser's theory have claimed that he seems to assert that works of literature can be meaningful only when their narratives are made to appear consistent; this, they argue, would seem to disqualify works that portray worlds characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity, or in which narrative questions remain unresolved. However, for Iser, it is not consistency itself but the reader's efforts to create it that is meaningful. Since meaning resides in the reader's experience, failure to resolve all questions or dilemmas about a narrative can be just as meaningful as success. Iser argues that works are literary to the degree that they offer readers challenging narrative and moral problems to wrestle with. "Popular" literature, by contrast, tends to make those judgments for readers by, for example, clearly delineating good guys from bad guys or wrapping up all the narrative conflicts in a neat ending.
<5>To illustrate his arguments, Iser often refers to the novels of 18th century novelist Henry Fielding, who wrote when the novel had not yet been firmly established as a distinct (let alone respectable) literary form. Thus Fielding felt it necessary to explain to readers how to digest this new sort of popular (as he hoped) form of narrative. In Tom Jones (1749), for example, this narrator explains the soon-to-be-a-convention of chapter breaks in the text by declaring that they provide the reader "an Opportunity of employing that wonderful Sagacity, of which he is Master, by filling up these vacant Spaces of Time with his own Conjectures; for which Purpose, we have taken Care to qualify him in the preceding Pages" (88). The chapter breaks serve precisely purpose Iser describes: they are places for the reader to assert the role of interpretation necessary to make sense or meaning of the work.
<6>The passage also illustrates, in its sarcastic declaration of faith in the reader's "wonderful Sagacity," the humorously oppositional tone that Fielding's narrator often adopts towards his reader. Iser's view of reading implies a mutually agreeable antagonism between reader and author, akin to that between players of a game. In the opening paragraph of Tom Jones, Fielding suggests the competing interests of author and reader are akin to those of a commercial relationship:
An Author ought to consider himself, not as a Gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary Treat, but rather as one who keeps a public Ordinary . . . Men who pay for what they eat, will insist on gratifying their Palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if every Thing is not agreeable to their Taste, will challenge a Right to censure, to abuse, and to d-----n their Dinner without Controul. (1)
Writing of another early novelist, Laurence Sterne, Iser argues that "Sterne's conception of a literary text is that it is something like an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination" (1980, 51). French essayist Michel de Montaigne, an early innovator in another print genre, also imagined his writing as a site of game-like interaction between author and reader; Montaigne uses tennis as a metaphor for verbal communication, whether oral or written: to keep the game going, the audience must position itself appropriately to receive and respond to the author's shots (Bauschatz).
<7>Reader response theories, then, describe reading as an experience which requires active, creative participation on the part of the reader. Instead of a puzzle devised by an absent, God-like author, literary texts are regarded as something like a game which readers and authors play with one another. The value of reading literature arises not so much from the answers the works themselves may offer to the questions they pose, but rather from the activity of trying to resolve the problems of moral and interpretive judgment that literary texts pose to readers.
<8>One of the attractions of this view of the activity of reading--to some readers, at least--is that it appears to "liberate" the reader from the "domination" of the author. For both Barthes and Iser, the reader is granted the status of a co-creator of the text, which ultimately exists not on the page but in the reader's mind or experience. But such liberation can seem frustratingly, perhaps deceptively, abstract. Readers might work--or play--with "works" of literature to create "texts," but the works themselves remain stubbornly unchanged. Readers may play with books, but the books don't really play with them. The very physical fixity of the written, and especially of the printed, word continues to embody the work's assertions of autonomy, authority, and resistance to the reader's manipulation. But, as Walter Ong has pointed out, this peculiar power of the written word is a function of technology, and as technology evolves so, perhaps, might the balance of power between reader, author, and the written word.
What Hyperfiction Wants to Do and Why It Can't
<9>In 1991, Jay David Bolter released an original and influential study of how recent changes in "technologies of the word" might change that balance of power. In Writing Space (updated in 2001), Bolter discusses ways in which authors were beginning to experiment with writing fiction on computers, which allowed for non-linear (or, as Bolter prefers, "multi-linear") organization of material and for various kinds of active participation by the reader. In Bolter's words, the computer promises to "realize the metaphor of reader response" (173); what Iser proposes as a theory of how we read print narratives, Bolter argues, becomes a necessary practice in the reading of computer-based fiction. Readers of such hypertext fictions--or "hyperfictions"--as Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story are required to make decisions about how to arrange their reading of the text. Instead of just turning the page and being forced to read whatever the author has put on the other side, readers of Afternoon confront "pages" (Bolter uses the neologism "lexia" for a single screen of text) from which they can proceed in a variety of different directions by following hypertextual links. The links of a hyperfiction, Bolter argues, are like Iser's gaps, places in the narrative where readers are forced to make decisions and judgments. The text is not organized linearly, with a single predetermined order, but "topographically," as a kind of map (though often a hidden and even shifting one) for the reader to explore.
<10>At any point in a hyperfiction, then, the reader seems to have more choices to make and more—or at least more obvious—gaps to fill than in traditional print narratives. Joyce's Afternoon provided a model that inspired a number of ambitious authors (sometimes referred to as the "Eastgate School," after Eastgate Systems, Inc., the publisher of many of their works) to extend this opportunity to their readers. These works in turn spawned a small school of literary criticism attempting to understand the nature of what seemed to many like a revolutionary new way to write and to read. Bolter's book exemplified the optimistic rhetoric of much of this criticism. According to Bolter, hypertext promised to "liberat[e] the text" from the "hierarchies" with which print "attempt[s] to impose order on verbal ideas that are always prone to subvert that order" (21). Print fiction had fostered and thrived on a myth of authorial control and creativity that threatened the reader's very selfhood:
taking the text as heterocosm only enhances the authority of the author, who serves as a kind of a deity for this world. It suggests a passive reading in which the reader "loses himself" in the world of the story. Losing oneself in a fictional world is the goal of the naïve reader or one who reads for entertainment. (155)
As Bolter himself admits elsewhere, much of the writing about hypertext is infused with an almost utopian tone: "the rhetoric of hypertext (and all of us who work in hypertext are guilty of this exaggeration) tends to by the rhetoric of liberation" (Tuman, 60). Opponents of such rhetoric in turn seemed to see in it the seeds of a wholesale abandonment of the very purposes of literature. Sven Bickerts, for example, in his aptly titled book, The Gutenberg Elegies, defends the very hierarchies whose overthrow Bolter celebrates: "'domination by the author'," Bickerts insists, "has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading" (163).
<11>Both the boosters and the skeptics of hyperfiction tend to assume that its chief distinction is the freeing of the reader from the power of the author and the work. How free, though, are the readers of hypertext? On the one hand, these readers do seem to have more decisions to make than do readers of print. Such readers must do what Iser only hopes print readers will do: explore and attempt to bridge gaps in the interest of building a text that makes sense or offers a meaningful or rewarding experience. But Iser's active readers do something else: before they can begin bridging gaps, they must find them. They must decide when the text does or doesn't make sense, where to ask questions, and what questions to ask. With every link chosen, the reader of a hyperfiction is reminded that these gaps have been written into the work by the author. While offering the reader the chance to stop wandering and look about, as do the gaps in print narrative, the gaps written into a hypertext by the author may appear as intrusions on the process of textual construction, which, according to Iser, "is the province of the reader himself" (111). Because a hypertext poses many of these questions for the reader, it may even discourage the reader from posing questions of his or her own.
<12>Hypertext authors thus appropriate an activity--in fact, a freedom--that is part of the process of reading print fiction and perform it for the reader. While some of the gaps in print fiction are physically inscribed into the text, for example between chapters, for the most part print narratives so forcefully assert their continuity and coherence that organic wholeness and closure have become conventions of print fiction. As Ong and Bolter both note, the very physical stability of a printed novel, its text fixed securely between its covers, becomes a figure of conventional narrative closure. This convention underlies Iser's theory, for gaps can only exist within a structure that is presumed to be otherwise coherent: gaps have to be gaps-in-something. Iser's reading process must begin with a presumption of—or willing suspension of disbelief in—the potential coherence of the text. In noting and filling those gaps, therefore, the reader of print fiction is actively resisting the work's presumption of closure and authority; as noted above, the relationship between reader and work (and thus author) is an antogonistic one.
<13>Unlike printed fictions, however, hyperfictions make no such assertions of coherence or closure. Unlike the book, they are mutable and in fact virtually immaterial. Whereas a print fiction asserts its coherence, a hypertext, writes Joyce, "yields" at every link. As a result, the links in a hypertext are understood as playing a different role than the gaps in a print narrative. Whereas in the latter these gaps appear as lapses of structure and authority, in a hypertext these gaps are the defining convention of the form. Hyperfiction readers presume multiple, ephemeral narratives and a lack of coherence and consistency. Thus, as Espen Aarseth notes, "in the hypertext environment of Afternoon, these devices are naturalized and therefore do not cause the subversion they might" in a printed book (86). Stuart Moulthrop, a hyperfiction author and critic, argues that a hyperfiction "invites the reader not to ratify its wholeness, but to deconstruct it" ("Reading From the Map" 129). But hyperfictions don't need deconstruction, as the reader assumes they are not constructed in the first place. Elsewhere, Moulthrop defends the experience of reading such narratives by claiming that "[b]reakdowns always teach us something" ("Traveling" 73). But hypertexts don't break down: they are broken to begin with. Thus, both "consistency-building" and deconstruction appear equally pointless to the hyperfiction reader. It is hard to play with a text that "yeilds," that doesn't fight back.
<14>Discussions of the experience of reading hyperfiction have tended to focus on two related structural features of those narratives that appear to distinguish them from print narratives: their multi-linear or "topographic" structure, and the absence of internal "closure," of a clearly marked end to the narrative and to the reading experience. Both features seem necessary to the sort of interactive reading that proponents argue allows hyperfiction to empower or liberate readers to create new kinds of meaningful reading experiences. In practice, however, it is precisely these aspects of hyperfiction that lead to its failure to produce narratives that are both satisfying and meaningful. As we will see below, however, games--and particularly those games which most closely resemble written fiction, role playing games--provide a medium in which these two structural liabilities of hyperfiction can be overcome, and in which can reader-players can participate in the co-creation of the kinds of narrative experiences hyperfiction aspires to.
<15>Bolter described the organization of hypertexts as "topographic." Rather than the linear progression of the print narrative, hyperfictions can be conceived of as a two or even three-dimensional map, in which points of the "story" are connected to others through the network of links. The reader can explore this territory in a virtually infinite number of ways, deciding which directions seem meaningful or interesting to pursue. Hyperfiction thus seems to "realize" not only Iser's notion of reading as the experience of a "wandering viewpoint," but the earliest structuring metaphor for narrative, the journey.
<16>In her book on electronic narratives, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray notes that the simple activity of exploring and orienting oneself in a new space, even a virtual space, can be pleasurable in itself (129-30). Nevertheless, readers often find that the experience of trying to orient themselves in a hyperfiction yields less pleasure than is generally derived from either orienteering (whether in real or virtual environments) or following the pre-blazed trail of a print narrative. Murray herself finds no such pleasure in hyperfictions like Afternoon. The result of such wandering is not the unfolding of a plot, "just a sense of going from the unknown to the known" (174). According to Aarseth, the effects of Afternoon's topographic structure are disorientation and "textual claustrophobia" (79), in which "the reader becomes not so much lost as caught, imprisoned by the repeating, circular paths and his own impotent choices" (91). As we have seen, advocates of hyperfiction argue that such experiences are precisely the point. As Murray suggests, though, such activity is "a cognitive activity at one remove from the usual pleasures of hearing a story" (174). It may increase reader activity, but it ignores an important dimension of the experience of narrative, which Aristotle first pointed out, and to which Iser's theory--and all theories of reader response--can be seen as a footnotes.
<17>Aristotle recognized that plots are not so much features of the work itself but of the reader's experience of that work. He argued that three elements were required to create the pleasure specific to tragic plots. First of all, plots need to proceed according to the rule of probability: the events should be plausible and, in hindsight at least, predictable consequences of the initial conditions posited in the author's created world. Within this general rule of probability, plots should contain moments of "recognition," in which characters learn things, and moments of "reversal," in which events turn in surprising--though, crucially, not improbable--directions contrary to the intentions of the characters. In effective plots, such recognitions and reversals not only happen to the characters, they are also, and more importantly, experienced by the audience. Such experiences of recognition and reversal explain much of our aesthetic response to everything from riddles and spectator sports to music, paintings, and literature. We derive our pleasure in stories from moments of realization and from events that are simultaneously surprising and fitting. Thus, for narratives to create their effects and meanings, they must unfold over time in fairly specific ways. This is precisely what "topographic" narratives do not do. They do not articulate the audience's learning experience over time to produce the sorts of effects that Aristotle argues are central to the meaning and enjoyment of narrative. By relinquishing the manipulation of time, narratives like Afternoon fail to make the passage of time meaningful.
<18>The second distinguishing feature of hypertexts, their absence of intrinsic points of closure, also follows from their articulation through space rather than through time. In a description of her experience reading Joyce's Afternoon, J. Yellowlees Douglas suggests that hyperfiction allows for a new kind of closure, imposed not by the text but by the reader. After four attempts to explore Afternoon, and despite irresolvable ambiguities her readings have generated, she experiences "a sense of having both literally and figuratively plumbed the depths of the narrative spaces" of the text (172). George Landow describes a similar experience in his readings of hyperfictions: "having assigned particular sections to particular sequences or reading paths, many, though not all, of which once can retrace at will, one reaches a point at which one's initial cognitive dissonance or puzzlement disappears, and one seems satisfied. One has reached--or created--closure!" (113). Other critics, such as Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce, see hyperfiction as challenging the very assumption that closure is necessary or even possible. As Joyce writes in Afternoon, "Closure is, in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends" ("work in progress").
<19>In either case --whether hyperfictions allow readers to impose closure or whether they demonstrate the fallacy of closure--these arguments define closure, as Janet Murray points out, as a "cognitive activity" not an aesthetic one. But the experience of narrative closure is not simply an intellectual or analytical activity. The promise of closure is part of our motivation for reading. If we feel that we are not moving toward it as we read, we become frustrated. Even truly picaresque narratives generally need to string their episodes along some sort of problem or purpose in order to keep readers reading. Explorers, however curious, and however diverting the scenery along the way, generally do not explore simply to explore: they hope to find something. This sense of forward movement is in part a function of the linear structure, and even the material form, of printed texts. But the reverse is also true: the promise of closure (which need not be fulfilled, but only promised) gives a linear form to our experience, and, as we have seen, that linear form articulated over time is a basic component of the machinery of narrative. Narratives create their effects, as Aristotle recognized, by playing with the reader's expectations of consistency or organic form. As Iser points out, active readers don't take consistency or organic form for granted; rather, they struggle to wrest them from the narrative or to challenge the narritive's versions of them. Readers often choose to step outside of the linear plot and even the linear arrangement of the book; they are constantly looking backwards and forwards, sometimes flipping back to reread or (horrors!) ahead to ease suspense. All the author controls is the sequence in which those parts are delivered to the reader. But it is precisely the reader's response to that sequencing of revelations that makes narratives pleasurable and meaningful. By relinquishing control over the unfolding of the narrative over time, hyperfictions abandon one of the most fundamental methods by which narratives create their effects.
What Games Might Do
<20>To help explain the nature and potential of this new and evolving medium, defenders of hyperfiction often try to situate it in relation to more familiar experiences, literary and otherwise. Twentieth century authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, and Milan Pavic, who wrote fictions that tried in various ways to encourage readers to resist the single linear form of narrative structure imposed by print, are often cited as unwitting (except, perhaps, for Coover) prophets of hyperfiction [1]. A more "popular" form of such fiction, the "choose your own adventure" story, usually aimed at juvenile readers, asks readers to make choices about where the story will go at crucial points. For example, the reader might be asked to decide whether the main character (often the reader him- or herself, addressed in the story in the second person "you") should walk through a door or pass it by. Depending on his or her decision, the reader is directed to one page or another and keeps reading until the next fork in the story. Such stories often have the quality of a game: wrong choices are often punished by ending the narrative prematurely and one must make a series of correct choices to get the narrative to a satisfying conclusion (though when this has been reached, readers will typically go back through the book and check out all the possible paths not taken).
<21> Such interactive reading experiences begin to blur the border between the experiences of reading and gaming, and examinations of hyperfiction from Bolter's through more recent studies by Douglas and Murray have also discussed games as a model for helping to understand the nature of hypertextual interactions. Typically the favor is not returned: literary narratives have generally not been used as models to help illuminate the experience of playing games (though, as we will see below, Murray does take games' narrative potential seriously). Role playing games in particular seem to present a close parallel to the reading experience. In The Act of Reading, Iser draws a distinction between our experience of fiction and other forms of perceptual experience which points towards this similarity:
We always stand outside the given object, whereas we are situated inside the literary text. The relation between text and reader is therefore quite different from that between object and observer: instead of a subject-object relationship, there is a moving viewpoint which travels along inside that which it has to apprehend. This mode of grasping an object is unique to literature. (109)
This last claim is certainly debatable--one might make the same claim about our experience of music, for instance--but in any case it does describe very well the experience of participating in a well-executed role playing game.
<22>Role playing games can be experienced in several different ways these days. Through computers, players can immerse themselves in various sorts of multimedia experiences. Some allow players to play a character who is visible on the screen; in others the screen imagery represents the character's view of the world. In many of these games, of course, players interact with the virtual environment primarily by fighting with it or, usually to a lesser extent, by trying to solve puzzles it presents. In some, such as the series of Myst games, that puzzle involves the reader in unraveling a series of events--a "plot"--which lies behind and explains the world the player interacts with. The player of Myst is initially literally dropped into a mysterious and apparently deserted world with no explanation offered of who he or she, as a player, is supposed to be, why he or she is there, or even what the goal of the game is.
<23>Players of computer games certainly become immersed in the experience of playing to an intense degree, often losing themselves for hours in the activity. However, the nature of immersion in such visually and aurally represented virtual worlds is different in kind from the effect of being "lost in a book." Despite the immersive experience of video games, as visual experiences they remain "objects" to the player in ways that, as Iser suggests, written texts do not. Written texts require the reader to co-create them through the act of reading. All reading requires a degree of interpretation, of adding meaning to the signs on the page. Readers must participate in conjuring the fictional worlds they inhabit; thus those worlds inhabit the reader as well. The multimedia virtual environments of most computer-based games, however, are given--imposed. Visual representations tend to speak for themselves, discouraging interpretation or critique and thus limiting potential meanings.
<24>Computer games of this sort resemble both print texts and electronic hypertexts in one respect: in both cases the text is fixed in advance and generally cannot be changed by the reader. The full text (not to mention the code which lies behind it) may be hidden from the reader, requiring the reader to figure out how to explore it, but in both cases the author or authors are not present to be interacted with. Computer games, however, more closely resemble hypertexts in that they offer explicit choices to players, choices that have been written into the game's "text." No choices can be made which have not already been anticipated by the author of the game. While these choices, when taken together, may allow for a virtually infinite variety of combinations and therefore a virtually infinite variety of possible "plots," these games nevertheless tell players where choices can be made rather than letting players decide for themselves. As we saw above, hyperfictions discourage--though they don't strictly forbid--such independent choice on the part of readers, the sort of independence that Iser suggests is the hallmark of the literary reading experience.
<25>As in hyperfictions, such games unfold through a process of exploration, often requiring the player to re-cross territory already visited and try alternative solutions to problems already posed. Unlike most hyperfictions, though, such games, almost by definition, also proceed inexorably towards a specific ending. They tend to take the form of complex mazes with some sort of treasure or solution to be gained at its center (or exit). The "sense of an ending" helps propel the player through the game, providing the motivation that hyperfictions lack. In this they resemble the closed narratives print texts embody. Yet, as Janet Murray points out, because the goal of most games is to win, happy endings are the preferred endings, a narrative convention that limits the kinds of stories such games can tell.
<26> Today's adventure-oriented video games are descendants of an earlier form of role playing game not mediated by a computer-based images and sounds, but conducted in language as a face-to-face oral interaction. Dungeons and Dragons is the best known of these, though it has spawned countless imitators. In these games, an author, or "dungeon master," composes an adventure that is negotiated by the players' characters, complete with setting, other characters, monsters, challenges, and rewards. Commonly multiple players play at the same time, working with--and sometimes against--one another. While the dungeon master sets up the challenges, the outcomes of those challenges depend on a combination of the initial conditions designed by the dungeon master, the choices made by the players (including, usually, the construction of a unique "character" to play), and rules for determining the outcomes of interactions, and some degree by chance, usually provided by rolling dice. Thus, like all the forms of narrative discussed so far, there is an author who determines to some degree the player/reader's experience. Unlike computer-based games, however, and to a much greater extent than is allowed by either print or electronic fiction, players of such role playing games are free to make choices that are not already built into the game by the author. This freedom is made possible by what might seem to be the technological limitations of the form: because dungeon masters must be there to run their worlds in person, players have greater access to the originator of the world itself and so can question and challenge its creator in ways impossible to readers of print fiction, hyperfiction, or computer game programs. Dungeon masters are themselves players, with their own motives and goals for the shared narrative, which condition how they respond to the evolving plot of the game and to the challenges that players pose them [2]. While dungeon masters typically prepare maps of the settings they have devised for the game, there is no rule forbidding players from marching determinedly off the map. In such situations, dungeon masters must devise ways for their worlds to respond. "Dungeons" are often constructed as confined spaces such as cavern complexes, space ships, islands, etc., precisely to limit such unpredictable player choices. Nevertheless players in such games have much more freedom to wander, to steer the narrative in directions of their own, and to resist authorial domination than do readers of any of the other "interactive" narrative media discussed so far.
<27> Players of such games typically journey through the world much as readers of narratives move through the temporal experience of reading. In this respect the experience of the role player does resemble that of the hyperfiction reader traversing a "topographically" organized text. Such games, however, incorporate the temporal element in ways that hyperfictions do not. As noted above, the "wanderings" of the hyperfiction reader take place at the conceptual level, not on the level of plot. By contrast, in a role playing game, the backtracking, aimless wandering, and getting lost are not simply ways of covering the terrain of a dungeon but become events in the unfolding of the plot, with consequences for the outcome of the game. As Gary Alan Fine has shown, gamers evaluate the quality of games in terms of plot and other narrative qualities (88-89). In this respect role playing games actually resemble print fictions more than they do hyperfictions: in both role playing and print fiction, the sequence and pace of unfolding events have consequences for the audience and thus create meaning. Iser describes the experience of reading as a cumulative process of learning and questioning: the reader draws certain conclusions from what has been read and attempts to project future events based on those conclusions. As Aristotle noted, the best plots are those that surprise readers but in ways which those readers realize are consistent with what has gone before in the plot. In role playing games, unlike in hyperfiction, these processes of revelation are central to the plot of the narrative itself. Thus, in addition to offering players the opportunity to make meaningful, independent choices that affect the plot of the narrative, role playing games also create meaningful consequences for those decisions.
<28> Role playing games, in contrast to both hyperfiction and traditional print fiction, offer multiple forms of closure, both intrinsic and extrinsic, even as their plots remain flexible and open-ended. Particular "adventures" are usually organized around some sort of quest or mission; the goal might be the defeat of a monster, the exploration of a dungeon, the acquisition of treasure (and often all three). Such goals provide the sense of purpose which propels the game narrative. At the same time, players typically continue to play the same character in game after game. Characters who successfully negotiate the challenges set them by one adventure accumulate wealth, equipment, and experience (often quantified in "experience points"). These acquisitions equip them to face more interesting (and rewarding) challenges in subsequent games. One goal of such games, then, might be called "personal growth," albeit of a fictional character but one with whom the player has a closer identification and larger personal investment (as, literally, the creator of the character) than one typically has with the character of a work of fiction. As Fine notes, "players must identify with their characters in order for the game to be a success. Put differently, players must invest their characters with meaning" (214). More fundamentally, the simple survival of the character becomes an end of the game, providing meaning even to adventures that are otherwise failures.
<29> Moreover, individual "dungeons"--that is, the location of a specific game or adventure--usually exist within larger worlds, and those games or adventures thus become episodes in a larger narrative whose setting is that world. From these narratives, which may involve multiple players and combinations of players (some playable via the internet have thousands of players), more complex histories of such worlds can be woven. While that history is composed of the multiple narratives of individual characters, it also provides an evolving context in which those characters' stories are given historical as well as individual meaning.
<30>Thus role playing games accomplish what hyperfiction tries but fails to do: by combining purposeful narrative and lack of conventional closure, role playing games produce narratives that can critique conventional narrative closure without making interacting with the text itself seem futile. As noted above, hypertexts are actually less subversive of this convention of print narratives than are print narratives--or, more precisely, their readers--themselves. Role playing games, however, can continue for as long as players and dungeon masters are willing to work together to continue creating them.
<31> In many ways, then, role playing games of this sort come much closer to "realizing the metaphor of reader response" than do electronic hyperfictions. According to Murray, "[p]erhaps the most successful model for combining player agency with narrative coherence is a well-run LARP [3] game" (151). One might, however, justifiably question the "literary value" of such narratives: they are, after all, played as games and their content tends to resemble that of pulp or genre fiction rather than "literature." One answer, of course, is that though played for entertainment, games nevertheless serve important cultural functions. Anthropologists have studied these cultural functions and noted their universality and the high value placed on them in most cultures. Literary critics from Aristotle on have often described literature's function as depending on its game-like detachment from reality, its quality as "play": an opportunity to experiment with choices and possibilities without fear of real consequences.
<32>If, therefore, role playing games can be regarded as a form of narrative which carries forward the insights of reader response criticism, what has kept them from producing works which have attained the status of "literature"? One reason is that as oral narratives, role playing games do not have a material existence. This is precisely what post-structuralist critics tried to argue about the "experience" of literature, that it really "existed" in the reader's mind, not between the covers of a book. Nevertheless, though elements of such games can be rendered in print (and are in fact sold as prepared dungeons), the oral nature of the games does seem to preclude the sort of careful interpretive attention to the text which seems to be a fundamental part of what we consider to the be the experience of reading. One might imagine recording games for future analysis. In fact, having derived many of their conventions from the fantasy fiction of Tolkien and others, role playing games have now returned the favor: the sci-fi/fantasy shelves of bookstores have been swelled in recent years by works based on role playing games and scenarios, including a whole series based on specific Dungeons & Dragons scenarios (which can also be purchased for playing in many of the same stores).
<33>But the real readers of such games are the players themselves. These players engage in such acts of interpretation as they play, but these acts are typically carried on "in real time," which makes reflection and revision difficult if not impossible. As Ong argues, such interpretative activity is made possible by writing and is extremely difficult without a technology to make words stand still.
<34>One might hope, however, for new games designed around more interesting problems than the slaying of imaginary monsters and the acquisition of wealth and power. Perhaps computer games are leading the way in this direction. The Sim series posed gamers with different sorts of problems, many of which raise questions that have concerned "literary" fiction. SimCity challenges players to design a working community and challenges their creations with a variety of natural and social problems. The Sims allows players to create and deploy characters who then interact over time in social, familial, and even sexual situations. As ingenious as these "games" are, they remain limited by the computer platform to offering "players" a pre-selected ranges of choices to make and primarily visual representations of the virtual worlds created.
<35>Several recent books have suggested possible future directions for interactive narratives, in particular those mediated by computers. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray posits that "[p]erhaps the next Shakespeare of this world will be a great live-action role-playing GM [dungeon master] who is also an expert computer scientist" (152) Our exploration of the fine but distinct border between the hyperfiction narrative and the role playing game suggests that successful interactive narratives are likely to look more like role playing games than like the hyperfiction currently being written. They will allow readers more freedom to interact directly with the author and, more importantly, to resist the author's attempt to control the reader's choices. They will retain the interdependence of the reading process and the plot of the narrative, which hyperfictions tend to divorce, and which makes the reader's unfolding experience of the narrative meaningful. They will offer narrative structures that motivate and give meaning to that plot, while allowing for that plot to unfold in response to the reader's decisions. They will, in other words, more resemble the earliest form of interactive narrative, the face-to-face oral tale, than they will the latest computer simulation.
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Notes
[1] See, for example, Borges' oft-cited story, "The Garden of Forking Paths"; Calvino's novel about reading novels, If on a winter's night a traveler; Coover's short story, "The Babysitter"; and Pavic's alphabetically arranged, multi-version novel, The Dictionary of the Khazars. Coover wrote an early and infamous hyperfiction manifesto, "The End of Books," published in The New York Times Book Review, and pioneered the teaching of hyperfiction as a literary subject at Brown University, though he has since attenuated his enthusiasm somewhat. [^]
[2] For a detailed consideration of the dungeon master's experience of gaming, see Fine. [^]
[3] Live-action role playing game, that is, one conducted synchronously and in person, as opposed to games mediated by computer. [^]