May 20, 1996

If the grunts, thuds and heavy-metal music blaring
from hundreds of booths at last week’s Electronic
Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles are any indication,
today’s popular shoot-’em-up video games continue
successfully exploiting certain testosterone-driven
adolescent urges.

But they also continue to be just plain
irrelevant to most girls and to adults of both
genders. What’s missing from most video games is an
interactive experience that taps into more complex human
urges.

Which is why, for the last six or seven years, pioneers
in technologies like digital animation and hypertext
have been experimenting with interactive forms of the
one experience common to all ages, genders and cultures:
storytelling.

The media we’re most familiar with today — television,
movies, theater, books — are based on story and
narrative.

The digital entertainment industry’s attempts to create
a market in interactive storytelling have ranged from
the ridiculous — the “interactive movie” where
theatergoers bang on buttons attached to their seats to
vote on what action happens next — to more sublime,
literary attempts to create hypertext fiction in which
the reader can choose among on-screen links to various
story threads that can each pull the narrative in a
different direction.

Most of these efforts have failed. Most narrative
CD-ROMs, including critically acclaimed works like Bad
Day at the Midway, from Inscape, are lucky to sell
100,000 copies, before being used once or twice and then
stuck on a shelf.

Even the runaway best seller, Myst, a painterly,
meditative story-based game on CD-ROM, has sold but 2.5
million copies. By contrast, Nintendo’s Mario Brothers
video-game series has sold 120 million units since its
U.S. introduction in 1985.

Despite the disappointing results so far, phenomenal
amounts of money, energy and creative talent are being
poured into seeking the interactive entertainment market
that lies beyond video games. But it may be that video
games themselves have part of the answer.

Video games are popular because no matter what you’re
doing when you play one — whether fighting some kind of
digital battle or puzzling out how to get from one level
of conquest to another — your actions have a material,
measurable effect on what happens next. You do
something, the game responds, and you react to its
response.

The result is dramatic tension — an emotional,
absorbing relationship between you and the game that
feels real because the outcome is unscripted and
unpredictable.

In fact, what makes a good story compelling is that even
though it is scripted, it draws us in and makes the rest
of the world disappear for a while — the old “willing
suspension of disbelief” that we learned about in high
school English class.

So it might seem logical that allowing you to interact
with a story would enhance the effect by creating a
video-game-like sense of engagement and relationship.
But so far, with most interactive movies or stories, all
you’re really doing is using the computer to snap
together short pieces of stories into longer ones.

And since all the choices are prescripted, the
interaction is about as emotionally compelling as making
menu selections in a Chinese restaurant.

In fact, Mason Tobak, a Stanford University graduate
student who has studied interactive fiction, says that
the experience may be even less fulfilling than ordering
dinner. “It’s work; it’s not relaxing,” he said. “It’s
going into a theater as a patron to see a play, and
having to prompt the actors yourself.”

Tobak’s analysis is starting to be echoed in the
interactive entertainment industry, including video-game
companies trying to move their products into a larger
market.

“Some kind of basic human emotion must be tapped” when
combining technology and story, said Mike Ribero,
executive vice president of marketing for Sega of
America Inc. “In today’s games the primary emotion is
competition, but there are other human emotions that can
be highly leveraged.”

Ribero says that the next generation of interactive
entertainment will focus on simulated environments more
richly featured than traditional video games, and that
many of these activities will play out on computer
networks like the Internet.

In these fictional scenarios — a kind of combination
chat room and on-line theme park — computer-generated
characters and human players would be able to play with
and talk to each other in ways that are as emotionally
engaging as today’s video games, but with content much
more like real-life relationships.

The founders of one San Francisco-based company call
this new view of media “postlinear” and accordingly
named their company Postlinear Entertainment.

In a postlinear world, according to the company’s
president, Ron Martinez, an entertainment property
starts simply as a very loose story structure. It is, as
Martinez explained it, “a world populated only with
characters and ambient conflicts” — with no narrative
but plenty of potential to create drama.

And these loose story environments, he says, can be
developed into other media. “You can create films,
games, comic books around stories which happen to
characters you care about,” Martinez said.

His company is now working on such a project with the
science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, whose popular
novel “Snow Crash” described a virtual world called “the
metaverse,” where computer hackers hung out to socialize
and exchange information. An unpublished short story by
Stephenson, “Storm Front,” will serve as the creative
core of the Postlinear project.

Postlinear is just one of a growing number of companies
devoted to creating the technology and the art that will
drive this new type of entertainment. Their collective
efforts are heartening to those who have insisted for
years that interactive media are not a book and not a
movie, but something completely new.

The story environments and tools in development today
are the first, welcome glimmer that the industry is
finally willing to define the new medium on its own
terms.

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company