Many interactive fiction commentators, armchair and professional, write as if the ultimate goal of the medium is to let the player be a totally free agent in a boundless game world. In their idealised IF of the far-off future, the player can, within certain parameters, determine almost everything -- the player character, the story, the narrative, and even the plot, themes and general tone of the game. Ten years ago, Brandon van Every fantasised about a game that offered almost limitless freedom:
1) the game has no endpoint. In mathematical terms, the game is a general graph with loops.In his recent essay titled "Co-Authorship and Community", Victor Gijsbers goes even further, envisaging
2) the game itself is goalless. We rely upon the psychological goals/motivations of the player, as to why the game should continue at all.
3) the game could have multiple beginnings, but it doesn't have to.
4) the game allows freedom of action and intention. In order to traverse/enjoy the game, it does not require a singular mindset of the player. The game is written from multiple perspectives, so that players can move freely between the different perspectives at any point in the game.
completely new ways of interacting with a piece of interactive fiction, new ways which would allow the player to freely use his creativity for the first time, and which would allow the player to be a real co-author for the first time. The player could change the work, add to it, rewrite it, improve it, or accept the voice of the author out of free choice.
The prophets of player freedom no doubt consider themselves among the radicals of the IF world, but in truth they have much in common with its arch-conservatives: the aficionados of the good old-fashioned "text adventure". Both groups admire most those games where the power is in the hands of the player; both reject author-imposed narrative. As one Zork fan put it:
Too many IF-authors today focus on creating a [...] complex storyline while blissfully ignoring the most basic elements of the text adventure game: puzzles, monsters and game items (e.g. "armor", "swords", "dragons", etc.)Both groups consider authorial presence an undesirable interference. As another Zork fan put it:
When an author takes pains to create a realistic setting, it's more work for me to get involved. This is because I have to filter it through my real experiences, which tend to get in the way of my imagination, rather than help. I waste time trying to understand everything.Both groups see the author as a functionary, there to facilitate the needs of the IF consumer, in the one case to enable his "freedom", in the other to provide him with lots of fun toys and puzzles, and allow his imagination free rein. They both think that the IF author, like a well-behaved retainer, is best seen and not heard.
I, on the other hand, prefer to see interactive fiction as a kind of art form.
Neither of the hypothetical proposals above have much to do with art. BvE's idealised game appears to have zero artistic content; it isn't a work of art, but a kind of machine to help him realise his fantasies, a text-based vibrator for the imagination. A tool, perhaps even a pleasurable one, but not art. Victor's idea isn't a new form of IF game, but an IDE with go-faster stripes, programmable in RAIF-Pool. If that's a work of art, then so is Emacs.
Even in games that actually exist, the weakest moments are often those where the author appears to eschew personal expression in favour of catering to player agency -- the multiple endings of the otherwise-interesting Floatpoint being a good example. Slouching Towards Bedlam launched a trend in which the player is invited to decide on the moral stance of the PC -- a device I find unconvincing, and probably an artistic dead end. Morality involves choice, and, as Jacek Pudlo (of all people) has argued, in IF there usually isn't any real choice. In the new moral IF, I just try all the options without any moral commitment, safe in the knowledge that I can undo and try again, which distances me from my character, and distances me from the game.
The effort to maximise player freedom is misguided. Art is not about catering to your audience; it's about taking sides, expressing an opinion, climbing the podium and shouting "Here I stand!" Art is not about holding a mirror up to nature, and IF is certainly not about holding a mirror up to the player.
Creating a work of art is an egotistical act. An artwork is a reification of the artist's self, a subjective consciousness made objective, bravely put forth and held out for admiration. This is why artists can get so touchy when their work is criticised; an attack on their art is an attack on their ego. There's nothing wrong with any of that; I wouldn't have it any other way. A work of art with nothing of the self invested in it is just machine-made trash.
Likewise, to experience a work of art is to submit to another ego. It's to entertain someone's else's vision; to welcome another mind and allow it, temporarily, to occupy your own (even if you make rude remarks about it once it's gone). There's nothing wrong with any of that either. It's just what people do in society; they give and take, they alternate between different social roles: speaker and listener, artist and audience. Our roles in making and experiencing works of art are slowed-down versions of our roles in a conversation. Experiencing a work of art is really just a single, isolated, extended social interaction.
Social interaction isn't to everyone's taste, however, and interactive fiction of the "text adventure" variety attracts people of such a temperament. Adam Cadre has observed that the medium is geared for autism; descriptions are pruned down to the necessary details, characters behave according to simple, easily-understood rules, storylines tend to focus on interacting with objects rather than human characters. But I think the medium is geared for autism in a more fundamental way: the idealised text adventure, in its past, present and glorious future, removes from its reader the burden of interacting with a single other human mind.
You don't have to get bogged down in someone else's story, someone else's opinions, someone else's life; all that matters is what you do with the objects at hand; you can decide on a story yourself, if you want to. You don't have to care about someone else's vision of the world; you can fill it all in with your own imagination, if you have one. With a poem or a novel or a newspaper article, you have to grapple in some way with the person who wrote it, but there is no such problem with the perfect text adventure. For the socially disadvantaged, it makes ideal reading material: the author is there only to offer the barest framework for the imagination, through which the player can wander freely, alone and uninhibited, creating and destroying at will.
I'm not attempting an ad hoc psychiatric diagnosis of IF fans. But I think IF -- and "interactive" art in general -- does appeal to a certain autistic tendency that has become more prominent in society. It's striking that IF was invented in the 70s and really came to flower in the early 80s -- at much the same time that the self-interested, self-defining, "self-actualising", "inner-directed" individual became a recognisable social type. IF is the art form of the Reagan generation, the generation that looks after number one, the generation that doesn't believe in society. The generation for whom the greatest freedom is individual freedom, which is no freedom at all. Taken to its extremes, it's just a form of loneliness.