Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (21 page)

However, another factor at work heavily biases the noun/verb balance in everything we do: the natural bent of our minds. For some reason, it’s easier to think in terms of nouns rather than verbs. This bias shows up in each of the aforementioned fields:

Language
: I leafed through my dictionary, picking pages at random and counting the number of nouns and verbs on each page. I counted a total of 101 nouns and 26 verbs, a four-to-one ratio. I repeated the experiment with a Latin dictionary and counted 57 nouns to 20 verbs, a mere three-to-one ratio. The English language seems to have a strong preference for nouns.
Contrast that with Hopi, for example, which is famous for its preference for verbs.

Economics
: Adam Smith’s book
The Wealth of Nations
laid the foundations of modern economics, establishing all the basic principles: the relationship between price, demand, and supply; the utility of division of labor; the advantages of free trade; and so forth. Yet the concept of services as a economic entity was poorly developed in Smith’s work. He was well aware of the role of labor in economic production, but only as a means of creating goods. Therefore, the father of modern economics never saw the yin/yang of goods and services; he thought almost exclusively in terms of goods. Indeed, the notion of services as an economic output didn’t establish itself firmly in economic thought until the early twentieth century. The “goods” side of the dichotomy was figured out quickly; the “services” side took another century.

Physics
: Isaac Newton laid down the physics of particle motion in 1664; it took another 200 years before scientists worked out the physics of wave behavior in as much detail. Even for the brilliant people who created the science of physics, particles were much easier to understand than waves.

Military science
: From the beginning of military history, the concept of “assets” was recognized. The actions of generals in ancient times clearly demonstrate that they were quite cognizant of the importance of how many soldiers and weapons they had. Early generals, however, only dimly grasped the notion that the way those assets were applied was just as important as the assets themselves. Alexander the Great seemed to appreciate the idea, but his use of it seems spotty. Napoleon was the first general to demonstrate a consistent application of the idea that armies are only as useful as the extent to which they are maneuvered. It was the military theorists between the two World Wars (Liddell-Hart and Guderian) who first put down on paper the ideas behind the operational approach to military strategy, and it took the Blitzkrieg to wake up the rest of the world to the value of these ideas. Therefore, military thinkers took more than two millennia to recognize the importance of the yang of operations.

Factory
: The management of raw materials and parts is an advanced field now. Using computers and close communications with suppliers, factory managers can ensure that parts and raw materials arrive at the factory just before they are used, thereby dramatically improving the system’s efficiency.
Labor management enjoys no corresponding system, however, so it remains a messy, uncomputerized task. Perhaps it’s because labor is done by human beings, who are not so easily pushed around to fit the algorithms. But then, why couldn’t algorithms be designed to take into account individual differences in human beings? The fact is, our understanding of the labor flow in a factory is far behind our understanding of the parts flow.

Computers
: From the start, the relative importance of memory and processing were recognized, largely because memory was in such short supply that computer scientists were desperate to find any way to get the work done. Indeed, the history of the relationship of memory to processing has been almost the reverse of every other field: Hardware limitations forced early programmers to put more emphasis on processing, but as computer memories became larger, programmers put less emphasis on the processing side and more on the data side of the dichotomy. A second factor contributing to this process was the explosion of demand for programmers. In the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, there wasn’t much demand, so only the best and brightest became programmers. When the demand for programmers exploded in the ‘80s, however, we could no longer afford to limit the ranks of programmers to the cream of the crop; large numbers of un-brilliant programmers flooded the field, and these people weren’t as comfortable working with algorithms as they were slinging bytes around.

The programming microcosm of games clearly shows this shift toward noun thinking. One of the early videogame systems, the Atari 2600, was equipped with a powerful processor: an 8-bit 6502 running at just under 1MHz. However, it initially allowed only 2KB of ROM and just 128 bytes of RAM. Games designed for this system were heavy on processing and light on data. Over the years, games have grown vastly in size. A typical game these days requires a CD-ROM with 650MB of storage. You can see the nature of the change most clearly by comparing the shift in hardware capabilities in videogame machines:

Note how data capacity has increased far more than processing capacity. The Xbox is millions of times better than the 2600 when it comes to data, but only hundreds of times better when it comes to processing. Games programming has shifted away from processing and toward data. Now, much of this change is caused by technological limitations; it’s easier to improve storage than processing. Nevertheless, this change also represents (to a lesser extent) what people seem to demand in their games as well as programmers’ proclivities. And a major question remains: If game machines are millions of times better, why aren’t the games themselves millions of times better?

These examples demonstrate just how frozen our minds are into noun thinking. We just can’t seem to “get” verb thinking, and when we do, it’s always late and second best.

In
Chapter 3
, “Interactivity,” one important point is that the degree or quality of the interactivity increases with the quantity and quality of the choices available to the user. To pursue that idea a little further, you can say that choice takes action as its direct object. You don’t choose between an éclair and cotton candy; you choose between
eating
an éclair and
eating
cotton candy. You choose between bowing your head and saying “Yes, sir” to your boss and pulling out a machine gun and blasting him to oblivion. You choose between verbs. Verbs lie at the heart of choice, and choice lies at the heart of interactivity. To put it bluntly:

Lesson #15 is the core reason that software sucks. Good interactivity design requires clear verb thinking, yet most people just don’t “get” verb thinking. So we struggle forward with noun thinking, building software that’s noun-heavy and verb-light.