Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (9 page)

Entertainers need insight into how the audience will react to their creations; designers of interactive storytelling need to go even further and anticipate their players’ imaginings and whims.

Therefore, second-person insight requires a fundamental and profound shift in attitude. You must go beyond the normal consideration of your audience’s perceptions and make those perceptions the entire thrust of your efforts. You must develop the mental discipline to get out of your own mind and get into your audience’s mind.

There are two facets to second-person insight. The first is empathy, but it goes much further than an emotional appreciation of the audience’s state. It’s not just the ability to empathize with their likely emotions, but the ability to empathize with emotions you wouldn’t feel. You might design a corner of your storyworld with pathos in mind, but your player might react to that situation with anger. You must not reject or suppress that emotional response; you must anticipate and respect it. The second facet operates on an intellectual plane; you must be able to visualize the confusion audience members bring to the experience. What questions will be going through their heads? What assumptions will they be making? How will their minds mesh with the thinking in your work, and where will their thinking clash with yours? How can you minimize the likely clashes between your product and their thinking?

We spend so much time inside our own heads (24/7 for sane people) that seeing the world through another’s eyes is immensely difficult. Indeed, few people appreciate just how differently other people think. Teachers do; it’s quite a jolt teaching your first class. You stand up in front of your students, reveal the truth to them in a few clean, simple sentences, and note with shock the utter incomprehension in their faces. So you repeat yourself with more elaboration, and behold the same blank stares. The act of teaching is mostly a matter of finding an infinite number of ways to communicate an idea. All good teachers have strong second-person insight, at least in the intellectual dimension.

A detailed appreciation of the nature of human understanding will clarify the role of second-person insight and reveal the importance of interactivity. The starting point is the notion of
associative memory
. Information in the human mind is not stacked neatly in files and folders the way it’s organized inside a computer. No, the ideas are organized by association. For example, credit cards and bank accounts are perceptually different from money, yet most people associate credit cards and bank accounts with coins and bills, even though credit cards and bank accounts don’t contain actual coins and bills. You might imagine coins and bills moving into or out of your bank account, even though nothing is moving; it’s just numbers being added or subtracted. The mental associations spread out from there: Money flowing into accounts from your paychecks, flowing out to pay rent, gaining interest, being transferred to savings or invested in stocks—all an imaginary process carried out in your mind by associations between these concepts.

Many of these associations are natural and logical, but people put different weights on them. Perhaps your view of these associations puts your checking account at the center of a web of connections. Another person might use the credit card as the focal point. A third person, blessed with lots of financial savvy, might well refuse to think in terms of a financial center of gravity and instead connect all these ideas in a more egalitarian style, concentrating on the balance of the overall distribution of assets among stocks, bonds, T-bills, cash accounts, gold, and so forth.

Even more important for interactivity considerations is the idiosyncratic nature of many of these associations. Some people have completely different connections; some people have connections in common but put different weights on those connections. Someone who invested heavily in Enron will have strong emotional associations with stocks; another person who held lots of dotcom stocks will have different emotional associations. A person who recalls grandfather’s old safe with its pile of grand stock certificates will always associate stock with certificates; the absence of those certificates from modern stock trading might induce a certain nervousness not shared by others. And what if grandfather had often intoned in his deep, resonant voice “Stocks, my child—you can’t go wrong with a solid portfolio!” How would that fond memory distort the web of associations in a person’s mind? And what if grandfather had died penniless?

It is this webwork of associations that constitutes human memory and human understanding. We each build our own webwork, node by node, connection by connection, as we learn and grow. Because we all live in the same universe, our webworks often share gross similarities, but the differences in our experiences ensure that each webwork’s particular structure is unique to its builder. This explains why we so often misunderstand each other. You and I might have a roughly similar overall understanding of the stock market, but your associations are so different from mine that we can come to stunningly different conclusions. You can explain your reasoning with determination and patience, but if my web-work doesn’t coincide closely with yours, I just won’t get your point.

These discrepancies of experience and understanding are just part of the human condition; we accept them, shrugging our shoulders and mumbling “
De gustibus non est disputandem
.” (“There’s no arguing about taste.”) If the audience rejects an artist’s work, the artist can dismiss them as obtuse cretins who simply cannot perceive his vision (webwork). Too bad for them.

The revolutionary value of interactivity lies in its ability to get past this limitation. Imagine the teaching process not as expository lecture, but as interactive conversation. The teacher probes the student’s webwork, noting carefully the deeper significance of the questions the student asks. The teacher uses that information to infer the structure of that webwork. Here is where the teacher’s second-person insight comes into play; a good teacher can quickly reconstruct the student’s webwork and identify the misplaced node or incorrectly weighted association. With the problem identified, the teacher can set to work shifting the student’s webwork. Initially, the student will resist, attempting to fit the teacher’s observations into the webwork in a manner that doesn’t stress or distort it. But the teacher presses, and suddenly the student’s webwork snaps into place. “Aha!” says the student.

This is the power of interactivity: Interaction reveals the discrepancy between the artist’s and the audience’s webworks and makes it possible for the artist to address that discrepancy. The result is an ability to reach people with tremendous impact. That’s what makes interactivity so powerful and what justifies interactive storytelling’s loss in narrative finesse.

To use interactivity effectively, you must deeply understand the human truth that people see and hear what they want to see and hear, and then you must come to
understand those desires. Being right is not good enough; you must somehow see your truth through other people’s eyes.

Second-person insight, like so many artistic gifts, involves a certain degree of mental aberration. To be of any value, the artistic expression must be unconventional, or at least non-obvious; at the same time, you must see your truth from many points of view. You must be able to see how your truth fits into many different webworks of knowledge. It’s a weird way to think, perhaps within the reach of only a gifted/cursed few.

Another requirement for the interactive artist is an iron determination to subordinate your own desires and interests to those of your audience. You must push down the artistic egotism that glories in self-expression, replacing it with other-person perception.

So you want me to abandon my own artistic drive and instead just “give ‘em what they want.” Sounds more like Barnum and Bailey than Michelangelo.

Absolutely not. I’m not suggesting that you should abandon your own artistic interests; after all, that’s what you have to offer your audience. Yes, you want to speak your truth, but that’s the easy part; the hard part is making them hear it. Ergo, you must silence the shouts of your ego so that you can hear the whispers of your audience’s needs.

Perhaps a metaphor will help. Imagine the king of a medieval country deciding how much of the country’s wealth should be dedicated to his own comfort and pleasure. “As the king, I’m the most important decision-maker in this country, so it’s vital that I be cushioned against the distracting vexations and tribulations of life. It’s my job to concentrate on the highest-level decisions. It is better for all if I wear the finest clothes, eat the best foods, live in the most luxurious palace in the country. Some of the peasants might starve, but it’s all for the greater good.”

You can instantly see through the selfishness of this argument, but how does it differ from this one: “As the artist, my ideas are the most important in the world, so it’s vital that I be cushioned against the distracting desires and interests of my
audience. It’s my job to concentrate on the grandest artistic ideals. It is better for all if I heed my own voice, aspire to my own goals, and pursue my own interests. Some of the audience might not understand my work, but it’s all for the greater good.”

Wouldn’t this argument apply to every artist in history? If so, the success of the great artists of history would seem to rebut this argument.

No, this argument doesn’t apply to all art—just to interactive art. Artists in other fields are perfectly justified in neglecting the needs and desires of their audiences because their audiences are so large that those needs and desires average out to meaningless gray murk. The great Greek sculptor Polyclitus once proved this point with a simple exercise. He showed a work in progress to a series of critics, asking each what could be done to improve the work. Then he carried out all their suggestions. The result was an ugly monstrosity. A work of expository art must have a single unifying vision; all those audience ideas and variations only muddy the waters.

Interactive art is profoundly different because it’s experienced individually by millions of people. Millions of people have seen reproductions of Michelangelo’s
The Creation of Adam
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and every single one of them has seen exactly the same thing because there’s just one image. But millions of people can play an interactive storyworld, and each one can experience something that nobody else has ever experienced. That’s the whole idea of interactivity: It responds to each person individually. Accordingly, you cannot hide your ego behind the argument that the audience’s needs and wishes are all averaged together. You must face each player individually.

Interactivity is not a binary quantity like mortality (either you have it or you don’t); it’s an arithmetic quantity like weight (you can have more or less of it). My favorite example of a low-interactivity phenomenon is the refrigerator light. You open the door and the refrigerator light turns on; you close the door and it turns off. That’s interactivity! (The refrigerator light “listens” to the door switch being opened, “thinks” with the simple-minded logic of “Switch open, turn on
light!” and “speaks” by turning on the light.) But it’s dumb interactivity, hardly worth the candle. It might entertain a three-year-old for a little while, but even a three-year-old quickly outgrows the insipid interactivity of the refrigerator light.

At the other end of the scale, I can offer sex as an example of the most intense interactivity. Powerful lovemaking is the deepest interaction two people can have; is it any wonder that society wraps it in such grand robes? This provides a useful rule of thumb in Lesson #8.