Part One: What is interactivity, actually?

I don’t know about you, but I keep the “played time” stats on my Steam profile hidden. A lot of the self-identified gamers I know — like how there are folks who read and then there are ‘readers’ — get a little shy and awkward when you ask them how many hours, exactly, they’ve poured into a game. It still feels like a Mom-question: how many precious days of your never-to-be-repeated mortal existence have you allowed this corporate Skinner box to confiscate? What else could you have been doing with all that time?

It makes us uncomfortable to quantify. But don’t get upset, I’m right there with you. You want to feel better about your gaming time? I got’chu, child. When I was thirteen, I discovered a text-only multiplayer roleplaying game, a MUD, and from thirteen to thirty I spent anywhere from six to twenty hours of my day on that game. I won’t even try to estimate the total time I spent on it — it absolutely took solid years of my life.

Instead, I’ll try to estimate the time I spent on the game that distracted me from that MUD, a hole a lot more of you can probably relate to losing years of your life in: World of Warcraft. Every three to four years, when the MUD again destroyed me emotionally and creatively, with its incestuous community of terribly edgy writers all trying to out-edge each other, I would dip to WoW for a few years of chaotic, shit-talking raids and drunken midnight battlegrounds. I started playing a few months before the launch of Burning Crusade, cut my raiding teeth in Karazhan, healed in Icecrown Citadel, and by Ulduar had become raidleader, herding twenty-five kittens on PCP for nine hours a night, four days a week, so that passing through those goddamn gates still triggers an instant migraine.

I played a lot more WoW even than most WoW players. And WoW was my distraction from the game I really wanted to be playing. And it’s not like I missed out on the high points of gamer culture in the meantime. I’m not a triple-A kind of gamer, but I played DDR and Soul Calibur a lot back in the day, I played League of Legends and Overwatch for years each, I’ve got 2600 hours in Path of Exile and I’m the kind of monster who has that and Diablo 3 and Grim Dawn and Titan Quest installed all at once, right now. Why does one person need four separate, largely similar loot-grind RPGs, two by the same publisher even? Because these days I can’t get an erection without doing some inventory shuffling to make room for it, honestly.

So… yeah. I’m not here to make you feel bad about the time you’ve spent gaming. I’m not here to suggest that it was pointless or meaningless, that you didn’t do anything with all that time. If someone who read books for 2000 hours is considered to have accomplished something and grown as a person, it seems utterly ridiculous to assert that a more interactive medium must necessarily offer a less valuable experience with the same time investment.

Time you enjoyed wasting is not time wasted, that’s what they say. But it feels different to put hundreds of hours into a game as an adult, when your other options are so vast and pressing, than as a kid. An adult measures the value of their time spent in-game by out-of-game metrics. What I want to know is… what makes you feel like your time meant something? What does an interactive medium let you do that makes you feel like you made a real choice, a real impact, a real difference? What does ‘interactivity’ mean… and how much does it ultimately matter?

What is interactivity, actually?

Comparing games to non-interactive media is an instructive trap here — it’s not relevant, but how and why people do it is important. No other medium advertises itself so exclusively with the premise that you will be able to alter the product, tailor it to your preference. You can customize your new phone when you buy it, sure, but you don’t think of that as having had artistic influence on the phone — someone else designed it and offered you a selection of options, and all you did was pick. 

So… when you just pick an ending to a game, you feel similarly cheap, don’t you? When you press a button on the Endingtron 5000, get a cinematic with your character’s name mysteriously omitted and the effects of your choices flattened out into the plot point the back of the box promised… that doesn’t feel like accomplishing anything. That’s the kind of ending you go to Reddit to bitch about. Doesn’t feel much like a game, does it?

Did you ever get an answer about whether or not Minecraft is a game? It sure doesn’t look like one, does it… I mean, how do you beat Minecraft? Kill the Ender Dragon, I guess, but that game was popular for years before the End even existed. That was never the point. There’s precious little that teaches you to play, no dialogue except the words you add to the game yourself, no quests, no goals, no borders and no time limits. It’s a world made of blocks that never ends, and you can move the blocks around if you want to. That’s it, that’s the whole deal. It’s Lego, just without the plastic tub that smells permanently of vomit.

But Minecraft is interactive in a way that games before it never were. You can do something in Minecraft that World of Warcraft has never once offered in its glittering history: you can dig a hole in the ground literally anywhere you want. That doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but it is. This fact raised a generation of gamers who took one look at WoW and said: “But… but why is this fun, I can’t do anything.”

interactivity is mechanical influence

In a game like WoW, I might have saved the world from zombies or eldritch space-gods, but when I get back to town, none of the people there will remember I did that. There are still zombies out there, and you can go fight the eldritch space-god I curb-stomped anytime you want to. I can too; I’ll probably do it again next week. Did I, then, do anything? Did I accomplish something? Is this interactivity? Or is it customization, me choosing from a short list of possible outcomes and receiving the product I requested?

Someone whose first game was Minecraft might say that, since I didn’t materially alter the game in any way, didn’t make any change to it that I got to define myself or that will even survive a respawn, I didn’t do anything meaningful. I’m not arguing one perspective or the other — I think all of these perspectives have merit, because they contribute to how we understand and define interactivity. From this perspective, interactivity is mechanical influence over the game’s environment or systems, the ability to see the effects of your presence as material changes in gameplay.

Sandbox vs. ending slides

So from a mechanical perspective, Minecraft is almost limitlessly interactive, but from a narrative perspective, it’s utterly inert. There is no narrative except what you bring to it, and your choices are meaningful only to the extent you decide to make them manifest in the game world with your mechanical efforts. 

In that way, something that places few limits on your mechanical influence but offers no narrative support or structure is a medium, right? It’s a substance that you can put your own creativity and effort into and shape something of your own. Lego is a medium, just like clay, or Play-Doh, or crayons. It’s sand in a sandbox. We don’t complain that it lacks narrative interactivity, because a story would be a distraction from our creative play with the medium.

But what about a game that permits no mechanical change, no visible impact from your journey through the world, and instead provides you with narrative resolution via ending slides or narration that changes based on your narrative choices? Think of something like the original Fallout games, or New Vegas and more recent CRPGs in the tabletop lineage, in which the world you see onscreen might look almost identical at the end of the game to the starting cinematic, but the text or narration tells you all the futures that spiral out from your personal, individual choices.

interactivity is narrative influence

All of the possible outcomes were already written out for you, of course — the only difference between this and a choose-your-own-adventure book is the number and complexity of intertwined choices, more than a single path through a physical book could allow. But Fallout: New Vegas is considered to have more narrative depth and meaningful choice than a game like Bioshock, where you have few meaningful narrative choices during gameplay and get one of two binary outcomes at the end based on a broad-brush numerical estimate of your mechanics-related ‘morality.’ Why is New Vegas deeper? Because there are more options than ‘save the girl’ or ‘kill the girl?’ Why is nuance seen as interchangeable with interactivity when we’re talking about story?

It’s because from a story-focused gamer’s perspective, the most meaningful form of interactivity is narrative influence — did your choices alter the story, change the shape of events? How much, and how often? Part of the emphasis on nuance here has to do with the persistence of the attitude toward games encompassed by the waggish statement, “Well, ya don’t watch porn for the plot either, do ya?” I’m certain you read that in the voice of your most repugnant former boss, the one you half expected to slap your ass when you pleased him.

For decades, the games industry has focused on the Straight White Teen Boy market to the exclusion of all others. This seems to go hand-in-hand with the assumption that writing and narrative in games is at best irrelevant, and at worst, an emasculating indulgence. What, you made me put brakes on the Murder Train to talk about feelings? Bad game designer! Back to your Skinner box!

This is why nuance has such outsized impact when it appears in games — because the idea that a game might ask an advanced question, might have more to say than “hur-hur guns and jiggle physics,” might actually pay a writer to pen a few lines of dialogue that don’t openly insult the player… it’s still a little new.

So interactivity is narrative influence, the ability to alter the game’s plot in a way that permits you to express yourself. More narrative options and nuance increase the likelihood that more varied audiences than Suburban Teens will be able to express themselves. From this angle, if you made a pyramid of wood a mile high in Minecraft, from a narrative perspective… did you really do anything? Every block of that wood was already in the game and coded to behave that way when you stack ’em. Just like the multiple endings of Fallout, it was all in the game already when you got there, and all you did was rearrange it to your liking.

Imagine a game that was as narratively open as Minecraft and is also mechanically open — a narrative sandbox, if you will. What would that look like?

I suspect that it would look very much like the MUD in which I drowned my teens and twenties. The acronym stands for Multi-User Dungeon, and it’s one of a handful of similar terms — MUX, MUSH, MOO — not even joking — that denote subtle gradations in the format, largely to do with how much power a user has to alter the setting and how firmly roleplaying standards are enforced.

But generally, what we’re talking about is probably what you’re imagining — one of those black windows full of white scrolling text, what Hollywood thinks “hacking” looks like. When the whole world is text, it’s a lot easier to create the kind of sandbox that Minecraft provides, but for narrative. Some of these worlds have more structure than others, more set parameters, genre guidelines, established gameplay, settings and overarching plotlines.

Many permit limitless interactivity in terms of a player’s control over what story is told or what game is played and how. You can build the ground, the spaces, the objects, and all possible actions within, out of text. The character is yours. The gameplay? Yours, as you like it. The story, or any other you can imagine? Yours, so long as you’re willing to schlepp the letters and numbers around to make it happen.

So when you do this… what are you doing, exactly? Is it materially more creative than Minecraft because the things you’re rearranging are words rather than blocks? Or is it less so, because the narrative you created might not even fully exist, might be only a few fragments of thought and setting and character floating in nothingness, an unfinished play with no actors? Is this unlimited interactivity? Or is it, like Minecraft, not even a game so much as a medium, a space in which to create and a substrate to create from?

Musical chairs

Again, I don’t think either answer is wrong. Games as a medium are fundamentally an interrogation of interactivity in art, what it means, what it can do. That’s goddamn inspiring and exciting! That’s a hell of a pitch, I’m in! If I’m fighting with you about how much of the game world I can alter as if it’s an integer value, too few Interactivity Units Per Megabyte, I’m not really engaging with the experience, am I? That’s like getting mad that your family won’t let you change the rules on the board game when you play — no, kid, it’s not a worse game just because you can’t alter it so that you always win.

Ultimately, that’s all we’re doing when we play games — reconfiguring preset pieces, words and numbers, into an order that better pleases us. Tweaking the rules so that the win state is something that actually feels like an accomplishment to us. All this ‘interactivity’ is just playing musical chairs on the Titanic. Sometimes we can rearrange parts of the physical space, or alter how we traverse it, and that’s mechanical interactivity. Sometimes we can rearrange parts of the narrative, or alter which way it goes or where it ends, and that’s narrative interactivity. And both can co-exist and overlap, and the basic lack of or presence of any specific type of interactivity is not, itself, an important metric for judging games.

The sliding scale of interactivity is about the options you have, and the number of them, and how nuanced they are, but it’s also about how much your choices linger, how much of the place is never the same again after you’ve touched it. A lot is made in modern games criticism of games being “linear” or not. “Linear,” in case you’re unaware, in the parlance of gamers means “bad story in a way we can’t articulate because story is gay and doesn’t matter, and bad gameplay because the map was longer than it was wide.” Linear means “thing I don’t have to feel obscurely corporately shamed for not buying.”

And here’s where using degree of interactivity as a metric for criticizing games runs up against a problem: our confusion about whether we are analyzing art or selecting a consumer product for purchase. Were we analyzing art, we might find all the foregoing navelgazing interesting and instructive — what kinds of interactivity does a given game have? What kinds serve the game’s perspectives and message best? What sorts of interactivity would provide a coherent ludonarrative that reinforced the artist’s intentions? How well was that achieved, and by what mechanisms of game design, UX design, narrative design, sound and graphical design, might we better accomplish it?

That conversation sounds fascinating. Sadly, I almost never hear it. Mostly I hear another conversation, the one wherein “interactivity” is a word wielded like a bludgeon, worn to blunt, lumpy pointlessness through overuse, all the meaning chipped away by people infected with the internet’s curious narcissism. The idea being that if a given piece of art or perspective does not please you personally, it is a bad product, there is something fundamentally wrong with it, something dangerous that is doing harm to The Good Things You Like in this world and must be stopped. And with this bludgeon, we have beaten our industry damn near to death.

But that’s another rant…