Just my usual trails of thinking in the dark hours of early morning. This time, on written book form versus interactive fiction, including games such as Silent Hill or Half Life 2 that can well be considered story.
The key word I’m hanging on is destiny. Printed text has long ago experimented with the open ending; sometimes offering other solutions (Atwoods’s short story Happy Endings) or leaving us hanging (inviting sequels, Harry Potter being the latest assurance of future income). While the thought behind interactivity is the idea of reader input that occurs naturally but enhancing it by giving it a more physical capability, there is still the predetermined outcome–or outcomes in some of the more sophisticated works–where any variations and paths still must end. I’m wondering if even in the reading/playing/clicking well-thought-out or exploratory, there comes a time when the frustration of a little power overcomes the joy of cutting one’s own swaths since the resolution is the resolution anyway.
It is human nature to decide one’s boundaries. Some of us are domesticable to the point of staying well within the corral, even to the point of visual knowledge, as a dog trained to white flags that parallel the buried wires of an electric fence that will buzz and zap. Some of us walk through our days with shoes prepared for climbing. Will the little bit of control that we’ve been given through the effects of new media preparations only serve to whet our appetites for pushing out the boundaries further and further until we read the only possible end–that is, a return to reality itself? Wasn’t this in fact the premise of Dungeons and Dragons? Murder on the Connecticut River?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology