ween the player-character and the player. The player takes first-person action within a simulated world.
- Narrativity – A heroic quest in which the player must accomplish some goal. The story-like quality of IF lies in the retelling (the trace) of the player’s actions – an IF is a virtual narrative.
- Segmentation – The fundamental story units are places and objects. The narrative potential of an IF is distributed amongst navigable spaces containing manipulable objects.
- Representation – Descriptive prose.
The “technical” part of technical genre means that the design commitments are embodied in a specific ways of relating to computation, that is, specific technical practices. For example, IF languages such as Inform and TADS make it easy to create places and objects, and to write many snippets of descriptive prose that are appropriately displayed as the player moves around in the world and changes the state of objects.
The IF design commitments above are the canonical commitments – many modern IF works explicitly push against one or more of these canonical commitments, by, for example, changing the role of the player character (making it more than a puppet manipulated by the player), or making the experience feel more story-like during play rather than the storyness being purely a property of the retelling. But the canonical commitments of the technical genre shape what experiments will be tried within the genre precisely by providing a position to push against.
As another example, offered without comment, the technical genre of hypertext makes the following canonical commitments:
- Interaction – Third person, exploring a text.
- Narrativity – Finding/untangling the narrative.
- Segmentation – Lexia (nodes) of text connected by links.
- Representation – Text, prose and poetry (because the segmentation isn’t places and objects, the text tends not to be as purely descriptive as IF text).
Segmentation is the dimension where authorial considerations (narrative design – what are the pieces of my story) most intimately intersects with implementation considerations (code design – what are the pieces of my code). Authoring tools, such as Inform or StorySpace, tend to freeze this relationship by offering a language/tool that makes a specific kind of story piece (e.g. a physical object, a text node) have a clean, one-to-one relationship with code structures (e.g. the object-oriented representation of a physical object in Inform). This is powerful in that the authoring tool itself embodies the design wisdom of a technical genre, but limiting in that the tool inhibits radical movement into other parts of the design space. Different points in the design space require novel architectural elaborations; the process of conceiving of novel story segmentations requires a simultaneous concern with authorial and implementation considerations.
When thinking about the entire space of things that might be called interactive narrative, what approaches have other people found useful?