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interactivity. At some future date, when we understand interactivity almost as
well as we understand storytelling, we can dispense with this rule, but for the
time being it must reign supreme.
Interactivity mandates choice
If interactivity must be our starting point, we must solidify our understand-
ing of interactivity before we can design with it. Irritatingly, we are obstructed
from this goal by the universal misuse of the term. I have in my possession a
bottle of “interactive shampoo” - or so the manufacturer claims. I also have an
“interactive rug” and an “interactive candy bar”. This paper is not the place for
me to discourse on a topic as broad as interactivity. Happily, for the purposes
of this paper, I need only assert one characteristic of interactivity: it mandates
choice for the user. Every interactive application must give its user a reasonable
amount of choice. No choice, no interactivity. This is not a rule of thumb; it is
an absolute, uncompromising principle.
Those who chafe at uncompromising principles can take comfort in my
concession that the amount of choice necessary to achieve interactivity is not
carved in stone; it depends on the design situation and as such is subject to
some interpretation. I can offer two ways to estimate the amount of choice
appropriate for interactive storytelling. The first is to consider the number of
choices implicit in a typical story. Since every action the protagonist takes, ev-
ery word s/he speaks, is the result of a conscious choice, we can safely con-
clude that hundreds or thousands of choices are made in the progress of a
story. Of course, many of those choices, such as including the grammatically
required definite articles in spoken sentences, are dramatically insignificant.
We can prune our estimates of the number of choices made during a story,
but there remain scores or hundreds of dramatically significant choices in the
typical story.
A second way of estimating the number of choices required for adequate
interactive storytelling is to consider a general criterion for interactivity: the
ratio of accessible states to conceivable states. For example, a word processor
permits us to realize the great majority of the documents that we can imagine;
we are therefore satisfied with the performance of our word processor and feel
little need for a better one. If, by way of contrast, our word processor broke and
lost its ability to change fonts on command, a great many of the documents we
could well imagine would no longer be accessible, and we would consider our
word processor to be much less satisfying.
