Trigger Happy
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you don’t have high levels of dramatic changes,
everything starts to seem the same. So above the
nonlinear play you have a totally linear story line.”
This, he thinks, is one way to address our theoretical
concerns about nonlinearity (that is, reversible,
interactive stories). Nonlinearity, Masclef agrees, leads
to non-urgency: the player has no particular reason to
do one thing rather than another. “You’ve got to hook
the player again. So when, say, ten percent of the game
is completed, we throw in a preplanned event that
changes things in a certain way. Generally [the story] is
scripted and possibilities are locked in time.” This,
then, is the traditional solution thus far in videogame
history: the drama is provided by the prescripted story,
the virtual exploration is interactive, and never the
twain shall meet.
Cracked actors
But what makes Masclef’s game more sophisticated
than most is its approach to character. Now, of course,
stories involve people (or at least intelligent, sentient
life forms), and so any videogame with narrative
pretensions must be populated with people other than
the main character (the one under the player’s control).
These are known generally as NPCs, or non-playable
