Trigger Happy
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player to rear a hilariously bizarre fish with a man’s
head (straight out of Monty Python’s
The Meaning of
Life
) that swims around a digital aquarium. The player
can speak into a microphone peripheral that plugs into
the joypad, and Seaman answers back. For the moment,
however, only half the job is done, for Seaman’s
responses are still all pre-scripted. Dynamic voice
synthesis and language creation in response to a
player’s conversation is still, it seems, a long way off.
When it happens, it will certainly be a wonderfully rich
form of interaction. But I don’t think it will achieve the
dream of interactive narrative. What it will
revolutionize instead is Olivier Masclef’s ambition of a
“dramatically interesting virtual world”: it will bolster
the illusion of actually being a character in an
imaginary social context. Yet for the game to be able to
surprise and move the player with its story line, it must
necessarily still keep certain plot developments out of
the player’s control. (“Could there be a truly
interactive, democratic art form?” David Cronenberg
wonders. “My films certainly aren’t democratic—their
creation is more like a dictatorship.”)
Like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, the future gameplayer might be an actor
