). If I could recreate that level of interactivity in a game, I would be a happy designer indeed.On to what I meant to say originally. There''s never been a medium as flexible as video games before. What defines a game? I would say interactivity, but that''s a meager enough thing to categorize a medium by. It admits equally of story and twitch-happy violence; the TLJs and the Q3As of the gaming world, plot-motivated and twitch-based, novel-like single player experiences and multiplayer environments that extract much of their continuing novelty from the presence of other human beings, in much the same way board games or sports like paintball do.
What I''m getting at is that neither of these extremes is somehow "right"; indeed, now and again you come across a game where they coexist peacefully (I would cite ONI or any of the Zelda zeries). It is probably true that games falling closer to TLJ''s end of the continuum are more likely to be considered works of art--at least by people capable of considering ANY game artistic--but that in no way invalidates the worth of the games clustered around the other end of the pole, the sports games and the fighters and the fps''s. They simply have different agendas.
For my part, it is the story end of the spectrum that fascinates most. I thought FFX was brilliantly artistic--like walking through an exquisite painting; no less a valid aesthetic experience than a traditional painting. When I first started reading avidly, in fourth grade or so, I yearned, as many young readers do, to somehow project myself into the story. Not to supplant the plot but rather to find in all the inevitable nooks and crannies that inhabit any story of nontrivial complexity, the opportunity to have some positive effect. An impact.
The experience I imagine doesn''t need to attempt to duplicate the collaborative rewards of pen-and-paper roleplaying, nor does it need to provide pie-in-the-sky AI to dynamically create stories of human interest. It just needs to provide a choose-your-own-adventure level of interactivity (which is far more than most games'', even RPGs), to give the player the traditional gratifications of a good yarn, along with the additional sense of having had an affect on the story.
I know all that is a good deal harder than I made it sound (I know from experience that scripting up a NWN module with even a modest amount of player-impact is a formidable task indeed). However, I don''t think it is too hard. Certainly well within the limits of ordinary human artifice. The question is more whether anyone will think it worth the trouble to go to that much effort when the potential financial remuneration for the project is less than certain.
