Loom’s Bobbin Threadbare by LucasArts

First Inklings of Interactive Storytelling

Jonathan Beyrak-Lev
Jul 20, 2017 · 11 min read

A decade and a half ago, around my 18th birthday, Chris Crawford offered me a life-changing opportunity to collaborate on his interactive storytelling technology, Storytron. The five years I participated in this project had an immense influence on me, but the holy grail of interactive storytelling has not been achieved to this day — not by Storytron, nor, to my knowledge, by any other venture of its kind. In this article I trace the origins of my interest in this technology, and draw from these some suggestions as to the possible future course of the field.

I must’ve been in kindergarten, or have very recently graduated from it, when I saw my first computer game. I don’t remember what it was, but it was love at first sight. The earliest infatuations I remember were with platformers, graphic adventures following soon after. Sonic and Commander Keen were among my favorite playmates, as were Fingus and Winkle from Gobliiins 2, but none compared to Bobbin Threadbare from Loom, who impacted me so deeply that I wore a hoodie to school for several years. All of these characters are the kind of people I would have enjoyed reading a story about — charming underdogs, either children or child-like, defying the laws of nature to conquer adversity. I found them easy to identify with, yet at the same time acting through them made me vastly more powerful and capable. In other words, they serve their respective games extremely well in supporting the core fantasy of interactive entertainment — that you have stepped into a world where your agency is enhanced beyond normal human limits. Whereas in other media you get, at most, to identify with people who can do things you can’t, in computer games I got to personify them. That made a big difference.

One reason why Loom in particular had such a stranglehold on my soul was the sheer amount of personality and story it crams not only into the protagonist, but into the the entire game world. Its first-class soundtrack, based on Swan Lake, its stunning graphics, still impressive to me in 2017, its beautiful, hand-sketched manual, and the deeply imaginative, colorful yet grim world it portrays, replete with interesting characters, hit my young mind like a hammer. The Israeli version didn’t get the included audiobook — that may have been fortunate, because had I had access to that I would have fallen so madly in love I’m not sure I could ever share my heart with another game.

Loom has, to use a term I got from being a Magic: The Gathering fan, an enormous amount of flavor, that non-interactive icing that makes you care about a game even before you play the first move; makes you build a world around it in your imagination. Of course, other media have many works that surpass Loom in flavor, and yet I have never in daily life worn any piece of clothing to represent myself as a character from, e.g., a book or a movie. I believe the reason is that, although Loom is a very linear game, with few actual opportunities for me to influence anything, let alone the plot, it offered me just enough agency to lure me into fancying myself in control, and my imagination did the rest, which included choosing garments that strengthened the illusion. That’s the kind of exponential increase in artistic power you get from mixing in even a modicum of interactivity into a competently flavored work.

There were other games that meant a lot to me because of the way they stimulated my imagination with an illusion of personification in a flavorful context. Dune 2 is still my fondest-remembered real time strategy game, although in game mechanic terms it has been surpassed many times over. That’s probably because my first contact with it was reading the manual, which contains enough hints of the richness of the source material (that is, the book on which the game is based) to get me very interested. I promptly bought and read Dune (I must have been 12), and it became my all-time favorite. Loving a game that offers the illusion of participating in the book’s events was a no-brainer, notwithstanding Dune 2’s plot, which is actually very character-sparse and doesn’t really have a lot to do with the book.

Later I played the completely different Dune 1, which makes a valiant effort to include dramatically interesting interaction with the book’s characters as a major game mechanic. It fails miserably, but the attempt itself is more than you could find in most games that came before or after. One thing both games do very well, though, is capturing the book’s atmosphere in their soundtracks, which did a lot to strengthen my emotional bond to them. They are not, however, worthy interactive renditions of the book, nor are the other three Dune games which have been made since. I consider it the holy grail of my career to produce such a worthy rendition (although there is of course the slight issue of the rights to the franchise, which are held by EA, not exactly the easiest people to resolve IP issues with). But even coming up with an idea of how to do it would be a major achievement.

Dune 2 wasn’t the only game that won me over with an interesting text-based story coupled with a flavorful world containing the allure of personification. It wasn’t even the first — that title belongs to Darkspyre, a game which comes with what to me seemed at the time to be a humongous novella. The game itself follows its short intro video (accompanied by Bach organ fantasia-like music) with several pages of textual exposition, some parts of which the player is invited to compose as the story unfolds. The actual gameplay that follows is a precursor to modern action roleplaying games such as Diablo, which for the most part I have no interest in, but those dual textual introductions, the strong flavor of its world, and its compelling soundtrack have secured Darksypre a warm spot in my heart.

Alone in the Dark is another game with excellent flavor and music supported by a relatively strong written narrative, which appears in the form of various book and letter excerpts throughout the game, as well as a physical copy of a fictional newspaper included in the game box. I later found that Alone in the Dark itself is based on the writings of horror novelist H. P. Lovecraft. I also recall Dark Reign fondly — that must be one of the last mainstream games to rely heavily on written narrative in its manual and between levels to drive the plot, and I was probably one of the only people interested in the text, but I devoured it.

I was very much enamored with Gabriel Knight, a narrative-rich game with excellent music and dialog, which comes boxed with a graphic novel (illustrated by the excellent Therese Nielsen, who also worked on Magic: The Gathering). In fact, Gabriel Knight was designed by a writer who later also published its story as a book. Although at heart an action-strategy game designed mainly for good multiplayer carnage, Myth: The Fallen Lords has copious “cutscenes” in the form of installments from an audiobook that are played between levels, supported by hand-sketched images of some of the situations described. Lastly, I should mention the genre of choose-your-own-adventure books, especially Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! (which I now enjoy in the marvelous iOS adaptation). They aren’t all that interactive, but still manage to create a powerful experience of being transported to participate in a fantasy adventure. What all these games have in common is that they stimulated my imagination to place them in a narrative context, to become interested in them as stories as well as games.

Nevertheless, none of the games I have described is true-blue interactive storytelling. Instead, they all have various bits of expository art tacked onto a core that is more or less interactive, but has no human drama in it. Nevertheless, the reason I bring them up is that they are the closest I have come to having the experience of participating as a character in a story. If they managed to give me that, they must have done something right, and I think it’s important to tease out what that something is. I’ve already hinted at a couple of answers — they have a strong illusion of personification and strong flavor. Furthermore, the styles of their expository elements emphasize text and/or spoken dialog over cinematic cutscenes, still graphics over animation. They tend to have excellent music, a relatively slow, somber, even pensive tone (Myth is one of the few franchises I’ve ever seen that have no music outside the cinematics and main menu), and intimate ties with literature in one form or another. Crucially, none of them even remotely resembles a movie — an important point that gives the lie to conventional wisdom about how to achieve Janet Murray’s much used, little understood idea of “immersion.”

There have been a handful of games that managed to give me an interactive storytelling illusion despite resembling movies in their expository style. The most important among them are probably the Wing Commander series, Terra Nova and Half-Life (the former two also rely a lot on dialog and written background stories). However, these games have something in common which sets them apart from many other movie-like games: an appreciable amount of their narrative occurs inside the game world, and not in the cutscenes that appear separately from it. The fact that the non-interactive story and and non-dramatic interaction both occur at the same time and place does much to support the illusion that one is a participant in the narrative. In other words, such games achieve unity of place and unity of time, which are two of the three laws of classical dramatic organization. The third, which they fatally don’t achieve, is unity of action. That is, the actions you take in interaction with the game world may be simultaneous with, but are rarely identical to, the important dramatic events that surround them.

As I look back at the non-interactive stories grafted onto these games, one other thing that strikes me is the kind of dark narrative they seem to share. None of these games depicts a muscle-bulging, babe-wielding hero like Duke Nukem, “here to kick ass and chew bubble gum,” and, save for the earliest ones such as Keen, Sonic or Gobliiins, neither are they in any way light-hearted romps. Loom’s protagonist is a shunned orphan who watches his world torn asunder by an army of revenants. Dune is basically a story about the good being brought down and then corrupted by the evil. Darkspyre tells of a world damned by the gods, to be redeemed when a hero finally succeeds, where many have perished, in conquering a dungeon of horrors. The word “horror,” of course, is a precise description of Alone in the Dark’s genre, which tells of a family, all dead now, having been driven to madness, illness and suicide by the spirit of a servant of dark primordial gods, buried beneath their house. Dark Reign tells of a brutal galactic empire mercilessly putting down a doomed rebellion, and in the process ravaging the peaceful civilization of a neutral planet. Gabriel Knight is about a decadent, pessimistic brat in his forties who discovers he is the last scion of a dying and dishonored family of monster hunters, a terrifying job into which he is pressed despite his utter unsuitability. Myth follows a common soldier in a Nordic mythology-inspired world as it is devoured by a prophesied anti-messiah. Sorcery! tells of a hero’s lonely travels in a fantasy world overrun by evil and decay. Wing Commander begins as a straight-up swashbuckler, but evolves into a dark tale of humanity’s desperate and corrupting struggle for survival against a superior alien race, while the protagonist, a thoroughly decent fellow, is repeatedly betrayed, defamed, and has his loved ones killed. Terra Nova depicts a group of space colonists who have escaped the tyrannical regime of Earth to find independence, only to be invaded by their former oppressors. The protagonist of Half-Life is a young physicist in a government research facility invaded by aliens. Surviving the slaughter of his colleagues by their supposed rescuers, the US Army, he manages to defeat the alien threat, only to discover that he has been a pawn in a government plot to conquer the aliens’ world.

There is no need to dwell on how limited a sample these collected stories are of all the different kinds of human conditions that one could spin a tale about. They are, with very little variation, stories of violent conflict in an SF&F setting. While these are not two attributes that one would be surprised to find in a computer game narrative, I think that each of them does warrant some thinking.

Start with the latter: why SF&F? I believe a very strong point can be made for using fantastical settings for interactive entertainment. This point has two sides: 1) the more “down to earth” the setting we use, the more we set up our audience to expect verisimilitude, which we are very far from achieving in an interactive product; 2) the more fantastical the setting, the grater the potential for the protagonist to do extraordinary things, which, as I hinted to above, is a core motivation for participation in such entertainment.

There is also more to say on the topic of violence than the usual rants about the “inappropriate content of video games.” Obviously, interactive storytelling should be less blood-splattered than computer games, becuase it is more interested in human emotions, motivation and relationships than in “the ultimate arbitration of mutual perforation,” as Will Durant put it. But that doesn’t mean it should have no bloodshed — violence is a topic of the highest importance, being the way in which people repeatedly and tragically destroy each other. What most of the games on my list share is a view of violence as an extremely costly and corrosive ordeal, even for the virtuous and victorious — not a bad message to get across, in my opinion as a lifelong resident of a war zone.

At the same time, violence is a difficult topic to tackle, because by its nature it risks diminishing the depth of interpersonal interactions between characters. Simply put, the more often characters die in a story, the less opportunity they have to have interesting relationships and interactions with each other. Actually, violence is only one of several “intense” topics that interactive storytelling should address, but address with care. My other obvious candidates for this list are sex, politics, religion, ethics and the holocaust (or genocide in general).

Sex is an especially interesting one. It is extremely central and ubiquitous, and unlike violence it vitalizes interpersonal interaction rather than killing it. However, I’ve never seen an interesting interactive treatment of sex. Some of the reasons for this are shared with other media; sex is so intense a stimulus that it is often censored, and when it’s not it requires some care to not let it devolve into pornography by default. I think one of the more unique problems we face is that the interaction in lovemaking is based on tactile — not verbal, not even visual — communication, at which computers are gloriously inept. I see some hope for mobile phones, though, given their ability to handle various kinds of tactile input and output — maybe a game where you caress your lover’s hand on the screen and feel it quaver in response, or blow them kisses by literally blowing into the microphone.

Let me attempt to summarize what I have said so far. My interest in creating interactive storytelling has come from childhood and teenage experiences, playing computer games that gave me the mere illusion of narrative interaction. What allowed these games to do this were certain characteristics, such as rich flavor, a reliance on textual exposition, and a compelling soundtrack, that promoted a sense of personification with a virtual character through which I experienced enhanced agency. They were based in SF&F settings emphasizing the grimness of violent conflict. I think a good direction to explore would be to create a similar experience, but do it through interactive, rather then merely expository means, and depict richer forms of human conflict beyond direct violence.

Here is a list of issues raised here that appear important to me:

  1. Promoting the illusion of interactive narrative
  2. Personification and the enhancement of agency
  3. Creating a flavorful storyworld
  4. What it would take to create an interactive version of Dune
  5. Unity of place, time and action in interactive storytelling
  6. Choice of settings for a storyworld
  7. Dealing with intense topics such as violence and sex

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