January 27th, 2023
I recently received an email from Jason Roher, one of the most eminent and creative game designers on the planet. Jason and I have known each other for over 15 years.
I was coincidentally looking at your website today... ye gads! Le Morte D'Arthur has been released!
However,
My initial experience left me bouncing off of it... mostly for structural/design reasons. The interactivity density, at least initially, is very low. Or put another way, the 2-way bandwidth disparity between player input and system output is huge. The first few interactions are not interactive at all (one choice given), and the first real interaction (how you apologize for not remembering the bay leaves) seems like a throw-away. Maybe it's not a throw-away, but it feels that way.
So my intro to this experience is: reading a few pages of non-interactive text, and making what feels like meaningless decisions along the way.
And I swear that "2-way information input/output bandwidth disparity" is a concept that I read in one of your design books! Where you talk about CD-ROM games, where the player can turn left or right with a single button press and watch a high-bandwidth movie play. Yes, there's no high-bandwidth movie playing here, but there is a lot of non-interactive text between each interaction. We have a 2-bit input, followed by a 16000+ byte output.
And maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't feel like this system has room for the Storytron-esque machinations of characters with their own emotions and goals and all that..... I'm left with the suspicion that this is just a semi-branching story tree, albeit one with very long linear limbs between the branching points.
The reason I'm telling you this is not to beat you up.... but hopefully to provide some insight into why other people might be bouncing off of it. Even people who ARE interested in interactive storytelling (I know of very few people who are as interested in it as I am)... and people who ARE interested in deep works of art about life and death.
And if I am missing something....
Jason
Jason's last comment expressing a fondness for the “Storytron-esque machinations of characters with their own emotions" is the most easily answered: the Storytron technology represents 25 years of development work, and after 25 years of failure with that approach, even thick-skulled me finally had to admit that it didn’t work. Storytron technology is too complicated, too messy, and ultimately too mechanical to be effective. Something simpler is necessary. Perhaps someday a descendant of the technology may prove workable — but not yet.
The first two thoughts are best answered by pointing out the distinction between intensity and depth of interaction. That difference is best understood by harking back to my lecture on the Evolution of Taste in 1990 (32 years ago! am I really THAT old?!?!!?) In that lecture, I observe that three areas of human enjoyment (cuisine, literature, and video) all possess special subsets that are favored by children: candy, comic books, and cartoons. These subsets provide short, simple intensely pleasurable experiences and as such are ideal for beginners — they are fun. However, these are only subsets of larger universes. Candy is part of the universe of cuisine, which encompasses a huge range of gustatory experiences, almost all of which are in some fashion more subtle than candy. Moreover, these other foods often provide a deeper experience. The same applies to comic books, which are a tiny subset of the universe of literature. Between news magazines, political commentary, history, novels, poetry, and other fields of literature, we have a body of vastly greater subtlety and depth. Compare a Superman comic book with a Jane Austen novel. Lastly, cartoons are the kiddie form of video, and again we see a huge difference between Mickey Mouse and, say, the recent movie of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Games are the interactive cousins of candy, comic books, and cartoons. Like these three, games are fun, intense, and simple. Unlike the other three, games are not part of a vast universe of interactive entertainment; the field is not yet artistically mature enough to have developed experiences that are deeper and subtler than games. Imagine living in a world of only candy, comic books, and cartoons. How would a life spent that way differ from eternal damnation?
Le Morte D’Arthur is my first successful attemp to produce a genuine work of art. It is not short. It is not intense. It is not simple. And it most certainly is NOT fun. This is why I have been so insistent that LMD is not for gamers, who expect brevity, intensity, simplicity, and fun. It is long, subtle, complex, and very deep.
The apparent manifestations of interaction in LMD is deferred until the end. The player’s decisions do indeed affect the outcome, but in ways too subtle to be presented immediately. Such is the nature of causality in storytelling: the pieces all come together only in the end. Luke Skywalker could not have destroyed the Death Star any earlier in the movie; he had to undergo a series of experiences to prepare him for that moment. Neo wasn’t ready to confront Agent Smith until after he had traversed the necessary trajectory.
Good art demands effort from its audience. Hamlet takes five acts to reach its resolution. In the Odyssey, the final confrontation with the suitors earns its power from the many tribulations Odysseus previously suffered. The final moments of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would be merely bombastic if the audience had not been prepared by the previous movements. A fine French dinner satisfies not with a single dish, but with the combination of the wine and the sequence of dishes presented to the diner.
Le Morte D’Arthur starts slowly and builds with frustrating deliberation. But it culminates in a conclusion far, far beyond the power of any game.
I sent this response to Jason, eager to see his response to it. It came back quickly:
By "depth of interaction" vs "intensity of interaction," it sounds like "intensity" actually means "frequency or density." And indeed, in any real-time, reflex-based video game (even PacMan), you interact very frequently (many times per second), though the interactions lack depth (subtlety, artistic meaning). The interactions are indeed "intense," as they take the form of a kind of mindless frenzy.
I have no idea about what's going on underneath the hood.... though I now suspect (or at least hope) that what seem like meaningless or trivial choices (how to apologize for a forgotten errand) actually add up to something monumental by the end.
Part of your "audience problem," I suspect, is that the world is FULL of pseudo-interactive text-based junk. Maybe some of it's well-written.... but most people get a big case of the yawns from anything that kinda looks/smells like "literary hypertext" (Eastgate Systems) or "Twine games" (which were popular creations among non-programmers about 10 years ago). You know, "I'm going to write some bits of poetry or story, but string them together in a maze-like web for you to whack your way through as a reader." Non-linear narrative and the like.
But here's another snag point for you: there's an awful lot of text in this thing, and the writing itself is solid but not excellent---it's obviously not the product of a master fiction writer who spent his life honing the craft of sumptuously poetic prose.
As a flip-side to that observation, you worked with a professional artist (and a skilled AI) for many of the illustrations---instead of drawing them yourself.
I suspect that if a professional "ghost rewrote" these passages for you, more people might get drawn into it.
"The quality of the graphics don't matter in interactive works" might seem to imply that the quality of the prose doesn't matter either. But the difference is that the audience spends so much more time (and effort) digesting the prose. It's the main thing they are doing, from moment to moment---reading, understanding, and---hopefully---enjoying the written words.
A case could be made for *very* dry prose to avoid distracting from the artistry carried by the interactivity (just the facts, Mr. Hemingway), but that's also not what's on display here. Very dry prose wouldn't have you "slap on the best fake smile." Neither would a master prose craftsman.
Jason
Ouch! That comment about my writing being “solid but not excellent” wouldn’t hurt if it wasn't correct. On the other hand, that crack about “slap on the best fake smile” requires recourse to pistols at dawn.
Jason is dead right that Le Morte D’Arthur is not a professionally produced work. If it were a professionally produced work, it wouldn’t exist, because professionally produced works require payments to professionals, which entails budgetary requirements I cannot meet. Once money enters the picture, all artistic merit is steamrollered by commercial requirements. Nobody would have spent the money required to produce Le Morte D’Arthur professionally.
But there’s a more important consideration here. Art is generally created by artists, who face their own internal demands in order to keep slogging. Sure, there have always been plenty of artists who worked for the money, but usually the best artists worked under financial arrangements closer to patronage than employment. Pope Julius II fretted for over four years while Michelangelo fiddled around in the Sistine Chapel. Beethoven enjoyed substantial patronage for his work. I enjoyed a small amount of patronage on Patreon, but it was only for the artwork that I contracted out, and didn’t even meet those expenses.
I always thought of Le Morte D’Arthur as my swan song, my magnum opus. After decades of design peregrinations, I realized that the sands of my hourglass were nearing their end, and the time had come for me to get serious. The Arthurian legends hold a special fascination for me because the “real” Arthurian legends — as opposed to the Hollywood nonsense — embrace powerful elements. I spent years studying the legends in their many forms and the more I learned about them, the more impressed I became with their substance. This is territory capable of carrying the weight of serious artistic effort. Here I would succeed or dismiss my life as a waste.
Thus, Le Morte D’Arthur is MINE in a way that non-artists might have difficulty appreciating. This is not a “product”. It is not something to put in a box and ship out. I have poured myself into Le Morte D’Arthur. It is an artistic avatar for Chris Crawford. Yes, there are substantial autobiographical elements to it, though they are not so pedestrian that you can readily pick them out; they’re scattered throughout the work in bits and pieces that are not meant for other people to find. They are intrinsic to the work because it is MINE.
No, I do not “identify” with Le Morte D’Arthur; if you wish to condemn it as crap, it won’t bother me, because I know that nobody can ever truly grasp everything that I have poured into it. I have received opinions from people who have played only the first dozen turns, and I laugh away these ignorant and presumptuous comments. They have not even scratched the surface. I have yet to receive truly cognizant commentary on Le Morte D’Arthur. It will take time.
Now at last I can directly address Jason’s comment about the lack of professional writing. Le Morte D’Arthur is not a collage of professionally prepared pieces stitched together like Frankenstein. It is the work on one mind. I wrote the text; I wrote the code; I built the audio and the video. I even prepared some of the imagery, although my competence at creating imagery is so wretched that I engaged a professional to create much of the imagery. I will point out, though, that I gave her detailed instructions on how each illustration should look.
Yep, my writing is sub-professional. It has to be that way, because Le Morte D’Arthur is MINE. The audio I created is slapdash, but it had to be MINE. How many other people (aside from, perhaps, Uakti) would assemble 30 feet of 2” PVC pipe to create the audio? I made the video, too, and it falls far short of what a true professional could do. No matter: this is MY video. And the code — good lord, if you think that the text is flawed, you should see the code! It’s a filthy mess that meets my only requirement: that it work.
Far and away the best movie on the Arthurian legends is Excalibur. In it, Merlin (who gets all the good lines) says, “I have walked my way since the beginning of time. Sometimes I give, sometimes I take. It is mine to know which and when.”
Mine.