Low-Interactivity Entertainment Designs

Let me now turn to low-interactivity products. They have a dismal history. Low-interactivity entertainment is not a new idea. In the first big boom of computer games, from 1981 to 1984, a number of low-interactivity games were attempted. One of these was Alien Gardens, published by Epyx. You were a kind of alien bee flitting through a garden of alien flowers, trying to pollenize them. It was a very low-key game, definitely low in the interactivity department. All you could do was buzz around and, every now and then, try to touch a flower, which might kill you or reward you. Unfortunately, the difference between flowers was arbitrary. The game made no sense and ranks as one of the great turkeys of computer game history.

1985 saw another low-interactivity product: Little Computer People, from Activision. This odd product created a small family on your screen, moving around their dollhouse in the course of their daily activities. You the player watched them. The product attracted much attention from the press, but it was not, I believe, much of a commercial success, largely because the player didn't do very much. Much later, Will Wright came up with a much better implementation of the concept with The Sims. The Sims offered the player more interactivity than Little Computer People, and was accordingly a great success.

Epyx roared back in 1988 with more low-interactivity products: its line of VCR games, released with much hype and excitement. Realizing the clumsiness inherent in the serial format of a videotape, the designers rightly limited interaction to the bare minimum, focusing most of their attention on providing interesting footage for the player, who would occasionally fast forward or rewind. Here was the ultimate couch potato game. You didn't need a computer to play it and you didn't have to do much work. All you did was sit back and watch the tape and occasionally push a button on your remote control. Sounds great, right? It sounded great to a number of publishers, who frantically put together their own VCR products. Yet, despite some expensive marketing campaigns, VCR games bombed. They were a total disaster. Mindscape shipped one product and cancelled the second one, even though it was ready to ship, because the first game had failed so completely.

Another experiment in this direction was the CinemaWare line of games. These games were strong on spectacle and weak on interaction. The marketing thrust of the CinemaWare line was that these games were just like movies, except that you could play with them. Most of the design effort was put into making lots of pretty pictures and animated sequences. The gameplay itself was weak. The first line in the series, Defender of the Crown, by Kellyn Beeck, created quite a sensation and sold very well. But after that, it seemed to be all downhill. CinemaWare went bust a few years later.

Another good example is the experience of Cyan, a game developer. Cyan's first game, The Manhole, was a low-interactivity adventure game for children. It sold enough copies to keep Cyan alive, but little more. Then they came up with Cosmic Osmo, sporting the same low interactivity but better cosmetics. Again, they made enough money to stay alive, but not much more. The big hit came with Myst, another adventure game. This time, however, the interactivity was more involved and the cosmetics were sensational. Myst sold like hotcakes, Cyan got filthy rich, and all seemed bright. Then they released a sequel to Myst, entitled Riven. It sold moderately well. A third game in the series, Exile, also did reasonably well, but again did not approach Myst in sales. Cyan continued in business by developing and licensing the Myst brand.

The same pattern shows up over and over. Laserdisc games made a huge sensation, but then faded away almost as quickly as they burst upon the scene. They were low-interactivity games. The 7^th Guest, by Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine, was a huge hit in the early 1990s, sporting low-interactivity puzzles mated with glorious animations. Their sequel, The 11^th Hour, sold reasonably well, but not sensationally well. And there were no further games in that series. Cliff Johnson made a minor splash with a brilliant collection of puzzles, followed it up with a sequel that didn't sell well, and then disappeared.

Low-interactivity games sound like a great idea, such a great idea that people keep going back and doing them over and over. And, in pure Darwinian fashion, the companies that have cast their lot with low-interactivity games have suffered extinction. Epyx, CinemaWare, and Mindscape were all reduced to ashes; only Cyan broke the curse. But the survivors seem unable to learn from their competitors' failures; low-interactivity games keep popping up like some time-hopping Sisyphusian dodo bird bent on repeating its extinction in as many eras as possible.

Why have low-interactivity games been such a dismal failure? One would think that there should be some small fragment of a market for them. Why is the historical experience so decisively negative in defiance of common sense?

There are two answers, I think. The first is that the available hardware is not up to the task. We have not yet hit the right combination of ingredients to build good low-interactivity games. The VCR gives lots of imagery, but its access times are so slow that even low-interactivity games suffer. The computer itself simply cannot generate or maintain images of enough variety and quality to entertain the player by themselves. The DVD should solve both problems. It offers faster access times than videotape, yet much greater image capacity than the computer. Whether the combination will be fast enough and visually rich enough to overcome the inherent weakness of low interactivity, I cannot say.

The second answer is more pessimistic. I have long maintained that interactivity is the essence of the gaming experience, and that the quality of the interaction determines the quality of the game. If this be true, then the very notion of low-interactivity games is intrinsically wrongheaded, and such products will inevitably fail.

An Interesting Exception

There is a small group of low-interactivity games that have been somewhat successful. These are the games produced by Cyan (Manhole and Cosmic Osmo) and Amanda Goodenough (Inigo Gets Out, Your Faithful Camel, et al), and a number of products from Broderbund. They are low-interactivity games, really more like vaguely linear stories with some buttons to press. They have been moderately successful. What is striking is that all of these products are designed for young children. It appears that our industry's Darwinian methods have at last found a suitable habitat for this otherwise less-than-fittest species of game.

Why is it that low-interactivity products are successful with young children when they don't seem to work with older players? I think that the answer can be found by asking another: Why don't high-interactivity products work with young children? Try foisting SimCity, Robotron, or Half-Life on a five-year-old, if you're willing to risk accusations of child abuse. The poor kid will be overwhelmed by such games. He just doesn't have the perspicacity to handle such a game. What's left for him but the low-interactivity games?

Workload Versus Payoff

Some thinkers have observed that many of the highly interactive games impose a large workload on the player. To master a fast-paced action game, you've got to practice, practice, practice. To make sense of a big strategy game like Civilization, you've got to study a heavy manual. Lower interactivity games, they note, impose less work on the player. Taking full advantage of this property of low-interactivity games should yield viable products or so they argue.

To evaluate this line of reasoning, I suggest that we start with high-interactivity games and then move toward lower interactivity. What do we gain and lose as we move in this direction? As we lose interactivity, we reduce the total quantity of decision-making that the player must perform. This reduces his workload. It also reduces his ability to creatively influence the outcome of the game. In other words, as we reduce the interactivity of the game (its gameplay), the player's degree of participation in the outcome is diminished and he therefore becomes less involved in the outcome, which becomes more predetermined.

But there's a catch: The player's workload is not proportional to the quantity of decision-making. Decision-making consists of two parts: a laborious process of learning the basic parameters for making the decision, and a faster process of applying those parameters. The player must go through the first process whether he makes one decision or a hundred. Thus, his workload is equal to a fixed quantity (learning the rules) plus a variable quantity (playing the game).

An example might help here. Suppose I present you with two games. The first is a truly minimal-interactivity game. You will be asked to make one decision during the entire game. It is a murder mystery game, the climax of which places you in a room with the six main suspects and a gun. You must decide whom to shoot. That's exactly one decision about as little interactivity as you can get. Yet you will likely ask a great many questions before making your decision. Can I shoot more than once? Can somebody else shoot me? May I choose not to shoot anybody? (True gamesters will note that the problems are trivially solved by playing the game several times, experimenting with each of these options in turn. While entirely possible, this flies in the face of the stated intent of the low-interactivity game.) Note that these questions are really questions about the rules of the game. You will have a considerable workload just learning the context for your single decision, and inasmuch as the outcome of the game rides on your single decision, you had damn well better learn the rules thoroughly.

The second game is a more conventional game with many decisions. Once again you will have the workload of learning the rules of the game, and in addition to that you will have the workload of making all those decisions. Yet the workload of learning the rules is most likely the more substantial of the two. In other words, if you end up making a hundred decisions during the course of this game, your total workload will not be 100 times greater than your workload with the minimal-interactivity game. It might not even be twice as great.

Thus, as we move from the higher-interactivity game to the minimal-interactivity game, two factors are reduced: the player's workload and his ability to influence the outcome of the game. But and this is the key point the latter falls faster than the former. Reducing interactivity gains us only small benefits in terms of reducing workload but costs us heavily in terms of the player's ability to creatively influence the outcome of the game.

This, I think, is the real reason why low-interactivity games have been such failures. Diminishing the interactivity just makes the game less fun faster than it makes the game easier. What we gain in terms of reduced workload we more than make up for in terms of diminished fun.

Weird Ideas

Lastly, there are the blue-sky concepts for low-interactivity games. Most of these center on some form of storytelling. In one approach, the computer tells the player a story, with the player somehow providing cues that the computer uses to adjust the story to suit the player's interests. For example, if the computer mentions an encounter with a beautiful girl, and the player so indicates, the computer could proceed to describe a sexual liaison. If the player is female, it might tell of a friendship developing between the two.

The problem with this lies in the nature of the cues provided by the players. Exactly how do the players communicate their desires to the computer? If we use a series of predetermined branchpoints (a branchpoint is a point reached during the play of a game, at which the player must make a decision that will take him down one of several paths), the game has reverted to a conventional adventure game, and the players still must learn the language of expression for the adventure. Proponents of such schemes often fall back on deliberately vague for mulations. The computer will "sense" the player's mood, they claim. I find it difficult to imagine just how this sensing will take place, and how the computer will interpret whatever it senses.

A variation on this scheme makes reference to the manner in which performing artists sense the mood of their audiences and adjust their performance accordingly. This, it is asserted, constitutes an advanced form of low interactivity that could be harnessed for new types of games. The problem lies in the input and processing required to accomplish this. The performing artist is analyzing fine shades of voice intonation and subtle nuance of facial expressions. This type of processing is way beyond anything we can process on a personal computer, even assuming that we could equip our games with microphones and television cameras to provide the input.

There is a second and more powerful argument against such schemes. Even if we could implement them, they would still be inappropriate. The performing artist who makes adjustments in response to the audience's feedback does so on a very gross average of the audience feedback. Some people will be screaming "Faster!" as others are yelling "Slower!" The artist can't do both, and so responds to the majority. What's more important is the fact that the audience understands this. We can't all have our way, so we accept the situation. But when I am the only user of a computer game, I am completely justified in expecting that I can have my way. I expect the computer to respond to my wishes. If the computer fails to understand my wishes or is incapable of executing my desires, I will be dissatisfied. So if I grunt or laugh or scowl or drum my fingers and the computer fails to get my message, the product will have failed.

Conclusions on Low-Interactivity Designs

The concept of low-interactivity entertainment is a ghost that we will never exorcise from this industry. The concept just keeps popping up like an annual flu bug. Some naïve fool will come forward with "this great new idea that nobody has ever thought of before." As I discussed, the concept seems sound on first examination, so people will probably give it credence. Who knows, some credulous publisher might be persuaded to part with development dollars to explore the idea.