Rethinking 'Interactivity'

Let’s begin this discussion with a well-worn syllogism.

Unfortunately, we have a similarly glaring mistake in our assumptions about gameplay.

Of course, we don’t usually put it in such stark terms (because this thinking is clearly untenable when we do so). Yet this is the heuristic through which we measure games, by and large. And as we have no obvious term for the opposite of “player agency”, its linguistic influence has skewed our assumptions ever further.

But this just reflects an even deeper problem. In fact, the very concept of “interactivity” has structural flaws in its depiction of games, because it is derived from—and burdened with—the older dichotomous model of authors versus audiences. That burden has manufactured a needless race for author/audience parity, to the point we now unquestioningly assume the existence of genuine “emergence” in games and praise it as the highest ideal.

The consequence is an expectation of “player-driven” content, accompanied by the dismissal of “scripted” content as all that is bad about game design. Meanwhile, we forget that the rules that generate “emergence” are themselves scripted content, that these devices are content at all. Few of us want to think of the incidents that arise from preordained rules as incidental to the preordained rules.

And so the romance of “interactive player agency” allows us to believe that the player can somehow summon up brand new possibilities without rewriting an already authored possibility space. That 2 + 2 can add up to 5 as long as the player does the adding.

All the way from the introduction of the phrase “interactive storytelling”, then, game design has been saddled with a regrettably irrelevant stratagem, an agenda of promoting games to the status of “art” (as if this isn’t already self-apparent) through insisting how different games are from traditional media. And this insistence on the idea of “interactivity” makes game design negatively beholden not only to its flaws, but to the specific strand of literary criticism and thought that spawned it.

An Alternative Approach: No Such Thing as Inter-activity

Obviously, games involve player action. However, player action requires something to be acted upon, and the means of executing that act. That is, gameplay happens within a system, where the system’s involvement is as determinant as the player’s. No matter what the player does, it is always in relation, opposition, or deliberate and targeted indifference to the authored demands of a game. It’s more “intra-” than “inter-”, to belabor the point.

And the importance of the restricting, causal power of the system—the agency of the rules, so to speak—is readily apparent if we consider what happens in its absence. Take greater rift running in Diablo 3, for example. Say we give the player max gear and max stats without requiring all those rift runs. Well, that’s just removing gameplay completely. Or again, the structural problem of DayZ is that, because the amount of control the player can obtain is nearly binary (all or none), the entire possibility space is inevitably thin. Regardless of all that purported player agency, the mechanical depth of DayZ in itself was ever going to be shallow.

(This is why players resort to testing the limits and rules of social co-existence to extend the gameplay of DayZ. They play another game within that game, once the mechanical game is complete. Hence Battlegrounds, which formalizes and removes uncertainty from the latter social game.)

The paradox here is that absolute player agency is the same as having no agency at all, because it renders the game meaningless and inconsequential. In fact, it’s actually impossible to tell how much control we have until we are forced to defend it. Having something to do, therefore, is identical to being limited in the things that can currently be done. Which means not even the goals of play can be purely player derived. As such, all gameplay is structurally driven, is game-driven.

For instance, that we can choose which track to listen to from an album doesn’t make choosing a game. We can also easily change the order in which to play an album’s tracks, or loop a single portion of a track ad nauseum, but we don’t feel a need to call that a “listener-driven” experience. It’s hard to envision this as any sort of agency at all. There is simply no substance or sequential causality to delimit the experience.

In contrast, the illusion of choice exists in Tetris because there is an imagined will against which the player is exerting their own. In reality, there is no freedom because there is a mathematically correct answer for each situation (you can choose incorrectly), and all the options are directly dictated by the game (exactly like any scripted dialogue in The Walking Dead). Otherwise we would all just spawn the most appropriate blocks and line them up to perfection, and where is the game in that? The gravity of Tetris is what gives it gravity, not the “freedom” to choose where tetrominoes are placed.

Simply put, then, player agency only exists through its opposite—it only exists dialectically. And because the number of possible outcomes becomes increasingly finite over the runtime of a game, all of this indicates there is such a thing as an authored dialectical arc in even the most open-ended games, with palpably finite boundaries, that unfolds like any narrative arc.

And dialectical arcs terminate when either the player or the game assumes absolute control, when either side becomes the sole determinant of the experience. (This can be simultaneously true, as in stalemates.) Even dungeon masters must follow rules (though actually, DMs are also players in the game of playing PnP games). When the arc ends, the game also ends, at which point it becomes a toy (see any Civilization game post victory, or indeed DayZ).

Consider: if rulespaces are truly open-ended and player-driven, it shouldn’t matter if we dropped the player into some random portion of the game for that game to make sense / be playable. Yet clearly it does matter. “Pacing” and “gating” are expositional devices, are sequential meaning methodologies. Endgames and boss fights are structurally rational capstones, just as DayZ climactically requires other players for there to be a reason to amass gear—for the player to be able to perceive the worth of that gear. And finally, cheating spoils for precisely the same reason as narrative spoilers, because the experience is built through sequence and progress. The structure of the experience is defined all the way through.

And so, Garry’s Mod is not a game. Tabletop Simulator is not a game. Running a simulation is not playing a game. All of these can become games, but not until a dialectical structure is imposed, or at least superimposed. Without dialectics, these systems are toys or tools (that is, work), not games.

However, the formulation proposed earlier about limitations being equivalent to pursuable activities is incomplete. Something to do is not the same as something worth doing. (Bear with me as things get a little hairy.) To be more accurate, how often the amount of things that currently can’t be done changes determines the amount of things worth doing. Fluctuation in both amplitude and frequency are required to maintain anticipation, to avoid perceptual stalemate, and we know this from experiments on variable reward schedules as well.

The variable degree to which we can clear lines in Tetris obscures how little choice there actually is. The skill is in picking the correct answer and implementing it fast enough. And of course, without that skill, the game will end.

It follows that agency in games is therefore deeply dialectical as well as deeply illusory. The system and the player both determine the shape and character of the possibility space simultaneously at all times, not in turn. It must be a constant tug of war. From this we can approach a move away from the ill-defined and ill-defining ideas of player agency and interactivity in favor of the idea of game dialectics and dialectical agency.

Asking “how much player agency is there?” tells us nothing about how engaging a game is, as much as it seems it should. But ask “how much dialectical agency is there,” and we begin to shift the focus towards how many of its systems are built for continued, mutually assured definition. It tells us the extent of the dialectical arc, the extent of the activity space that feels worthy to explore.

Effecting this shift in thinking requires us to critically examine the various ideas about gameplay that derive from the flawed foundation that is “interactivity”. It requires us to see how traditional media also contains many of the purportedly unique, “dynamic” properties of games. To that end, we need to dissect the limits of player agency even further.

Dismantling Player Agency: Systemic Integrity Matters

Strangely, discussions about player agency often end up referring to Star Trek’s holodeck as the paradigm. What’s strange is that such an erroneous conception has persisted for so long, because the holodeck has never been relevant to the experience of player agency.

Since all of the agency in the holodeck derives directly from its users’ ability to freely change the settings and rules, it’s really a mod creation system which users take for test drives after parameter changes. In situations where this agency is removed, the users have no option but to hop on the rail or cheat, as in “Fistful of Datas” (where Worf does both). They have to play the game as a game.

But if we give this power to players during the runtime of a game, they will protest the inevitable consequences: everyone whimsically deciding their own rules of play, thus denaturing the legality of rules. If the jurisdiction of the rules becomes incoherent, there ceases to be a game.

Remember David Sirlin’s “Playing to Win”? It ruthlessly highlights how much of our rulespace is imaginary. And as soon as that imaginary space is breached, we call foul, we call cheap. How much more, then, the actual fixed and structurally implemented rulespace?

So the egalitarian guarantee that the same rules apply to all players is as strong an imperative as player agency, if not stronger, because we need our efforts and time in games to have “real” value. That is, the desire for player agency has less to do with getting our way than it does with wanting our choices to have authenticity or integrity, in order for our way to have lasting meaning. Otherwise, we would all just be cheating to produce unlimited agency (as noted in the Tetris example).

Fan fiction is fine, but we want to know our efforts are cannon. Even if we want the system to provide for a happy ending, to provide that I-block, it would be cheap to write one in ourselves. It would not be “real”.

This means that the importance of guaranteed rules is not limited to multiplayer experiences alone. As long as the system is an artifact, internal or social reality (the most pervasive dialectical structures of them all) are the only realities we can hope to permanently affect.

However, the need for stable rules is more than about recognition and permanence. Just as the mind can only be observed by its outwardly exhibited behavior, the same is true of the played rules of a game. We don’t reveal the solution for the player; the player has to predict the solution. Gameplay is therefore the response to a theory of mind the player has constructed from the observable rules in play concerning their intentionality, their trajectory, their subtext, etc.—the contents of the imagined rulespace, as it were. Without yomi, it’s just button mashing.

If the rules constantly change, the player has no ability to engage, because the player has nothing with which to build a theory of mind. To state the obvious, the rules must be knowable or predictable in order to be actionable. There’s a reason extreme speed Tetris displays more than one incoming tetromino.

This is what makes invisible Tetris at the end of that video, or blindfold chess possible. Further, what is one of the greatest fighting game feats of all time is directly a result of this knowability (of both the game and the opponent). And the reliance on theory of mind crafting is so strong that a counter strategy of deliberately pursuing inefficient paths can prove devastating.

And this is the artistry of games: to force us to question everything we thought we knew, about the game and about ourselves, by constantly throwing the limits straight at our faces, compelling us to hone ever more nuanced, ever more expansive, ever more accurate theories of mind and self-understanding.

All of this is to say that player action can’t (and shouldn’t) generate mechanics or experiences that aren’t already present in the possibility space, because that space must be meticulously constricted for it to have substance, for it to even be perceivable. Negative space is every bit as important as positive space.

Dismantling the “Traditional Media” / Games Divide: No Passive Reception in Media

This is not to claim that there can’t be content within the possibility space which the player initiates without prompting. In fact, attempting to draw where authored content ends and where audience participation begins is both futile and (especially for our purposes) unproductive.

What is the threshold at which looping a section of music creates new music? Likewise, if a player fortifies a skill trainer in Morrowind to teach skills not known by that trainer, is that a rewriting of the game’s rules or the logical conclusion to the existing ones? (Of course, my argument has been, and will be, that it’s the latter, just as the Golden State Warriors aren’t actually writing any new rules per se. They’re simply throwing out the imagined ones.)

But crucially, this ambiguity of separation applies to all forms of media, because no piece of media can ever dictate how it will be interpreted or operated—because media are methods of information delivery, not the actual information itself. Not even the news can tell people what to believe as facts. What we call “player agency”, then, is merely freedom of interpretation and association. It’s us crafting a theory about the mind of the content, as we do at the receiving end of all media, as we do when entering any on-going dialogue.

Which is to say that whenever we digest any media, we bring our own intentionality into the process. We can choose to humor the opposite party, to respond e