Agency and the Art of Interactive Digital Storytelling Noam Knoller Interface Studies Group, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected]
Abstract. Taking seriously Andrew Stern’s aspiration that IDS become a premier art form for the 21st century, this paper re-examines agency, understood as the ability to freely control the plot, as a key concept in IDS aesthetics. Tracing the origins of this notion in IDS theory, this paper suggests that “true” agency is a myth, and that even restricted agency is too constrained to serve as a desirable goal for IDS-as-art. Keywords: agency, control, art theory, interactive art, IDS.
1 Introduction In an inspirational keynote at the first international conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), intended to equip the research community with a prescription for R&D, Andrew Stern expressed his belief that “digital interactive stories can become a premier art form of the 21st century”[1], but lamented the current condition of this nascent form, which is far from realising its potential. He then proceeded to list the “quintessential requirements of interactive story”. The first such requirement is to acknowledge that “agency is the primary feature that must be offered players”. Stern refers to the success of “high-agency videogames” as “empirical proof of this assertion”. According to Stern, agency is “the first wish that most players, developers and researchers originally feel when first encountering and considering interactive story”. Stern provides two descriptions of agency. He first links it to meaning, writing that “the most successful games offer true agency – the ability for players to have persistent, meaningful effects on the events of the experience” ([1], p. 2). He then premises it on intentional direction of the plot, writing that in the context of interactive stories it is “the implicit promise to the player to be able to directly affect the plot of the story, taking it in whatever direction they wish” ([1], p. 3). Stern bases his suggestion that agency become the primary design ideal for IDS on the assumption that this is what players want and expect, and he even goes as far as to say that if anyone believes otherwise then “it is only because they have been conditioned by play experiences (or research experiments) that fall short of this ideal” (Ibid). Consequently, Stern links agency to player control by suggesting that the term “storytelling” be replaced by “storymaking”, since the verb “telling” implies a conceptual framework which is “antithetical to the notion of giving primary control to players to direct the interactive story”, which is what the research community should aspire to “as we work towards building interactive stories with true agency”. R. Aylett et al. (Eds.): ICIDS 2010, LNCS 6432, pp. 264–267, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
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In an online response to Stern’s article [2], improv-theatre maker Andreas Benkwitz wrote about control-agency that “if there is such a desire or ideal, it stems directly from our romantic ideal of authorship or being a creative artist…Stern wants to transfer the control ideal from the artist to the player and assumes that the ideal player wants to be like the romantic ideal of the free artist”, and calls this ideal “control hell”. In my opinion, the notion of control-agency seems more clearly to betray the cybernetic, control-engineering origins of the HCI heritage of IDS theory. However, a full discussion of the origins of this “control hell” must remain outside the scope of this short discussion, which will be limited to some of the theoretical issues that stem from Stern’s keynote: the definition(s) of (true) agency, the relation between agency and authoriality, and the scope of control-agency’s applicability.
2 Definitions of (True) Agency Stern’s two descriptions of (true) agency in the keynote are not identical. The first speaks of meaningful influence on events, yet lacks specificity about the mode of influence and lacks the component of intentionality - which the second description restores. Both, however, do not refer to some distinctions that were introduced to the discourse since Laurel broadly applied Aristotle’s use of agency - originally related to a character’s potential for action ([3], p. 60) - to user experience, as “the ability to do something” ([3], p. 116, italics in the original). Laurel’s concept was not specific to IDS or interactive art of any sort. This was left to Janet Murray’s influential definition: agency is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”([4] p, 126). Murray's two innovations, which Stern upholds, are (1) to explicitly link agency to meaning and (2) to constrain the meaning of doing to the player’s (intentional) decisions and choices. Neo-Aristotelian theory, besides emphasising the primacy of agency (as Mateas does in [5]), contributes another important idea to the understanding of IDS experience: that of the temporality of meaning production. Mateas and Stern [6] distinguish between local and global agency. Local agency is the experience attendant to a specific user action or choice: “When the player's actions cause immediate, context specific, meaningful reactions from the system, we call this local agency.” Global agency can be deferred: “[A]t the end of the experience the player can understand how her actions led to this storyline.” This important distinction (which nevertheless seems not to revise Murray's emphasis on intentional actions), is missing from Stern’s keynote. Is it local or global agency – or both - that players most wish to feel and which is responsible for the success of high-agency videogames? A final distinction was introduced in Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum's ICIDS2008 paper [7] - the distinction between true, or unrestricted agency, and limited agency. They note correctly that it was the latter type which Murray initially suggested as a primary feature of interactive narrative (cf. [4], p. 152). However, it would seem that it is time to recognise that any distinction between true and restricted agency has no practical or theoretical value. Put simply, such true agency as Stern seems to call for just doesn’t exist, at least not outside the realm of expectations and theoretical discussions. In fact, if there is an expectation of true agency, it may be (as Tanenbaum and
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Tanenbaum also note) merely the product of the relatively recent culture of games, which conditions some players to expect to be able to control the plot (“taking it in whatever direction”, as Stern suggests). Agency in an IDS work (and in relation to any mediating technology in general) is always restricted. It is limited by the design of the system – as both Laurel (who devotes an important section to the importance of authorial constraints) and Murray have indeed emphasised. Rather than an ideal, true agency should be seen as a myth. Furthermore, restrictions on agency should not be viewed as a shortcoming. Dramatised agency – and this is what one might indeed experience in IDS – should be no different from any other emotion felt in a dramatic context. As with pity and fear, so does the feeling of agency in an artistic, dramatic context is experienced as free from any "threat of harm or pain in the real world" ([3] p. 114). Agency in IDS is not real world agency. It is always already restricted, first by virtue of being simulated and dramatised, and then specifically by any additional (authorial) constraints.
3 Agency and Authoriality Stern’s suggestion that the community should (a) be engaged in building interactive stories with true agency by offering players primary control to direct the interactive story, as well as (b) avoid “telling”, appears to contrast agency with authoriality. If agency is primarily what IDS experience is about, but telling is not desirable, then it follows that interactive stories shouldn’t be authorial. This may be an interesting avenue to explore but it can’t be the only avenue. IDS, especially IDS-as-art, must also remain open to the possibility of authorial experiences that maintain, for example, a bi-directional communication between author and player (for a recent communicative model of IDS see [8]). In fact, players of authorial works are also always addressees of an authorial creation and may very well accept and welcome authorial restrictions on their agency. Some evidence for this may be found in Knoller and Ben Arie [9], which analysed the self-reporting of a small sample of subjects who experienced Turbulence, a "lowagency" narrative hypervideo (agency is understood in this case not as a quality of meaningful involvement but rather as a quantity of the power to act). Subjects in that study had a mixed background in terms of their exposure to gaming and gaming culture, so their expectations varied. One point in the work was specifically designed to contradict assumed player intentions. If agency is indeed the freedom to control the story, this should clearly have resulted in a devastating loss of (global) agency, and that loss would be experienced as frustrating and certainly not pleasing. And yet, the subjects of the study seemed to indicate something else. Some (not all) of them noted that the low local agency impeded their engagement. But, on the other hand, some of those interviewed welcomed the apparent loss of global agency as part of the experience, highlighting the existence of different plot options. While a more careful study is required to validate and further nuance this conclusion (and especially to investigate how much prior immersion in gaming culture affects expectations), we can at least accept that for some players, global control-agency is not a requirement for pleasure as they expect and even enjoy authorial constraints and challenges.
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4 The Limited Scope of Agency Suggesting, as Stern does, that agency premised on intentional player control over the direction of the plot is an ideal that can’t be questioned, over-constrains the artistic possibilities of the medium. It misses out on at least two important aspects of potentially meaningful interactive experience that fall outside the realm of intentional choices and decisions of players. First, current sensing and affective computing technologies are able to react to implicit aspects of user behaviour and performance. Being implicit - and therefore unintentional - these aspects of interactivity can’t be understood in terms of local control-agency, which is necessarily intentional, and yet they may produce meaning retrospectively, as the player's implicit causation of events becomes apparent. Second, even if technology was able to respond only to choices and decisions, artists are within their rights to treat agency as subject matter by creating IDS experiences that play on, challenge and frustrate aspects of control-agency (both or either local and global) rather than simply offer it as-is (as we’ve seen in 3 above – and there are other examples such as [10] and [11]); and players may enjoy such experiences and find them meaningful. In these respects, it seems that the assumption of the primacy of agency as intentional player control over the plot, at least for IDS-as-art, requires some revision.
References 1. Stern, A.: Embracing the Combinatorial Explosion: A Brief Prescription for Interactive Story R&D. In: Spierling, U., Szilas, N. (eds.) ICIDS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5334, pp. 1–5. Springer, Heidelberg (2008) 2. Benkwitz, A.: Untitled comment (2008), http://icids2008.ning.com/forum/topics/embracing-thecombinatorial?commentId=2496408:Comment:523 3. Laurel, B.: Computers as Theatre. Addison Wesley, Boston (1993) 4. Murray, J.H.: Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Free Press, New York (1997) 5. Mateas, M.: A Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Drama. In: Working notes of the AI and Interactive Entertainment Symposium, AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2000) 6. Mateas, M., Stern, A.: Structuring Content in the Façade Interactive Drama Architecture. In: Young, R.M., Laird, J.E. (eds.) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 93–98. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2005) 7. Tanenbaum, J., Tanenbaum, K.: Improvisation and Performance as Models for Interacting with Stories. In: Spierling, U., Szilas, N. (eds.) ICIDS 2008. LNCS, vol. 5334, pp. 250– 263. Springer, Heidelberg (2008) 8. Ben-Arie, U.: The Narrative-Communication Structure in Interactive Narrative Works. In: Iurgel, I.A., Zagalo, N., Petta, P. (eds.) ICIDS 2009. LNCS, vol. 5915, pp. 152–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2009) 9. Knoller, N., Ben-Arie, U.: Turbulence - A User Study of a Hypernarrative Interactive Movie. In: Iurgel, I.A., Zagalo, N., Petta, P. (eds.) ICIDS 2009. LNCS, vol. 5915, pp. 44– 49. Springer, Heidelberg (2009) 10. Radúz Činčera, Kinoautomat, Czechoslovakia (1967) 11. Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008)
