Why Interactivity?
'Interactive' is the latest buzzword throughout the entertainment industry. EVERYTHING these days, from televised concerts by semi-retired pop stars to video games to restaurant dining is getting billed as 'interactive.' In this environment it's perhaps hardly surprising that the burgeoning of a whole new genre of interactive literature has gone largely unnoticed by ninety-nine per cent of the reading public. Something that seldom gets asked, however, is why making a previously established medium 'interactive' is supposed to be a good thing. Do we really enjoy eating out more when the waiters are dressed up as pirates and say 'Arr, me laddie" when we ask for ketchup? Is Phil Collins really any more musically exciting because we can write him an e-mail that says 'Duh, hi, phil - play "Invisible Touch" again, wouldja?' Now, it seems to me that there are two justifications for 'interactivity' in the arts that are floating around in the popular imagination, neither of which really gets to the heart of things. Lets take a little look at these notions of what makes interactivity so important, and see how well they serve to explain what's distinctive and appealing about IF itself:
BAD IDEA #1: Interactivity is good because it "removes barriers" between the reader and the text.
You'll hear this suggestion if you hang around English departments at all, and certain elements in the hypertext community are especially keen on it. The idea, as applied to literature, is presumably that normally when we read we're frozen in chilly detachment, and by having something to do aside from just staring at words on a page we'll become more sensitive to the plight of characters, more wrapped-up in their concerns, etc. Sometimes strange, misguided notions of personal freedom get wrapped up with this notion of what's good in entertainment, as if flipping through T.V. channels with a remote were somehow more 'liberating' than concentrating hard on a really good movie, or typing "Kill Troll with Sword" 500 times in a work of IF expressed one's personal autonomy more fully that getting through volume three of Remembrance of Things Past. Now, there seems to me to be an important kernel of truth in this notion, to be exploited below. The problem with it (as Brecht might have remarked, if he was still around and not too busy stealing money from his collaborators) is that in fact it's all too easy, as a matter of fact, to get one's audience to sympathize vicariously with a bunch of characters. The fact that people are so good at doing this is one of the main things that frightens parets, legislators and media critics about all of these mass-market, first-person shoot-'em-up computer games that have become so popular with kids over the past few years. This worry seems to me to be at least largely well-founded. The trick in any art form (as Aristotle actually did point out, somewhere inbetween dissecting chicken embryos and proving the existence of god) is to find the perfect balance for one's reader between absorption and detachment. My own favorite example of this having been accomplished in IF are Leon Lin's hilarious KISSING THE BUDDHA'S FEET, wherein it gradually emerges that, far from being the sturdy, practical Everyman type so familiar from commercial computer games and bad Hollywood movies, you turn out to be a rather obsessively anal little wonk who deserves all of the stress that he is subjected to.
Latest Articles