(Just a long ramble that came to me in the middle of class because I loved where the discussion was going.) As we discussed interactive narratives today, it began to seem to me that Minecraft was the one game I knew that bore all the features we seemed to so deeply crave–except for one problem: Minecraft doesn’t seem to have any narrative to speak of.

I am of the belief that as a game approaches maximum interactivity–that is, as the player’s will increasingly becomes the sole factor shaping the narrative experience–its structure must grow increasingly “porous”. There is no room for high contextualisation, because just as it is much easier to damage a smartphone such that it loses functionality than it is a chalkboard, narratives with high contextuality are extremely difficult to mold and adapt because any change threatens to damage whatever makes them tick.

The ultimate interactive experience is, of course, life itself, and to create a game so responsive without the developers having to account for every single choices in analogue (identifying discrete option paths and scripting out the individual outcomes), it needs to mirror real life in several ways. This implies that as a game becomes more interactive, it also necessarily loses elements that would qualify it to be a narrative, simply because that is the nature of interaction. That is why I’d propose that Minecraft is the closest thing to a model of a true interactive narrative that exists at present, being an excellent balance between both.

Is it a narrative? This is a game that, to me, straddles the boundary between narrative and pure organic experience. Being an open sandbox game where one can do practically anything one chooses with the materials made available, one might initially be tempted to believe that it is entirely absent of a narrative, but I would dispute that.

For simplicity’s sake let’s say that a narrative is an emotional thread realised through events involving characters, organised in the ternary structure of introduction, body, and conclusion, in which the conclusion offers a satisfying resolution to that which is troubled in the prior segments. This emotional core is what makes the story worth traversing, the resolution being the reward of the turmoil–and learning–that one endured throughout.

To me, Minecraft has a narrative, and that narrative is self-generating; it emerges as the player plays, within the framework supplied by the game. It has an emotional thread, and that thread is survival and discovery. The feeling of a story arc lies, I think, in the process of realisation one undergoes, as one comes to understand that the world is vast and that one is tiny, and that one’s thirst for exploration is endless as the world within which one resides

It is a very particular kind of “empty world experience” as described in class. The world bears evidence of a past and of outside influences–other consciousnesses shaping the landscape, building monuments outside of one’s notice–and within that framing, AI monsters and creatures are imbued with intelligence. Within the framing, the randomness becomes indicative of organic life appearing and morphing outside one’s control. The ever-present threat of death and the pressing need to survive, to move, maps a trajectory or various trajectories along which one’s self-generating narrative proceeds. One moves forward because 1) there are things one must discover, and 2) one is afraid to die.

And it would be wrong to say that there is no ultimate goal in even a concrete sense. There is a distant goal, an ultimate quest (the same way religion or existentialism supplies our lives with an ultimate quest, perhaps?), in the End, a realm that embodies the very concept of ending, a realm with as much psychological and philosophical dimensionality as it is has physical aspects, an abyss into which the very universe, and the reason for its existence, threatens to be swallowed.

But this ending is so impossibly difficult (probably requiring hundreds of hours of playtime on average), and it can be arrived at in so many different ways, that it never feels omnipresent in a way end goals tend to be in other games. Minecraft questions whether a game’s raison d’etre necessarily has to be the ending, the boss fight, by presenting us with an ultimate objective which one is free to ignore if one does not think it will improve the gaming experience (I mean, if you think about it, you could choose to ignore the plot or the ending in any game, in favour of indefinite exploration)–something that one will arrive at “someday”, a goal that oscillates between concrete and immaterial–a feeling of one, rather.

There is a reward to “completing” the game, however, and that reward is an explanation. As the credits roll, one is presented a short story that offers a troubling yet immensely moving ontological reflection on the meaning of one’s existence within the world of the game, and why one plays at all.

I think Minecraft has a narrative–perhaps in the loosest sense–but it has a narrative, because I decided to play it and inhabit its world as if it does, and yes, not everyone will. To me, it represents the closest thing to a truly interactive narrative.

I’ve always held a fascination towards branching narratives. Oddly enough, however, I rarely derived much enjoyment from experiencing Choose Your Own Adventure stories (I own one such book and I found it frustrating more than anything) and Twine stories, much less creating them.

As I was reading The Garden of Forking Paths, and particularly towards the climax, the story exploded at once into a thousand; I felt like I was experiencing so many concurrent timelines, because the story demanded that I imagine them–not only in Doctor Albert’s creation, and not only within the life of the fictitious Doctor Yu Tsun, who perhaps knew that his story could have gone a billion other ways, but also within my own: how, at every second, a thousand options lie open to me, to advance any one of countless stories that I could potentially live.

And then it hit me that the reason linear narratives are so exciting is suspension of disbelief. The reader places oneself within the shoes of the main character, causing them to forget that the events of the story are predetermined. As in real life, the story suddenly becomes a garden of possibility, every single branch as possible as every other, and moving forward in the narrative merely feels as natural as living one’s life.

The reason actual branching narratives are rarely satisfying is that the act of traversing the branching paths calls attention to the act of reading or experiencing the story. One becomes aware of the artificial attempt to recreate the sense of possibility, when the effect is the reverse: the reader realises that the possibilities are finite because suspension of disbelief is broken and the reader realises that all the possibilities exist in physical form somewhere, and that that indeed means that they are finite. I have never seen any branching narrative succeed properly in its execution. There are often too few branches–and I, as the player, can easily access all of them in a single sitting, causing the story to feel nearly as finite as a linear one would be.

Doctor Albert’s story within the story is an attempt to crystallise that experience, but I do not find the concept of the story in itself very appealing. What I do find appealing is how the concept of the branching path manifested in Yu Tsun’s narration, as he killed Albert, how he suddenly saw all the possible outcomes of his act fanning out before him.

I believe the only true way to capture the idea of branching possibilities in a narrative form that can be experienced is to introduce randomness into the setup, such that there truly were an infinity of different stories one could experience. This is why games succeed in a way hypertext stories do not where branching narratives are concerned.