Trigger Happy
is a small step toward narrative interactivity—but only a small one. In the space-combat game Colony Wars, for example, every few missions the player gets an FMV sequence detailing how the war is going: if gameplay has gone badly, a player’s side is in disarray; if gameplay has gone well, a player’s side is making victorious incursions into the enemy’s solar system. But note that this overarching synchronic story is an extremely simple one: one side wins, the other fights back, somebody emerges as the war’s victor. The plot in fact only branches in two directions at any given point, and there are only a handful of possible endings to the saga, depending on the player’s overall skill.
One reason for this is that it would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for a studio to make the bank of hundreds or thousands of different cut-scenes needed to create satisfyingly complex stories by stringing together permutations of a handful of them. This problem of data intensiveness is likely never to be overcome. It is not a question of data storage, but data creation in the first place. It is simply impractical to write and pre-render that much FMV video.
The amount of work involved is not peculiar to the videogame form, either. Imagine an author writing an “interactive story.” Let us say this story will be
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