Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

in a drama over which he has no control—for only then, as we have seen, is it a drama. The author, pace Roland Barthes, is not quite dead yet.

Pending some future computational revolution, then, in which a machine might be programmed to simulate a real human author, with a real author’s consciousness, creativity and life experiences, truly interactive narrative is going to be out of reach. These are the (very difficult) minimum requirements, and they go beyond even the requirements of Strong AI. There are heuristic “story-writing” programs already, but their output, although impressive in its syntactical sophistication, is worthless in literary terms. There is as yet no reason to think that solving the data intensiveness problem by applying algorithmic processes to the actual plot, rather than to character behavior, will result in anything a human gameplayer would be interested in, emotionally or otherwise.

But this should not be surprising, or even disappointing. Because stories will always be things that people want to be told. If everyone wanted to make up their own story, why would they buy so many novels and cinema tickets? We like stories in general because they’re not interactive.

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