Free Will

Interactivity, Plot, Free Will, Determinism, Quantum Mechanics, and Temporal Irreversibility

Yes, believe it or not, these six things are all tied together. Moreover, they're tied together in a way that reveals some useful truths about designing interactive stories. In this essay, I'll trace those connections.

The starting point of the discussion is the conflict between plot and interaction. There are theoretical reasons for this conflict. They are best seen from the point of view of the plot faction. Many of these people are writers. Plot creation is, from their point of view, an enormously difficult task demanding great talent and creative energy. The thought of allowing an audience to mess up their carefully crafted plots leaves them cold. Knowing how difficult it is to get a plot to work well, they realize that any intrusion by the audience into the process will only yield garbage. If interactivity requires the audience to involve itself in the direction of the plot, then clearly interactivity and plot are incompatible.

Adding to this apparent incompatibility is the attitude of the other side. The protagonists of interaction tend to take a dim view of plot. The strongest example of this is the possibly apocryphal story about id software and the creation of Doom. There was, so the story goes, some dispute within the organization about the proper role of story in the game. One faction argued that there should be some story element to tie everything together. The other faction argued that Doom was to be an action game, pure and simple, and that "we don't need no steenking story". Eventually, the anti-story faction won out, the losers left the company, and nowadays story is referred to within id as "the S-word". So the story goes.

Consider one of the most powerful storytelling products to appear on a CD: The Madness of Roland. (see "Review: The Madness of Roland") This was a story with no interaction whatsoever. It would seem that the author of The Madness of Roland had said to himself, "we don't need no steenking interaction".

What's particularly interesting is that plot and interaction seem to contradict each other in the sales figures. The top games of the last year have been games with all interaction and no plot (Doom II) or games with all plot and no interaction (Myst, 7th Guest). Could it be that there is no workable middle ground?

related essay: Plot versus Interactivity

So what we have here is an apparent incompatibility between plot and interaction. It would seem, from both theoretical considerations and direct experience, that plot and interaction cannot be reconciled. This in turn implies that the dream of interactive storytelling is a chimera.

The central issue that we face here is not new. In slightly different terms, some of the brightest minds in human history have struggled with this problem. The results of their efforts might prove illuminating. Now, you might wonder how a problem in game design could have attracted the attentions of august thinkers in times past, but in fact they weren't concerned with games. They were working with bigger problems. OK, I'll stop being so coy: I'm talking about the classic theological problem of free will versus determinism.

How did we get from games to theology? What's the connection between "plot versus interactivity" and "free will versus determinism"? It goes like this: God is omniscient and omnipotent. Everything that happens in the universe happens according to His benevolent design. There are apparent evils in the universe, but these are all part of God's greater intentions. But this must include the actions of people as well as the actions of natural phenomena. Thus, a terrible disaster is an "act of God", but so is a murder. How then can human beings have any free will? They are pawns in the hands of an omnipotent God. If we did have free will, then God would be neither omnipotent nor omniscient, for then He would neither control nor know what we would do. But if He is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, how can he fit any definition of god? Thus, free will clashes with determinism.

The connection with games should be obvious. Determinism in theology is analogous to plot in storytelling. Free will corresponds to interaction, for how else can a player interact without the exercise of his free will? Indeed, we can make the analogy more explicit by viewing the creative person as the Creator of a miniature universe. The storyteller, for example, creates an imaginary universe populated by his characters. Like some omnipotent god he decides their actions and predestines their fates. To reverse the analogy, the history of the universe is nothing more than a huge story written by God that we act out.

But wait! The games creator is also a god of sorts. He too creates a tiny universe and exercises godlike control over that universe. Yet, free will seems to exist in the game universe. What is the difference?

At this point, some people step forward with the observation that free will in the real world could be an illusion. After all, God would want us to think that we have free will, but in fact has already determined our actions for us. We think that we are making our own choices, but in fact our choices were predestined. Even if we try to assert our free will by deliberately making apparently arbitrary decisions, that too could be explained as God's plan for us.

Now, the debate over free will versus determinism took a new turn about 70 years ago with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the introduction of quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle established that the basic behavior of the universe was fundamentally random. That is, the most basic processes that underlie the functioning of the universe are unpredictable. This blows determinism right out of the water. If you can't even be sure where an electron is or where it's going, then you certainly can't be sure what a complex system like a human being will do. Predestination just went down