Chris Crawford wrote:
> My problem is that spatial factors have been
>so much overdone in just about everything.
I don't think the problem is with spatialization per se. The problem is
that the vocabulary is still miniscule. The current approach to
spatialization in interactive fiction is similar to the earliest days of
cinema when films were shot from a single point of view in linear time.
Map exploration and getting into hidden rooms are just as primitive and do
not sufficiently leverage either the metaphorical or emotional carrying
capacity of the medium.
The challenge is to approach space the way authors have long approached
time: as a material to be shaped, cut and woven into a story rather than a
physical process to be simulated.
The example you give of the phone call is a good illustration of how
effectively time has been tamed by literature. Phone calls don't happen in
plays or movies the way they happen in real life. They happen precisely
when it's time to move the story along. They interrupt a character at the
brink of revealing something, or inform a character of something just in
time to do something about it, or drag a character away at just the right
moment. Audiences do not see such timing as unrealistic because they judge
story-time by a different set of rules as real-life-time. The phone call
is just a device, the audience knows it, but no one cares.
For the reasons you describe, a phone call isn't necessarily a particularly
good device in an interactive story. But it shouldn't surprise us that
techniques designed for one medium don't necessarily work as well in
another medium. This doesn't mean that good devices don't exist. We just
haven't stumbled across very many of them yet.
In this regard I actually think it's a good thing that the carrying
capacity of VRML over the net is still severely limited. It forces authors
to work less literally and more metaphorically. They might just figure out
ways of driving a story using space other than by putting locked doors in
the way of the user.
Michael
