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". ...