Is Minecraft the perfect interactive narrative?
Interactive narratives are resource-intensive: they almost always require more writing than a linear narrative of comparable length, and much of this writing ends up going unexplored.
As of now, most interactive stories have taken the form of branching narratives. While creating the illusion of player agency, these stories quickly reveal their shallowness when we become aware that only specific, discrete, and seemingly arbitrary decisions open up alternate pathways. Oftentimes, even five different endings are often not enough to mask a branching narrative’s discrete, mechanical nature.
One wonders if it is possible to create a narrative that morphs in response to every player choice, whether large or small, whether altering minutiae or transforming the course of the tale: a perfectly interactive narrative.
The current paradigm of interactive writing often conceives of interactive stories as networks of discrete branches and pathways. In this paradigm, the perfectly interactive narrative would be a story with a virtually infinite number of branches. When every additional branch could potentially double the amount of writing needed, the writing required of such a story would likewise tend towards infinite.
One other possibility quickly presents itself: for a story to be perfectly interactive, its plot must be generated ad hoc.
I was pondering this matter in class one day, when it occurred to me that Minecraft might be the answer to this conundrum. It struck me then, as a half-formed thought, that Minecraft bears the abovementioned traits of a perfectly interactive narrative.
Except for one thing: Minecraft doesn’t seem to have any narrative to speak of.
I believe that as a game approaches maximum interactivity–that is, as the player’s will increasingly becomes the sole factor shaping the narrative experience–its structure must grow increasingly “porous.” There is no room for high contextualisation; just as it is much easier to damage a smartphone to the point of non-functionality than a hammer, a narrative with high contextuality is harder to mold and adapt because even a change to one plot beat could threaten to disrupt the core of its appeal.
The ultimate interactive experience is, of course, life itself, and to create a game as responsive as realitywithout the developers having to account for every single choices in analogue (identifying discrete option paths and scripting out the individual outcomes), it needs to mirror real life in the way it responds to decisions: that is to say, in a distinctly non-narrative fashion. As a game becomes more interactive, it also necessarily loses elements that would qualify it to be a narrative, simply because that is the nature of interaction.
That is why I’d propose that Minecraft is the closest thing to a model of a true interactive narrative that exists right now.
Is it a narrative? This is a game that, to me, straddles the boundary between narrative and simply experience. Being an open sandbox game where one can do practically anything one chooses with the materials made available, one might initially be tempted to believe that it entirely lacks a narrative, but I would argue otherwise.
For simplicity’s sake let’s say that a narrative is an emotional thread realised through events involving characters, organised in such a way that the conclusion offers a satisfying resolution to that which is troubled in the prior segments. This emotional core is what makes the story worth traversing, the resolution being the reward of the turmoil–and learning–that one endured throughout.
To me, Minecraft has a narrative, and that narrative is self-generating; it emerges as the player plays, within the framework supplied by the game. It has an emotional thread, and that thread is survival and discovery. The feeling of a story arc lies, I think, in the process of realisation one undergoes, as one comes to understand that the world is vast and that one is tiny, and that one’s thirst for exploration is endless as the world within which one resides
It is a very particular kind of “empty world game”. The world bears evidence of a past and of outside influences–other consciousnesses shaping the landscape, building monuments outside of one’s notice–and within that framing, AI monsters and creatures are imbued with intelligence. Within the framing, the forces of mathematical randomness become indicative of organic life, growing and morphing outside one’s control. The ever-present threat of death and the pressing need to survive, and to move, maps trajectories along which one’s self-generating narrative proceeds. One moves forward because 1) there are things one must discover, and 2) one is afraid to die.
And it would be wrong to say that there is no ultimate goal in even a concrete sense. There is a distant goal, an ultimate quest (the same way religion or existentialism supplies our lives with an ultimate quest, perhaps?), in the End, a realm that embodies the very concept of ending, a place with as much psychological and philosophical dimensionality as it is has physical aspects, an abyss into which the very universe, and the reason for its existence, threatens to be swallowed.
But this ending is so impossibly difficult to attain(probably requiring hundreds of hours of playtime on average), and it can be arrived at in so many different ways, that it never feels omnipresent in a way end goals tend to be in other games. Minecraft questions whether a game’s raison d’ être necessarily has to be the ending, the boss fight. It presents one with an ultimate objective which one is free to ignore if one does not think it will improve the gaming experience. If you think about it, you could choose to ignore the plot or the ending in any game, in favour of indefinite exploration —only in Minecraft is it truly rewarded.
The ending is something that you’ll arrive at “someday,” a goal that oscillates between concrete and immaterial — a feeling of one, rather.
There is a reward to “completing” the game, and that reward is an explanation. As the credits roll, one is presented a short story that offers a troubling yet immensely moving reflection on the meaning of one’s existence within the world of the game, and why one plays at all.
I think Minecraft has a narrative — perhaps in the loosest sense — but it has a narrative, because I decided to play it and inhabit its world as if it does, and it offered a thread of meaning throughout the experience, start to end. And yes, not everyone will. But it seems to be the closest we have ever come.
