Looking for recommendations: IF theory and criticism

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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No worries, I knew that was not your intent, so I thought I’d let you know.

I’m intrigued by your suggestion. How does play work in this framework? To me, it is clear that the wrestlers are performing as separate, fixed characters. Simulated Others, in my own language. Moreover, they must perform difficult feats. Just based on my stated definition, this is something like IF. Still, it may be my age or bias, but as I said in your thread, IF is a subset of the “video game” medium for me.

However, mine is also an intertextual definition, so another form of entertainment can be in productive conversation with IF and may share many important features. Edit: since intertextuality is analog rather than digital, it is not always clear where one conversant ends and another begins.

Still, I think you might have been thinking of the audience as having the IF experience. It’s true that they are immersed in a fiction, but I am looking for audience agency. I have the impression that I am more invested in player agency than you are, so perhaps that isn’t important to you.

Take a minute to build out your idea a bit when you get a chance, if you don’t mind. I’m interested!

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Drew’s point about whether the audience is having the interactive experience seems apropos. You could say that the wrestlers are playing a game, but that’s not usually how we think about improv theater. The actors are performing, not playing, even when they’re making stuff up as they go. And wrestling shows seem to fit well into the idea of improv theater. That’s how I usually see them categorized, anyway.

(There’s “interactive” theater, in the Sleep No More sense, but pro wrestling doesn’t involve the audience in that way.) (Although I suppose someone must be trying a crossover at this point!)

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In my mind, “game” implies the winner and loser are not predetermined. My understanding of pro wrestling is that the outcome of any single match is preordained, even if there is opportunity to go off-script (hence why betting on pro wrestling is not a thing).

To me, the hallmark of IF is the feedback loop between the viewer and the narrative. At some point, the topic of ergodic literature will come up, namely, a type of text where the reader must “work” to traverse it. I struggle to see in pro wrestling the reader’s “work” that ergodic literature requires.

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I think this is right as to IF – and I share the intuition that pro wrestling is sufficiently distinct that I struggle to see many productive areas of theoretical engagement – though to go back to a theme I mentioned earlier in the thread, tabletop roleplaying is maybe an interesting comparison or maybe bridge to the stuff Dorian is talking about? The audience is the players in most tabletop games (though I suppose the rise of the intended-to-be-broadcast actual play stream undermines that assumption), and in many the outcome is completely preordained and the questions aren’t about whether how something happens, rather than whether it does. Yet these are still intuitively games, with a lot of overlap (to my mind) with how IF engagement works…

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E: This thread has lasted much longer than I would have guessed. Thanks to everyone who has posted. I joined this forum for conversations like this.

I’ve read the interactive storytelling article, and unless I misunderstand, it is more of a theoretical field of inquiry than a body of work. That is not bad. I like theory and theoretical things, but it is hard to evaluate a real thing next to a potential thing. It sounds like there are few showpieces at the moment.

My basic task as a critic is to read games as texts, i.e., cultural objects that can be interpreted, so the capacity for a text to generate itself is only as interesting as the text it can generate (for me, people should study whatever interests them). Still, it’s not like there wouldn’t be work in that field for humanists. Despite everyone’s best intentions, it seems that AI can evince cultural biases. After all, they reflect a culture’s idea of “intelligence,” and that has its own context, its own “master texts,” and so on. A computer, in all its innocence, would not be ashamed of its blind spots. For better and for worse.

From a humanities perspective, I would ask what the interactive storytelling (mostly) theoretical model can contribute to a discussion of IF. Since there seem to be shared elements. What is that conversation like? Game studies, new media studies, game design, and narratology (along with the computer science people I imagine doing interactive storytelling) are radically new fields (compared to English or even pop culture), and it is very reasonable to assume that there will be significant consolidations for good reasons (some ideas and terminologies are better than others) and bad (the economic and social realities of the academy). I try to be prudent when coining or using new specialized terminology.

I like the idea of looking at wrestling and asking how it is and isn’t interactive fiction. To me, this is the essence of radical critique. It is hard to arrive at new ideas without new lines of inquiry. It’s useful to consider what seemingly incompatible objects might be in conversation with one another. It’s not so different for someone from my background (humanities focus on IF of the sort eligible for IF Comp) to ask how The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is IF. Or how Disco Elysium is IF. We have 40 years of saying “no” to that. So the willingness to chase down controversial or “obviously wrong” ideas is valuable to me.

Working with an intertextual model of influence, we can also ask questions like: “are there shared craft elements between wrestling and IF games?” There is, there must be, some sort of “script” encompassing a season of many matches. How is that made? That would be an interesting thing to chase down. I’m not sure that the exchanges between announcer and audience would be enough for interactive storytelling (we’d have to know things like: how often do audiences change the script? aren’t crowds far more predictable than people? and so forth), but the announcer certainly could be a fictional element to characterize and assess.

bonus: the story of Tay the AI chatterbot (RIP)

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To be clear, the Practice conference once had a pro wrestler in to talk about the game design principles of the sport. I don’t think that talk got posted online, unfortunately.

(Practice was a general game-design conference at NYU. Last ran in 2018. They made a point of having talks from a lot of fields that were not videogames, but might speak to it: pinball design, bicycle racing, breakdance, street games.) (NarraScope was significantly modelled on Practice.)

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Nice.

There has to be some good content out there about pinball machines and vintage arcade cabinet design. I really love that stuff.

This was the first year that I planned to play close attention to Narrascope. I came down with COVID instead!