The Ghost in the Machine: ludology, narratology and the reinvention of the character in interactive fiction

Abstract

Interactive Fiction is a form of digital experience that gives the power of agency to the player/interactor through their decisions, with direct consequences on the narrative configuration of the work. This form of mediality has brought new challenges and subverted traditional notions of narrative representation (shaped mainly from the field of print fiction), as the nonlinear structure opens the way to different plot paths, depending on the interactor’s performance and choices. In this context, it is understood that the configurable nature of the character, either as a fictional entity with certain diegetic properties or as a fundamental piece of game mechanics, is the object of increasing attention from the academic community and the people involved in video game development or Interactive Fiction. The process of character construction, regardless of its specific nature (PC: playable character; NPC: non-playable character), takes on its own specificity and raises problems that usually do not arise with other literary and cultural products, even from the contemporary context. More than prolonging the heated debate about the degree of adequateness of this medium to narrate stories that led to the formation of two distinct theoretical approaches – the ludological and the narratological –, it is important to develop a holistic method capable of bringing together different angles of analysis, recognizing that video games tend to develop complex narrative models, but cannot survive without a consistent structure and a rule system. Particularly, recent Interactive Fiction projects using Artificial Intelligence devices that allow the selection, based on computational procedures, of events coherently according to the type of intervention of the interactor and making the most of the narrative tension raise new questions regarding the character’s ontology, its potential for manifestation of aesthetic effects and its ability to instigate emotional involvement.