Infinite Games?

Anonymous Coward writes "BBC is running a story on how US scientists are working on improving AI - with potential benefits for coming games. The system, called Liquid Narrative allows to avoid scripted storylines, and finally gives us, the gamers, full freedom to do whatever we want to do. R. Michael Young, the project coordinator, says: 'Game companies are realising that story telling has a lot of potential that has not been tapped yet.'"

Comments

the desire for telos

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A good few years ago, I wrote an MA Thesis on videogame culture. One of the areas that I looked at was the striving towards psychological mastery in videogames through a striving for the end - telos. In psychological terms, videogames insert "the subject into a narrative in which she or he sees herself or himself projected as the hero and potential master" (Peter Buse, 'Nintendo and Telos: Will You Ever Reach the End?' Cultural Critique 34 (1996) 163-84 (p.169))

The ideas that Liquid Narrative are developing - realtime self-evolving narrative strands, reactive storytelling etc, seem to play interestingly into this notion of psychic development.

However, one question I ask is: do games need narrative at all? Games are about play - we are all home ludens. Do basketball games need narrative? The most interesting, successful and universally appealing games are those such as Tetris, where there is no end, but no story to get there either.