I talk about interactive fiction (hereafter abbreviated “IF”) more than I actually play it. The truth is, playing IF usually irks me. Besides my obsessive-compulsive need to explore every facet before moving on, it’s their endings that drive me crazy. As someone who fancies himself a storyteller, I often ask myself: How do you end IF gracefully?
There Can Be Only One
My first creative writing professor drilled into my head that endings should be surprising yet inevitable, that they should somehow flow from the beginning. Whatever that means. If you’ve written fiction, you probably know how it feels to write an ending that just didn’t feel right. If you didn’t give up, you either had to revise the ending, the beginning, or—the likeliest scenario—both.
To me, this implies that a story’s beginning somehow contained or predetermined the true ending. If it’s true that a story needs a particular ending to be satisfying, then how could users’ choices leading to one of many endings ever feel as satisfying as a traditional novel?
Thus the two major pitfalls of IF endings. IF writers take heed.
Pitfall 1: Every Ending Sucks Except One
Perhaps the “stories only have one ending” hypothesis is too fatalistic or narrow-minded. Maybe there really can be multiple, equally satisfying endings. But when has this ever been the case? Have you ever played through an IF without finding one ending that stands out from the others, one that seems more natural and satisfying than all the rest? I haven’t. Sure, personal taste factors in, but there’s usually general agreement between players as to which ending is the best or “real” ending.
The worst examples of the favored ending are Choose Your Own Adventure books, where there’s usually only one good ending, a couple of pretty crappy endings, and a ton of endings where you die, lose everything important to you, and/or inadvertently aid the villain and feel like a total loser. The only way to reach the good ending is by memorizing your every move and using the process of elimination.
It’s just like playing a video game from the late 1980s.
“You enter the brick castle from one of many doors. Repetitive, ominous music plays. You’ll hear this music in your head when you try to sleep tonight. Years later, you’ll start humming it for no discernible reason. Then you’ll spend twenty minutes trying to remember where you heard that song.”
> Continue into the castle…
“You reach a large pit of bubbling lava, or maybe it’s tomato soup.”
> Try to jump over the pit of lava.
> Wait for your timer to reach zero, then plummet downward through the floor into infinite nothingness.
> Ask your brother to help you jump over the pit of lava.
“You try to jump over the pit of lava. You pressed the A button a half-second too early. You fall into the lava, which is definitely not tomato soup. As your flesh peels off of your bones, you imagine what might’ve happened if you decided to go on that bird-hunting trip with your dog instead. At least you wouldn’t have jumped into a pit of lava.”
“In your last moments of consciousness, you wonder why you thought your plumbing skills made you qualified to venture into hazardous dungeons to fight giant, fire-breathing reptilian dictators, all for the love of a woman. You can only hope your brother will succeed where you failed.”
“If it’s any consolation, the princess was in another castle anyway.”
GAME OVER
Pitfall 2: Every Ending Sucks
If you’re playing an IF written by a remarkably creative author, you might encounter several equally “real” endings that are determined by your choices. Though some paths end better for different characters, none of them feel like the canonical ending. None are obviously the properly intended ending.
How happy are you with any of these endings? Knowing it just as easily could’ve ended some other way, how legitimate or conclusive do they feel? There usually seems to be something trivial or unsatisfying about all of them from a storytelling perspective. After all, how many surprising yet inevitable endings could there be to a story?
Part 2 of “Endings in Interactive Fiction” will be available Wednesday morning. Please let me know what you think so far. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? I’ve already written most of part 2, but I would love to incorporate any interesting ideas or questions that come up before I post it.
Update
Part 2 is up now.
2 Trackbacks
[...] Jeremiah Mattocks Geek by profession. Writer by obsession. Skip to content HomeBlogAboutPortfolioContact « Endings in Interactive Fiction, Part 1 of 2 [...]
[...] “Endings in Interactive Fiction, Part 1 of 2″ http://www.jeremiahmattocks.com/blog/endings-in-interactive-fiction-part-1-of-2 [...]