Against the wall

...or how to stop worrying and start writing interactive games and fiction without making things to complicated

"... [I]f you want a white, or even rainbow colored creature or hand, read how to play good. If you want a black creature with horns, and a red hand, read how to play evil. If you just want to stay neutral, mix in a little of both."
From: The Black and White walkthrough

Creating a work of fiction/cinema is sometimes like playing a chess-game: it's a design made with the intention to take an audience on a journey you have prepared. It is a present to your audience, it's a surprise and you hope it will cause the audience to react the way you want them to. And I'm trying to build a present for my audience, too: I want to write a world. I want to write a world everyone can visit and do whatever he or she wants. And at the same time the visitors should be part of a dazzling, entertaining, suspenseful adventure.

It should be a world much like Jorge Luis Borges' world in 'The garden of forking paths'. In it a writer has left behind a big pile of paper that - at first - seems to be a collection of unfinished novels. But in reality they are one and the same novel: the author has written every possible follow up to his story to its conclusion, thus creating a garden of forking paths.

I've been trying to create a garden of forking paths for almost 10 years now. To realize it I've been learning some programming in order to develop my own writing tools especially designed for the task at hand, I've been working in 3D, I worked with a group of game developers for some time, I've been in close contact with a publisher of interactive fiction, I learned my flash, my html, etc. And, of course, I've been writing. But I am not even near finishing it. In fact: I am starting over all the time, that's why it is fair to say I have not even started writing yet.

So: what's the problem?

Suppose all good works of fiction/drama/art are good because they show people something they could not have seen with their own eyes. Suppose we are talking about a movie, then according to my definition it is a good movie when it causes and experience the viewers could never have experienced on their own. Hitchcock was one of the people to discover we can become scared or angry when we look at a series of moving images. The big question I have to answer first is: what is the experience one can give a user when viewing/playing/etc an interactive piece or when walking through a garden of forking paths?

Interactive fiction and 3D hold a promise, the promise of a world where everything is possible, a world where we can become whomever we want to be today. Which is a bit dramatic, and at the same time it could be quite interesting. But until now nobody has realized that. Not in games, not in interactive fiction. Was Borges a visionary, did he see the path literature would take in the 21st century and the centuries thereafter, or is his story 'The garden of forking paths' nothing more than a nice thought experiment? In short: Will it ever be possible to create such a story and if so: what would it look like?