Will Wright, creator of The Sims and the upcoming Spore, is guest editing Wired this week. He has written a fairly good article on the strengths of gaming, which you guys should read: he talks about how games, unlike any other form of media, allow full range for the human imagination.

We love Will, but we think he's muddied up his argument when he says this:

Games cultivate - and exploit - possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn't the One? In interactive media, we can explore it.

No, you can't... you can only rigidly program in a limited number of different possibilities. Your options for exploration in a game are only trivially greater than your options in a novel. In linear story-telling, you are told a narrative in which one and only one outcome can happen. In games, you are often told linear stories in which more than one outcome occurs, depending on your actions. But really, this is no different a mechanism than choose-your-own-adventure novels. In other words, branching narrative paths don't make any form of art dynamic and it's silly to think that gaming, in its current state, is any different in this regard to drama or literature. The only real difference is that a game might have two or three equally rigid endings where a novel might only have one.

There are some games that are "dynamic," but this dynamicism comes in with the cost of an extremely vague or non-existent plot. What truly dynamic games would offer would be an infinitely branching plot depending on a player's action at any given point. But there's no reason to think that this technology will ever be available: the problem is well known in both computer sciences and philosophy. It's called combinatorial explosion. Consider the French aleatoric novelists of the 19th century. Every chapter would end asking the reader to flip a coin, which would determine which chapter the reader moved onto next: 2a or 2b. 3a, 3b, 3c or 3d? And it simply explodes from there. There's no reason to believe that computers will ever be able to process a nearly endless stream of possibilities, which is why meaningful choices in games are so limited.

More pretentious blather after the jump!

We get Will's point: games are both special and imaginative. We agree. But when Will says we can only imagine books, but we can explore games, he's making a ridiculous distinction. We're still talking about a finite number of possibilities — any outcome that deviates from the programmed paths will need to be imagined. Games may be superior to books in the number of plot possibilities they offer, but they are still largely trite clich s when it comes to important artistic elements other forms have already mastered: believable characters, emotional poignancy, intellectual sophistication, etc. Novels and films possess an artistic and even humanistic quality that games are sorely lacking.

At this point, playing a game is no more interactive than reading a book or watching to a film. That you fiddle with a controller during it doesn't make a game more more so — interaction is about your ability to change outcomes, to influence the course of events. You might as well say that turning a page in a book makes a novel more interactive than a film. In games, like in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels, this influence is an illusion. In other words, for us to imagine outcomes an artist did not intend in almost any medium, we have to imagine them.

We think what Will should be saying here is that games, giving players more branching paths, encourages them to imagine more possibilities. In fact, that's what we think gaming's true strength is as an art form. We're surprised to see one of gaming's premier designers so magnificently overstate the medium's strength.

Dream Machines [Wired]