How important is it that interactive fiction be, well, interactive? Can the medium--i.e., story advanced by reader/player's prompts--accommodate stories that don't rely on anything the player does, that don't even give the player an objective to drive the plot? These are some of the questions posed by Ian Finley's Exhibition, a remarkably well-written and thoughtful piece that gives the player so little to do that the piece could have worked perfectly well as straight fiction. Moreover, given most players' expectations, the playing experience in the interactive medium is rather distancing--and yet the story itself is genuinely intriguing, so much so that the player can almost forget that he has no part in it.

It's a simple concept: you're in an art gallery viewing an exhibition by an artist who recently killed himself, and you're viewing it through the eyes of four different people--two of which knew the artist personally, two of which didn't but assessed the exhibition as art critics. That's the story: you look at the exhibition, switching back and forth between the various characters as you please to view all the paintings, and you also get various stray details about the crowd and the design of the museum. In a sense, you discover that the real action of the story has already happened, and you reconstruct it by examining the paintings, by scrutinizing the various characters' reactions to the paintings, and by choosing to credit this assertion about the artist and discredit that. This is similar in a way to Infocom's mysteries, since the point of those games was to reconstruct past events, though the problems there were much more concrete--finding clues that lead to conclusions about a murder, generally. The focus here, by contrast, is on the relationships between the characters, between the artist and his church, between the artist and his country-- well, obviously, plenty is going on here, and much of it is really very interesting. Moreover, the author doesn't take sides on the proper interpretation of the paintings--unlike conventional mysteries, there is no right version to glean, though chances are that the player will feel strongly by the end that a particular view is by and large plausible.

There's an inherent difficulty here, though, in that it's relatively easy to involve the player in tangible tasks like figuring out who committed a murder; it's much harder to make him or her care deeply about an artist's relationship with his church. The distinction is simply the difference between having an objective and having a story to read. To be sure, poorly done IF with a concrete objective can be highly uninvolving, and the author here brings considerable skill in writing and character development to bear on the noninteractive story--but, honestly, making a player genuinely care about the characters and relationships over the course of a fairly short work of IF is a difficult feat. It's true that the player may respond intellectually where he or she does not respond emotionally, i.e., warm to the task of getting to the heart of the character simply because it's fun to sift the material for the truth. It's a rather esoteric premise for a game, though, and it's hard to see this as an IF genre with a lot of potential adherents. This may be because the exercise doesn't really have much bearing on anything outside the game--the speculation and debate engendered by the game, if any, focuses on what this fictional artist was like and what his various fictional paintings meant, not on anything broader regarding art or psychology (or religion or sexuality, for that matter)--which makes the intellectual exercise feel more like a logic puzzle than a serious inquiry.

Is that asking too much? Perhaps. But let's be realistic here: IF is hardly an art form so divorced from an entertainment aspect that it can avoid the requirement of a hook, something to draw the player in, entirely. (Are there any such media? Maybe not, but the instinct, in dealing with visual art or with music, is that those works need not have a hook to succeed--whereas a medium like cinema, even when it aspires to art, faces somewhat different expectations.) And what Exhibition really lacks is a hook, or anything else giving the story a shape; broader ramifications, perhaps in the form of an argument by the author about something with life outside the game, might have done just that. As it is, Exhibition is easy to appreciate as a well-written and well-crafted piece, but it is difficult to imagine that people will be swept away by its story. This may sound like pandering; I see it as realism, an important aspect of storytelling. (For what it's worth, Babel, by the same author, was absolutely terrific in this respect.)

None of this makes Exhibition a bad game, of course; I'd say it does what it does remarkably well. The paintings are richly described, and the character of the speaker comes across vividly in each description (almost too vividly, in the case of one character who insists on filtering everything through her own rather constricted experience, and who becomes rather irritating--but, it seems clear, intentionally so). The characters are designed so that certain people have more or less insight into certain aspects of the artist, but none of them really understand all of him--and the character perhaps in the best position to understand him was in denial about a key part of his life. It all makes for intriguing speculation, and it's possible to develop a measure of sympathy for the artist along the way, though exactly how much will vary with the player and with the way the player approaches the game (for example, getting all the comments of one character at once, or viewing each painting through four different lenses before moving on). Moreover, the depth of characterization is highly unusual for IF, and it struck me along the way that I would find it genuinely entrancing if I sensed that understanding the character would somehow lead me to understand something, accomplish something--even within the game. Exhibition, in other words, may be significant more for what it could lead to--development of a particular character in order to move a story--than for the story it actually tells, where the trials and tribulations of the artist are the plot.

There is an obvious comparison here. Adam Cadre's Photopia elicited similar complaints of noninteractivity, from me and from others, after the 1998 competition (though many others felt the interactivity quotient was just right, of course). The difference between Photopia and Exhibition, though, is that the former provided the illusion of interactivity; the player's actions at least seemed to move the story along, even if much of the story progressed without the player's help or input. Here...well, there's no story to move along as such, so it's hard to say there's an illusion of anything, really. More importantly, the story Photopia told was well calculated to leave an emotional mark on the player--too well calculated, some might say, but to deny its effectiveness is to concede that the game did land its punch, so to speak. It is a matter of opinion whether the emotional tug overcame the limited interactivity there, but here the game is over before it starts--the effect of the gallery as a whole is diffused over the course of the explorations, and there is no particular moment that any player is likely to remember. Moreover, part of the reason Photopia's illusion of interactivity worked was that the game put the player in a variety of settings and required him or her to perform a variety of actions--whereas, here, EXAMINE, LISTEN and SMELL will yield just about everything Exhibition has to offer. As those are arguably the most passive verbs that conventional IF has to offer, other than WAIT, the player has almost no power to affect the environment (and doing anything out of line yields a message along the lines of "I don't do that sort of thing," customized for each character). That passivity highlights, in turn, how little the player can do in the story, and how similar the experience is to reading a long series of descriptions of paintings.

This sounds more negative than it should be, because I did, in fact, find Exhibition fascinating at many points along the way-- the author plays the various interpretations off against each other very well, particularly when a character makes a confident assertion about the artist that, the player can feel reasonably sure, is entirely wrong. The imagery is rich, and often disturbing; the critic's analyses show that the author has a good sense of how to look at a painting. The stray details, particularly when certain characters comment on people in the crowd, are illuminating, and suggest that the characters viewing the gallery are as much under examination as the artist. In the end, though, I felt like Exhibition would work best as an extended, well-developed aspect of a much larger game, rather than a game in itself, and I gave it a 7 in this year's competition.