For the past four thousand years of human existence, the ideas of individuals or societies have often been expressed through the use of stories. These stories had been expressed in a few major forms: oral narrative, music, visual art, written prose or poetry, and dramatic presentations such as plays. As history progressed, more complex forms of these media came about in the art of storytelling, making the story more flexible and more complex In the sixth century BCE, Thespis of Athens added the actor to a drama, which added a kind of interactivity and active exchange between the characters of the story instead of a passive re-telling. This essentially resulted in the modern definition of a play, bringing the audience into the present rather than the past, which made the story more sensuous and realistic for them; this in turn enhanced any kind of insight gained from the viewing.

Media were also combined to form new media as history proceeded. The aspect of visual art was added to the medium of drama as costumes and stage art became more prevalent in the field. By the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the media of music and drama were brought together in the form of opera. In the first half of the twentieth century, the new technology of film enabled almost every mode of storytelling described above to be combined into a single unitary medium. All of these methods of expression made the story more flexible because, through this combined use of several media or techniques, it was possible to make the experience more sensual. But although there was a greater amount of freedom in expression using this kind of medium, it was also more difficult to do this properly because there were more aspects of the medium to control; and so with greater complexity comes a greater potential for error. Because the strength of the medium lay in its heightened aspect of sensuousness, it was easy to make this the only strength of a story; that is, to ignore the story elements of theme, characterization, plot, and depth of setting.

But if done in a proper way, the heightened sensory arousal of a multi-media work such as film combined with strong story elements could produce a kind of synergy—a synergy that not only made the experience extremely realistic for the audience, but at the same time produced a nœsis or catharsis in the viewer’s mind. These aspects of story element and spectacle are intertwined, they strengthen and enforce each other. For example, a film that has a compelling plot, complex characters, and a thought-provoking theme is very commendable and insightful. However, if the creator also succeeds in creating a realistic atmosphere through the media of the film (e.g., sets, lighting, music, etc.), then the two components will create the described synergy: the audience will be compelled by the story elements, and the atmosphere will magnify these elements and make the overall theme of the work seem much more real and brilliant to the viewer. On the other hand, a realistic atmosphere combined with weak elements produces nothing but a sensory arousal on the part of the reader and no real insight. This is because what the audience sees will have no real foundation to make it truly feel real in the viewer’s mind; instead, the story simply seems real to the eyes, like a wax statue.

Within the past two decades, however, a new medium for artistic expression has evolved through advances in technology. This new medium adds a new property to the expression of ideas through story—it essentially conflates the audience and the story into one. The digital medium of computers makes it possible to take images, sounds, written text—anything else that technology provides—and fuse them together with the newly-created art of programming. Using this extensibility in storytelling, the work not only evokes more sensuousness in the audience, but the new property unique to the medium is invoked as well: interactivity.

Interactivity provides the audience with the ability not only to enter the world which the author creates, but to initiate an active exchange with it. As Thespis turned the passive re-telling of a story into the active presence of a story, digital interactivity now turns this active presence into an active experience by making the audience and the actor one and the same. This property can be used for a great deal of things; for example, it can be used to make the components of a story non-linear. The decisions of the viewer—who is actually the protagonist of the story—can be used to provide for an infinite amount of storylines, each based on the various decisions of the audience. This theoretically enables the author to place a variety of themes, or variations on a particular theme, within his or her work; the themes which are actually evoked or the way they are portrayed depend on the character of the audience and his or her decisions when experiencing the story.

Of course, this sort of example is nearly impossible to realize at this present time due to a variety of reasons—if it took Dante years to write the Divina Commedia, think how long it would take someone to make an epic whose storyline and theme were subject to any actor! For instance, The Commedia would be completely different if written from Machiavelli’s point of view; but this would have to be accounted for in an interactive work, because anything would be possible because of the variability present in the character of the audience-actor. This kind of experience would not be possible without the existence of currently non-existent advances in artificial intelligence which would enable computerized characters to have teleological goals and motivations, yet the ability also to adapt to their own environment brought about by the protagonist. Perhaps one day a great work will consist of a single artificial being whose conversation with the audience or other artificial beings is the story, like an interactive form of the Platonic dialogues. The occupation of the programmer would conflate with that of the writer and the two would essentially become one and the same.

But, as stated before, all of this lies in the distant (or perhaps not too distant) future. In the present, however, interactive fiction has already brought its presence into the digital world in a very quotidian, almost philistine form: computer gaming. But the arena of computer gaming is not regarded as anything truly artistic because, like Hollywood, it has become carried away with expressing the sensuousness of the story rather than the story itself. This is primarily due to the unwieldy property of the medium in its present state.

Because it is more complex, the medium of interactive storytelling is even more volatile than that of film. Fifteen years ago, computers were not yet powerful enough to display dazzling images or crystal-clear sound and music—so the artists could only experiment with the story elements and interactivity of their work. Because there existed few sensuous properties in the medium, the medium was less complex; it was easier to handle and mold. In this way, the computer game was much more controllable and very similar to an interactive kind of book. These kinds of works, developed primarily by companies like Infocom in the early 1980’s, were generally overshadowed and eventually engulfed by the razzle-dazzle and lure of id-gratifying "video games" like Pac-Man and its descendants. Works like these took storytelling to its bare minimum and made the "special effects" the virtue of the work, because that was what would attract the greatest audience. As a result, the technology which spurred the development of high-resolution video and audio enabled the overemphasis on sensual qualities and the near-disintegration of the story element for storytelling in the digital medium. And it was the digital medium’s unique element—the element of interactivity—which made it possible for interactive fiction to have less story-level depth than that present in most modern Hollywood "trash" films. A passive story has to have its own storyline to motivate it; but a story in which the audience is the protagonist need have no more story than "shoot anything that moves" since the audience is motivated by their active participation in the sensuousness of the game. What the protagonist senses, the audience senses because the audience is the protagonist and that makes the experience all the more realistic.

And thus it is this interactivity which is both the virtue and the bane of the digital medium. Interactivity is capable, with the correct attention to detail, of creating dynamic works of art which rival those of Homer’s Iliad or Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Divina Commedia; and it is also capable of quenching the most lascivious and visceral appetitive desires. The latter has already been accomplished to its furthest degree in respect to current technology because that is what the majority of consumers desire, but the former has scarcely been even conceptualized. Most of today’s computer games which have comparatively strong story elements are generally the equivalent of trash novels or soap operas; the characters and plot may be relatively well-developed, but the theme and the work as a whole is not very unique. There are some software gems which have come close to being regarded as artistic works, however; SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy series of games have generally had very creative story elements and the user can even find themselves intertwined with the lives of the other characters in the story.

The digital medium is still in its nascent stages of development and is very hard to mold into what the artist wishes it to become. Present in modern interactive fiction are not merely the attributes of story elements and written words, as there are in books; nor even is the medium bounded by the properties of lighting, sound, choreography, music, and everything else that is present in the field of modern drama. As stated before, the digital medium possesses interactivity, and this quality can be harder to mold than any other property because its possibilities are infinite. To orchestrate interactivity with the aforementioned qualities, it can be surmised, is a very difficult thing to accomplish; instead of having only one author, a project of this magnitude requires the dedication of several people such as programmers, musicians, artists, and even multiple writers, for something so complex surely cannot be carried out by a single person in one lifetime. But how could Dante have carried out the expression of his Beatific vision if dozens of other people had to carry out different portions of his vision? Obviously, this is a conundrum, since it is very difficult to find several people who share the same insight on a particular theme and wish to express it in collaboration through a single unitary work.

Thus, it seems as though going through the process of creating a work of art that is interactive fiction would be very difficult. Perhaps the answer lies in going back to the roots of interactive fiction and harnessing interactivity itself before trying to orchestrate it with multimedia; for one should master one’s own instrument before playing in a group. That is to say, perhaps it may be worth something to go back to the technology of the early 1980’s and experiment with text and interactivity, something simpler and easier to mold. In this way, we might concentrate more on the text, the interactivity, and the story elements rather than scurrying haplessly to try to manage all of those properties and fuse them together with multimedia at the same time.

This kind of action would obviously not work well in the consumer scope, for who would buy a text-only work of interactive fiction when they can buy something with realistic graphics and sound? But at least some kind of organized move towards the heightened awareness of uniqueness and story element in the field of digital entertainment is needed.

Interactive fiction is just as valid a medium for artistic expression as anything else, but, as with many other forms of art, the avaricious hand of business reaches for what shines the most. Because interactivity arose during the time period at which anything was susceptible to the hand of business, it was taken by it, and fostered by it to serve its needs. As a result, its practice has been hailed in its over-sensuousness as something merely commercial, or as something which is done purely for the sake of money.

This "criminal history" has stained interactive fiction, and in its stead the word has been dubbed the graceless term "video games" for the past two decades. But computer entertainment does not have to be philistine, inartistic, and Epicurean. During Shakespeare’s time, his plays were regarded somewhat similarly: they were mostly viewed as popular by the general public and were deemed to have no real artistic value by critics or scholars; it was only until after his death that people began to look at his plays differently. Perhaps interactive fiction may follow the same path. Today, asking a literary critic to look at a computer game would be like asking the same person to read a comic book or a book written by a child. But perhaps in the future, things may change. All that is needed to trigger this, in my opinion, is for creators to take the time to examine the very foundations which their interactive video games are based on: stories.

Perhaps, with the correct kind of rehabilitation, the digital medium can mature and reach its true form. Because its expression has been truncated by one side of society and captured as its slave, the other side ignores the medium. But if the medium is given freedom—if it is touched by the other side—I believe that it can be hailed as the greatest advancement in the art of storytelling since Thespis put his first actor on the stage of drama.