Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 171)

Trigger Happy
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is a small step toward narrative interactivity—but only
a small one. In the space-combat game Colony Wars,
for example, every few missions the player gets an
FMV sequence detailing how the war is going: if
gameplay has gone badly, a player’s side is in disarray;
if gameplay has gone well, a player’s side is making
victorious incursions into the enemy’s solar system. But
note that this overarching synchronic story is an
extremely simple one: one side wins, the other fights
back, somebody emerges as the war’s victor. The plot
in fact only branches in two directions at any given
point, and there are only a handful of possible endings
to the saga, depending on the player’s overall skill.
One reason for this is that it would be prohibitively
expensive and time-consuming for a studio to make the
bank of hundreds or thousands of different cut-scenes
needed to create satisfyingly complex stories by
stringing together permutations of a handful of them.
This problem of data intensiveness is likely never to be
overcome. It is not a question of data storage, but data
creation in the first place. It is simply impractical to
write and pre-render that much FMV video.
The amount of work involved is not peculiar to the
videogame form, either. Imagine an author writing an
“interactive story.” Let us say this story will be