10 by 10 room

Will Right (of Sim City and, soon, Spore) argues in Wired that games can unlock human creativity: “Dream Machines”.

So it’s time to reconsider games, to recognize what’s different about them and how they benefit – not denigrate – culture. Consider, for instance, their “possibility space”: Games usually start at a well-defined state (the setup in chess, for instance) and end when a specific state is reached (the king is checkmated). Players navigate this possibility space by their choices and actions; every player’s path is unique.

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.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Borgstrom’s essay ; while Borgstrom talks about paring down an infinite space of possiblities into a single line of stories, Wright talks about the opposite effect: starting from a static effect and reaching out to an larger range of possibilities.