We Contain Multitudes

I have an idea in my head for an interactive fiction story: a depressed young man sits in a cafe, waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend. Depending on what happens - what she says, whether he even gets the call, whether he talks to the older man reading a paper or the little girl playing with his shoelaces, whether he springs for the expensive sandwich and finds out he’s overdrawn his account, whether an overheard phrase or a stray shadow spark a memory - the young man experiences a different future. Sometimes he reaches out for help. Sometimes he goes home and kills himself. Sometimes he lashes out in anger and hurts someone. Sometimes an instinctive, kind reaction on his part saves someone else’s life.

I believe we are all fruits in barrels. The metaphor comes from this post, which has this quote by Philip Zimbardo, the man who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, about the study that made him famous:

“It’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches.”

Zimbardo is a situationist. He believes people’s thoughts and actions are influenced far more by their environment than by anything fundamental about themselves. As I say in the linked post, I don’t believe it’s that simple: there is a deep and subtle tension between one’s personality and one’s circumstance. Or to strain Zimbardo’s metaphor: sure, a bad barrel will rot the apples you put into it, but it won’t change an apple into an orange. For all the people convinced by a man in a lab coat to shock a stranger nearly to death, there will be some who will never do it.

That said, I find situationism very compelling, especially when so many people seem to make the Fundamental Attribution Error - that is, to believe that the actions of others are based on their personality and not their situation. (“He blew me off because he’s a jerk and a flake. I forgot to tell him I’d be late because I had something really important to do.”) I think that, in general, the situationist perspective is the far kinder one - one that encourages empathy, understanding, a sense of there-but-for-go-I.

Interactive Fiction, and its less popular cousin, Hypertextual Fiction, are a way to explore how situations change behavior. A tightly wrapped bundle of alternate universes, they let you ask, again and again, “What if? What if?” What if he hadn’t yelled at her? Would she still have broken up with him? What if he hadn’t been told he was useless and helpless? Would he have stopped for that stranger and saved his life?

That said, I’ve yet to find a story that takes that perspective. IF stories are frequently second person - “You come to a door. Do you want to go through it?” This means that the central character, the person who the story-verse is shifting and moving around, is not actually being written. Even in third person stories, it seems to me that the psychology of the main character is not the focus, but rather the environments around them that are being created and explored. This makes practical sense. How do you write a coherent narrative around a character who readers can make do anything?

Perhaps what I’m looking for is a riff on interactive fiction, where instead of playing the narrator, the reader plays god. They shift the situations in the story according to their whims, with the main character’s response determined by the writer. This, then, would be a challenging but plausible assignment for a writer: take this character and think through how they would react in each situation, how their personality would respond to the user-chosen environment. How a character who could do so much in one circumstance could do so badly in another.

I’ve yet to find this. Of course, I haven’t actually read many pieces of interactive fiction. For some reason, they tend to leave me cold. Perhaps that’s for the same reason we make the fundamental attribution error. Maybe it’s why we take the sprawling future and the messy past and weave them into too-simple narratives. Perhaps we’re made to want a single story, a single explanation, even if that’s not the reality - even if we know, deep down, that we are all like Walt Whitman: large, and containing multitudes.