Blade Runners : Speculations on Narrative and Interactivity

The 1998 release of Westwood Studio's Blade Runner computer game offers a unique opportunity to speculate on a key element of new media forms: interactivity. There are two principal reasons for this: first, the game may be compared to the film—or rather films—on which it is based, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) as well as the "director's cut" released a decade later. Aside from the promise of a comparison between film and computer game for providing insight into the differences between narrative and interactive media forms, this exercise is particularly felicitous in the case of the Blade Runner films. Jean-François Lyotard's influential proposition in The Postmodern Condition (first published in 1979) regarding a dissolution of the legitimizing force of the great narratives of European modernity—those of universal emancipation, enlightenment, and progress—precipitated a wider questioning of the nature and function of narratives in the formation of social structures and individual identity. ¹ Blade Runner has attracted considerable critical interest in this regard as a film that imagines (and images) a dystopian, postmodern near future in which history has emptied out into a jumble of cultural, linguistic, and architectural fragments, and in which individual identity is a tenuous proposition, never far removed from indeterminacy and illegitimacy. ²

It is in this context of the widespread questioning of the forms and outcomes of the project and progress of Western modernity that the discourse has developed promoting the new media's superior modality of engagement with and between individuals in the guise of interactivity. Discussion of the benefits of interactivity over narrativity has tended to align itself with a paradigm shift toward a postmodern, posthuman situation in which pluralist social formations and multiple identity options succeed modernist ideals of national monocultural identity. ³

This enthusiasm for interactivity leads me to my second principal reason for examining the Blade Runner game. It has received a mixed reception in the game-playing community that is indicative, I argue, of an internal tension in the game's adaptation of the film. This tension exists between its interactive and narrative elements. While it has won praise from many quarters (including picking up an Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Award in the adventure game category), one hard-nosed game reviewer, Ron Dulin, has criticized the Blade Runner game for failing to live up to its promise to revolutionize the adventure game genre. ⁴ It was promoted as "the first real-time adventure game" that had "a constantly changing plot" peopled with characters armed with sufficient artificial intelligence to make game play unpredictable and highly responsive to player interaction. ⁵ These promises have not been fulfilled, according to Dulin, who argues quite correctly that the game is too "automated" in terms of navigation, the occurrence of key events, and the ability of the player to play with/in the interface. ⁶

This criticism of the game as too automated is illuminating. It mobilizes what is the key binary opposition structuring both mainstream and critical discourses on computer-mediated interactivity: that between freedom and constraint. Interactivity is generally presumed to offer greater freedom to the media user, who is no longer simply a passive recipient of broadcast transmissions—no longer constrained by an inability to respond, alter, or otherwise interact directly with the media text. Conventional narrative, with its closed, linear, and predetermined form, is seen as the model instance of constraint against which the new media struggle. ⁷

Yet the notion of automation does not only involve the opposition of freedom and constraint. It also refers to the process of regulated mechanical (re)production, of blind machinic repetition, a process whose polar opposite is the human activity of crafting the handmade item. This polarity is fundamental to the analysis of the modern industrial age of mass reproduction, and it can be seen in the film's narrative and figural preoccupations with various forms of automatons, artificial...