I used to think that film had it easy when it came to conveying story. Then I thought about why I generally don’t like older movies: the information design is too often clumsy. Casablanca, supposedly the best screenplay of all time, has a confusing first five minutes, packed to the gills with a telegraph reporting murders, a police roundup of normallooking guys in suits, planes taking off, a pickpocket, a shooting of a guy carrying posters, and the arrival of a German officer. What was I actually supposed to take from all of that? Later context cues helped me understand that the most important bit was the introduction of some valuable transit papers. The problem is that I was pulled out of my immersion to fill in for the media’s responsibility of telling me what’s going on. To live up to modern standards of information design, that sequence might play more like this: the roundup is causing some confusing clamour in the streets below that the camera does not attend very carefully, signalling to the audience that they aren’t supposed to understand it yet. A main character snatches a copy of the police orders from someone and reads it. We cut back and forth from the text to his reaction so we know what it says and how it makes him feel. Next, he discusses with another character the search for the transit papers and how it affects them both. Everyone gets it.

This is the phenomenon of interpretability. Although film isn’t interactive, audience members can walk away with different understandings of what they observed, for reasons that range from having different cultural references to paying attention to different corners of the screen. By and large the attitude modern film takes to interpretability is that it should be crushed, flattened and normalised, that an arsenal of techniques should be applied to ensure each audience member receives the same information unambiguously. That reveal at the end of The Usual Suspects is a masterpiece of information design. After having just barely ushered the audience to conclusion A, the film enters headlong into the ambitious endeavour of switching to conclusion B. One at a time, the camera focuses in on small details in the environment, and we hear flashback voiceover connecting those to what we grow to realise was a series of landmarks that were planted previously in the story. The actor clearly shows that he feels set up in the same way the audience has been. Everyone is able to understand this scene and even go back afterward to recontextualise the entire film. Call me new-fashioned, but knowing such feats are possible makes me reluctant to struggle my way through older films.

What can this mean about videogames? One thing that Medal Of Honor has taught us is that copping the same approach is a dead end. By extending these techniques into the interactive realm – drawing the player’s attention when needed, bottlenecking at key points and so forth – Medal Of Honor presents an experience that is cinematic not just in its grandiose vision but in its linearity. The chaotic, expansive battlefield of Normandy it portrays is sequenced step by step. Rail shooters can be fun, but deliberately crafting an experience to be the same for all players works against videogames’ unique quality. We don’t want another linear narrative but a landscape and a toolkit for the player to use to create their own story. Can film’s lessons be transferred to this goal instead?

Even if the specific lessons don’t port over that well, the philosophy behind them can be. The information design in a film is like its instruction manual, explaining how the film can be used. Film doesn’t actually aspire to zero interpretability, as that would be preachy or expository. Instead the goal is to keep the interpretation out of the mechanics that make the drama function and into the drama itself, to make the audience work where it really matters. You don’t want the audience wondering what the plot device of the transit papers means, instead you want them wondering how much is appropriate to sacrifice for love, which is closer to the point of Casablanca.

What instruction manual do we need for an interactive story? Well, unlike film, the interpretation comes directly from the player’s actions, so players need to understand the landscape and know how to use their toolkit, or else we risk them misplacing their efforts. We’ve gotten very capable at teaching players what surfaces a grappling hook will attach to, or the fact that the fire button makes the grenade explode on contact whereas alt-fire makes it bounce. But how will these techniques apply to new domains of interactive story? How will we educate players on the future tools for interacting with characters? Will the player be able to differentiate the fixed plot device of a German officer from the choice opportunity of how to exploit the transit papers? If we start as clumsily as film did 70 years ago, how long until we can guide players through masterful feats of their own storytelling?

Randy Smith is the co-owner of Tiger Style, whose first game, Spider, is available now for iPhone and iPod Touch.