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By Mark Damon Hughes <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>

  Finaly Fantasy irritates me. I'd enjoyed some of the earlier ones, though they were still annoyingly linear. FF7 got rave reviews, so I bought it. FF7 has pretty graphics for its time, and some people have a very high tolerance for sitting back and going through someone else's story, even when it's a really stupid story.

  I'm not one of those people. I don't care about graphics as long as I know what things are. I like to control my fate. I like a detailed setting to interact with, *not* a detailed plot. And preferably, I'd like there to be a real life-or-death, "can I figure this out?" challenge to the game; I can accept a game that doesn't have that, if it's otherwise interesting. But FF7 had nothing that interests me, and everything I hate in games.

  Interactivity is, as always, the thing it really comes down to (see Chris Crawford's book and articles). And interactivity is the opposite of plot. Books and movies and TV shows can have detailed plots, because you don't control them.

  There are two kinds of games. "Non-interactive games" have detailed plots. I hate these things, but some people like being led by the nose through a plot. A lot of games have static, detailed plots, but not all of them. FF7's the poster child of non-interactive games.

  "Interactive games" should *not* have detailed plots; the whole point of such a game is that you interact with it. An interactive game ought to have at most a minimal plot that gives you something to do, and preferably a choice of several plot threads running through the world.