From Ozans to God-modes: Cheating in Interactive Entertainment from Different Cultures

This paper compares methods and objectives of cheating in low-tech and high-tech interactive entertainment, oral storytelling tradition and computer gaming. Oral story traditions are one of the oldest forms of interactive entertainment. The interaction between the audience and the storyteller is a limited form of interpersonal communication and is regulated by traditions or an interaction system called “open form”. Historical records and recent anthropological research data shows that in the Middle East it's not uncommon for the audience and the storytellers (i.e. naqqals or ozans) to try to influence the interactive storytelling process (i.e. changing the fate of a story character) by external dynamics, such as gifts and money. As one of the newest interactive entertainment systems, computer games are based on an interaction between the player and game system regulated by rules. These rules can be broken by several types of computer-game cheating. It is interesting however to see the similarities of methods and objectives in these interactive systems from different centuries. Audiences and players are seeking the same kind control over the system which can lead to new experiences or destroy the system. 1. “Open Form” Audience Participation in Oral Tradition According to Walter Ong (2003, p: 58), in oral culture originality of a text bases on the interaction between the storyteller and his/her audience. In oral tradition the storyteller has to make the audience to participate to the narration to get an excited and emotional response. Therefore each new story session has to be different. The form of interaction and its effects on the re-shaping of the story can be various. Umberto Eco’s “open” and “mobile” artwork definitions are some of the earliest conceptualizations of “interactive” art. According to Eco an artwork after Einstein physics can no more be stable and solid as an artist’s creation; in other words be closed. He suggests that artworks will be open to audience participation and influence, and therefore in the next phase become mobile. Mobile artworks consist of unfinished artistic pieces that the artist exposed to the audience and take their shape with interference of the receiver. In this process, it is aimed that the receiver participated to the text as interpreter. (Eco, 2001, p: 151) He gives examples of contemporary mobile artworks made by painters and sculptors like Munari and Calder and claims that the mobility can (or will) be occurred in the field of narration and gives the example of Mallarme’s experimental (and unfinished) 19th century project “Grand Oeuvre” (The Grand Masterpiece) or “Le Livre” (The Book). In “Le Livre”, the pages are not