November 11, 2002:
The term "linear narrative" is misleading, because it doesn't capture the structuring logic underlying the linear form. Linearity is a consequence of deterministic causality: thing x happens, therefore thing y happens. Most of the time the "line" which this type of narrative relates is a chain of these cause-and-effect couplets, even when that chain is disguised, for instance in detective novels or Modernist formal experimentation. "Plot" is a shorthand for chains like this, and while it's possible to define plot and linear narrative as logically distinct, in practice they're usually conflated.
Linearity is inadequate because it's unreal. Real life seldom unfolds in deterministic ways. The roots of our decisions, for instance, are typically only partially opaque. Decisions have multiple causes, grouped like knots or hairballs, or "navels" in Freud's term: complexes of determinants of unequal weight. Anyone who's ever made a list of pros and cons knows this in practice, with the caveat that they're typically listing only those determinants which are immediately conscious. It's seldom realistic to look at real life decisions in terms of isolated causes-and-effects.
One irony of the history of literary ideologies is that Realism, the ideological claim to reflect reality literally, is overwhelmingly based on plot, that is, on abstracted, deterministic causality. It's hard to imagine a more unreal ideology. Naturally the most sophisticated Realists valued psychology over plot, but my suggestion is that ultimately plot is in the way.
At first sight it appears that the form in which these works were distributed tended to reinforce their linearity. We're supposed to read magazines and codex books from beginning to end, in a unidimensional, that is linear process. But, magazines and codex books are in principle random-access. Readers can jump to any passages they like. Think of your mom reading the endings of her detective novels first. The fact that we're supposed to not do this is an artifact of literary ideology. If we don't read from beginning to end, we could get confused, lose the plot, get the chains of causes and effects muddled up. Woe to poor pitiful us.
Role-playing games offer the rich possibility of a really radical break from determinism. By their nature they tend to force authors away from it. Here's an example which is crude but easy for non-gamers to follow. Suppose your character is walking along, and comes to a proverbial fork in the road. You can choose any of two or more possible directions. As author, I can't assume that you'll choose one over the others. If there's an option I'd prefer that you choose, the best I can do is make that choice more likely than the others. For instance I could put a sign up at the fork pointing in one direction, with blinking neon letters reading, "Interesting stuff this way -->." The other directions can be unlabeled, or can have handwritten notes that say, "I went there, it was dull." It's likely that more characters will choose to follow my neon sign, but, this isn't guaranteed, it's merely more probable.
Causality in RPGs is inherently probabilistic. I could make my example deterministic by eliminating the other forks, but if I do this, I bore my participants. The fun comes from making these choices.
This is far more realistic than Realism.
One of my favorite sections of TriadCity is titled "Critique of the Novel as a One-Dimensional Form." You reach it after much exploration, through a dense neighborhood not unlike 19th century Montmartre. Bistros, alleys, noisy clubs called The Agile Rabbit and The Red Windmill. Artists, poets, writers conversing, debating, drinking. After a series of obscure turns you arrive at the entrance. If you choose to go in, your experience turns out to be unlike anything else in the City.
To put this in context. In TriadCity you interact with nearly everything you see. You don't have to stop after reading "A bag sits on the table." If you like you can look at the table, look at the bag, get the bag, look inside the bag, take things from the bag, eat the things you find there, give them to someone else, perform any number of naturalistic actions with them. You have the ability to be active, going far beyond the active use of your imagination required to read novels. In RPGs you participate in shaping the narrative, and what you contribute becomes part of the experience shared by other participants.
Suddenly you're inside a tunnel. There's only one possible direction. You have no choice but to move forward. You enter a series of rooms. Unlike the rest of the City, they're entirely empty. Nothing to do there at all, except look at the rooms themselves. Your abilities to interact, to participate, to be nondeterministic in that lifelike way, are absent. Each "room" is a paragraph from A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Walking through the tunnel is reading the novel. That's all. There's nothing to do except read. For most participants, this is a stifling, airless, joyless, boring experience, which drives home the contrast between the two media.