Story Time?

Ahhh, story time with Amy....
Around 20 years ago (yes, I am old) my father brought home a few floppy disks - you remember, the ones that actually "flopped". He said I would like what he had. We loaded it up on the computer my father had built (we were the only people in our neighborhood to have one at the time), and up popped this game in which I had been stranded on an island and had to follow clues to get myself out. The most frustrating part was the linear aspects. You'd type a set of commands and if you didn't type them perfectly, nothing would happen, or you'd get a wise crack. For instance, I had to feed a parrot to make it speak the code for pulling the grotto levers (amazing what I remember). I had not found the birdseed, so I tried feeding that parrot everything I could. Finally in frustration I typed a command that equated to "eat the parrot." Which my character subsequently did, to the remark of, "Well, do you feel better now?"

It wasn't until today that I realized that was the precursor to what we have now. Games, online or otherwise, have always been very linear to me. Even EverCrack was linear in the sense you wished to level and to learn new skills and the only problem was initially, you reached level 50 and there was nowhere else to go. The expansion pack allowed for another 10 levels, but they weren't worth the effort.

Other than playing Thomas with my kid, I do have another hobby... I write. I create worlds, set characters into them, and have a blast making them do all sorts of things. I've been writting since I was around 10 and some become short stories, some are novel legnth, some sit and wait for me to pick them up again. I have one story thats in the last category. A young woman becomes a priestess and goes to a village with a history of losing thier clergy. The secret is that the man that built the church there did so to make up for a terrible crime and the evil of the crime is infused into the church. The result on the town is the loss of young children to a strange plague and the eventual insanity of the clergy. Anyway, one night I asked my hubby's advice on where to go from the point I was at - let me now mention that I've only got roughly 50 pages in everytime I've attempted this book, so it's pretty pathetic as it stands. He read through the section, along with my synopsis and asked about a zillion questions. His response was, "Man, that would be a cool RPG, can't you see it? You could release souls to build mana, you could have her follow clues with her interactions with the townspeople, and every clue gives her access to other stuff, more places, like that chamber hidden in the Priest's study behind the wall..." I said, "What chamber?" His response was very flippant, "The one you need so she can find the diaries that tell about the history of the church."

Moving my mind from a linear set of events to an ongoing set of events is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Everything I study is linear in a way. You look at the history of a culture, you focus on the changes in anticipation of what will come next. I'm not really a creator in the sense that I define what is to come next (other than in my writting, even though I would argue my characters, once defined, determine the storyline for me). I observe, I sit back and watch what's happening and try to understand where it fits in the grand scheme of the culture. Why did my first "subject" take in her sister's child as her own when her sister died? She did it because in her culture, that child was as much her's as her sister's. Why did that child not make a distinction between her aunt and her mother? There is no distinction in the kinship system to allow for it. While she knew her aunt was not the one who bore her, in all the ways that mattered, her aunt was her mother, even when her mother still lived. That "slice of life" type analysis has been beaten out of me in anthro - we avoid looking at groups as static, they are ever changing. And we always no there is not end point....
So why is it that the thought of SL not having an edpoint so darn distressing to me?

I think perhaps my creative side, what I have of it, and my researcher side is clashing. I watch events unfold and look to the history to try and explain them. In SL, I have to create some of those events and I have to accept that it is never finished. Any thoughts of this?