OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS, I'd wager that I've spent somewhere shockingly close to a thousand dollars buying assorted cheat sheets, maps, help books, and phone support to assist my usually futile attempt to complete a video game. My relationship to these reference texts is intimately bound up with my memory of each game, so that Riven brings to mind those hours on the automated phone support line, listening to a recorded voice explain that the lever has to be rotated 270 degrees before the blue pipe will connect with the transom, while Banjo-Kazooie conjures up a cheery atlas of vibrant level maps, like a child's book where the story has been replaced with linear instruction sets: Jump twice on the mushroom, then grab the gold medallion in the moat. This sounds like a cry for help, I know, but I suspect from the great, looming racks of these game guides at most software stores that I am not alone in this habit. The cultural elite likes to turn up its nose at the video game industry, but if one measure of artistic achievement is the number of Cliff's Notes-style pamphlets published to make a work more accessible, then the Western Canon has nothing on Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid.

The need for such guides is both a blessing and a curse. Games have complexified tremendously in recent years: You didn't need twenty pages to explain the PacMan system, but two hundred pages barely does justice to an expanding universe like Myth II or Ultima. But that complexity can also be crushingly annoying. Anyone who has spent any time exploring environmental games like Vampire: The Masquerade or Zelda knows the feeling. You're stuck in the middle of a level, with all the various exits locked and no sign of a key. Or the password for the control room you thought you found two hours ago turns out not to work. Or the worst case: You're wandering aimlessly through hallways, like those famous tracking shots from The Shining, and you've got no real idea what you're supposed to be doing next.

This aimlessness is the price of interactivity. You’re more in control of the narrative now, but your supply of information about the narrative -- who you should talk to next, where that mysterious package has been hidden -- is only partial, and so playing one of these games is ultimately all about filling in that information gap. When it works, it can be exhilarating, but when it doesn't -- well, that's when you start shelling out the fifteen bucks for the cheat sheet. And then you find yourself hunched over the computer screen, help guide splayed open on the desk, flipping back and forth between the virtual world and the level maps, trying to find your way. After a certain point -- perhaps when the level maps don't turn out to be all that helpful, or perhaps when you find yourself reading the help guides over dinner -- you start asking yourself: Why is this fun again?

THE BALANCING ACT between creating open-ended game environments and utterly bewildering the players is probably the single most important issue facing game designers today. To a certain extent, this is a problem of dimension: The old 2-D "side-scrollers" had a kind of narrative line built into their very physics; you could go forwards or backwards, but that was all. To use the old Disney World expression, these games were "stories on a rail." You could pause in midstream, and even venture back a few scenes, but the lack of a third dimension kept you locked onto a single story line whether you liked it or not.

Now that our graphics cards can handle 3-D environments with startling ease, some game designs have dealt with the narrative challenge posed by the added dimension by eliminating story altogether. The "narrative" behind a Quake death match is effectively: "I killed these two guys, then I grabbed the really big gun, then I killed three other guys, then I got killed, then I respawned and killed a few more guys." (Even that ultimate limit point of storytelling -- death itself -- has no real impact in QuakeSpace.) But despite the success of titles like Quake and Unreal, the narrative impulse is alive and well in the video game world, but it is struggling with its interface conventions. Stories imply a sequence, and so the question becomes: "How do you usher players through a sequence of events without putting them on a rail?"

"One of the best fundamental principles that anybody ever expressed to me about game design is that games should teach you how to play them," says Hardy LeBel, designer of the newly released Oni, from Bungie Studios. An action title deeply influenced by Japanese animé films like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, Oni follows the story of a young cybernaut named Konoko and her battle against an industrial espionage outfit called, predictably enough, The Syndicate. Designed by real-world architects, the game levels are massive in scale: huge warehouses, airports, and industrial parks. And while much of the game revolves around engagingly realistic fight sequences, Oni follows a sequential narrative, with Myst-like puzzles scattered throughout the world.