The mailing list has archives. We've had amazingly high signal to noise there, read through 'em and get a good perspective at everyone's opinions.
iDrama is a discussion list for concepts in Interactive Drama. We're a group of people who want to take computer games beyond the current trends towards hack and slash or "choose your own adventure" branching movies, and explore ways to improve storytelling and drama using the computer as a medium.
It grew out of a discussion group that wanted to build commercial technologies around interactive storytelling, but we eventually decided that those who'd been thinking about the problems longer than us had some neat technology, but still hadn't answered the questions of how adding interaction to a story was going to make it more compelling.
My (danlyke@flutterby.com) personal attitudes about the subject change regularly, but as of this writing I'm convinced that interactive drama isn't about the players or audience being in direct control of the characters, but about helping the audience to better explore and under- stand the emotional states of the characters, and about tailoring the presentation of the story to the audience.
Many of those on the list will want to turn the concepts discussed into commercial enterprises. This means two things: Information that you regard as proprietary should be marked as such; but people who come up with good ideas generally make good employees and partners, if we create the right atmosphere this will spin-off a startup or two and the way to find those partners is to put those ideas out there and find out who agrees with you.
To subscribe, send a message to "majordomo@flutterby.com" with "subscribe idrama" in the body of the message. For assistance, send e-mail to me, "danlyke@flutterby.com".
Archives and assorted notes will be kept on the web at http://www.flutterby.com/idrama/