Re: Who is the storyteller?

[Morbus Iff]

Feeling remotely better this week, so I apologize for those who have been
waiting on my eve... ahk, who the hell am I kidding?

>> Is it enough, then, to let the camera angles be all in the head of the
>> person? Of course, than we lose a very integral part of the "interactive"
>> moniker, but we gain an important asset: imagination.
>
>Unfortunately, we lose something else: potential market.
>
>But that's the snide answer. Think about the concept more as simile. Even
>in the DVDs with multiple camera angles the director still chose all those
>angles. The question is really about forcing the player/audience to look
>at a particular subset of the world.

I see your point, but myself, I think the camera angles are redundant to a
degree. Think of roleplaying games for the computer or the various video
game systems. We'll take the Mario game for the Nintendo 64. That game had
a camera which you could move around, and view every angle of the action in
real time. The only time people really used it was when the autocamera of
the game screwed up and didn't give them a good view of their problem.

Most of the time, I just sat there and swirled the camera around really
fast just so I could see the edges of the screen blur (or attempt to). Will
there be a point that by adding interactive camera angles to a story that
it's too much? If we're not doing good camera work in our story in the
first place, what makes us think that we'll improve the story by allowing
the player to control the view?

>When reduced to text it's kind of the same issue that the interactive
>fiction people struggle with, how to represent the world beyond the story
>elements without getting bogged down in all the tired little details.

What about animation with a bit of still life? Think the closeup of the
eyeball in the original Psycho. That was a photo, but damn, it looked good
for that minute it was on screen - the slow descent into the eye was all I
needed to create that scene.

Starship Titanic probably did one of the best jobs commercially as an
interactive fiction game - and did better on the website, making it more
interactive by sending email to your box, and using cookies to control
different aspect (which would have to be used in any sort of interactive
web game/story, I think).

Yet Starship Titanic was basically filled with encounters only. You saw a
guy, perhaps the background pulsed, perhaps his eyes shifted from back and
forth. You filled in the details of the scene by looking at the picture,
and then filled in the body of the story by reading the text.

>> Another idea we had with this HTML world/game was to grab information from
>> the player first - where they lived, if anyone died recently, some personal
>> information from them that would help us to make the story closer to
>> reality for them... again, that something that could be linked to.
>
>Now we're talking. When that headcold wears off howzabout riffing in this
>direction for a while?

In the very preliminary stages of talking about this, the major first step
to be hurdled was sex. We all know we're different, so I'll cut the crap
with furthering the discussion.

With females, we had fallen into the stereotype roll, which as I look on it
now, was probably going to be our first error. We had questions like "Have
you known anyone who has been raped? Or yourself?", "Do you have
children?", "Do you have a wellpaying job?", "Has anyone died in your
family?" and so on.

Before I go on, I'll assert that the questions wouldn't be as blunt as
that. They would more be based upon a personality test. I give you a
situation of someone being raped or the like idea, and then based upon your
answer, you'd be ranked in some sort of "probably knows someone who was
raped", "probably raped herself" or "has no clue what we're talking about".

The spidering could go on and on. Based on that answer, we could get more
personal, or based upon a positive answer to the "wellpaying job" question,
we could go more business like - all to hook you up with the "right"
character as part of the game.

The male questions were similar, only tainted by the sex idea.

In our game, we had a core set of characters. Say 10. Each of these 10
closely linked to major personality that could be devised from the
questions. There was the business like woman, or the raped female. There
was the heartbroken husband who had lost his wife, or the sportser jock guy
who used to play football in college yet now works at a shoestore. There
was the kid who was just beat up by the neighborhood bully.

Those were our basic ideas. Comments?


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