IDrama continues

[Dan Lyke]

Back from SIGGRAPH. Deep breath. Two weeks 'til I head off to Burning
Man, and way too much to do between now and then.

Raimo Lang commented:
> Having a filmwriter backround I'm - ironicly enough - still
> suspicious about the use of the word story in realation of
> interactivity. In the true sense of a word story. Would be
> nice to be converted in that.

I'm not convinced that I'm right yet, but here's my argument:

I believe that if you know something more about your audience, you can
tailor a story more specifically to them. I've seen this with verbal
storytelling, any of us who've told stories to children have done it to
some extent, where the storyteller will draw out descriptions and
compress sections to make the story more compelling to the audience.

Now this only works with smaller audiences, because too large and you've
got a statistical sample, which is why I think it would be great to be
able to let an author leverage their skills to the individual members of
their audience rather than having to tell the same embellishments to a
hundred thousand at a whack.

To try some real world examples, what if you were showing "Raiders of
the Lost Ark" to a bunch of herpetologists. Indiana Jones falls into the
tomb with all the snakes and they all go "ho, hum, what a wimp." What if
we could tweak the story elements enough to make it spiders, instead?

Or even simpler, if we can model the audience's emotional state we can
draw out the suspense a bit longer, or maybe shorter.

Dan