Let's take another stab at it

[Chris Crawford <chriscrawford@wave.net>]

I'm not surprised that I have succeeded in confusing people with Crawford's
Overcondensed Milk of Interactive Storytelling. Permit me to decondense some
of my jargon.

When I pedantically insist that a story can't be interactive, but
storytelling is, my concern is to emphasize the role of process in
interaction. I like to posit a grand polarity between process and data, with
manifestations all over the place (services versus goods in economics, verbs
versus nouns in linguistics, particles versus waves in physics, cycles
versus bits in computing). Now, you can only interact with process; you
can't interact with data. Data (numbers, images, sounds, words, plots) is
all reducible to a bunch of bits, and you just can't interact with dead
bits. Process, however, is the very life and breath of interactivity. You
most certainly do interact with a process (simulation, game, conversation,
storytelling). 

Does that help?

Chris