Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

Several months ago I proposed shutting down the idrama@flutterby.com
mailing list. The suggestion was made that maybe we could rekindle
interest in the topic if I could write something on why I've lost my
own interest in interactive drama. This is my attempt at that.

In writing this, I'm looking at two distinct issues. One is that my
belief in the value of interactive drama has changed, the other is
that my goals and desires have changed. I have to be careful to keep
the two separate, so keep me honest here.

Let's start with my goals and desires. Before the computer games were
either puzzles (ie: solitaire) or social experiences (Scrabble),
sometimes mixed with some storytelling (D&D).

After computers, the storytelling bit has become quite a bit less
social. It's hard to convince me that as we've watched MMORPGs or
networked FPS games evolve to be more graphical that the discourse or
social experience has improved over the days of MUDs.

And the puzzle bit has deteriorated too. True, we learn how to
optimize some pretty bizarre systems as we learn how to do the
double-tap Up, tap Left, Right, then hold Down combination to do that
radical reverse kick flip onto a rail, but after spending umpteen
hours beating Tony Hawk, or grinding my way through yet another field
of cannon fodder enemies in the latest Whatevercraft I've neither been
seriously mentally challenged, nor has most of the time spent in these
games learning reflexive moves led to skills with any broader
application. I'd have been far better served by spending those hours
working through Tony Hawk learning how to ride a real skateboard, for
instance.

So from my perspective, playing computer games, as they've evolved,
has become an impediment to better social experiences, makes for less
compelling mental exercise than the alternative, and introduces hours
of practice on skills which don't transfer in any meaningful way to
the real world.

But we still have storytelling, right? Here's where my belief in the
value of interactive drama has shifted.

Perhaps the greatest promise I've seen from interactive drama is the
idea that we could tailor storytelling to a particular audience. Just
as live performers can interact with an audience, feeding off the
energy of the applause and improvising for best effect, so we could
teach computers to make stories more compelling to the audience.

This isn't a simple task. Clearly, if we allow the user too much
control over the story we're no longer telling a story, see "puzzles",
above. And when we don't allow control over the story, we end up with
tedium. See "Warcraft 3" (which I'm currently working through so that
I can communicate with some teenagers in my circles).

It's also the case that as we tailor a story we have the issue of
communal experiences: If you tell a story to one person, they've got
nobody to share it with, and the strength of much popular culture
comes from being able to discuss it with your peers. Why else do
people go to see movies on opening weekend? What do we talk about
while sipping our morning coffee in the company cafeteria?

Further, at what point in tailoring the story to a smaller audience
wouldn't we just be better off telling the story to that audience? And
this last one is probably what really triggered me over the edge: We
have *far* more entertainers than we have audiences. Book authors tell
me that they make $1.50 in royalties for a book, but get a $3.00
kickback from Amazon if someone buys that book from a link on their
website. I live near a fairly amazing little music town, but I think
I've yet to find a band at one of the nightly performances there that
I don't prefer listening to over the latest computer augmented pop
"vocalist" (ie: dancer with tits) that the mass market pushes. And I
read 30 or so nearly daily online comics, the authors of which work
for advertising revenues or tips. I've read a bunch of online novels,
one ongoing serial which recently blew by the size of the "Lord of the
Rings" trilogy, all written by their authors for the ego value (often
under pseudonyms, go figure). The process of delivering an audience to
these various producers has far more economic value than what they
produce in the first place.

So if compelling artists are so cheap that they're playing for tips in
the local bars, an experience which leads to social interaction (and
if I'm inspired to join in the music, me practicing skills which have
real world application), why am I trying to automate that task?

I'll still be finding better ways to use technology to enable artists
to express themselves (I'm just joining a startup focused on this), to
enable like-minded people to find each other and communicate with each
other through networks and computers, to help further fragment the
audience so that we can break the monopoly of the mass-market
pablum. But the direction of computer games, and the idea of offering
some genericized personalized experience of entertainment rather than
connecting an audience with a real performer, no longer excites me.

How about you?

Dan