RE: Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>]

Peter Gruenbaum wrote:
>
> With a story, you want the decision making in the hands of
> the author.

As an author I of course agree.  :-)

> I'm very skeptical about the idea that we can program a
> computer to look
> at the input from participants in an interactive drama and
> make a good
> decision about how the story should go. We need something
> that makes it
> easy for an author to look at the input from participants in
> real time
> and make decisions and have those decisions be implemented.

If this can be done, it cannot be done on any large scale.  I prototyped
exactly this problem when I ran The Games Of Mallor and The Games Of The
Immortals back in the 1998..2001 period.  They were freeform PBEM RPGs,
no rules, just I say something then you say something.  In my 1st game,
I took on as many players as I possibly could, to see what number of
players a Gamemaster could handle.  I was writing 40 hours a week.  At
peak I got no farther than 16 players.  They were on many separate
storylines.  For sanity, I got rid of half the players and consolidated
the stories down to 4 storylines, leaving me with 8 players.  Shortly
after that the game imploded.  Over the course of the next 4 games, I
developed the following rules of 'jazz' interaction:

- no more than 5 players, including myself
- no more than 3 independent units of action

The latter in particular became known as "The Rule Of Three."  A jazz
interaction between 2 players resulted in a boring dialectic.  4 or 5
players, nobody would understand what was going on or be able to follow
along.  But with 3, there was sufficient dynamic complexity to be
interesting, and sufficient simplicity to be understandable.

So, if you made a product where 5 people Gamemastered *themselves*, I
believe a viable business model could result from this.  But if you
think you're going to set up a game server and provide GM services for
people, you're either going to charge them a *lot* of money per hour or
it simply ain't gonna work.  There's a reason all the traditional forms
of entertainment are many-to-few.

> You can do this on a small scale with email (I've done it
> with having an
> interactive story with four people), but that doesn't scale
> up. I only
> have vague ideas about what this tool would look like, but if
> anyone has
> heard of anything like it, please let me know. I'd be very curious.

You found the correct tool in the 1st place.  There is NO TECHNICAL
OVERHEAD in e-mail.  With pure e-mail, you won't handle more than 5
people.  Anything with technical overhead is going to be worse.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur

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