RE: Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest

["Joe Andrieu" <joe@andrieu.net>]

Howdy, 

I must say I think you guys are missing the point.  Or more diplomatically,
the point I see in interactive drama is different than where you guys seem
to be coming from.

I don't want stories written by computer. Nor do I want the player/user to
write the stories.  Both of those seem uninteresting problems.

What I do want is for a player to be able to be in an interactive context,
where their actions have meaningful results and the system manages the
experience so that the resulting experience tracks along a well-formed story
arc.  So the player can do anything they want, and as long as they aren't
acting schizophrenically or intentionally acting inconsistently, the result
goes through a good story: introduction, complication, climax and resolution
driving by their own interests and motivations.  They get the emotional
power and engagement of a good story while being the interactive lead
protagonist.

I agree with some of the negative comments, especially that many of the
folks chasing interactive drama are committed to technology for technology's
sake. I think more importantly, almost everyone I've talked to has a flawed
model of story.  [And I've made a focused effort to learn the latest
thinking in the game and academic communities: I've published a paper at the
2002 Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling, attended the 2003
International Conference on Virtual Storytelling, and both attended and
spoken at a few AAAI conferences on the matter, and of course gone to many
GDC sessions].

I also agree with Brandon that studying STORY is a prerequisite that most
people working/dabbling in this area ignore. There are several multi-billion
industries that generate a lot of value by delivering high quality stories.
There is much to be learned there, from Aristotle through to Robert McKee.
I also believe in the primacy of the author... the computer aint going to do
it; but if you give a writer good tools, I believe they can craft an
interactive "product" that delivers good story.

Unfortunately, many of the people writing top-notch stories understand it at
an unconscious level. You see or read a good story and you can recognize it
immediately, you don't need to have a formal understanding or representation
of the story to appreciate or to write in that fashion.  I would also say
that most of those who have mastered the art of writing and DO have a
conscious, formal understanding, are busy enjoying that craft and making
their livelihood at it: they aren't looking for computers to reinvent what
they know so well. Especially as the vast majority of them don't grok
computers and programming the way they do story.

However, for a computer to manage the story experience, you have to encode
exactly what you mean by the "story" in a way that it can work with it.  You
need a formal representation. 

_Romeo & Juliet_ is the same "story" as _West Side Story_ on some level.
Clearly, offering variability while maintaining that type of core story is
critical to interactive drama. And yet, there are very few systems out there
that are even attempting this kind of structured story management, and none
(other than ours) that is using what I would consider a viable definition of
story.  [Apologies for the plug; we don't have our system working, but we do
like our approach.]

Instead, you see discussions of branching decision trees or nodal plot
graphs or "steering" the player back onto the intended plotline.  Stories
aren't the sequence of "plot" events any more than they are defined by a
sequence of words or images on the screen.  And yet that is how many many
people are thinking about them. Once you strip away a particular
manifestation of story, a particular interpretation in a particular medium,
I believe you can define the core story elements in a way a computer can
work with, so you can consistently generate experiences that feel like a
good story.  A good author is required to craft that core story and an
as-yet unbuilt system has to find a way to deliver it to the player.

It's a hard problem, but I believe strongly that it really is just a matter
of time until someone finds a way to make it work. 

-j


--
Joe Andrieu
joe@andrieu.net
+1(805) 705-8651
Realtime Drama
http://www.realtimedrama.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-idrama@mail.flutterby.com
[mailto:owner-idrama@mail.flutterby.com] On Behalf Of Brandon J. Van Every
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 11:35 PM
To: idrama@flutterby.com
Subject: RE: Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest

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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