[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
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.
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.
It's the equivalent of having a GUI to tell the computer what to do.
The story remains under the control of the author and the technology
allows it to reach out to many people.
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.
Peter
I'd love to talk with you more about this, Peter - and anyone else on
this list who is committed to using digital technology to empower,
enable and support collaborative storytelling, and to sharing what we
learn in the spirit of open development, rather than proprietary
advantage. (contact information at the end of this email)
I was doing exactly what you describe five years ago on a relatively
modest MMO scale in Kaon Interactive's "Terra" (until Kaon decided
they'd rather sell their patented 3D technology to corporate advertisers
rather than build computer games), and I was working on implementing it
on a global MMO scale with my company Planetary Arts and our product
"Mars First!" three years ago -- when my key employee tried to rip off
our IP and the ensuing legal battle shut the company down (although we
held on to our IP and won that battle, it was a pyrrhic victory -
because of the costs involved with the case, we lost the war of keeping
the company going).
I spent a few years licking my wounds and figuring out how to best use
my creative talents in the most effective way to make the greatest
possible difference in the world. Last year, I converted our development
project to a non-profit, open-source, 501(c)3 creative studio - Public
Interest Entertainment Corporation -- to which I have gifted all our
assets. I built a solid board of directors, including crusading game
design and virtual reality pioneer Brenda Laurel, independent film
producer/director Ziad Hamzeh, and open standards/consortium legal
expert Andy Updegrove, to help me explore how to create a successful
digital entertainment company on an open development, non-profit basis,
dedicated to public service -- i.e., maximizing value to society, rather
than maximizing investor return.
We are developing on a new model to bootstrap operations with minimal
funding, create some tangible output for the public domain, and then
secure charitable funding for a socially-constructive
massively-multiplayer virtual world environment -- one that relies on
innate human storytelling skills and a deep understanding of social
network dynamics to build a respectful, collaborative and exciting
relationship with the participant-community, rather than relying on
NPCs, automated scripts, binary logic and the as-yet oxymoronic
"artificial intelligence".
All the tools, technologies, management systems, content and creative
output we develop will be released for public use under Open Source
and/or Creative Commons licenses, as appropriate for each type of
"stuff", fulfilling one of the organization's three objectives, to make
top-tier tools of virtual world building and massively-scaled community
management accessible and affordable to the broadest possible community
and thus free the creative energies of professional collaborative
storytelling from the corporate publishing stranglehold.
The key to compelling, collaborative storytelling on a very-large scale,
I believe, is using technology as you suggest - not to replace human
decisionmaking, but, instead, to enable, empower and support it,
specifically to build tools that allow the cyclical Emergent Story
Process I developed to engage large-scale communities in ongoing
immersive storytelling and play. The problem I have found is that most
people pursuing "interactive drama" have had an engineering mindset and
a fascination with automation - and that tends to lead to an artificial
reduction of all storytelling to quantifiable, non-abmiguous binary
choices. That is why I prefer the human-centric term "collaborative
storytelling" rather than the machine-centric, or at least top-down
author-centric "interactive drama". Relying directly on humans rather
than technology to propel real-time evolving story reinjects the
emotional depth and artistic truth that is often tossed out in our
eagerness to automate complexity. (you can see some of these ideas
implemented by Toby Ragaini's story crew in The Matrix Online).
It is like the difference between developing the Web and developing
Powerpoint. The web is a broad technology that facilitates human
communication on an unprecedented scale, freeing up human minds to
explore and create in unanticipated ways, while Powerpoint is a focused
technology that artificially constrains our creativity in
machine-friendly ways, and quantifies the ineffable in easily digested,
business-friendly chunks.
Personally, I'm interested in technology only and to the precise extent
that it facilitates human communication and collaboration. I'm not
interested in technology designed to constrain us to match its own
limitations.
Anyway, if you or anyone else reading this is interested in talking more
about this, check out our website at http://www.piecorp.org/
You may also be interested in my article about using opensource/open
development methodology as tools for social change, "A Lever Long
Enough: Value driven enterprise in the networked information economy",
at http://piecorp.org/aleverlongenough.html
Feel free to email me at piecorp@galiel.com, and thanks for contributing
your thoughts to this discussion.
David Galiel