Re: Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest (NOT)

["Laura J. Mixon" <ljm@digitalnoir.com>]

Dan, jumping in very late, here's my take.

Stories provide two fundamental values:  they entertain and distract 
us; and they provide deeper meaning.  They teach us what it means to be 
human.

A truism among writers is that stories are a string of lies we tell to 
reveal a deeper truth.  Chris Crawford once expressed this more cleanly 
as "Stories are extrinsically false and intrinsically true."   In other 
words, through dramatic exaggeration, distortion, and omission, stories 
dampen the noise and heighten the signal of human conflict, and enable 
us to see the underlying patterns.

I am convinced that the interactive medium can be used to provide those 
two same benefits, albeit in a very different form than what we're used 
to.

Isn't our Grail in essence the Holodeck?  Imagine a scenario where you 
can step into a world where you can explore what it's really like to 
have superpowers, say, or be a member of the first space station on 
Mars.  Imagine that you get called upon to solve a murder mystery.  Or 
the sheriff of a town and the bandits are about to descend.  Or you can 
choose to have a love affair with some hottie.  And the outcome is not 
predetermined -- just about anything could happen.  Imagine that the 
characters you interact with respond to you intelligently and 
dramatically.  Imagine that you can go through multiple times, and 
experiment with different kinds of behaviors and strategies.

I'm telling you, quite honestly, my biggest fear is that we'll have a 
hard time unplugging people from their favorite storyworlds!

As a storyteller, the design of characters and the building of their 
possible and likely responses to the player are the elements of the 
interactive story structure.  And if I do my job right, will entertain 
and distract them, and will provide that sense of revelation, that 
deeper meaning, also.

By creating an interactive storyworld, I may not be crafting a single 
consequential series of interactions leading to a foregone conclusion 
-- but I AM crafting a cloud, or web, of potential interactions, all of 
which resonate with each other and with different potential outcomes, 
create in the end a sense of deeper meaning for the player, through the 
thoughtful design of character traits and the interweaving of a causal 
web of dramatic consequences that the user and the nonplayer characters 
can engage in.

Granted, it will be a very different animal than what we current 
conceive of as story, but I've been working with Chris Crawford on his 
technology for going on 10 years now, and my gut tells me we are 
absolutely on the right track with this.  And that we are on the brink 
of success.

There is powerful story in the mix, with Chris's Tron.  I can hardly 
wait to get my hands on the current version and start experimenting.




-l.

On Mar 24, 2005, at 2:47 PM, Dan Lyke wrote:

> 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