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