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

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

Laura J. Mixon wrote:
>
> 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.

Interesting.  I hadn't exactly heard of this "writer sensibility"
before.  But in what little work I've done as a writer and a game
designer, I have thought, "We don't have to explore literal truth, we
can explore metaphorical truth."  This is a way out of the trap of
realism / simulationism.

> 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.

Those are encouraging words, especially since Chris' own recent words
were more stalwart than encouraging in flavor.  It's good that you have
a partnership.  Pencil me in as an interested author if a commercially
viable system ships on Windows.  That was the dealbreaker last time
around.


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

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.

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