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author, audience, computer

WFreitag@aol.com wrote:


So the envelope keeps growing, and the rowers keep on rowing, and there's no earthly way of knowing just how fast that we are going, or which way the river's flowing... (Sorry, started channeling Wonka there.)

Indeed, measuring progress towards the goal of Interactive Drama is difficult. We see gestures towards it, but few compelling results, and nothing to indicate that the problem is 'solved'.

So, every time discussion starts up again on the list, someone feels obliged to explain to us why we're wasting our time with interactive story system technology (that is, with the very subject this list is supposed to be about)

Well, given the slow progress in the field, someone is inevitably going to suggest, "Less of X! More of Y!" In the interest of getting things done, I'm usually in the camp of "Less attempts at dynamic content generation! More manual labor!"

because their personal interpretation of what interactivity means (or what drama is) is unrelated to, or opposed to, rule systems or computers. It shouldn't bother me, but it does get tedious.


I just think humans are better and faster at composing dramatic rules systems than computers are. I call that sort of thing "writing skill." I don't have any problem with people trying to amplify their writing skill using computers. I just think trying to get the computer to do it entirely is damn hard. Achievable within the next 20 years, but I think we can get pretty close to strong AI in that timeframe also. We're going to need a lot of computing resources, and a way to manage the overwhelming complexity of those resources. A more "biological" approach to computing.

We can strip out a lot of the complexity if we find the right abstractions, but I have my doubts about how much one can abstract away. Do The Sims provide anything more than "boring fish stories?" We just might need a lot of resources and wetware to remain interested in what's going on.

In my own case the issue is most decidedly not the story I personally want to tell. When I want to tell a story, I tell it. The issue is the digital virtual world I personally want to create -- which, to be as rich and engaging as I want it to be,

I really hate the word 'rich' as applied to either technology or content. It's a meaningless gestural word, much like we were taught in grade school that 'very' is a meaningless word. (Usually.) Microsoft is the worst offender, using "rich applications, APIs, and content" in near continuous drone, like chocolate that's supposed to be good for you. So, anybody who talks about things being "rich and engaging" ends up sounding like a Microsoft Tele-Evangelist to me.

requires the ability to interact with its visitors so as to generate the stories THEY personally want to tell.


The job of telling the story can be assigned to various people or things. At one extreme, you assign it all to the player. They tell "boring fish stories" to each other, which are deeply engrossing to them, but to nobody else. At another extreme, you assign it all to the author. Really that's a movie, no interactivity at all. (Well, excepting that some movies are "mentally interactive," in that they can be left open-ended, and the audience completes the film with their own meanings.) A third extreme is to assign it all to the computer. At present, this produces either trivial results or random noise. Neither are terribly interesting to a human.

So we have this triangle: author, audience, computer. Many strategies can be tried within this engineering triangle. Some of our religious arguments are no more than people advocating different points in the triangle. Anybody into Barycentric coordinates? :-)


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

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                         - anonymous entrepreneur