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When there's not so much bickering, I do really enjoy this mailing list. I'd like to have a discussion about interactive drama and genres. My perception is that interactive fiction has been heavily weighted towards science fiction and fantasy genres, especially compared to other genres. (For example, I heard the other day that more than half the paperbacks sold are romance novels.) Is that a valid perception? If so, I can think of several reasons for it, ranging from what technology is good at to what kind of audience likes both fiction and technology. Are we limiting ourselves by putting so much attention on fantasy and science fiction? In the spirit of "less bickering, more doing", I've posted my 1998 experiment in interactive drama which is definitely not in the fantasy or science fiction genre. It's called "Chromosomes and Conveniences", and it was an interactively generated play about four biology graduate students dealing with an advisor who abuses his power over them. The play is broken up into many short scenes, sometimes separated by a short monologue. The first 10 scenes were not interactive, scenes 11 and 12 were slightly interactive, and scenes 13 - 22 were very interactive. I gave four friends of mine the ability to influence the actions of the four main characters and I corresponded with them through email to find out what they wanted their characters to do. The scenes and the emails are posted together. You can find it here: http://www.speakeasy.org/~pgruenbaum/preface.html A few warnings: * The play contains strong language and sexual references * The html is very crude * The email correspondences are not always easy to follow, even for me. But it's interesting to see how getting input from people is very much a back-and-forth process. Some background in case you're interested: I got the idea of using email as a medium to influence characters from something I had once heard about the software company Purple Moon. Purple Moon was making interactive drama software for girls in the 1990s and they created a website where their users could write letters to characters from the software titles. People in the company would write back to them in character. The company soon got completely overwhelmed from all the fans writing in. It got me thinking about using email as a way to be someone other than yourself. What I needed was a story with a small number of characters that some friends could control. Then I realized that I already had such a story. I had started a play a few years back for a playwriting class and had never finished it. I signed up four friends and started sending out scenes to them once a week. Eventually I started asking for their input. My plan was to take the input and write up the scenes and send them out to everyone. But I couldn't do it immediately, or else the people would learn stuff about other characters that they shouldn't. So I delayed sending out the written scenes until I thought enough time had gone by that it wouldn't matter. Unfortunately, this confused people: they couldn't keep straight the relationship between the scenes they were getting and the input I was asking from them. If I were to do it again, I wouldn't send out the final version until everything is complete. It was a slow process. Almost like playing chess by mail. A scene could sometimes take a close to a month to complete. You'll see that the email correspondences can be much longer than the scenes. In fact, the play ends a little too abruptly, and I suspect that's because I became eager to wrap it up. But the people involved said it was very engaging and enjoyable. It got me thinking about scale, how difficult it would be to scale this process up. (Brandon has said something similar about his own experiences.) I'm still thinking about it, and I haven't given up on it. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on genres and/or on this style of interactive fiction. Peter |