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Re: Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest



Brandon J. Van Every wrote : 
Joe Andrieu wrote:
  
So the player can do anything they want, and as long as
they aren't
acting schizophrenically or intentionally acting
inconsistently, the result
goes through a good story: introduction, complication, climax
and resolution
driving by their own interests and motivations.  They get the
emotional
power and engagement of a good story while being the interactive lead
protagonist.
    

You really expect them to achieve this by doing "anything they want?"
Even with your sanity constraints, the range of their acting is vast.
And hence their bad acting.

--> First of all, it is not granted at all that playing Interactive Drama is acting...
If I understand well the point of Brandon: leaving much freedom to the user would simply provides bad stories. But the idea of Interactive Drama is precisely to build a system able to integrate any user's action in a plotline generated in real-time...One might or mght not believe it is possible, but this is the challenge.

The "anything they want" still calls some comment, because such _expression_ is often used to described Interactive Drama, and it is misleading:  I is clearly not feasible to build a system able to meaningfully respond to any user's action: it would require a perfect AI (Science Fiction). I prefer a definition/goal of Interactive Drama saying that the user would be able to do "anything other characters can do". This clearly constraints the story, because it restricts the range of actions of all characters into a limited set of actions (this set can be huge, thanks to combinatorial factors). But I believe it saves Interactive Drama from pure utopia.


Nicolas

www.idtension.com

-- 
Dr Nicolas Szilas
Department of Computing
Macquarie University
Sydney NSW 2109 Australia
ph:  +61 2 9850 9113
fax: +61 2 9850 9551


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