--> I don't think you can push the analogy that far... We have learned from the seventies: most projects on Interactive Drama do not claim that their system is creative. This means that, even if those systems claim to be intelligent, they are not designed to replace the authoring activity, and its main feature, creativity. Fair enough. I don't believe anyone is as naive as they were in the seventies about what AI can do. But I do think that people are giving over control that the author should have. Here's an example: in any kind of drama, the author has control over dialog. How else can a character be guaranteed to stay in character?. Imagine that you were creating an interactive sitcom. (Sitcom's are wildly popular. If you could successfully create an interactive sitcom, you could break into a huge market.) The average participant can't be counted on to write humorous dialog. An AI system would be even worse. Unless you want to severely limit the participant's choices, you need to have a quick and witty author who can take a participant's desires for his/her character and create the dialog needed. By now, I'm positive you've come to the conclusion that I've lost touch with reality. There's no way an author can do this with any kind of scale without running into the burnout that Brandon wrote about. (I like Brandon's jazz-like rules. They're very much in keeping with what I found with my own interactive drama experiment.) As I said before, I only have some vague ideas of a tool that would make this possible. I'm pretty sure that if I posted my unformed ideas in a public forum like this, they'd be torn apart. That's why I was curious if anyone else is thinking along these lines. If I figure it out, I'll try to keep you posted. Peter Nicolas Szilas wrote: Peter Gruenbaum wrote :Interesting thoughts. They've inspired me to write down my own thoughts on the subject. Sometimes when I hear people talking about interactive drama, it reminds me of the discussions I heard in the 1970s about artificial intelligence. (I might be one of the few people on this list who is old enough to remember the 1970s!) People were positive that AI was right around the corner and that in a few years, we would be able to program a computer to make good, intelligent decisions on its own. Well, we all know that isn't what happened. The computer revolution took off when GUIs were introduced. That kept the decision making in the hands of people. The GUIs made it easy for people to have their decisions have quick and powerful consequences.--> I don't think you can push the analogy that far... We have learned from the seventies: most projects on Interactive Drama do not claim that their system is creative. This means that, even if those systems claim to be intelligent, they are not designed to replace the authoring activity, and its main feature, creativity.With a story, you want the decision making in the hands of the author. I'm very skeptical about the idea that we can program a computer to look at the input from participants in an interactive drama and make a good decision about how the story should go. We need something that makes it easy for an author to look at the input from participants in real time and make decisions and have those decisions be implemented. It's the equivalent of having a GUI to tell the computer what to do. The story remains under the control of the author and the technology allows it to reach out to many people.--> I undertand that you are skeptical. As a researcher on Interactive Drama, I also want that the story remains under control of the author, but by "under control", I do not mean that the author is choosing each possible step in the story. Rather, I believe that some higher control is possible. The challenge is that the system does not become an intelligent and non controlable black box, that the author is not happy to work with, and which can not produce interesting experience. 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 |