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

[thom@indiana.edu]

Hi Laura. Thom Gillespie here from Indiana University. I do a column for Digra 
called the ivory Tower and I wondered if I could ask you questions about 
interactive writing from your perspective for the column?

This is for igda.org

--Thom

Quoting "Laura J. Mixon" <ljm@digitalnoir.com>:

> Dan, jumping in very late, here's my take.
> 
> Stories provide two fundamental values:  they entertain and distract 
> us; and they provide deeper meaning.  They teach us what it means to be 
> human.
> 
> 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.
> 
> I am convinced that the interactive medium can be used to provide those 
> two same benefits, albeit in a very different form than what we're used 
> to.
> 
> Isn't our Grail in essence the Holodeck?  Imagine a scenario where you 
> can step into a world where you can explore what it's really like to 
> have superpowers, say, or be a member of the first space station on 
> Mars.  Imagine that you get called upon to solve a murder mystery.  Or 
> the sheriff of a town and the bandits are about to descend.  Or you can 
> choose to have a love affair with some hottie.  And the outcome is not 
> predetermined -- just about anything could happen.  Imagine that the 
> characters you interact with respond to you intelligently and 
> dramatically.  Imagine that you can go through multiple times, and 
> experiment with different kinds of behaviors and strategies.
> 
> I'm telling you, quite honestly, my biggest fear is that we'll have a 
> hard time unplugging people from their favorite storyworlds!
> 
> As a storyteller, the design of characters and the building of their 
> possible and likely responses to the player are the elements of the 
> interactive story structure.  And if I do my job right, will entertain 
> and distract them, and will provide that sense of revelation, that 
> deeper meaning, also.
> 
> By creating an interactive storyworld, I may not be crafting a single 
> consequential series of interactions leading to a foregone conclusion 
> -- but I AM crafting a cloud, or web, of potential interactions, all of 
> which resonate with each other and with different potential outcomes, 
> create in the end a sense of deeper meaning for the player, through the 
> thoughtful design of character traits and the interweaving of a causal 
> web of dramatic consequences that the user and the nonplayer characters 
> can engage in.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -l.
> 
> On Mar 24, 2005, at 2:47 PM, Dan Lyke wrote:
> 
> > I'll still be finding better ways to use technology to enable artists
> > to express themselves (I'm just joining a startup focused on this), to
> > enable like-minded people to find each other and communicate with each
> > other through networks and computers, to help further fragment the
> > audience so that we can break the monopoly of the mass-market
> > pablum. But the direction of computer games, and the idea of offering
> > some genericized personalized experience of entertainment rather than
> > connecting an audience with a real performer, no longer excites me.
> >
> > How about you?
> >
> > Dan
> >
> 
> 
>