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Re: Interactive storytelling and me; and a challenge
Benja Fallenstein wrote:
Artists don't need that musical instrument stuff. They'd go sing a
song rather than tinker with the sounds a piece of metal makes when
you mount it on a wooden box.
I don't know why you snipped the bit about the difficulties of being an
artist *and* a technologist. Also, if you spend all your time building
violins rather than playing them, you're a craftsman, not an artist.
Are your readers going to weight your branches as you do? Are they
going to dwell on things to the same degree you do? In linear media,
particularly film, you have control over the pacing. When using
open-ended technologies, pacing is much tougher.
You mean because you don't know how long the user will sit before each
choice point, pondering it?
From my experience with reading that kind of work (and Erasmatronic
storyworlds, too), I believe that the answer is simple: A reader with
at least a bit of experience in the medium will take a very short time
for each choice point, choosing what seems right at the moment
practically instantly after having read the main text (or skimmed over
it).
Yes, but you're smart, and trained in the navigational methods of such
storyworlds. Can you get a *general audience* to make those choices and
stick with it? The adventure game industry died for a reason.
Computers got more popular, people got dumber. Meanwhile, production
values increased. So we got more and more expensive adventure games
chasing a smaller and smaller percentage of smart people.
In any case, there are some places around where such stories are
created by readers adding "chapters" to loose ends of the story they
are reading; writing.com is such a place. The results are absymally
bad. That, of course, is unsurprising; any story that people would add
to independently, without any overall concept to guide them and
without any regard for quality, *in an artform nobody really
understands yet*, would probably be absymally bad, interactive or not.
I disagree. I'd say, rather, nobody has a financial committment to the
quality of the undertaking. Why *should* you put your best work on the
web for free? I sure as hell won't.
I think that's a crapload of nonsense, but I don't think there's any
point in discussing it. :-) Let's just agree to disagree here,
discussing this won't move interactive whatever forward.
You seriously don't understand the issue that money tracks talent? No
money, then talented people are going to go find other ways to get
paid. There will always be a few mavericks who will do it anyways, but
the world tends to starve the artists who don't find a way to get paid
for their talents.
[Understanding = Perceivability, Interesting option = High Concept,
Viable option = Well, dunno, Not same = Perceivability, High Concept,
Dramatic difference = Perceivability, High Concept.]
So you're saying that my taxonomy of "five things a choice point must
get right" can be reduced to the two ideas of what you call
perceivability (things must happen for discernable reasons) and high
concept (make it interesting and new).
I don't think I agree. Of course you can trivially reduce it further,
in the sense that you can reduce the whole endeavor to the single
rule: "Make it a *good* choice point, dammit!" But I feel, for myself,
that the above list is more helpful in pointing out *what exactly* is
wrong with a "bad" choice point,
You feel this way because it is your list. :-)
I'm not interested in what the main character or player
"might" want to do. I'm interested in the High Concept of what I want
him to do, and getting the player to swallow that.
I think what you disagree here is Chris' notion that the perfect
storyworld/game offers the player all reasonable options, not my
notion that a good choice point doesn't offer the player unreasonable
options.
I don't think you've defined who's in charge of the "main character."
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA
"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
- anonymous entrepreneur