Flutterby™! : Interactive Drama

Back in around the turn of the millenium, I was interested in a notion that I think we universally called "interactive drama". The notion was that somehow by modelling the core aspects of story and human interactions we could create games that were more compelling. And more a lot of things.

At some point my interest in games waned fairly sharply. The particular incident was when I was trying to get the timing down just right to unlock the final hidden area on the Dreamcast version of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, and I suddenly realized that I'd spent an hour developing an absolutely special case set of reflexes. And the mailing list I ran, that at one point had some pretty high profile people on it, petered out, and it's one of those things that I think about occasionally as I watch things like the way modern shooters adapt to provide a difficult but not impossible set of adversaries, no matter what your skill level (and how you can game them...).

Anyway, with this morning's news of the Zynga/Facebook/ stock crash, I realized that we'd all disavow it strongly, but what Zynga has done, with its understanding of just how much to tickle and reward users, is basically what the "interactive drama" community aspired to.