Re: iDrama or...?? (warning: testy)

[WFreitag@aol.com]

thom@indiana.edu writes:

>The issue isn't modeling emotion or meta-story 
>development, the issue is the story you personally want to tell.

The issue is that you don't know anything about modeling emotion or 
meta-story development (or Erasmatronics or writing novels or Hap behavior hierarchies 
or computer game design or business models for interactive entertainment 
development or applications of genetic algorithms or IF writing or programming 
tools or tabletop role playing games...), but you know how to argue your personal 
opinion about what is and isn't art and how long an artist's training period 
should be and what parts of the creative process should be done in what order, 
so you want to make those things "the issue."

Or more likely, I'm wrong. That can happen, when one takes it upon oneself to 
proclaim what the issue is.

(But if I'm right, then congratulations. It's working!)

>Interactivity is completely related to communication 
>and it is what any 2 human beings does naturally once 
>they are within 5 feet of each other even if they
>don't know each other: "Hi," snear, nod. <em> This is
>my definition of interactivity <em> With this definition
>of interactivity the iDrama box is much larger than the
>envelop most of the discussion on the iDrama lists occupies 
>at the moment.

Yes, humans interact with each other all of the time. Of course, many of 
those interactions have been fairly closely examined already, and their study goes 
under different names, such as politics, psychology, economics, linguistics, 
tactics, history, ethics, anthropology, management, gender studies, education, 
and a hundred other fields. I trust you're not suggesting that our envelope 
must include them all? That would be equivalent to having no envelope at all.

Now, regarding the envelope we've got. The i does stand (as far as I know) 
for interactive. Interactive drama. However, there's a broad sense of 
interactive drama that you're implying, which appears to encompass any type of creation 
or communication of dramatic narrative by humans interacting with each other. 
Here's the thing about creation or communication of dramatic narrative by 
humans interacting with each other: it's no big deal. It isn't rare, it isn't 
difficult, and the vast majority of it isn't particularly interesting. I've been 
doing it, in various forms, since early childhood, for 38 years. Tabletop and 
LARP role playing gamers, collaborative writers, improv performers, BDSM 
fetishists, schoolteachers, and kids playing house all do it every day. (Many, and 
in some categories even most, do it poorly. But some, in all categories, do it 
very well.)

By contrast, the interesting and (to say the least) difficult problem is 
dramatic narrative created (not, preferably, merely communicated) by the 
interaction of a person (or group of people) with an artificial standalone system, 
designed for the purpose, composed of rules of some kind. For the most part this 
implies digital systems, but not always, because sets of rules comprising 
interactive story systems (at least, relatively simple ones) can also be presented 
in other forms such as books or card sets.

I and others do post to idama about other interactive storytelling outside 
that domain, such as (just recently) certain tabletop role playing games, 
because of possible insights they might reveal about approaches to the types of 
interactive story systems of interest. Not because idrama is really about creating 
new kinds of tabletop role playing games or live performance media or improv 
shows or new reasons to rack up cell phone text messaging charges.

Unfortunately, the word "interactive" implied by that little "i" doesn't 
clearly convey that distinction between idrama's subject matter, and just about 
everything else in the universe that can with a little stretching be described 
as "interactive" -- which is, in fact, just about everything else in the 
universe. So the envelope keeps growing, and the rowers keep on rowing, and there's 
no earthly way of knowing just how fast that we are going, or which way the 
river's flowing... (Sorry, started channeling Wonka there.) So, every time 
discussion starts up again on the list, someone feels obliged to explain to us why 
we're wasting our time with interactive story system technology (that is, with 
the very subject this list is supposed to be about) because their personal 
interpretation of what interactivity means (or what drama is) is unrelated to, 
or opposed to, rule systems or computers. It shouldn't bother me, but it does 
get tedious.

Most likely, those correspondents are genuinely enthusiastic about what they 
see as exciting new ways to tell "the stories that they personally want to 
tell"...perhaps involving cell phones and faxes and roving actors and direct 
interactions between "audience" members. Which is fine. They should go do it. It's 
a blast. I know because I did it 23 years ago (with regular phones instead of 
cell, paper mail instead of e-). Like I said, it's no big new revolutionary 
deal or anything, but I'm sure there's more still to be discovered, much more 
potential to be realized, in the form.

Just, do not, DO NOT, tell me that that's what _I_ should be doing, or that 
it's "the real model" for what idrama is about. That's like trying to convince 
a present-day audiovisual tech engineer that it would be better to give up on 
blue laser optical disk technology and work on eight-track tapes instead.

In my own case the issue is most decidedly not the story I personally want to 
tell. When I want to tell a story, I tell it. The issue is the digital 
virtual world I personally want to create -- which, to be as rich and engaging as I 
want it to be, requires the ability to interact with its visitors so as to 
generate the stories THEY personally want to tell.

- Walt