The following notes/passages/excerpts are from the book (pgs. 339-342) The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software by Chris Crawford. eISBN: 9781593270193 pISBN: 9781886411845
My notes are marked in red and italicized. The rest are excerpts from the book.
Interactive Storytelling is NOT…
Some kind of altered computer game – Interactive storytelling is aimed at the general population. The story comes first: plot and character command more design attention than cosmetic factors. Interactive storytelling will attract a completely different set of authors, publishers, distributors and retailers than computer games.
It is not interactive fiction. The latter field is the next generation text adventure; its adherents prize parser quality, puzzle depth, and mapping cleverness. Plot and character rank only secondary status.
Interactive storytelling is not digital storytelling. This term applises to the use of the computer in conventional storytelling as tool for producing components previously handled with other technologies.
Interactive storytelling is not the same thing as interactive stories. This later term is a misnomer and a technical impossibility. A story, once created, is frozen in place by its plot; interaction is impossible. A story is information, which cannot be interactive with; Storytelling, on the other hand, is a process – which can be interacted with.
What’s the difference between an Interactive Story and a Conventional Story?
A conventional story only shows one viewpoint which most of the time it is the strongest viewpoint whereas an interactive story can show all the different viewpoints on a truth which vary between strong and weak.
Pushing the envelope or abstracting storytelling in the computer era
What if that first translation, from Big Idea to story, were not done by the storyteller but by the computer in collaboration with the audience? In other words, we simply transfer the process of instantiation from storyteller to computer. The storyteller still defines and controls the Big Idea, but rather than expressing the Big Idea through a single instance, he expresses the Big Idea itself in more abstract terminology. He communicates the Big Idea tot he audience in the form of a computer program. The audience runs the computer program, which interacts with the audience in such a way as to spawn a story expressing the Big Idea while matching the interests of the audience.
Obviously it is impossible to achieve a perfect match between creator’s control and the audience’s interests; this issue has always existed but has never been a serious impediment as long as there is enough overlap between the audience and the creator… though it is STILL a problem but it is often ignored if there is enough overlap.
I would like to note that this is the area that relates to motivation of reading and re-reading an interactive story in regards of the following:
Seeing Things from a Different Perspective, Looking for Deeper Meanings, Trying out “What-if” Scenarios and Reflecting on Techniques Used.
Getting back to storytelling, the so9lution is to dived each party’s contribution along the lines of process and dat. Let the designer specify the processes of the story world, the dramatic rules under which it operates. Let the audience provide the data operated upon by the artist’s rules. The artist’s process plus the audience’s data yield a single story. The same processes with another set of data yields a different story. This is interactive storytelling. Although the implementation is difficult, the concept is clear and simple. all the other crap floating around about branching, multiple storylines, interleaving, and so on is either irrelevant or secondary.
The paragraph above reminds me of role-playing games with a set adventure. The goals are all the same but how the players reach them is left to their own devices.
The Approach
Start with the verbs! Organizing the design around the verbs completely changes the technology and the design process-for the better.
The storytelling engine basic task is to execute verbs. Each verb can lead to another verb and so on, generating a long sequence of events: a story. The verbs are created and specified by the author. Each verb can generate a number of options for other actors. Which options are available and the rules by which those actors choose among the options are again specified by the author. The human protagonist is given control of one actor and makes the choices for that actor.
Hmm, seems like the audience takes on the role of writer who’s many tasks is to provide obstacles and road blocks for the main character while s/he is trying to obtain what s/he wants out of the story to be happy.
The Erasmatron, another engine the author built, seems to be a rather complex system that many shy away from however it does offer a sound solution to proper interactive story telling. He writes about it, renamed it to SiBoot, in many blog posts on his website www.erasmatazz.com
+++ End Excepts and Notes +++
Regardless of what medium the story is told through the bottom line is that interactive stories are multifaceted viewpoints of a particular story. Abstract storytelling is the inclusion of everything while not focusing on one storyline such as a forest instead of a specific tree.
Though how we interact with these stories when it involves technology should not be dismissed entirely for everyday there is a new way to interact with devices whether with voice, touch, indirect objects, gestures or even by thought.
What about social media? Is that not a form of interactive stories? Yes and no. If we were to focus on one person’s life and utilize the viewpoints on their life then maybe… its not really easy but it is intriguing to wonder about the “what-ifs.”
After reviewing the chapter about Interactive Stories from the book, The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software, and viewing the video from Joel Beukelman about Exploring Interactive Design: Experience Over Aesthetics it brings to mind my final thoughts about interactive stories for tonight… how can the experience be improved while addressing the problem that many choose to ignore which is the balance of storytelling between the creator and the audience?