Good points. Yes, iTunes is computer entertainment, and for that matter, so are things like GarageBand and most uses of digital photography. I'd bet that there's a lot of time spent on hobbyist activity as computer entertainment. So yes, I have to concede that point.
I think you misunderstand what Storytron is all about, but I don't feel any need to cram my opinions down your throat; we can both afford to wait. Within a year, Storytron will have made its public debut and we'll see just how well it works. If, a year's time from now, Storytron is an abject failure, you're welcome to send me a "nyaah! nyaah! nyaah!" email.
Chris
Time, yes; but whether you grasp the system remains uncertain, and your strong animus towards me suggests that you are not making an objective assessment. But why speculate? The demo will be coming out in a few months, and within a few years you'll be able to read all about it and proudly tell your friends, "Back when nobody else knew about Storytron, I recognized just how important it would be." Won't they be impressed with you!
Yes, some of the ideas in Storytron were relatively new when they first came out ten years ago, but have since been anticipated. And some of the ideas are just re-invented wheels. I mention them to emphasize just how far we've gone to make this easier for storybuilders. Our latest wierd idea: bounded numbers. These are numbers that are constrained to fall between -1.00 and +1.00. (All it does is map the number line onto the line from -1.00 to +1.00.) We have all the basic operators for them in bounded form: bounded sum, bounded difference, bounded product, bounded quotient, and so forth. It's a really weird mathematical system but it has the nice property that the user never needs to worry about scaling factors.
But again, the whole point is to make it accessible to non-technical storytellers. We don't expect a lot of people to understand it at first, but once we get some demos out there, and people start to realize what the technology can do, I think we'll get a good mass of talent materializing.
And yes, there are serious applications of the technology as well, although we have shaped it with narrative as the primary application.
All the things you describe can be done in Storytron, although some are easier than others:
1. Reacting to inaction: This can be a little clumsy to implement. It depends upon whether it was part of a deal, or just a basic expectation. The trick is to create an "expectation verb" for the the boss that executes at, say, 9:15 AM and asks the boss to check whether the employee has arrived, and, if not, to take appropriate action. Actually, there are several ways to do it, and the biggest problem would be deciding which method is best.
2. Sure, Actors already respond individually to other Actors. They have a full set of emotional attitudes towards other Actors (they're called P2 values). We even have "UP2" values: the uncertainty of that feeling. For example, Marcy saw Fred kicking a kitten, so Marcy has a very low value of P2Nasty_Nice for Fred -- and her UP2Nasty_Nice value is also low, because she's SURE of it. However, if Marcy is gossiping with Jane about Fred, and Marcy says that Fred is a low-life creep (low P2Nasty_Nice), and Jane knows nothing else about Fred, then she'll adopt Marcy's opinion of Fred -- but she'll have a higher value of UP2Nasty_Nice based on how much she trusts Marcy (that's P2Faithless_Honest).
3. Reactions based on Actors: sure, this is easy to do. You can do it implicitly in the emotional reaction Scripts by factoring in one of the ReactingActor's P2 values for the Subject. Or you can do it explicitly in the Role definition. There are probably several other ways to do it as well, depending upon exactly what effect you want, but these are easy and obvious.
The answer to your question is complex. No, this technology will not yield stories just like those in the books. The experience will be more meandering. But neither will it be random. We have an Actor called Fate whose job it is to keep the story moving along. We have PlotPoints that assess the progress of the story at regular intervals. There's a lot of stuff there to handle these problems. That doesn't mean that they are solved, but it definitely is in there.
To answer your question, "How do you as the player know what the others are doing when you aren't watching?":
They tell you. There's a whole (and quite complex) system for how people know about events and decide whether and how to tell others about events. (There's even a means to record how strongly they believe in the truth of a reported event.) I disabled the system a few months ago because I want to get this thing out quickly and there's a tricky problem in the presentation of the events, but the basic technology is in place. After all, being able to talk about events is crucial to drama. And then there are lies and secrets, another crucial part of drama that is also part of the technology.
Yes, we are showing the stuff to the world before it's done. But we've been absolutely clear with everybody that it isn't finished. This gives people a chance to comment on the technology while it's still in flux. If you don't want to be involved at that level, fine -- don't. But there are a lot of people who really appreciate being able to affect the technology while it's still in flux.
In reference to the BBS, you write that "there aren't that many comments, spread out every few weeks or so." This is incorrect. If you examine the little box in the upper right corner of the window, you'll see that it reports 2270 Posts in 167 Topics by 178 Members -- and we started the BBS in May. Activity has been steadily increasing with time.
There is substance to your criticism but there is also a great deal of vagueness. I can't prove that this system will work, and you are not attempting to prove that it won't work -- you're expressing a gut feeling that it won't work. That's fine -- but your misgivings would have greater weight with me if you were well-versed in the technology. There are scores of naysayers who can't be bothered to study the technology -- they have already made up their minds and nothing will convince them. There are a goodly number of people who have made a preliminary examination of the technology; most of these seem more confused than pessimistic. There are a handful of people who have really dived into the technology and every one of these people is excited about the possibilities of the technology. They are full of ideas about how to improve the technology, yes, but they believe in it. Not one person who has expressed fundamental doubts about the technology has done so in a manner connoting deep familiarity with it. That gives me a lot of confidence. But I will not ask you to make any leap of faith. All I ask is fairness. Wait for the demo. Wait for other people to do the hard work of learning the technology, and see how they react to it. You can always jump on the bandwagon later.
Yep, there's no demo. People have been screaming for a demo for years. And we nearly started working on a "dead demo" -- a fake representation of what would happen. We decided that our time would be better spent on building the real thing.
Moreover, I have been building this thing from the ground up to be viable as the foundation for an industry. This has required months and months of effort to build in capabilities that won't even show up for years. It's easy to slap together something that works once and can't be revised, but building something that many different people can mess with, that is extensible and malleable -- this takes a lot more work. That's why it has taken so much time to get the pieces together. But we already have a demo on our laptops -- it's not very good but it gets the basic idea across. Please see Cory Doctorow's observations on it a BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/15/storytron_int eractiv.html
We're now in the process of improving the demo. However, it will be some months before we can release a downloadable demo.
Lastly, a higher-level point: all that theoretical stuff may be difficult to digest, but ultimately it is the true basis of understanding. If you see a demo, you get just one glimpse of one manifestation of the possibilities. If you understand the theory, you can see all the possibilities. It takes a lot more effort to understand the theory, but it yields a correspondingly greater return.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Yes, the Storytron technology presents only a first-level approximation of drama, and as such does not address many of the finer points. But for now, we don't need to address the finer points to produce entertaining and commercially successful works.
Your statement is predicated upon the assumption that you grasp the model. I have written many times that we believe it takes about three months of full-time effort for somebody to really understand the technology. You've had less than 24 hours. Perhaps you are making a hasty judgement?
The point and click scripting system used in the Erasmatron eight years ago was most certainly NOT a "catastrophic failure" -- the people who actually used the Erasmatron cited it as one of the most enjoyable aspects of the system. There were plenty of other problems with that design, but point-and-click programming was not one of them. And the new generation scripting system that is used in Storytron is even better. You're in the difficult position of asserting that something is impossible when it hasn't really been beaten to death. Moreover, remember that the scripting system in Storytron is not meant to be a general-purpose programming language. It's a narrow-purpose scripting system. It doesn't even have any flow control! So don't be so quick to dismiss what you haven't examined.
Along the same lines, it might be premature of you to dismiss Storytron's basic idea as already having been done when you didn't even bother to read the entire interview, much less any of the documentation on the technology itself.
No, I am clear that there are some people who understand the technology quite easily. It's just a matter of orientation. I don't expect everybody to get it instantly.
You're right when you note that the inability to explain a concept or principle bespeaks a failure to understand that concept or principle. However, this Storytron stuff is not a concept or principle -- it's a technology. There are actually a lot of concepts and principles that underlie the technology, and I do explain those concepts and principles at some length in various places, such as my book on interactive storytelling.
"Everybody" hates me? Does Ezra Whorton hate me? Sandy Piscator? Johnny Fisher? What kind of scientific study did you do to arrive at this conclusion?;-)
I'd suggest that your statement would be more accurate if you rephrased it to "Everybody I know hates Chris." And then of course it would be reasonable to ask how many people you know.
There certainly are some people who hold my work in high esteem -- I keep getting paid to speak at all manner of conferences. However, I agree that my caustic remarks about the games biz have alienated a great many of the younger members of the games industry. The older guys are generally more sympathetic to my points, because they've been around the block a few times and recognize that, while my phrasing might be undiplomatic, my basic points are often sound.
And even more interesting is the fact that some people hate me because they don't like my ideas. What does that suggest?
No, computer games are a tiny subset of computer entertainment software. Or, they should be. That's the whole point of that extended analogy. And the fact is that right now, computer games are just about 100% of all computer entertainment software -- which means that there's something really huge that is just waiting to happen: computer entertainment software for "The Rest of Us".
Yep, this is hard for some people to grasp. Until there is a demo available to the public, a certain number of people will react as you have: "I just don't get it." There are other people who do get it. It's really difficult to grasp something that is so utterly different from anything that has come before. If you were to follow some of the discussions on the BBS, you'd see that there are people who really do understand it. We have written vast amounts of material trying to explain it to people, and some people just can't seem to understand. I suggest that you withold judgment and wait for a downloadable demo, which will probably become available early next year.
It's true that human-moderated RPGs are able to get some real dramatic interaction in them. But that's because they're human-moderated. As soon as we move to the computer, we lose all that.
There's no need to solve the strong AI problem, because this is not the real world we're simulating. This is a story. It is populated not with people but with characters. Characters aren't supposed to act realistically, they are supposed to act dramatically. What would happen if we solved the strong AI problem for Captain Kirk and one of his crewmen was trapped on a hostile planet? Kirk would say "Screw him, I'm not going to risk the ship for one crewman." Very realistic. Very undramatic. In a real story, Kirk would say, "Even though the odds against saving him are hundreds to one, and even though attempting to save him will put the ship at a very high risk of disaster, I'm going to attempt to save him." And then, by the absolute, inexorable laws of dramatic physics, he'll pull it off. It HAS to be that way -- this is drama, not the real world!
We don't have to solve any AI problem because this is not an AI problem; it's an artistic problem and is solved by each storybuilder as per their own artistic sensibilities as expressed in their scripts and verbs.
Interactivity is the enemy of plot, not narrative. Don't think in terms of a book -- that's a story. Think in terms of Grandpa telling little Annie a bedtime story. If Annie interrupts Grandpa in mid-story and wants the story to go in another direction, you think Grandpa's going to say "Shut up, you brat! You're messing up my carefully prepared plot!!!"
Have you actually read the stuff on the website? There's a mountain of material there: the overview, the tutorials, the reference documentation and, above all, the BBS, where we have had extensive discussions on these subjects for months. I know you don't want to wade through all that stuff, but it's where the answers are. I agree, it's not as good as actually playing the thing; for that, we need to get our demo running, and I just yesterday got the demo operational (but really lousy right now). Over the next few days we'll be fleshing out the demo so that when I leave for Europe next week I'll have something nicer to show off there. Unfortunately, the demo won't be made available for download for some months yet (why? three little letters: RMI).
My gold standard comes when the player feels as if he's interacting with an interesting character in a dramatically interesting way. And I'm pretty confident we'll get that.
RPGs are fundamentally about solving physical problems -- that is to say, obtaining something, killing something, moving something -- there's always a THING in the center of the action. Interactive storytelling is primarily about people -- about interacting with characters. Yes, there are things in Storytron (we call them Props), but they're not that important. The central issue in interactive storytelling is what you do with and to other people. And that "do" part means VERBS -- lots of verbs allowing to interact with actors in lots of different ways.
I'm quite surprised at the amount of activity in response to this article; somebody just advised me of it and it appears to be rather busy. Here are some generic responses:
1. First, there are always skeptics and naysayers who have disparaging things to say about the Storytron technology. Some of this is due to the fact that my often harsh criticisms of the games biz have antagonized many people. That's OK -- but I just want to advise other readers that some portion of the negative comments are a response to my comments about the games industry, not a response to the Storytron technology itself.
2. Second, I remind everybody that Storytron technology is exceedingly complex, largely because narrative is exceedingly complex. I have spent years trying to trim it down to the absolute minimum required to do the job, but that absolute minimum is still overwhelming to beginners.
3. I'm always surprised by the comments along the lines of "How does this differ from Technology X?" All I can say in answer to such questions is "read the documentation". Storytron technology is so utterly different from role-playing, MUDs, interactive fiction, and other technologies that it's difficult to know how to begin to answer such a question. It's rather like somebody asking you the difference between a spreadsheet and a word processor. Well, yes, they do both allow you to set fonts. They both allow you to create tables. They both allow you to print out documents. But they are so completely different in form and purpose that it's a waste of time trying to come up with a list of differences. The easiest way to differentiate Storytron from the other stuff is to cite its purpose: to provide genuine, honest-to-gum interactive storytelling. (See next point)
4. A common question (already offered here) is, "What is interactive storytelling, anyway?" If you attempt to answer this question by comparing it to other forms, you get confusion. Interactive storytelling cannot be described as "just like a game, only..." or "kinda like interactive fiction, except..." This approach always yields even more confusion. I haven't spent 14 years re-inventing the wheel -- this thing really is profoundly different from other stuff out there. The closest to it is Facade -- and Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas will be quick to point out the many, many differences between Storytron and Facade.
It's not a story, it's storytelling, and the difference between the two is profound -- and confusing. A story is noun or data; storytelling is verb or process. That's why there's not a plot in it; only stories can have plots. Storytelling does not intrinsically include plot. Think of it this way: the difference between story and storytelling is analogous to the difference between a cake and cooking. A cake can have texture, but cooking doesn't have texture. Texture is a consequence of cooking, but not a component of cooking. In the same way, plot is a consequence of storytelling, but not a component of storytelling.
So what is it? As we have built it, interactive storytelling puts the player in the role of protagonist in a dramatically rich environment, and then permits the player to interact with other actors in a dramatically rich fashion. The size of the verb vocabulary is what makes it so different; Storytron can provide thousands of verbs. No more just picking things up, using them, destroying them, and so forth. Most of the verbs provide interaction with PEOPLE, not THINGS. We already have about 80 verbs (few of which are fleshed out, though) and intend to have hundreds by the time we release the technology.
Anyway, if you want to learn more, go to the website.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. Yes, iTunes is computer entertainment, and for that matter, so are things like GarageBand and most uses of digital photography. I'd bet that there's a lot of time spent on hobbyist activity as computer entertainment. So yes, I have to concede that point. I think you misunderstand what Storytron is all about, but I don't feel any need to cram my opinions down your throat; we can both afford to wait. Within a year, Storytron will have made its public debut and we'll see just how well it works. If, a year's time from now, Storytron is an abject failure, you're welcome to send me a "nyaah! nyaah! nyaah!" email. Chris
Time, yes; but whether you grasp the system remains uncertain, and your strong animus towards me suggests that you are not making an objective assessment. But why speculate? The demo will be coming out in a few months, and within a few years you'll be able to read all about it and proudly tell your friends, "Back when nobody else knew about Storytron, I recognized just how important it would be." Won't they be impressed with you!
Yes, some of the ideas in Storytron were relatively new when they first came out ten years ago, but have since been anticipated. And some of the ideas are just re-invented wheels. I mention them to emphasize just how far we've gone to make this easier for storybuilders. Our latest wierd idea: bounded numbers. These are numbers that are constrained to fall between -1.00 and +1.00. (All it does is map the number line onto the line from -1.00 to +1.00.) We have all the basic operators for them in bounded form: bounded sum, bounded difference, bounded product, bounded quotient, and so forth. It's a really weird mathematical system but it has the nice property that the user never needs to worry about scaling factors.
But again, the whole point is to make it accessible to non-technical storytellers. We don't expect a lot of people to understand it at first, but once we get some demos out there, and people start to realize what the technology can do, I think we'll get a good mass of talent materializing.
And yes, there are serious applications of the technology as well, although we have shaped it with narrative as the primary application.
All the things you describe can be done in Storytron, although some are easier than others:
1. Reacting to inaction: This can be a little clumsy to implement. It depends upon whether it was part of a deal, or just a basic expectation. The trick is to create an "expectation verb" for the the boss that executes at, say, 9:15 AM and asks the boss to check whether the employee has arrived, and, if not, to take appropriate action. Actually, there are several ways to do it, and the biggest problem would be deciding which method is best.
2. Sure, Actors already respond individually to other Actors. They have a full set of emotional attitudes towards other Actors (they're called P2 values). We even have "UP2" values: the uncertainty of that feeling. For example, Marcy saw Fred kicking a kitten, so Marcy has a very low value of P2Nasty_Nice for Fred -- and her UP2Nasty_Nice value is also low, because she's SURE of it. However, if Marcy is gossiping with Jane about Fred, and Marcy says that Fred is a low-life creep (low P2Nasty_Nice), and Jane knows nothing else about Fred, then she'll adopt Marcy's opinion of Fred -- but she'll have a higher value of UP2Nasty_Nice based on how much she trusts Marcy (that's P2Faithless_Honest).
3. Reactions based on Actors: sure, this is easy to do. You can do it implicitly in the emotional reaction Scripts by factoring in one of the ReactingActor's P2 values for the Subject. Or you can do it explicitly in the Role definition. There are probably several other ways to do it as well, depending upon exactly what effect you want, but these are easy and obvious.
The answer to your question is complex. No, this technology will not yield stories just like those in the books. The experience will be more meandering. But neither will it be random. We have an Actor called Fate whose job it is to keep the story moving along. We have PlotPoints that assess the progress of the story at regular intervals. There's a lot of stuff there to handle these problems. That doesn't mean that they are solved, but it definitely is in there.
To answer your question, "How do you as the player know what the others are doing when you aren't watching?":
They tell you. There's a whole (and quite complex) system for how people know about events and decide whether and how to tell others about events. (There's even a means to record how strongly they believe in the truth of a reported event.) I disabled the system a few months ago because I want to get this thing out quickly and there's a tricky problem in the presentation of the events, but the basic technology is in place. After all, being able to talk about events is crucial to drama. And then there are lies and secrets, another crucial part of drama that is also part of the technology.
Yes, we are showing the stuff to the world before it's done. But we've been absolutely clear with everybody that it isn't finished. This gives people a chance to comment on the technology while it's still in flux. If you don't want to be involved at that level, fine -- don't. But there are a lot of people who really appreciate being able to affect the technology while it's still in flux.
In reference to the BBS, you write that "there aren't that many comments, spread out every few weeks or so." This is incorrect. If you examine the little box in the upper right corner of the window, you'll see that it reports 2270 Posts in 167 Topics by 178 Members -- and we started the BBS in May. Activity has been steadily increasing with time.
There is substance to your criticism but there is also a great deal of vagueness. I can't prove that this system will work, and you are not attempting to prove that it won't work -- you're expressing a gut feeling that it won't work. That's fine -- but your misgivings would have greater weight with me if you were well-versed in the technology. There are scores of naysayers who can't be bothered to study the technology -- they have already made up their minds and nothing will convince them. There are a goodly number of people who have made a preliminary examination of the technology; most of these seem more confused than pessimistic. There are a handful of people who have really dived into the technology and every one of these people is excited about the possibilities of the technology. They are full of ideas about how to improve the technology, yes, but they believe in it. Not one person who has expressed fundamental doubts about the technology has done so in a manner connoting deep familiarity with it. That gives me a lot of confidence. But I will not ask you to make any leap of faith. All I ask is fairness. Wait for the demo. Wait for other people to do the hard work of learning the technology, and see how they react to it. You can always jump on the bandwagon later.
Yep, there's no demo. People have been screaming for a demo for years. And we nearly started working on a "dead demo" -- a fake representation of what would happen. We decided that our time would be better spent on building the real thing.
Moreover, I have been building this thing from the ground up to be viable as the foundation for an industry. This has required months and months of effort to build in capabilities that won't even show up for years. It's easy to slap together something that works once and can't be revised, but building something that many different people can mess with, that is extensible and malleable -- this takes a lot more work. That's why it has taken so much time to get the pieces together. But we already have a demo on our laptops -- it's not very good but it gets the basic idea across. Please see Cory Doctorow's observations on it a BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/15/storytron_int eractiv.html
We're now in the process of improving the demo. However, it will be some months before we can release a downloadable demo.
Lastly, a higher-level point: all that theoretical stuff may be difficult to digest, but ultimately it is the true basis of understanding. If you see a demo, you get just one glimpse of one manifestation of the possibilities. If you understand the theory, you can see all the possibilities. It takes a lot more effort to understand the theory, but it yields a correspondingly greater return.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Yes, the Storytron technology presents only a first-level approximation of drama, and as such does not address many of the finer points. But for now, we don't need to address the finer points to produce entertaining and commercially successful works.
Your statement is predicated upon the assumption that you grasp the model. I have written many times that we believe it takes about three months of full-time effort for somebody to really understand the technology. You've had less than 24 hours. Perhaps you are making a hasty judgement?
The point and click scripting system used in the Erasmatron eight years ago was most certainly NOT a "catastrophic failure" -- the people who actually used the Erasmatron cited it as one of the most enjoyable aspects of the system. There were plenty of other problems with that design, but point-and-click programming was not one of them. And the new generation scripting system that is used in Storytron is even better. You're in the difficult position of asserting that something is impossible when it hasn't really been beaten to death. Moreover, remember that the scripting system in Storytron is not meant to be a general-purpose programming language. It's a narrow-purpose scripting system. It doesn't even have any flow control! So don't be so quick to dismiss what you haven't examined.
Along the same lines, it might be premature of you to dismiss Storytron's basic idea as already having been done when you didn't even bother to read the entire interview, much less any of the documentation on the technology itself.
No, I am clear that there are some people who understand the technology quite easily. It's just a matter of orientation. I don't expect everybody to get it instantly.
You're right when you note that the inability to explain a concept or principle bespeaks a failure to understand that concept or principle. However, this Storytron stuff is not a concept or principle -- it's a technology. There are actually a lot of concepts and principles that underlie the technology, and I do explain those concepts and principles at some length in various places, such as my book on interactive storytelling.
"Everybody" hates me? Does Ezra Whorton hate me? Sandy Piscator? Johnny Fisher? What kind of scientific study did you do to arrive at this conclusion? ;-)
I'd suggest that your statement would be more accurate if you rephrased it to "Everybody I know hates Chris." And then of course it would be reasonable to ask how many people you know.
There certainly are some people who hold my work in high esteem -- I keep getting paid to speak at all manner of conferences. However, I agree that my caustic remarks about the games biz have alienated a great many of the younger members of the games industry. The older guys are generally more sympathetic to my points, because they've been around the block a few times and recognize that, while my phrasing might be undiplomatic, my basic points are often sound.
And even more interesting is the fact that some people hate me because they don't like my ideas. What does that suggest?
No, computer games are a tiny subset of computer entertainment software. Or, they should be. That's the whole point of that extended analogy. And the fact is that right now, computer games are just about 100% of all computer entertainment software -- which means that there's something really huge that is just waiting to happen: computer entertainment software for "The Rest of Us".
Yep, this is hard for some people to grasp. Until there is a demo available to the public, a certain number of people will react as you have: "I just don't get it." There are other people who do get it. It's really difficult to grasp something that is so utterly different from anything that has come before. If you were to follow some of the discussions on the BBS, you'd see that there are people who really do understand it. We have written vast amounts of material trying to explain it to people, and some people just can't seem to understand. I suggest that you withold judgment and wait for a downloadable demo, which will probably become available early next year.
It's true that human-moderated RPGs are able to get some real dramatic interaction in them. But that's because they're human-moderated. As soon as we move to the computer, we lose all that.
There's no need to solve the strong AI problem, because this is not the real world we're simulating. This is a story. It is populated not with people but with characters. Characters aren't supposed to act realistically, they are supposed to act dramatically. What would happen if we solved the strong AI problem for Captain Kirk and one of his crewmen was trapped on a hostile planet? Kirk would say "Screw him, I'm not going to risk the ship for one crewman." Very realistic. Very undramatic. In a real story, Kirk would say, "Even though the odds against saving him are hundreds to one, and even though attempting to save him will put the ship at a very high risk of disaster, I'm going to attempt to save him." And then, by the absolute, inexorable laws of dramatic physics, he'll pull it off. It HAS to be that way -- this is drama, not the real world!
http://www.storytron.com/overview/ov_storytron.htm l
and here's a more detailed explanation of verb-based interaction:
http://www.storytron.com/overview/storyworld/verb_ based_dramatic_interaction.html
here's a very thorough discussion of the nature of the interface:
http://storytron.com/smf/index.php?topic=21.0
We don't have to solve any AI problem because this is not an AI problem; it's an artistic problem and is solved by each storybuilder as per their own artistic sensibilities as expressed in their scripts and verbs.It is for precisely this reason that we have been invited to speak at a major conference on corporate training. Yes, it can be done.
Interactivity is the enemy of plot, not narrative. Don't think in terms of a book -- that's a story. Think in terms of Grandpa telling little Annie a bedtime story. If Annie interrupts Grandpa in mid-story and wants the story to go in another direction, you think Grandpa's going to say "Shut up, you brat! You're messing up my carefully prepared plot!!!"
Have you actually read the stuff on the website? There's a mountain of material there: the overview, the tutorials, the reference documentation and, above all, the BBS, where we have had extensive discussions on these subjects for months. I know you don't want to wade through all that stuff, but it's where the answers are. I agree, it's not as good as actually playing the thing; for that, we need to get our demo running, and I just yesterday got the demo operational (but really lousy right now). Over the next few days we'll be fleshing out the demo so that when I leave for Europe next week I'll have something nicer to show off there. Unfortunately, the demo won't be made available for download for some months yet (why? three little letters: RMI).
My gold standard comes when the player feels as if he's interacting with an interesting character in a dramatically interesting way. And I'm pretty confident we'll get that.
RPGs are fundamentally about solving physical problems -- that is to say, obtaining something, killing something, moving something -- there's always a THING in the center of the action. Interactive storytelling is primarily about people -- about interacting with characters. Yes, there are things in Storytron (we call them Props), but they're not that important. The central issue in interactive storytelling is what you do with and to other people. And that "do" part means VERBS -- lots of verbs allowing to interact with actors in lots of different ways.
The differences between interactive storytelling and interactive fiction are profound. Here are a few indicators:
Interactive storytelling is primarily about interactions with other actors, who can make their own decisions.
The personality modelling in interactive storytelling is much more complicated.
Decision-making in Storytron is numeric, not boolean.
The user interface is linguistic (that's not at all the same as textual!!!)
1. First, there are always skeptics and naysayers who have disparaging things to say about the Storytron technology. Some of this is due to the fact that my often harsh criticisms of the games biz have antagonized many people. That's OK -- but I just want to advise other readers that some portion of the negative comments are a response to my comments about the games industry, not a response to the Storytron technology itself.
2. Second, I remind everybody that Storytron technology is exceedingly complex, largely because narrative is exceedingly complex. I have spent years trying to trim it down to the absolute minimum required to do the job, but that absolute minimum is still overwhelming to beginners.
3. I'm always surprised by the comments along the lines of "How does this differ from Technology X?" All I can say in answer to such questions is "read the documentation". Storytron technology is so utterly different from role-playing, MUDs, interactive fiction, and other technologies that it's difficult to know how to begin to answer such a question. It's rather like somebody asking you the difference between a spreadsheet and a word processor. Well, yes, they do both allow you to set fonts. They both allow you to create tables. They both allow you to print out documents. But they are so completely different in form and purpose that it's a waste of time trying to come up with a list of differences. The easiest way to differentiate Storytron from the other stuff is to cite its purpose: to provide genuine, honest-to-gum interactive storytelling. (See next point)
4. A common question (already offered here) is, "What is interactive storytelling, anyway?" If you attempt to answer this question by comparing it to other forms, you get confusion. Interactive storytelling cannot be described as "just like a game, only..." or "kinda like interactive fiction, except..." This approach always yields even more confusion. I haven't spent 14 years re-inventing the wheel -- this thing really is profoundly different from other stuff out there. The closest to it is Facade -- and Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas will be quick to point out the many, many differences between Storytron and Facade.
It's not a story, it's storytelling, and the difference between the two is profound -- and confusing. A story is noun or data; storytelling is verb or process. That's why there's not a plot in it; only stories can have plots. Storytelling does not intrinsically include plot. Think of it this way: the difference between story and storytelling is analogous to the difference between a cake and cooking. A cake can have texture, but cooking doesn't have texture. Texture is a consequence of cooking, but not a component of cooking. In the same way, plot is a consequence of storytelling, but not a component of storytelling.
So what is it? As we have built it, interactive storytelling puts the player in the role of protagonist in a dramatically rich environment, and then permits the player to interact with other actors in a dramatically rich fashion. The size of the verb vocabulary is what makes it so different; Storytron can provide thousands of verbs. No more just picking things up, using them, destroying them, and so forth. Most of the verbs provide interaction with PEOPLE, not THINGS. We already have about 80 verbs (few of which are fleshed out, though) and intend to have hundreds by the time we release the technology.
Anyway, if you want to learn more, go to the website.