Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (3 page)

Mark Barrett
has been a freelance designer and writer in the interactive entertainment industry since 1995. During that time, he has performed a variety of services for his clients, including scriptwriting, game design, design consulting, mission design, and voiceover direction. From 2000 to 2002, Mark was a speaker at the Game Developers Conference, moderating roundtables on emotional involvement in interactive entertainment. He has also written a number of essays and articles on game design theory and practice, which are available at
www.prairiearts.com/design.htm
.


Aria Danika
is an independent filmmaker and digital artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the co-author of
Flash MX Magic
and
Flash MX 2004 Magic
(New Riders Publishing) and the technical editor of
Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript 2.0
(New Riders Publishing) and has written numerous online articles, interviews, and reviews. Aria has worked for BBCi (B&P Director) for five years and was part of the team that launched the new media services, including interactive TV and online communities. She has been a Macromedia beta tester since 2000 and has developed and taught courses in Flash Experience Design. In August 2003, she co-founded openedsource.net to focus on interactive design and digital art. Her research interests include intersections of media, particularly film, and the adoption of filmic language in video games and online art. She’s currently spending her free time blogging, skateboarding, and exploring interactivity across different platforms, which has resulted in a series of audiovisual experiments, installations, and web toys.

Many years ago I was a bigshot in the games industry. I led the games research group at Atari. My face oozed over the covers of magazines; store shelves sagged under the weight of the fourteen games I created. Five books (before this one) bear the scarlet letters of my name as author. I founded and ran the Computer Game Developers Conference in its early years. But in 1991, dissatisfied with the ever narrower stance the computer games industry had taken, I decided to stop working on games and instead focus my energies on interactive storytelling. It was unknown territory to me, but with my generous assessment of my ability to conquer all problems, I pulled out my machete and began hacking my way forward.

At that time, only a few prescient people had recognized the importance of storytelling. Brenda Laurel had done a great deal of impressive work on the relationship between drama and computers, but it was of a character that scientists call
hand-waving
: speculative and lacking in the detail needed to provide a solid foundation for future elaborations. Cognitive scientists were developing ideas about
narrative intelligence
, and these concepts looked promising, but they had not been developed far enough to be useful. A group of graduate students at MIT had formed a reading group on narrative intelligence, attempting to apply some of these newly developing ideas to computer science, but again, they couldn’t get far with the still-forming concepts of the time.

Most of my game designer colleagues reacted to my decision with incomprehension; they were sure I had finally floated off to cloud-cuckoo land. Their responses to my excited jabbering could be summarized in a single word: “Stories?!”

Thirteen years later, the world seems to have caught on to the importance of storytelling; now that people are willing to listen, I have a lot to say. Others have made their contributions, and although some are important (and are described in this book), there’s a lot of taurine coprotext
¹
out there; this stuff incites me to make some of my points more sharply than you might otherwise expect. Every new field attracts its instant experts eager to cash in on the credulity of newcomers. Bah on them!

The result of my labors is a technology I call the Erasmatron, the core components of which I have patented. This book is about interactive storytelling, not the Erasmatron. My vision of interactive storytelling is unavoidably colored by my work with the Erasmatron, but over the years I have experimented with or read about a number of other concepts in interactive storytelling, and this book is my attempt to gather all those ideas together under one roof. This topic is a lot bigger than the Erasmatron, and I hope this book reflects that difference.

I have set off some of my most important conclusions as numbered lessons; you’ll find them scattered through the book. They seek to summarize my conclusions in catchy slogans. If I could, I would have added a snappy jingle to accompany each of them. Aren’t you glad I couldn’t?

This book reeks of the crotchetiness that is my alliterative middle name. It’s also highlighted by plenty of Absolute Truths that might strike skeptical readers as less than absolute. Fortunately, I’m blessed with a schizophrenic personality that harbors my Alter Ego, an intellect more nuanced, more even-handed, and more sensitive to the thinking of those unlike myself (normal people). I’d like you to meet him:

Thank you, Chris. I hope to provide useful counterpoints to your elucidations and look forward to our continuing productive relationship.

As you can see, Alter Ego tends to feckless blather.

Just as you tend to wild, inflammatory generalizations!

Sez you!

Let’s just get on with it, okay?

The following typographic conventions are used in this book:

A
monospace
font is used for code terms, such as statements and functions, and to indicate programming variables, such as the verb
RunAway
or the mood
Anger/Fear
.

Italics
are used to introduce new terms; to denote titles of plays, movies, and books; and to convey emphasis.

STORYTELLING ISN’T AN IDLE
leisure activity that humans developed to while away the hours: It evolved for serious purposes, as a necessary component in the development of human culture. Without storytelling, humans could never have communicated complex information. Storytelling isn’t merely characteristic or even definitive of the human condition—it’s absolutely necessary to the existence of human culture.