Failed Screenwriter

The first 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling is calling for papers. I love to see this stuff - supplies me with reading material. I also enjoy seeing how they succinctly describe what we're all trying to do.

In order to create novel applications, in which users play a significant role together with digital characters and other autonomous elements, new concepts for Human-Computer Interaction have to be developed.

Where we differ is our approach in developing these new concepts for Human-Computer Interaction. Where they call for papers I call for volunteer developers to put tools in the hands of artists. Maybe they think it's too complex for artists to grasp.

In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models, by drawing from narratological studies, and by taking into account the characteristics of programming. Consequently, due to its technological complexity, it is currently hardly accessible for creators and end-users.

Complexity is not the answer

Maybe I'm taking it out of context a bit, but the call for papers implies that we still need to figure this stuff out. I'm in agreeance with them that we have yet to crack this nut, but implying that it will take more complexity to solve goes against what I see happening on the Internet and in business. I've been a product manager for most of my career and I've got to say, you quickly learn to steer clear of complex. Complex is another word for unforeseen delays and failure.

Who says we need to figure it out ahead of time

Growing up with the Internet the practice of "launch early, launch often" is second nature to me. We shouldn't be looking to figure it all out at the beginning, we should be looking to put the tools in the hands of artists and letting them experiment - that's the whole idea behind TapBot.

Foster innovation with a platform

I know I've been harping on the platform concept movies 2.0, but Amy Shuen put it nicely:

Companies have adapted to user-centered innovation in different ways. Several authors have described how companies have innovated by providing platforms from which externally generated innovations can result, and where users--as well as ecosystems of affiliates, third-party developers, and service providers--can form innovative communities.

Amy Shuen - Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide

Forget the call for papers, lets try and build an innovative community around immersive story!

At the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco I couldn't escape the mantra, "the network as a platform". But hearing it from every corner got me thinking about entertainment as a platform.

Somewhere along my failed attempt at screenwriting I came across the concept of interactive story and could instantly envision the future of movies. Of course others had visions of the future as well, like Chris Crawford and a host of other entrepreneurs/academics. In 1995 Bob Gale even turned his vision into reality with the release of Mr. Payback, albeit to poor reviews. Sitting at the Web 2.0 conference I began to see my vision from a different perspective, not form that of interactive story but from the same trends that power Web 2.0. I began to see the future of movies as a platform.

Imagine the scenario

1. You log onto one of the metaverse platforms
2. Lead your avatar into a virtual theater building and select a theater.
3. Upon entering your avatar is transported to a totally different environment, or scene, and has even taken on a different appearance.
4. Characters in the scene approach and speak with you through text chat, or voice.
5. You converse with them through text chat, amazed they respond as if they were real people.
6. Slowly they draw you into the story.
7. The story continues to unfold with you its protagonist.

First movies 1.0

Before movies can evolve into a platform some underlining technology needs to be in place first. Just as Web 2.0 had a Web 1.0 to lay the ground work, the same will be true for the future of movies.

Essential movie 1.0 elements

The platform emerges

As they say, story starts with character. So that's where we'll start and lucky for us we already have the basis of computer characters in ELIZA, the famous chatterbot that first popularized artificial intelligence (AI).

Well before the advent of multimedia, there was a moment in the history of the computer that demonstrated its representational and narrative power with the same startling immediacy as the Lumieres ' train did for the motion picture camera. This is the famous but often misunderstood moment in which the first completely computer-based character was created.

- Janet H. Murray from Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

You can think of AIML as an updated version of ELIZA, and with it an artist can easily enough build a character bot that interacts with a player using natural language and gives off the impression of being alive. AIML works by extrapolating upon a relatively narrow set of patterns (input) and responses (output) and therefore can be tripped up. An artist can combat this by adding their own patterns and responses, the same way they would add personality to a character, but trying to accommodate every possible input is a losing battle. Some think this problem is ripe for the application of AI, AI that learns. However such AI technology may overtly complicate AIML and take it out of the hands of the common artist. I also have my doubts that AI can magically solve this. AI has come up short on many an occasion and I'm a bigger fan of the less glamorous AI that powers Google and made it a billion dollar company - tapping into the collective intelligence of the Internet. A character bot can do the same, if it encounters a slang term it's never seen before it can ping the Google servers to try and ascertain a meaning. The same AI Google uses to suggest alternative searches (the "Did you mean:") could also power character bots to not sound like, well mindless bots.

Tapping in to the knowledge base Google has amassed could just be the beginning. Across the Internet new knowledge bases are being constructed and made available (for free and not so free). The semantic web is one such knowledge base that is gaining steam. As an artist, think of constructing a set for a scene to play out. Today you would most likely open up a 3D tool such as Blender and start creating objects. But what if those objects were already created and not only that, they came with a battery of semantic data - weight, how much weight it can support, texture, etc? Granted that would be a mountain of information but isn't that the same mountain of data the proponents of the semantic web are promising? And we don't have to start with a full set of data, just enough - just enough so that an artist can populate a set with pre-made objects. Pre-made objects that the metaverse physics engine would also know how to manipulate based on that same semantic data.

By tapping into the collective knowledge of the Internet an artist's creative output can be extended beyond what they could ever hope to create using conventional methods. Look at what Web 2.0 has made possible.

Power of the platform

By leveraging the platform an artist can lower their production costs, which will undoubtedly spur experimentation and draw artists into the innovation cycle - democratize innovation. And much of that experimentation will likely be directed at trying to break story into individual elements - not so much into theme or acts, but a form that enables a computer to interpret and manipulate it. Think more moving from analog recording to digital recording. Janet H. Murray in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, equates this to the invention of musical notes.

If artists and others are able to break story into individual elements the platform will really take off. Think of what digital recordings made possible. Artists can apply the same analytics companies use to evaluate their web sites and marketing but to their creative work. Imagine applying A/B testing to your entertainment, and all in real time.

Artists can take advantage of other 2.0 tools - Folksonomy, RSS, etc. They could even open source their creations, allowing others to extend and rework them or drop a character bot into their own creation. Gives fan fiction a whole new meaning.

And who knows, with the platform and further experimentation we might be able to do what others have failed to do - create a mainstream, successful, interactive story. Of course I'd just be happy seeing an immersive story.

Transitioning traditional forms of storytelling to the Web is a daunting task. However easy it might look, it only takes a few moments of trying to create one of these hybrids to realizes the difficulties. I've been banging my head against the wall trying to tackle interactive story for years now. Penguin Books is also trying through experimental sites like, We Tell Stories. Six online stories released over six weeks, the first one by Charles Cumming, "The 21 Steps", utilizes Google maps. Instead of flipping through the pages of a book you follow a plotter on Google maps and get the story through little comment balloons.

Penguin worked with ARG firm Six to Start to develop the stories. Given the level of involvement in ARGs it is a little disappointing to see how little there is in, "The 21 Steps" and the other stories released so far. I'm hoping the yet to be released stories will go further, however I worry that the authors (who are already established writers) might be clinging too much to the traditional forms of narrative. An indication of that might be the addition of a seventh story.

And, in fact, We Tell Stories includes a seventh, hidden story that works more like a digital scavenger hunt than an experiment in interactive storytelling.

- Telling Stories the Online Way

By now you've probably heard that quarterlife bombed on NBC, the experiment to bring a popular scripted web video to prime time television a failure. Josh Catone on ReadWriteWeb, argues that it might not have been that much of a bomb all things considered. And according to reporter Scott D. Pierce it wasn't that bad.

No, "quarterlife" wasn't bad. And the one episode of the 2006 Heather Graham's "Emily's Reasons Why Not" that aired in 2006 was pretty good. (Although word was that the writers exhausted all their talent in that half-hour.)

The thought that they may have exhausted their efforts in one half-hour episode is an interesting one. Even Will Ferrell has been unable to keep the momentum going on his site funnyordie.com.

Even with the benefit of perspective, the gulf is stark. Mark D. Kvamme, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, financed the comedian Will Ferrell’s funnyordie.com last year, which has had only one runaway hit, “The Landlord” video.

- New York Times article - Bridging the Gap, the Sequel

Everyone knows that to be successful on the web videos must be short - shorter the better. However that doesn't leave much room to develop a plot or characters - the very things that keep us coming back each week with popular television shows. ReadWriteWeb simply asks the question, Is scripted web video failing?

If the scripted web video has failed to catch on, you might blame the attention deficit audience rather than the content or format. Where as watching television is habit, affording it more leeway, the web has yet to reach such a plateau. And it may never reach such a plateau, requiring the entertainment of the future to be drastically different than anything we see today. We won't be able to simply transition today's formats to the new medium. We're already seeing the death of scheduled programing with DVRs . We may see the same fate for scripted series and it might go even beyond that. But we shouldn't see this as the dearth of rich entertainment, rather we should see it as an opportunity for experimentation. The introduction of photography certainly hurt painting, but also allowed artists to experiment and produce what fills our art galleries today. I of course greatly look forward to the experimentation in interactive story. The entire purpose of immersive drama is to kick start that experimentation in interactive story.

I sadly missed the Metaverse U conference at Stanford. Watching some of the interviews collected by Henrik Bennetsen on YouTube I noticed the common theme - that the metaverse is going to unleash some sort of utopia. Then again that might have had a little to do with the questions.

The idea is basically to get people to answer these four little big questions:

1. What excites you about current metaverse technology?
2. What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
3. What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
4. What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

Our hope is to build a time capsule.

The last comment is telling - a time capsule. Granted, we commonly find time capsules humorous, most for their utopia-esque dreams. Technologists are all too prone to such dreams, thinking the latest technology will usher in a kinder, more just, utopian world.

I'm guilty of being a bit utopia-esque myself, especially in this blog with immersive drama. Being utopia-esque scares me a bit because I believe it clouds our vision. I've been a product manager for most of my career and the one thing you develop a skill for is sniffing out bullshit from higher ups. Everyone has half baked ideas but it seems the higher you go in an organization the more they mistake these ideas to be clear and well thought out. So when a half baked idea is green lit, it's up to an underling to discovers just how many holes a half baked idea has. Sometimes the holes kill the idea, other times it is pushed through. And as the saying goes, in the world of software no one knows if the finished product is broken or not, it isn't like a new car coming off the assembly line where everyone can see it's missing a wheel.

So with TapBot, my open source project to bring immersive drama to the metaverse I will try and avoid all pie in the sky, half baked ideas. And I should start by better clarifying the goal of TapBot. When you come right down to it, TapBot's first goal is simply to deliver tools artists can use to create storytelling in the metaverse through the use of avatars and graphical characters. Maybe that isn't the perfect wording yet, but it is closer to the heart of the project and should keep it focused. Eventually I see TapBot taking advantage of AI and semantic web technologies to build out that tool set. One way to think of it is if others are building the semantic web to be utilitarian, TapBot will build it out for entertainment. One thing TapBot will not be doing is reinventing the wheel. The inspiration for coining the term immersive drama was to remove much of the theory part that has enclosed interactive story development. TapBot will look to steal technology and apply it to entertainment. That might not make it sound so appealing, but the truly fascinating part will be seeing what artists create with the tools. Over time the theory will develop from their creations and not the underlying technology.

Nicholas Carr's latest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google is very insightful, however near the end he extends into fear mongering a bit. Some of that fear mongering springs from an interesting point, Larry Page and SergeyBrin's motivation for Google had more roots in AI (artificial intelligence) than being just a search engine.

They weren't just interested in perfecting their search engine, they said. What they really looked forward to was melding their technology with the human brain itself. "You want access to as much [information] as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct," explained Brin. "The solution isn't to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind."

Larry and Sergey are still pursuing their vision of AI.

"Every time I talk about Google's future with Larry Page," reports Steve Jurvetson, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, "he argues that it will become an artificial intelligence."

It is difficult to see exactly what scares Nicholas with this, other than general fear of omnipresent technology.

"Why not improve the brain?" Brin muses at one point. "Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain."

Plugging AI resources into my brain doesn't scare me, if anything I'd be giddy about it as Larry and Sergey are. But what I'd like to see is the AI used not just to assist us, but to power our entertainment as well. And I don't mean in some pie in the sky, where AI constructs interesting stories for us on the fly. No I mean in a more practical way, say as to power language processing for virtual characters, enabling them to process slang and be topical with current events. That could be immersive drama's beach head as the search engine is for Larry and Sergey's AI ambitions, who knows where it could lead.

But alas I doubt Larry and Sergey's ambitions align much with entertainment. Entertainment is soft compared to their math and science backgrounds. Where as I see incredibly interesting data from immersive drama they may see too much ambiguity, but isn't Google's attempt to interpret queries fraught with as much ambiguity? Immersive drama represents a way to technically examine entertainment like never before. Just as we gather click trails for web sites, we'll be able to get the same for immersive dramas. We'll get metrics on engagement, time spent with a certain character, type of responses, etc. - practically everything needed to construct AI as Google has done by taping into people's mind through search. But if still Larry and Sergey can't wrap their heads around the entertainment aspect, maybe games will be the carrot they need. Games today has a little science built up around it, maybe that will capture their interest and eventually lead them to immersive drama.

One area I can see them moving quickly into is the metaverse, but not the one many of us think of when we hear the word. I see them expanding Google Earth, adding avatars, and integrating their AI. Think of this as an intermediate step to tapping directly into your brain with their AI - a digital interface to the AI before it goes direct.

The father of Eliza died March 12. With the creation of Eliza, Joseph Weizenbaum practically invented the field of chatterbots and popularized AI (artificial intelligence) in the 60's. But more than that he demonstrated the capabilities of computers to be more, especially where entertainment was concerned.

Well before the advent of multimedia, there was a moment in the history of the computer that demonstrated its representational and narrative power with the same startling immediacy as the Lumieres ' train did for the motion picture camera. This is the famous but often misunderstood moment in which the first completely computer-based character was created.

- Janet H. Murray from Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

While presently Weizenbaum's Eliza is more credited with sparking AI, over the next few years I believe it will be seen more as the central building block of immersive drama. Eliza's ability to create an illusion will prove more fundamental and long lasting to entertainment than AI.

In fact, the responsiveness of the conversation was an illusion, because Eliza was programmed simply to respond to certain key words and phrases.

In trying to develop immersive drama I'm naturally interested in artificial intelligence (AI) and how it might be used to create realistic characters. Given AI today, we can create the NPCs (Non Player Characters) we encounter in video games today. To create immersive drama we will most likely need more from NPCs and consequently AI. So you can understand my enthusiasm when I read posts like, Virtual character with child-like reasoning abilities enters Second Life.

Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.

A pretty tall order, but that's pretty much in line with the field of AI - grand predictions and a lot of failure. But maybe the researchers at Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department have figured out a way to make it work. Than again, some of the quotes from the post make me suspicious.

“Declarative definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind, including lying, betrayal, and even evil,” are covered as well, according to Bringsjord.

Evil - really. Perhaps that is stretching it a bit? The concept to try and recreate the theory of mind makes sense, however when do we cross over from trying to create the illusion of a character and creating a real entity? If Bringsjord's objective is entertainment he might be a little off the mark, especially when you consider a character in a movie is more a metaphor for human nature than true representation.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they're superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we thing we understand them, we don't. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I'm a bit iffy.

- Robert McKee

When I read about AI initiatives like this it reminds me of my issues with interactive story - where the usual approach is more that of a problem solver than artist. Sometimes I question if researchers are aiming more for simulated reality than entertainment and if they're aware of that?

While at the Screenwriting Expo in LA, I was a bit shocked hearing Chris Klug words of advice to any screenwriter looking to enter the game industry.

Mention interactive fiction and they'll think you're an academic.

That isn't to say game companies are adverse to story, they're looking to incorporate more and more of it in every game, they just don't want to hear about university experiments, thesis papers, and unproven theories. I've spent the last few years combing through those very books and papers. I may have read 70% of everything written about interactive story, which isn't much compared to other fields of study as there's only a handful of people actively pursuing interactive story. And after all that reading I'm still a bit lost as to exactly how I would apply all those theories.

In Janet Murray's book Hamlet on the Holodeck she eloquently describes the challenge.

The lesson of ELIZA is that the computer can be a compelling medium for storytelling if we can write rules for it that are recognizable as an interpretation of the world. The challenge for the future is how to make such rule writing as available to writers as musical notation is to composers.

Murray goes further, looking to Neo-Arisotelian theory as the model to emulate, an idea Brenda Laurel introduced years earlier. I first learned of Aristotle's Poetics while studying screenwriting. If you've never dreamed of becoming a screenwriter you're probably unaware of the cottage industry teaching screenwriting - guru's, conferences, books, etc. Each comes with their own theory on how to write the great American screenplay. However the minute you sit down to write you'll quickly learn that all that help is a bit too academic, too abstract to be helpful. Most of the theories and tools are applied in the rewrite process, not in creating the first draft. Today there is few if any examples of interactive story, so it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. It's difficult to apply much of the theories if we have no equivalent of a first draft.

So in the end I can see where the video game industry is coming from when they run from the very mention of interactive story. We're spending too much time talking and not enough time building. And when examples are built many times their audience isn't the mainstream public but other academics. Too often they see a problem to be solved rather than a means to an end. That's probably where the field has gone wrong for so long. Feeding their own desire to solve a challenge or simply feeling the need to carve out a new field, many have taken their eye off the true objective.

The great stake-claiming race is on, and academics from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping "the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure."

- Espen Aarseth from First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

First we need to establish the mainstream user as our audience, no longer academia. Now if we could figure out what the mainstream audience wants we'd have our objective, but that gets a bit confusing.

By day I dream up and develop new products, oddly enough it's my job. Throughout the process it's paramount that we always keep in mind the user's need or desire. Ask someone to describe interactive story and you'll get multiple variations. When I envision interactive story I see Star Wars, but where I'm Luke Skywalker. Others might see a space odyssey in the world of Star Wars. Sometimes you can't even trust what people say. For years people told ATT they wanted a videophone, but after decades of R&D, no one actually used the video feature. To learn the truth ATT only had to spend hundreds millions of dollars on R&D and run through multiple prototypes to learn the truth. We need a similar process of experimentation to discover what will connect with the mainstream audience.

When I see the metaverse I see all the elements necessary to create interactive story, well just about - avatars, 3D environments, scripting languages, etc. People create machinima using these elements every day, why can't we unleash these artists to create interactive story? My guess is that they, like the game industry, are turned off by all the academic theory - arguments between branching narrative and true agency, between games and interactive story, and others. We need to ditch for now and look to create lite tools artists can experiment with. Let the artists discover and define the models, techniques, and structures of this new medium.

Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to artists - or more precisely, to the communications craftsmen. The same thin is happening now with personal computers.

- Paul Heckel from The Elements of Friendly Software Design

Actually calling it a new medium might carry too much baggage. Better to describe it as a genre - where classic video games are driven by challenging the user to master skills or solve puzzles, interactive story will be driven by drama. Calling it interactive story may also be too much baggage, I suggest the name, immersive drama.

Hopefully with this lighter and more immediate approach of putting the tools of creation in the hands of artists we can begin to see the first few rough drafts. Then we can truly study them and perhaps move to true interactive story that demonstrates agency.

Microsoft's $44.6 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! is a classic case of a company not getting it. Yahoo! is crap. I should know, I use to work there. I left in 2003 when it became obvious the company had no idea what it was, what's its objective should be, and had no gumption for innovating. I thought the press and analysts would soon see through it as well, however then came Google's AdSense. AdSense brought money back to the market and Yahoo! got swept up in the wave. But it's now obvious Yahoo! was just along for the ride. By the time this deal closes, if it closes, the combined search market for Microsoft and Yahoo! will be less than it is today. It is Google's wave, everyone else is just along for the ride.

This is a deal armchair strategists and Wall Street stock pumpers have been in love with for the last couple of years. Yahoo's been a weak stock and they'd love to make a profit on what's been a lousy investment.

- Microsoft-Yahoo the mother of all clusterbombs

It's Google's wave because they get it, just like Gates understood the market in the 80's and rode it to dominance in the 90's. Goolge's reign has just begun. So who if anyone is going to compete with it? Who will force Goolge, to buy a dieing company just to try and stay relevant? The social networks just went off a cliff.

The major challenge for MySpace, Facebook and every other social network: Figuring out how to turn their enormous online audiences into dollars. But they may have another problem: Figuring out how to keep their enormous audiences.

- MySpace and Facebook's Real Problem: Bored Users

Most likely the company, the model that will compete with Google has yet to materialize. And when it does it will be from where Google is blind - the metaverse. Google isn't completely blind to the metaverse today and will surely jump into the metaverse as it develops, but it's over confidence in AdSense will hinder its exploration. Their take aways from experiments will be clouded. They simply won't get it. At some point Google will leave an opening, an opening some industrious company to exploit. Seth Godin explains in his new book Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?, that the same thing happened to WordPerfect, the one time market leader for word processing.

When Microsoft introduced Windows, WordPerfect Corporation hesitated. They saw no reason to support Microsoft's effort to sell an entirely new operating system, and they (rightly) pointed out that version 1.0 of Windows was pretty lousy. So they reinvested in their DOS version.

And as they say, the rest is history.