Periodically I’ll do these “current thinking” posts to review how my thoughts on immersive story have changed. They may also help others new to the concept to quickly get up to speed. Also won’t hurt to see how my thoughts evolve.
Interactive story
I’ll start with interactive story. As defined by Chris Crawford, interactive story is a form of interactive entertainment in which the player plays the role of the protagonist in a dramatically rich environment. Looks pretty straight forward, but if you’re one of the few who have ever tried to create an interactive story you know how difficult it is. The small community that has formed around interactive story certainly understands the difficulty. Much of that difficulty is due to the notion of agency – agency or not to agency. Think of agency as the ability for a players actions to truly affect the plot and story. Take the Matrix for instance and you’re Neo , but you decided to swallow the blue pill and stay in the matrix. That would certainly change the story/plot and demonstrate agency. This would be true interactive story. What makes it difficult is that people usually want the story that was in the movie, where Neo swallows the red pill; how can you give them that even if they swallow the blue? This would be the interactive story conundrum.
Some in the community believe if you solve the conundrum and you’ve essentially invented the future of movies, the future of entertainment. However the interactive conundrum is not a problem to be solved by scientists or academics. For one, these things aren’t problems to be solved but things to be discovered. Early film pioneers didn’t invent continuity editing, they stumbled up on it through experimentation. And secondly, it is the artist who will most likely solve the conundrum in some satisfactory manner.
Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to artists – or more precisely, to the communications craftsmen. The same thing is happening now with personal computers.
- Paul Heckel from The Elements of Friendly Software Design
Immersive story
If we discard the interactive story conundrum baggage and just let artists experiment with narrative what we’re left with is immersive story – dramatic narrative for the metaverse, where a player interacts in real time with computer controlled NPCs and virtual environments.
By moving to immersive story instead of interactive story we and the artist can realign out focus on entertaining rather than trying to solve a conundrum. We also leverage the metaverse for distribution.
Immersive story engine
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Right now there is no immersive story available because there is no tools to power or create an immersive story. What we need first is an immersive story engine. Simlar to a game engine, it will work with the virtual world platform to coordinate creative assets, NPCs, other players, and story elements. Some may refer to the immersive story engine as a drama manager.
Developing a game engine is an infinitely complex endeavor, and the same will be true for an immersive story engine (I know, I’ve already started an open source project, TapBot, to make one and it’s little more than a project site still). Most likely an immersive story engine will need to incorporate AI, physics engines, the semantic web, in addition to other emerging technologies. The key will be to try and leverage other fields. In fact another way to look at immersive story is as a question – how can we use the same technology being developed for intelligent virtual agents and use it for entertainment?
Intermediary steps
There are however intermediary steps we can take before jumping to a full fledged immersive story and engine. An obvious one is simply creating a virtual intelligent character from an intelligent virtual agent. Grab some natural language processing AI, combine it with character elements, and wrap it in an avatar. What exactly constitutes a character element and how to incorporate that is something I ponder here in my blog.
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