Failed Screenwriter

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.