I got into the game industry and joined Playdom to experiment with interactive drama. I dream of a future where we play or interact with games for the drama more than the game aspect. It’s a lofty goal but very similar to Bing Gordon’s dream at EA to see if a computer can make you cry.

“We see farther”, we crowed. We predicted the games business would develop to stand side by side with the $20 billion annual revenues of movies and recorded music. We foresaw a day when a New Hollywood would be created by “software artists” who harnessed Moore’s Law into a new category of art. We believed that their digital games would one day deliver the kind of emotional experiences we all enjoy in movies, what Stephen Spielberg describes as “sitting back and being washed over with emotion.”

Sadly though EA failed.

But we fell short of the lofty creative goal of “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” because we didn’t develop new models of character and narrative. Floyd, the robot friend in Steve Meretsky’s Planetfall, was a heart-warming sidekick but, no matter what words we typed into the Infocom parser, he died a sacrificial, text-only, death for us.

Bing has since had an epiphany and replaced his dream with a strange amalgamation. Instead of eliciting emotion through story he thinks the answer is allowing people to relive their gaming moments socially, to reinforce and create social connections.

But while we were looking for movies powered by millions of transistors, we ignored the emotions we were creating in games as a new kind of playground. Instead of creating emotion-laden, but passive stories, we elicited emotional moments off the screen, between friends, in the retelling, in the trash-talking. The emotional moments turned out NOT to have correlation with processing power, visual effects, and 3d graphics. The emotion came from who we played with, not what machine we played on. Games help us create richer photo albums of our lives.

So rather than trying to create stories and characters that “wash over” our audience, rather than trying to prove that a computer can make you cry, let’s create play spaces that help us make more and better friends. We are the characters, the heroes, the actors. And we are making stories together.

In that light Bing sees social games as the perfect beast but I completely disagree. I agree that social games help us connect but we aren’t building stories here. We aren’t the character, the heroes, the actors. I think their original goal to have computers make us cry is still attainable even if they failed. When EA started it was a much different environment, but as Bing mentions the playing field has changed with social games. And where Bing now sees social games as a place to make connections I see them as the perfect opportunity to try and make a computer, a game, an interactive experience make us cry.

It’s not a technology problem

Bing starts his post by describing Moore’s Law and how at EA they thought it would do the same for the video game industry. As processors got more powerful so would the game engines and graphics.

For 25 years, the videogame business has counted on Moore’s Law to deliver the promised land of the New Hollywood. We thought more powerful chipsets driving higher resolution pictures, more lifelike animations and bigger production budgets would almost automatically deliver the emotion of movies. We thought that amazing hardware would spontaneously generate resonant characters and heart-wrenching stories, but the highest points turned out to be a robot, a polygonal babe, and a horny swinger wearing a gold medallion.

Though good story has never needed technology to be. Even as movies became a popular medium for story books and comic books remained, even thrived. Story isn’t a technology problem, it’s a problem of creativity. They were led astray by the visual, Bing even admits to it.

They went after the wrong audience

We’re all familiar with the video game industry and its struggle to attract women. Most games are built for men and why not, they’re the ones lining up outside the stores. Listening to Bing talk of the early days at EA I would think them ecstatic if EA could deliver Star Wars in interactive form, with graphics equal to the movie. I would have loved playing that as a kid – fly the X-wing fighter, practice with the lightsaber, all that. But in reality if you handed me the controls I would just wreck shop. I would cut Obi-Wan’s arm off just to see what he’d do. A controller in my hand I could care less about the story.

However if you could create an interactive version of Gone with the Wind I would expect women to treat it very differently. Taken in by the story elements I would expect them to play the parts. Men, boys are the wrong audience to start experimenting with story.

Social games are a new opportunity

Where as Bing thinks the promise of social games is making connections I think they’re ripe for attaining his original goal at EA.

For one, a large percentage of the social game audience is female and they’re looking for story.

They also tended to prefer games that emphasized narrative and character development over combat and preferred solo to group gameplay.

Secondly, social games are easily accessible so if there is a hit the audience can grow overnight. And thirdly, the technology isn’t complex and is already in the hands of artists.

Tim O’Rielly recently posted about a dream he had for augmented reality and fiction.

I share this dream as a reminder that the fiction and entertainments of the future may have a very different form than the fiction of today. The first metamorphosis is just to change the medium, in the way that the paper map or atlas morphed first into online mapping sites.

In a lot of ways what he’s describing in his post is interactive story, or more specifically interactive drama. The technology is usually what draws people to interactive drama, but it’s the story that makes them run for the hills.

Story is hard

As Robert McKee has a funny line comparing aspiring writers to aspiring music composers.

If your dream to compose music, would you say to yourself: “I’ve heard a lot of symphonies… I can also play the piano… I think I’ll knock one out this weekend”?

McKee’s message – story is hard and it takes study. I’ve spent the last 10 years just trying to write a good screenplay. I’ve written lots of screenplays, none of them good so who cares. If the story can’t hold an audience no amount of technology is going to change that. It might prompt some posts on TechCrunch but the buzz will fade and the artist will move on to more rewarding projects.

Adding technology only adds to the difficulty of creating story

A few people have been plugging away at the interactive drama conundrum for nearly two decades. I’ve been plugging away for 5 years and have nothing to show for it but half-finished scripts, mock-ups, and this blog. Chris Crawford is probably the most dedicated in a field where I’ve seen more than a few come and go. It’s a tough problem to solve and it gets old when no one finds mainstream success. To this day when you explain interactive drama most people reply, ”You mean like those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80′s?”

Choose Your Own Adventure diagram by David Sky

There’s a reason Choose Your Own Adventure books were for kids, they’re really hard to write. David Sky does a great job of mapping out the branching storylines. Seeing it laid out you can better appreciate when Chris Crawford discusses the problems of branching storylines. The author had to keep everything in their head and resolve every storyline in a satisfactory way. It’s hard enough to perfect one storyline, try multiple intermingling.

Even though branching is the most common method for creating interactive drama there are others, or at least other theories. Chris Crawford has his approach. I think there is a lot that can be done with perceived agency.

Unanswered question

In many ways those of us in the field plug away with one unanswered question hanging over our heads – do audiences actually want the interactivity in their stories? The question has probably been the impetus for more than a few to leave the field as we can’t get the answer we want until we find mainstream success.

I know personally that it was the interactivity that drew me to the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, however I also remember jumping back and forth to see how each storyline played out. Was it the interactivity that I enjoyed or was it the story? It all reminds me of how for years people told ATT they wanted picture phones. Hundreds of millions of dollars and decades later they gave them the Picturephone, but all people did was dial and walk away.

What we need are more artists

Film pioneers first occupied their time filming Vaudeville acts and oncoming trains. It wasn’t until the discovery of continuity editing that artists created the modern film. And when you really look at it, modern film doesn’t make much sense. We know logically that Superman will win in the end, he always does. But we still go along and emotionally feel that he might not. The artist is able to weave his tale and play with our emotions.

I hope the same will be true for interactive drama. Right now we mostly have technologists in the field, what we need are more artists. And I think they’re coming for a few reasons:

1. There’s a captive audience thanks to Facebook – artists can get feedback and social gaming companies are looking to feed that audience anyway possible
2. Hollywood model is dieing – they need to find a new model
3. Technology is cool – it draws buzz

Remember, it’s about the story

All that said, there are some examples of succesful interactive dramas – just from Japan. Look at visual novels and dating sims. To some these might only be scratching the surface of what the technology is capable of, however remember that it’s mostly about the story. I hope we see more variations, but it’s more about the story. Dan Hon said pretty much the same thing in his piece about ARGs – it’s not about the tricks and games but the story.