Books

You might start with the book many credit with introducing the idea of interactive story to the wider public, Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre. I finally read the book a year ago and found it more nostalgic than helpful, but Brenda does have an interesting perspective.

The next book that came along I found much more helpful, Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck. I actually received this book as a gift from a friend and found it eye opening even if it is a bit dated.

The first book I read on the subject was Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling. I might disagree with some of Crawford’s suggestions but of all the resources he at least lays out a strategy for actually creating interactive story. A strategy he is putting into action at Storytron.

A more recent book and good overview of the interactive story field is Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction.

Online

Two great blogs you can add to your RSS reader would be Grand Text Auto and Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction. A few of the writers behind Grand Text Auto put together the interactive story Facade. The developers of MASQ also have an interesting take on interactive story AlterAction.

Ongoing projects

And If you get tired of reading you can always check out some ongoing projects.

• Echo & Shadow
• Fairyverse
• INSCAPE
• Storytron

Examples of interactive story

If those aren’t enough of you, why not just jump into some interactive stories.

• MASQ
• Facade

Continuing updates

When I get some time I’ll move this into a more permanent page which I can continually update. But I hope this helps for now.

The quick intro explains that you’re searching for an elixir with the power of immortality. I have to admit though after the intro I didn’t exactly play along, I just clicked about trying to see what was possible. Soon I had picked up two items (a potion and a pair of glasses) and was in another room. That was where my game came to an end.

My earlier strategy of clicking around failed me in this room. I put the glasses on the skull and opened the blinds but that was about it. Luckily they give you three clues to help you along, so I used one.

The glow of dawn’s light can lead you to knowledge.

What the heck does that mean? Oh right, it’s a game not expressly an interactive story. Either way, the clue only succeeds in frustrating me. I try and burn another one of my 3 precious clues.

You have your clue for this scene.

I call it quits.

How was it so easy to step away from the game? They never hooked me. Following Myst it is relying on three things to build interest.

1. The challenge
2. Exploration
3. Story

I’m not a gamer so the challenge didn’t do it for me. The exploration could never be on par with that of a multi-million dollar video game. And the story never got started because story starts with character. You play the game in first person view so you never see yourself. I can’t feel any connection with the character I’m playing. There is no other character in the game, just the remnants of their existence. But really this is the same problem the Myst series ran into as Chris Crawford pointed out years ago.

A variation on this design is the interleaved story/puzzle, best exemplified by Myst. This game offered a classic adventure-style puzzle built into a kind of hidden story. The product’s popularity was boosted by the use of beautifully rendered 3D imagery. The result was a huge success, but Myst didn’t offer anything like true interactive storytelling. Players deduced the story from fragments picked up during their meanderings through the Myst world. The story itself was completely noninteractive, in no way responding to players’ actions. The most convincing demonstration of this approach’s futility lay in the declining success of the product line. Although each succeeding product in the line offered even higher quality, overall sales dropped off. The Myst concept was a fad, not an enduring solution.

- Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

One other problem of mixing games and story, and a classic problem with interactive story is that games are driven by the player where story driven by the plot. Like me, if you’re interested in the story you’ll most likely have a similar reaction when the game aspect intrudes. I don’t want to have to advance the story, I want it to advance me. I want the story to adapt to any odd thing I might do but I expect the story to catch up and lead me along again.

Screencaster made a noble attempt, but they forgot character. Character is the key to unlocking it all. Myst used graphics and novelty, the series however could not repeat the novelty. We watch super hero movies knowing the outcome because of character. Character is what hooks us. The problem is, it’s rather difficult to create character given the capabilities of virtual worlds of today.

Perhaps the hook, The Quest for Eternal Life was relying on was collaborative play. The opening screen does say:

You’ll Need Your Friends to Find Eternal Life

In the help section it goes even further.

Q: How do I send this game to my friends so they can play?
A: At the bottom right of the page you can select any one of your friends to join you playing The Quest for Eternal Life. Better yet, invite them all to play with you.

I unfortunately wasn’t hooked enough to invite any friends. It’s the character stupid.

That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.

They talk about a study done in the 1990’s where one volunteer is designated as a tapper and one as a listener.

Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped.

Being all well known songs this seems pretty easy. However listeners guessed only 2.5% of the songs: 3 out of 120. The interesting thing is that before the experiment, tappers predicted that listeners would guess correctly 50% of the time.

The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself - tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune - all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

We in the virtual worlds industry certainly suffer from the curse of knowledge. We already have the song stuck in our head. So how do we break through that? Like the guys from 37 Signals and their post, how would you make virtual worlds sound interesting to the mainstream user in 20 seconds or less?

But to elicit emotion you must first connect emotionally with the audience. If you don’t care about the characters in a movie you don’t care about the movie. Screenwriters, filmmakers know how to create that connection, it’s a little more unclear how virtual worlds will do that. How will virtual worlds create that emotional connection? A couple of things in the Vivaty office last week got me thinking.

First there was a product requirement that multiple streams of music not clash in a scene. The engineers of course wanted to ensure that the falloff (spatialization) was as realistic as possible. Of course my thinking was why? Couldn’t we improve on the real world, just have the sound drop off precipitously at a certain point to ensure that nothing clashed? It would still give the user the impression of spatialization and without any clash. This brings up the question of realism vs symbolism? In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explained the benefits of symbolism vs reality in communicating emotion. If we’re just dealing with emotion here why not simplify it to its bare essentials?

Then something else made me question that thinking. In our test environment we had a bug where avatars would lose their clothing. The thing that caught my attention was how the engineers responded. They found it funny, but some engineers tried to cover up the screen when their avatar was naked. In another instance two people accidentally got their avatars to lay next to one another, embarrassed they quickly ran away from each other. Of course this was all in jest, but it demonstrated how people connect emotionally with their avatars.

So where do we draw the line between attaining realism and simplifying things to focus on the emotional? Screenwriting has characters. So do video games to an extent. Virtual worlds don’t yet have fictional characters but have something even more powerful -  yourself in the form of an avatar. Now is the emotional connection with the avatar established quicker if it is realistic or symbolic? Is the emotional connection reinforced more by realistic or symbolic avatars?

They don’t just withdraw from the family to their own computer for private screen time. They pretty regularly say, ‘Hey–look at this!’ to others in the household.

Not only are they turning to the internet for entertainment over television, they seem to be doing so in a social way - shared experiences. If virtual worlds are all about entertainment, and more specifically shared entertainment the future should be bright.

Guess the next slew of virtual worlds we’ll see are heavily driven by story, mostly story worlds in the form of MMOs. But one investment caught Wagner James Au’s eye, RobotGalaxy.

I’d say the third quarter investment with the most promise is RobotGalaxy, a virtual world aimed at boys, who’ll be able to buy customized real robots in stores, then hook them up to their computers (and the world) via a USB cable.

Unfortunately RobotGalaxy isn’t out yet so I can’t see if customizing the robots also means customizing the story. But I guess just being able to tweak the character in a story is at least a start.

When I’m asked what are virtual worlds, I kind of feel like that aspiring screenwriter. Where do you begin to explain virtual worlds? Do you start by explaining the technology? Do you mention all the things you can do in virtual worlds? Then again, what can you not do in virtual worlds?

Eventually though the aspiring screenwriter learns how to boil it down, to find the central theme or plot of their screenplay. They learn how to pitch it. So what’s the central theme of virtual worlds? When we boil it down, what are virtual worlds? What’s the one thing you’re looking for when you go to a virtual world? Entertainment.

When you want to connect with friends do you go to virtual worlds? No, you turn to Facebook or email for that. But if you want to hang out with friends you jump into a virtual world. If you’re bored and want to meet new people you jump into a virtual world. If you want to meet fellow accountants you get on LinkedIn.

Of course I’m not including enterprise virtual worlds. And some users may enter a virtual world to sell items. But even here the items they’re selling are predominately for the purpose of entertainment. When you want to have fun, when you want to entertain yourself, you jump into a virtual world. A few people may use virtual worlds for other things, but the majority use them for entertainment. This is very different than how the Web began. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web to distribute scientific information. Still today most people get online to connect, read the news, etc. but not to distinctly entertain themselves. When you’re bored and have company over you’ll suggest going to see a movie - that’s entertainment. Sure you can find entertainment on the Web but most people turn to it for other reasons.

So if virtual worlds are entertainment we can think of virtual worlds as a games closet. When your a kid visiting the grandparents you commonly turn to the games closet for entertainment. Television is great but when you have cousins over you would rather do something social, you turn to the game closet. Sure there are other things crammed in there, like maybe grandmother’s sewing machine. But the majority of the closet is filled with board games, a badminton set, maybe a football. 

An MMO might be Dungeon & Dragons in the stack of board games. A serious game in a virtual world might be The Ungame.

Virtual worlds will evolve but I think the metaphor will still be appropriate. Just as the game closet can hold other things, it will always be known to me as the games closet. I go there for entertainment, for social entertainment just as I turn to virtual worlds today. This doesn’t say that virtual worlds aren’t a great place to keep in touch with friends or do other things, it’s just that today their essence is entertainment. We turn to them as we would any game closet.

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. Those stories would be retold and repeated, and eventually achieved mythological status as “facts” that guided future action. But making decisions on the basis of myths is dangerous territory.

Now that I’m at a start-up, one competing with Eric’s IMVU interestingly enough, I am more weary of false positives than ever. Start-ups are at the cutting edge of trying to define user needs and wants, swinging this way and that to try and discover the one thing that will click with users. For us in the virtual worlds industry, we’re all searching for the killer app. Which in a way pits Eric and I against each other to see who can sift through the false positives quicker. Because start-ups aren’t so much about building but about understanding users - people. You build to learn.

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

- Peter Drucker

Reading the a post about upcoming enhancements to Xbox Live, my first thought was that the avatar has finally come of age. I remember talking about avatars at Yahoo! in 2000, but not much came of it. 

Users loved them but didn’t use them much as they lacked functionality - they weren’t 3D nor portable. Well they still aren’t all that portable but many things have changed since those early years.

Then I began to think more about what the Xbox Live service was doing. It wasn’t just the avatar that Xbox Live and other services were adopting, they’re adopting a host of other virtual worlds features. Ability to customize your avatar, earn points, leveling, socialize, etc. None of these are new and they’re all taken from someplace else - mostly from games. But I would still say that virtual worlds represent a unique combination of features and place different emphasis on them. Which got me thinking, if games have game dynamics (some may call them game mechanics) why can’t we have virtual world dynamics? Game dynamics is not just the set of features but how they interplay with one another, the same can be said for virtual world features.

So I think I’m just going to start using the term “virtual world dynamics”. My last question, should it be plural - virtual worlds dynamics? Maybe not.

That is the very question MindFuse is trying to answer - targeting casual gamers with an MMO. My guess is that to attract the casual gamer MindFuse had to lessen some of the game dynamics of a traditional MMO. The whole concept of casual gaming is that players don’t have time to invest - invest in leveling and all that. So it’s also understandable that they also won’t be as invested in the game. The problem then is how does MindFuse keep users coming back? My guess is with story. If the game dynamics are weak the story must pick up the slack. Visit the MindFuse site you’ll see that they devote an entire page to story. In a way, story is lighter than all the game dynamics found in MMOs. The same reason you can’t turn off that horrible movie is that you’re hooked - hook the viewer and they’ll keep watching, they’ll keep coming back.

It’s likely that as virtual worlds and more importantly MMOs move to try and attract a more mainstream audience they will need to lessen their game dynamics and rely more on story. Story will increasingly play a bigger role in the evolution of virtual worlds.