Failed Screenwriter

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

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.

The quest to discover the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is surprisingly similar to that of interactive story. The key point of this analogy as pointed out by Andrew Glassner in his book Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction, is that many people got lost trying to find the Northwest Passage.

Sought by explorers for centuries as a possible trade route, it was first navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1903–1906. The Arctic pack ice prevents regular marine shipping throughout the year, but due to climate change, the pack ice is being reduced and this Arctic shrinkage may eventually make the waterways more navigable.

We early enthusiasts of interactive story are in pursuit of the perfect combination of interactivity, agency, narrative, etc. that will make interactive story click with the public. If it was just interactivity we were after we would have succeeded in the 80's with Choose Your Own Adventure books. But like many attempts, ala Mr. Payback, they ultimately end up as just footnotes on the path to interactive story - their creators having simply gotten lost. And to get lost you first have to believe something exists.

This was driven in some part by scientific naiveté, namely an early belief that seawater was incapable of freezing (as late as the mid 18th century, Captain James Cook had reported, for example, that Antarctic icebergs had yielded fresh water, seemingly confirming the hypothesis), and that a route close to the North Pole must therefore exist.

When these early explorers thought Northwest Passage, they saw a clear waterway in their head. And the same is probably true for the early enthusiasts of interactive story - we all have an image of what it will look like. Of course what the Northwest Passage ultimately turned out to be a little different than what early explorers had envisioned. The same is most likely going to be true for interactive story.

Even when the Northwest Passage was finally discovered it wasn't what explorers expected.

Sir Robert McClure was credited with the discovery of the real Northwest Passage in 1851 when he looked across McClure Strait from Banks Island and viewed Melville Island. However, this strait was not navigable to ships at that time...

Finally conquered by Roald Amundsen in 1906, that doesn't bode well for interactive story - a mere 55 year difference between discovery and the first ship sailing through.

So us early enthusiasts of interactive story can learn a lot from explorers searching for the Northwest Passage. Many of us will get lost, what we envision in our heads is most likely way off from what will end up being like (if it even exists), and it will probably take years to exploit once discovered. However as global warming makes short work of the pack ice, it might one day be feasible for commercial ships to cruise through the Northwest Passage as was originally envisioned.

Now that it seems the press is turning away from Second Life, just after advertisers turned their back, people feel more free to rip on Second Life and admit that there simply isn't much to do there once you get there.

Having spent last weekend walking around its virtual universe, I have to report that the whole thing is pretty crap - a bit like Milton Keynes with a very bad hangover. The branded locations that sounded so impressive in the pages of BusinessWeek are very basic and virtually devoid of visitors.

In the post, Second Guessing Second Life, the author explains how he resorted to what could be considered griefing to try and entertain himself.

I grew so bored and lonely in Second Life that I resorted to removing my trousers and shouting at the occasional avatars that passed by in a desperate attempt to make contact.

If you read the comments you'll see Second Life still has its fans, for which Second Life offers great entertainment. The problem is that most people can't figure out how one can find it entertaining as acknowledged by all the "What to do in Second Life"lists. Such lists are never a good sign, as I saw hundreds of them when I worked at GeoCities in 1999. If you remember GeoCities you also know how much of a fade having your own homepage actually was, but in 1999 we were sure it would become essential for everyone in the coming years. There was some truth to idea of presence on the Internet but it were better served by social networks and blogs. Evolve is what Second Life and virtual worlds need to do. I of course and convinced that part of that evolution is interactive story.

Please bear with me on this rant, I'm going to do more of a brain dump and hopefully in the end my reasons for a new direction will be apparent.

The end goal in all of this is to be entertaining
We, meaning the few of us plugging away in this field at the moment, are trying to build or create an interactive story. But before we can do that we need to build an interactive story engine and to do that we'll need a strategy. All this is the nuts and bolts of a car, the strategy being the internal combustion engine. But all that means nothing to users, all they're looking for is entertainment. When the novelty of interactivity wears off, the interactive aspect better add to the entertainment value. It's all about entertainment, it's got to be entertaining.

The current vision of interactive story
I left one thing out above, it isn't just an engine and strategy you need to make interactive story work you'll also need to settle on a definition or vision of what interactive story is. This is still up for much debate - is it a game, is it participatory story, collaborative fiction, etc. But to try and avoid the messy details lets concentrate on the universal tenants.

• Story or drama driven
• The player can interact with the environment, other characters, etc.
• Through that interaction the player can affect the story

Andrew Stern sums up the last points one word, agency.

For me (and this is my personal bent), if a fiction exists on a computer, with all of the potential that implies, it’s not enough to only explore a virtual world or networked narrative, without having an effect on it. And when there are effects, they need to build upon themselves, and be significant throughout the experience — not just selecting one of a few different endings, or worse, having my interactions get discarded in order to return to the story’s unwavering, linear plot. Yes, I’m talking about the a-word, agency.

- Andrew Stern
GTxA Symposium: Future Directions

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Choose Your Own Adventure captures these, however I think everyone in this field is hoping for more then that, more interactivity, more intricate plots, etc. The problem isn't making an interactive story engine, it's making the interactive story engine we have in our heads - Star Wars but with us playing Han Solo. We want it to capture the same emotions as the movie, to experience the surprises, and all while being interactive. This is no easy feat, all the years of work and theory have yet to produce an interactive story that matches the caliber of Star Wars. Andrew Stern has even railed at our failing - I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.

I work in new product and when you come a dead end, you change things up. Maybe our goal of an interactive Star Wars is too narrow, impossible, the wrong goal? Maybe we're coming at it from the wrong direction? Maybe the technology to deliver it isn't here yet. With questions like these floating around my head I came across an MIT study done in 2000, Physically interactive story environments. In it they introduce the concept of "less-choice, more-responsiveness".

In particular, we found that compelling interactive narrative story systems can be perceived as highly responsive, engaging, and interactive even when the overall story has a single-path structure, in what we call a “less-choice, more-responsiveness” approach to the design of story-based interactive environments.

This got me thinking, in trying to build an interactive story engine we constantly worry about two elements. One of course is if it's entertaining. The second is if it's interactive enough. In theory they should both compliment one another, however at this early stage in the development of interactive story they're likely hinder one another. Questions such as, "is this truly interactive, is the player's actions truly affecting the story?" But after reading this study it seems that true interactivity with the story might be implied by the players if the system is responsive enough. This begs the question, are we simply over thinking the issue of interactivity?

Another way to think about this implied interactivity might be in how we feel anxiety, doubt, etc. in movies. When we watch a Superman movie we know he will prevail, that everything will end happily , however we allow ourselves to get carried away with the story. We feel scared for Superman in the final confrontation with the villain. We know there is no flexibility in the outcome of the movie, but we go along for the ride, we imply flexibility which would be the same with implying interactivity.

Changing our goal to immersive story
So if the player's are willing to perceive interactivity who are we to get in there way trying to give them true interactivity? We in this field rack our brains trying to make interactivity story be just that, interactive. But perhaps our goal should be to help players feed their sense of interactivity or play to the entertainment factor just as movies do. Screenwriters know they must grab their audience, have them empathises with the characters, in the first 10 pages. Do that and you don't have to worry too much about creating doubt latter in the movie.

Perhaps the interactive story artists isn't the one who should be worried about adding interactivity, maybe it's for the player to add. Create the responsive environment that facilitates the player to add the interactivity, and if the story is entertaining enough we've succeeded.

A better name for this form of interactive story is immersive story, where the goal is to provide a responsive story environment. More specifically provide the responsiveness that users want or expect, the responsiveness that deepens the story. I know how this might sound pointless in the light of true interactive story, however I could paint movies in the same light. Create a story where the outcome is already given but take the audience through the motions anyway.

Perhaps we've been over thinking interactivity all along
I think it's ample time for a new approach. Secondly, if we can create immersive story we would have the building blocks for true interactive story. The biggest benefit for this approach I would think is the ability to deliver entertainment. Writers and creators know how to create entertaining stories, they would need to experiment with interactive story, possibly for years, before they could be confidently deliver entertainment of the same caliber.

My main interest with interactive story is as entertainment, but that does not mean I disregard it's potential as an educational tool. Being a subset of story, it would be nearly impossible for the new medium to not have some educational aspects. One aspect that intrigues me is how we think in stories, how we pattern our life and perception of the world in stories.

Jerome Bruner, the famous cognitive psychology, proved that even before children are able to talk they are organizing their world and communicating through stories. First with stories of completion. Through gesture or facial expressions a child says, "All gone" when the bottle is empty. They also attach emotions - satisfaction of they are done or need for another bottle. In the 80'sBruner was involved in researching a 2 year old girl, Emily, who's parents noticed that when they put her to bed she spent time talking to herself. Bruner and other psychologist studied audio tapes of Emily and realized that she wasn't just using story to communicate with others, she was using it to shape and mold her own view of reality as well. We did the same when we were Emily's age (probably not as verbally), weaving together the strands of our day into the fabric of our memory, and in doing that shape our mental lens through which we would view each succeeding day. According to Bruner, we think in story.

So by making story interactive we would in theory be able to play, to experiment, with our own thoughts. We often wonder how we might act differently if given the chance to do something over, now we can. However this is also where I get weary as I pontificate about how great something is for education. I grew up with the first home computers which were also set to revolutionize education. But other then using them as fancy typewriters and simple games I never got much out of them at school. Such educational dreams could also be heard around the birth of television, but in the end it's educational value was better served in giving societies shared experiences. How much did Archie Bunker teach us about ourselves over watching Sesame Street?

For me it's as they say, education must be entertaining. I love to contemplate the educational value of interactive story, but I'd rather not at the expense of the first goal - to entertain.

I'm convinced that communication is the biggest point of failure in projects. So in my quest to popularize the concept of interactive story and its potential in the Meataverse, I threw together a video. Threw being the key word. I'll work on my machinima skills and get a better one up soon (soon being the key word there).

I made the long trek from Orange County to Burbank yesterday for the Virtual Hollywood Meetup. Being able to discuss the Metaverse and meet some of the people I had only known through their blogs and work was well worth the trouble, even if CalTrans closed lanes twice on my route home.

The main themes batted back and forth were community, user generated content, and story. The mention of story of course piqued my interest. Jason Stoddard from Centric was the first person in the industry who didn't give me a blank look when I mentioned interactive story. He even mentioned that they have a few interactive story projects in the works. But it wasn't so much that they talked about story, but how they talked about story. The how was much different then my experiences at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose. There I got the feeling that they were looking for ways to slot story in, not unlike how Chris Klug, creative director at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, described the game industry.

There's a dearth of story approach to video games. It is the proverbial needle in the haystack to find someone in the industry who understands story structure. Today people are hired for their technical prowess.

But as Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us has been preaching, it's story that will unlock the true value of the Metaverse.

When I explain the concept of interactive story, many people equate it to being able to make the decisions in a story, sometimes they even mention the Choose Your Own Adventure books popular in the 80's. When theorizing about how to build an interactive story engine it's also common for people to look at story as being decision based. However story is much more then just decisions.

For one, writers in general don't work by imagining themselves in the shoes of their protagonist, guessing at what they would do when presented by a choice. They already know what choice their characters would make. Shakespeare didn't question if Romeo would drink the poison, he knew he would. Knowing the outcome, Shakespeare probably spent his time building up that choice, employing various tools to make it all the more dramatic.

Writers use many of tools to construct a story and keep the audience's attention, of which choice is just a small one. Dramatic tension is probably the most powerful, where somebody wants something and there are obstacles. Those obstacles are also likely not to be choices either. Unless a choice is a dilemma, they simply do not hold much power in a story. Michael Hauge captures the weakness with choices when explaining a common problem writers have with biographies, they forget to craft them around a visible goal and end up with just a long list of choices.

The problem with biographies is there is no visible goal, their life just goes on and on.

- Michael Hauge

Life is a series of choices, we expect more out of our entertainment. Interactive story should allow writers to use all their dramatic tools, not just one.

Hearing Chris Klug, speak at the Screenwriting Expo in Los Angeles, I was surprised to hear his warning about interactive story.

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

Kind of scary when the creative director of a game start-up, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, advises those looking to write for video games to never mention interactive story. Apparently interactive story is the kiss of death in the game industry, and for a few reasons:

1. They've heard it all before and also seen it fail before
2. They see interactive story as a branching narrative, and each branch is dollars going out the window if no player takes that path
3. Instead of seeing successful interactive stories they see dissertations and experiments from academia

This does not bode well for the prospects of interactive story, an entire industry seeing it as a red herring. But then again, the games industry might be the wrong place to look for support. Games even more then movies are about genres - first person shooter, MMO , etc. People buy genre games for the same reason they see genre movies, because they know what to expect. And as Chris also says:

What drives the bus is games.

The game audience is buying to play puzzles, to compete, to beat a game. They are not buying to watch a couple fall in love like in a romantic comedy. The game audience is already there and the game companies are trying to serve it.

Interactive story should try and find another avenue to get in front of an audience. Say one that is yet to truly find itself or genres - say virtual worlds.