Failed Screenwriter

Reuben Stiger, the CEO of Millions of Us, has an interesting post that was right up my alley - Has the Internet Failed as a Storytelling Medium? I agree and disagree with some of Reuben's post, but find it more interesting is that he never mentions interactive story in the entire post.

I first met Reuben at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose. I was enthusiastic to hear his message that the metaverse needed story, however I was less enthusiastic after emailing with Millions of Us Chief Creative Officer Douglas Gayeton . Douglas and I traded a few emails on the topic of interactive story which boiled down to the following response.

justin, this seems like a poor interaction. the beauty of a virtual world is that you can intereact with real people. why would interacting with bots with super limited communication skills be better than interacting with real people?

Granted the limited communication skills is a giant hurdle, however I like to see that more as a challenge than a reason to look elsewhere. Perhaps that hurdle is why people skip over the concept of interactive story. It's as if no one knows of the concept or that a few people have been plugging away at it for years. People like Chris Crawford with Storytron, the Grand Text Auto crew with Facade, Javier Maldonado with MASQ, and more. There are even books on the subject - Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, and more. Combine all their work, the built up knowledge, and bring it to the metaverse and all I see is great potential for the future of entertainment. There is even potential for user generated ads, how can the industry turn a blind eye to all of this?

Maybe another reason interactive story is always left out is it's actually incredibly difficult to create. I, like all the interactive story pioneers and adventurous writers, quickly learned that the obvious solutions turn out to not be solutions at all. Much of the difficulty boils down to the dreaded notion of agency - agency or not to agency. If interaction is a given, I like to think of agency as the ability for that interaction to truly affect the plot and story. Think of the Matrix 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 give you agency. This would be true interactive story. What makes it difficult is that people usually want the story where Neo swallows the red pill as in the movie, so how can you give them that even if they swallow the blue? I think it's possible but it'll take a complete reshaping of what we think of as narrative and something beyond my feeble mind. I think an intermediary approach will be to not worry about agency, to create immersive story. When freed from the burden of agency, of trying to solve the interactive story conundrum, I believe artists will create the killer app Reuben is asking for in his post.

But in the end, and as Douglas would point out, the only thing that will keep people from leaving out interactive or immersive story is a popular example - a product. I believe that the first remnants of that example is only a year or two away. I'm hoping to actually accelerate that with TapBot.

I came across an interesting repost by William Huber on Zang.org - Guiltier pleasures: social cognition in gaming. He brings up an interesting point, saying that games will not evolve by adding story and narrative but by exploring the unique opportunity to experiment with cognition.

William Huber came to this realization seeing Facade premiered at GDC in 2004. Facade is perhaps the first true example of interactive story and still available for anyone to experience for themselves.

It was seeing players deal with situations and emotions uncommon in typical video games that spurred Huber's thinking. Facade simply didn't react like a typical video game. He saw this as an analogy with social cognition, where infants after 3 months graduate to enjoying perfect contingency to imperfect contingency.

When the player can reduce his/her interaction with the agent to a predictable input/output system - a game of perfect contingency, with or without complete information - players will not bother to engage in social cognition and instead settle into mechanistic, operational play. The problem is that so many interesting mental phenomena occur in social cognition - guilt, identification, personal (rather than managerial) responsibility, love.

Likening gamers to infants below 3 months might not be well received but antidotally I can see it. When I play a game I'm more interested in getting familiar with the controls, how things are going to work, and how to get from A to B. This would be like watching a movie and trying to figure out how they filmed it rather than just enjoying it. Of course at the beginning of a movie we need to get our bearings, but if the creators did their jobs well it is almost second nature. Soon we enter the story world, however with games even after learning the controls we are constantly trying to figure out how things work so we can use them to our advantage. Huber suggests we continue to play with this exploration rather than try an weave in story elements.

Instead of trying to just emulate novelistic or filmic recollection/representation, a game-system can stimulate social cognition directly, with agents that imperfectly and unpredictably respond to socially relevant stimuli. Of course, this is in the context of otherwise effective, skillful game design, including the drama management used in Facade to channel the motivations and reactions of the agents into a paced, dynamic narrative.

As much as I agree with Huber, I believe he's looking at this from the perspective of a gamer. I don't mean to knock gamers in any way, but perspective is always important. From his perspective he is discounting the role of the writer to create a character or story that produces imperfect contingency. However we shouldn't overlook his take either, it's an interesting point and may ultimately evolve into a rule of thumb for immersive story artists. You also can't emphasis enough the differences between the gamer audience and those looking for narrative entertainment like movies and immersive story.

A recent post on Massively poses the question - Are hardcore players skewing game development? Interesting question even if posed to a mostly hardcore MMO audience.

MMO's have never really appealed to me, not only is it a time issue but I get bored with video games in general after maybe 20 minutes. So to answer the question from my perspective, the hardcore players are skewing development. But maybe I will never be their target audience even if they skew to less hardcore players.

If you think of MMOs as just one genre of gaming, you'll see the question from a different perspective. Would you ever want to cater a horror movie to an audience looking for a romance? Audiences want what they expect, what you sold the film or game on in the poster. Of course that gets to the heart of the question - is there an audience already in MMOs that care about different experiences than leveling and fighting monsters?

If there is, as the post The future of storytelling in MMOs suggests, that audience might be better served through themed virtual worlds or immersive stories. Using the genre analogy again, it is difficult to mix genres. Scream did a nice job with comedy/horror, but horror/westerns have been notoriously bad. Expecting MMOs to appeal to a wider audience might turn out to be a horror/western.

At the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco I couldn't escape the mantra, "the network as a platform". But hearing it from every corner got me thinking about entertainment as a platform.

Somewhere along my failed attempt at screenwriting I came across the concept of interactive story and could instantly envision the future of movies. Of course others had visions of the future as well, like Chris Crawford and a host of other entrepreneurs/academics. In 1995 Bob Gale even turned his vision into reality with the release of Mr. Payback, albeit to poor reviews. Sitting at the Web 2.0 conference I began to see my vision from a different perspective, not form that of interactive story but from the same trends that power Web 2.0. I began to see the future of movies as a platform.

Imagine the scenario

1. You log onto one of the metaverse platforms
2. Lead your avatar into a virtual theater building and select a theater.
3. Upon entering your avatar is transported to a totally different environment, or scene, and has even taken on a different appearance.
4. Characters in the scene approach and speak with you through text chat, or voice.
5. You converse with them through text chat, amazed they respond as if they were real people.
6. Slowly they draw you into the story.
7. The story continues to unfold with you its protagonist.

First movies 1.0

Before movies can evolve into a platform some underlining technology needs to be in place first. Just as Web 2.0 had a Web 1.0 to lay the ground work, the same will be true for the future of movies.

Essential movie 1.0 elements

The platform emerges

As they say, story starts with character. So that's where we'll start and lucky for us we already have the basis of computer characters in ELIZA, the famous chatterbot that first popularized artificial intelligence (AI).

Well before the advent of multimedia, there was a moment in the history of the computer that demonstrated its representational and narrative power with the same startling immediacy as the Lumieres ' train did for the motion picture camera. This is the famous but often misunderstood moment in which the first completely computer-based character was created.

- Janet H. Murray from Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

You can think of AIML as an updated version of ELIZA, and with it an artist can easily enough build a character bot that interacts with a player using natural language and gives off the impression of being alive. AIML works by extrapolating upon a relatively narrow set of patterns (input) and responses (output) and therefore can be tripped up. An artist can combat this by adding their own patterns and responses, the same way they would add personality to a character, but trying to accommodate every possible input is a losing battle. Some think this problem is ripe for the application of AI, AI that learns. However such AI technology may overtly complicate AIML and take it out of the hands of the common artist. I also have my doubts that AI can magically solve this. AI has come up short on many an occasion and I'm a bigger fan of the less glamorous AI that powers Google and made it a billion dollar company - tapping into the collective intelligence of the Internet. A character bot can do the same, if it encounters a slang term it's never seen before it can ping the Google servers to try and ascertain a meaning. The same AI Google uses to suggest alternative searches (the "Did you mean:") could also power character bots to not sound like, well mindless bots.

Tapping in to the knowledge base Google has amassed could just be the beginning. Across the Internet new knowledge bases are being constructed and made available (for free and not so free). The semantic web is one such knowledge base that is gaining steam. As an artist, think of constructing a set for a scene to play out. Today you would most likely open up a 3D tool such as Blender and start creating objects. But what if those objects were already created and not only that, they came with a battery of semantic data - weight, how much weight it can support, texture, etc? Granted that would be a mountain of information but isn't that the same mountain of data the proponents of the semantic web are promising? And we don't have to start with a full set of data, just enough - just enough so that an artist can populate a set with pre-made objects. Pre-made objects that the metaverse physics engine would also know how to manipulate based on that same semantic data.

By tapping into the collective knowledge of the Internet an artist's creative output can be extended beyond what they could ever hope to create using conventional methods. Look at what Web 2.0 has made possible.

Power of the platform

By leveraging the platform an artist can lower their production costs, which will undoubtedly spur experimentation and draw artists into the innovation cycle - democratize innovation. And much of that experimentation will likely be directed at trying to break story into individual elements - not so much into theme or acts, but a form that enables a computer to interpret and manipulate it. Think more moving from analog recording to digital recording. Janet H. Murray in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, equates this to the invention of musical notes.

If artists and others are able to break story into individual elements the platform will really take off. Think of what digital recordings made possible. Artists can apply the same analytics companies use to evaluate their web sites and marketing but to their creative work. Imagine applying A/B testing to your entertainment, and all in real time.

Artists can take advantage of other 2.0 tools - Folksonomy, RSS, etc. They could even open source their creations, allowing others to extend and rework them or drop a character bot into their own creation. Gives fan fiction a whole new meaning.

And who knows, with the platform and further experimentation we might be able to do what others have failed to do - create a mainstream, successful, interactive story. Of course I'd just be happy seeing an immersive story.

Nicholas Carr's latest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google is very insightful, however near the end he extends into fear mongering a bit. Some of that fear mongering springs from an interesting point, Larry Page and SergeyBrin's motivation for Google had more roots in AI (artificial intelligence) than being just a search engine.

They weren't just interested in perfecting their search engine, they said. What they really looked forward to was melding their technology with the human brain itself. "You want access to as much [information] as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct," explained Brin. "The solution isn't to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind."

Larry and Sergey are still pursuing their vision of AI.

"Every time I talk about Google's future with Larry Page," reports Steve Jurvetson, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, "he argues that it will become an artificial intelligence."

It is difficult to see exactly what scares Nicholas with this, other than general fear of omnipresent technology.

"Why not improve the brain?" Brin muses at one point. "Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain."

Plugging AI resources into my brain doesn't scare me, if anything I'd be giddy about it as Larry and Sergey are. But what I'd like to see is the AI used not just to assist us, but to power our entertainment as well. And I don't mean in some pie in the sky, where AI constructs interesting stories for us on the fly. No I mean in a more practical way, say as to power language processing for virtual characters, enabling them to process slang and be topical with current events. That could be immersive drama's beach head as the search engine is for Larry and Sergey's AI ambitions, who knows where it could lead.

But alas I doubt Larry and Sergey's ambitions align much with entertainment. Entertainment is soft compared to their math and science backgrounds. Where as I see incredibly interesting data from immersive drama they may see too much ambiguity, but isn't Google's attempt to interpret queries fraught with as much ambiguity? Immersive drama represents a way to technically examine entertainment like never before. Just as we gather click trails for web sites, we'll be able to get the same for immersive dramas. We'll get metrics on engagement, time spent with a certain character, type of responses, etc. - practically everything needed to construct AI as Google has done by taping into people's mind through search. But if still Larry and Sergey can't wrap their heads around the entertainment aspect, maybe games will be the carrot they need. Games today has a little science built up around it, maybe that will capture their interest and eventually lead them to immersive drama.

One area I can see them moving quickly into is the metaverse, but not the one many of us think of when we hear the word. I see them expanding Google Earth, adding avatars, and integrating their AI. Think of this as an intermediate step to tapping directly into your brain with their AI - a digital interface to the AI before it goes direct.

In trying to develop immersive drama I'm naturally interested in artificial intelligence (AI) and how it might be used to create realistic characters. Given AI today, we can create the NPCs (Non Player Characters) we encounter in video games today. To create immersive drama we will most likely need more from NPCs and consequently AI. So you can understand my enthusiasm when I read posts like, Virtual character with child-like reasoning abilities enters Second Life.

Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.

A pretty tall order, but that's pretty much in line with the field of AI - grand predictions and a lot of failure. But maybe the researchers at Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department have figured out a way to make it work. Than again, some of the quotes from the post make me suspicious.

“Declarative definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind, including lying, betrayal, and even evil,” are covered as well, according to Bringsjord.

Evil - really. Perhaps that is stretching it a bit? The concept to try and recreate the theory of mind makes sense, however when do we cross over from trying to create the illusion of a character and creating a real entity? If Bringsjord's objective is entertainment he might be a little off the mark, especially when you consider a character in a movie is more a metaphor for human nature than true representation.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they're superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we thing we understand them, we don't. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I'm a bit iffy.

- Robert McKee

When I read about AI initiatives like this it reminds me of my issues with interactive story - where the usual approach is more that of a problem solver than artist. Sometimes I question if researchers are aiming more for simulated reality than entertainment and if they're aware of that?

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.

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.

In lue of fire works this year I spent the 4th of July getting TapBot.org up. I've been tinkering with the project for years and really dove in feet first over the past two months. So the site is live, it's ugly, and much of it embarrasses me. But as they say in the biz, get it up as soon as it functions and you're still a little bit embarrassed by it.

So I've fleshed out the concept a little, now it's onto the real work of recruiting volunteers - namely programmers.