Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (Chris Crawford)

Posted by Michael on May 16th, 2006, in Books

This book is partially an attack on the traditional games industry (in which the writer was extremely active about a decade ago) and an introduction to the technology that Mr. Crawford has been developing since he turned his back on it. Chris Crawford considers contemporary games to make extremely primitive use of the interactive medium and he argues for an approach that will allow for a lot more variety in the stories that can be told with it. He considers interactivity to be the core of the computer’s innovative potential and the algorythm to be the essential means of expression. He measures interactivity by counting verbs, by counting the amount of things that a player can do. True enough, contemporary games contain very little verbs (run, jump, shoot).
Given the current success of computer games, Mr. Crawford does not believe that any significant storytelling medium can grow out of games. Interactive Storytelling will become an art form on its own that will one day completely overshadow games.

The biggest gift to humanity in this book is a definition of interactivity that puts an end to all confusion and fuzziness that surrounds this term:

A cyclic process between two or more active agents in which each agent alternately listen, thinks and speaks.

Beautiful. Thank you, Chris.

There’s no denying that this book has been very inspiring. Mostly because I disagree with almost all of the solutions that Mr. Crawford offers. 🙂

There’s somewhat of a rant here about how I dislike the concept of a drama manager and in general the obsession with plot found in most people who are interested in stories.

Apart from that, I have an intuitive aversion of the way in which Chris Crawford attempts to express story events in semi-mathematical formulas. It’s as if he’s trying to tell a story to a computer, rather than using a computer to tell a story to a human. It’s the type of thing of which I suspect that it can only relate the essence of an event but non of the little details that make the event meaningful and emotionally interesting. The kind of cutting up into little pieces that causes the soul of an event to slip through the cracks.
But this could be a huge prejudice from my side and maybe his “algebraic approach” does pay off in the end, when his technology will be used by artists clever enough the wield the brush he is creating.

He is well on his way to actually releasing software that will enable artists to create interactive fiction according to his vision. I will be looking into Storytron more closely soon.

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