I’ve been watching the Storytron development for some time now. But Susan Gibb is actually doing brainwork in the building environment, SWAT. She’s developing some fine ideas for approaching the Crawford vision of interactive storytelling. Following her into this and playing with Storytron, I imagine, will be an electric process. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with and look forward to working with the environment, as well.
The questions I have are all conceptual, such as what happens when story doesn’t develop.
Tuned stay.
This snip from the website is of particular interest
You also want these choices to amount to a satisfying story, with a beginning, middle and end, albeit which specific beginning, middle and end those will be depends on the player’s decisions. You have several tools that let you do just that – making sure, for example, that the pace stays right, that the story doesn’t end before all the threads are resolved or continue after they are, that certain key events happen at designated times and so forth.
“Tuned stay?” You sound like you’ve already worked with SWAT.
It will be an extremely interesting learning experience, and I agree with your concern for story. There are many more elements to writing that clearly have enhanced traditional and especially new media stories. Drama can be the inclusion of lighting, environment, sound, pause, flashback; these may not be a part of the Storytron platform–we’ll have to wait and see if the dynamics of interaction alone will produce effective story.
This storytron thing does look like an interesting experiement in stories. My initial reaction to the posts you put up, steve, was that you were describing what Dungeons and Dragons becomes under a good Dungeon Master. Perhaps storytron can be used to devise serious scientific experiements centered on just how human intereaction creates a good story.
i.e. Set up a storytron world, have a reader use it, then have another play out the same world with a dungeon master-like “author”. See what storytron lacks–might tell us something about human intereactivity, meaning, and such things. It’s a hard thing to describe but am I right in assuming that your previous post about the application to politics touched on the same aidea of using the system to explore social science?