The October Dr. Dobbs Journal has an interview in which Editor-At-Large Mike Swain talks with Chris Crawford, one of the early Atari game development gurus, about the interactive storytelling paradigm, of which Crawford is the inventor. It gives an exciting glimpse into the possibilities for the future of computer games, and I believe games will play a huge role in the future of healthcare - indispensable for training staff and patients and highly varied in their therapeutic applications as well.
Crawford's new company, Storytron, is intent on commercializing his interactive storytelling engine, which has been in the works for more than a decade, waiting for technology to catch up with its demands and for a few key insights to fall into place.
Crawford describes interactive storytelling as
...an artistic medium which offers the rich emotional experience of a story, coupled with the empowerment of actually being the protagonist.
Past efforts at interactive storytelling kept the player in a passive role, still reading and watching, occasionally making choices between two branches in the narrative thread. Crawford has coined his new paradigm Storytronics, which he describes as follows:
The basic concept in Storytronics is that interactive storytelling is first an interactive experience - that is, it is not an experience where the player's main role is to read text or watch footage, sometimes getting the attractive opportunity to "choose the lesser of two evils". It is an experience where the player has volition, and is at liberty not merely to choose between narrative possibilities, but to behave in whichever way he or she likes, thus freely directing the course of the drama. The computer-controlled characters, likewise, behave according to their unique personalities, reacting dynamically to the player's behavior.
To make this possible, he has had to come up with some very creative code and a whole new programming language he calls Deikto targeted at storyworld creators, whose role is to develop the world in which a nearly infinite number of stories are possible - a computer-generated world much more like the real world than what computer gaming has been able to produce thus far.
What a fascinating turn of events! I'm going to be watching this carefully, and seeing if the therapeutic gaming world picks up on it. I wrote a couple of posts last winter about the work of Dr. Carolyn Watters and her efforts in therapeutic computer gaming, and eventually I will get around to asking her for her take on this new development. I'm also really curious as to how this will tie into agent architectures and scenario planning, two of my other key interests. Lots of room for imagination here!
Comments