{"id":13,"date":"2009-03-25T16:56:15","date_gmt":"2009-03-25T16:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=13"},"modified":"2018-07-16T17:10:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-17T00:10:26","slug":"the-wrong-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2009\/03\/the-wrong-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wrong Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing<\/a> concerning the public release of Chris Crawford’s ‘Storytron’<\/a> interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I’ve never believed that there was anything to be gained from the approach, and yet Crawford’s passion is real. I presented a paper years ago at an academic conference at which he was one of the star speakers, and he’s the mad prophet of the gaming\/interactive fiction world \u2014 Howard Beale without the rage.]<\/p>\n

I also tend to think that Crawford is barking up the wrong tree. Worse, I have a nagging feeling that there isn’t a tree there at all. Notwithstanding his talent for grandiose self-promotion<\/a> \u2014 not that that’s unusual in AI circles \u2014 his insistence that what he’s doing has anything much to do with stories<\/em> is making a rod for his own back. What he’s doing is (still) interactive game<\/em> design. Nothing wrong with that, obviously, except when it pretends to be something it isn’t.<\/p>\n

This sort of story-world as pinball machine \u2014 build all of this machinery<\/em>, give the user some small element of input, analogous to flipper control, and then expect what comes out of the other end to be a story<\/em> \u2014 is a problem in all sorts of ways. Firstly, building the worlds is extraordinarily difficult. It’s basically the AI world-knowledge problem. That means almost no-one can\/will take the trouble, as I think Crawford has discovered. Secondly, a sequence of events \u2014 even a perfectly coherent sequence of events \u2014 is not at all the same as a story. Stories need an authorial hand, not just the laws of physics.<\/p>\n

I’m also far from convinced that ‘interactive fiction’ is something people even want. Maybe I’m lacking imagination, but the most profound value in fiction is that we don’t<\/em> interact with it. It’s a time when we get to enjoy the skill of the author, into whose hands we willingly place ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing concerning the public release of Chris Crawford’s ‘Storytron’ interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I’ve never believed that there was anything to be gained from the approach, and yet Crawford’s passion is real. I presented a … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,34,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","category-games","category-narrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":772,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}