Storytron - News

I flew to Atlanta on Thursday, April 9th, delivered my lecture on Friday the 10th, and returned home on Saturday the 11th. The purpose of the trip was to recruit authors for Storytron. There were about 150 people at the conference, and I got about 100 of them in my lecture (there were three other lectures at the same time). My lecture consisted of two parts. The first half made the point that the games industry is never going to incorporate social reasoning into its designs. I hammered that point home with six different arguments supporting my claim.

The second half of the lecture was a sneaky way of boasting about Storytron. I offered as my sixth argument the case that interactive storytelling is immensely difficult to pull off. How difficult? Well, let me just list the eight breakthroughs that I had to make in order to get my own version of interactive storytelling working:

1. the realization that the essential problem with games is the absence of social reasoning (”People, not things!”)

2. Crawford’s First Law: “Always ask, what does the user DO? What are the verbs?”

3. The need for a linguistic user interface (LUI)

4. The concept of the toy language as derived from the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in linguistics

5. The inverse parser.

6. The need for design to proceed from the language to the reality, not vice versa.

7. The whole Deikto-Engine system for implementing the above ideas (that was a big one)

8. The need for storytellers to do the authoring, not programmers, with its implications for Swat

9. Sappho: a scripting language designed to be accessible to non-technical artists. That drove home the point that Storytron is really nifty-keen.

I concluded by observing that interactive storytelling would never come about by any evolutionary process on the part of the games industry; it would require a revolution in the form of a new industry, the interactive storytelling industry, which would someday be about three times larger than the games industry. I then invited the audience to join the revolution. Oh, and the website is storytron.com. Hint, hint.