Storytron Storms Atlanta

April 29th, 2008

–posted by Chris

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.

Join the discussion!

Check out the Latest New Pages

April 25th, 2008
–posted by Laura

Over the past five days, we have gotten most of the new website up. Pati got our site navigation system working, and we’ve launched several new sections. Check out our FAQ, and the new Authors section, with its extensive Storyworld Author’s Guide. Also see About Us, with Team bios and photos, which just went up this evening.

Now, while Chris hunkers down in Casa Crawford, nearing completion on Balance of Power, the rest of us have two main priorities. First, we are improving and expanding our BBS registration-login function. In tandem with this, we are devising a privacy policy, which will (a) tell you how we’ll protect the data you share with us from spammers, scammers, pirates, scalawags, and ne’er-do-wells, and (b) build the systems that actually do the protecting. Once all this is done, we’ll be able to bring our registration/ login and contact us/ feedback pages up.

Also — and this is the really fun part — we have just begun work fixing up the Players section. (We had a rudimentary version up for a couple of days, but decided it needed more attention.) This is where you will view, select, play, and rate storyworlds. It’s a big effort, and as with our prior efforts, we’ll probably bring it up in chunks, as we complete them. Watch for it!

If you are curious about our progress, the Site Map page gives you a color-coded glimpse of where we stand with the different portions of the website.

Join the discussion!

Welcome to Storytron!

April 25th, 2008

(originally posted 18 April 2008 –posted by Laura)

We are thrilled to announce the official launch of Storytron, Inc.’s new website.

These webpages are the manifestation of a dream Chris and I have shared since we met in the nineties. It’s a forum we have created for our fellow interactive storytelling aficionados to join us in the creation of a new, computer-based artform.

What’s it all about? Those who know Chris and me already know the answer. It’s about interactive storytelling. There is a whole brave new world out there — unexplored terrain — a form of computer entertainment that leverages the very different strengths of story and games, and combines them into something utterly new, unlike anything you’ve experienced before. It’s an interactive entertainment experience people all over the world can enjoy. We believe it has the potential to transform the entertainment industry. We want to make this revolution happen, and we want you to join us.

When my friends ask me what it’s about, I tell them, imagine your favorite story. Think about the characters you love and the exciting events that happen to them. Now, imagine stepping into that world. Imagine that you are the protagonist. You get to decide what happens next. Your actions affect the outcome. That’s interactive storytelling. That’s what Storytronics allows you to do: play a storyworld, live out your favorite stories and make it come out differently each time.

We believe there will be a big market for people who want to relax and enjoy themselves playing Storytronic storyworlds. In addition, we believe there are plenty of clever people in the world with a desire to tell stories in a new way, who will enjoy the creative challenge of crafting those storyworlds for others to enjoy. So we want to create a platform not only for players of storyworlds, but for the authors as well.

Our goal is to foster the creation and publication of an array of different kinds of storyworlds. Storyworlds in every conceivable genre: romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, dramas. You name it. Authors create these e-worlds and publish them on our server. People from all over come to play them and to share their experiences with others in our forum, the StoryBoard.

We’ll be providing further details as we go along about what kinds of experiences you might enjoy, as a player, and how you might benefit from your efforts, as an author. This is only the beginning! Check in often for further updates.

Join the discussion!

Next Entries »