A year has passed since I formally abandoned working on my plan for interactive storytelling. The basic plan was for me to build a compelling storyworld that would inspire a community of storybuilders to emerge, and that community would then expand and create an industry. The plan failed for three reasons:
1. I aimed too high and created a technology that was too complicated. It was very difficult to work with.
2. The aging process reduced my ability to keep a zillion details in my mind as I worked; this made it impossible for me to build a good storyworld. The pace of progress slowed.
3. The Encounter Editor, a much simplified technology that I had hoped would be easier for other people to work with, attracted nobody.
So I gave up. But I kept wondering about the failures and what could be done. I have now come up with Plan B. It might not work, but it’s another shot.
The basic idea of Plan B is to start from the ground up to build a community of creators who grasp the concepts underlying interactive storytelling. Instead of just walking them through technology, I explain fundamental concepts such as:
1. Object Versus Process
2. The difficulty and importance of process-intensive thinking
3. What a story really is (it’s amazing how many people in the tech world have such primitive notions of storytelling)
4. The role of mathematics in creating algorithms that specify processes
Then, rather than crawl through the specifics of the technologies I have built, I explain the basic concepts behind those technologies, with a view to inspiring students to create their own versions of the technologies. These include:
1. Personality modelling
2. Bounded number mathematics
3. Object and process elements of story worlds
4. Events, Sentences, and Verbs
5. Roles and Options
6. The Sappho scripting language (it has a LOT of good stealable ideas!)
7. Engines
8. Faces
9. Languages for interpersonal interaction
10. Information transfer among actors (gossip)
First is the class that I have been developing for over a year now. The current version can be found here. I am still working on it and will need some more time before it’s ready for general use. The class is delivered via Internet. Each week, students read one lesson; on Sunday, we meet via Skype for open discussion. This affords greater interaction with the students than a simple lesson would permit.
Second is the creation of a discussion forum for ongoing discussions among the students about the material. This would be structured in parallel with the course material.
Many questions remain: should I also make videos for YouTube to attract more students? Should I re-institute an annual conference to permit more intense discussions? What is the proper role to be played by each of the following venues:
1. Text on my website
2. Class meetings once a week
3. Videos on YouTube
4. A road show in which I spend a day at different institutions teaching the material
5. An annual conference
6. A discussion forum on the Internet
Regarding #4, I believe that I could probably organize a road trip to Europe. I would require the recipients to pay my travel costs, but nothing more. I could also try to organize a road trip in America, but I don’t see much likelihood of success, and I’ve half a mind to charge travel costs plus an honorarium, just because I’m so mad at Americans for rejecting my work.
I would very much like to hear opinions on how best to proceed with Plan B. I am especially interested in comments regarding the relative value of the six different forms of communication.
Additional Thoughts
I have received a number of comments on Plan B and several people have suggested that I prepare videos on YouTube or podcasts. One fellow has argued that I am such a good lecturer that I should exploit that talent in videos. I balk at these suggestions, because I find video presentation of information to be so frustratingly inadequate. At the suggestion of one person, I watched a video of a GDC lecture and could barely restrain my growing anger at the speaker’s lethargic presentation. The information density was way too low; minutes rolled by while he droned on about petty details; big ideas were few and far between. I was so frustrated that I began answering emails while listening to his light drizzle of ideas. Gad, I hate wasting time listening to thin gruel!
Perhaps this problem is unique to me. I bemoan the effects of aging on my mind—the loss of short-term memory, the inability to keep a zillion details active in my mind, so necessary to writing software. Yet there is another dimension of cognitive performance in which I continue to gain strength: the ability to process big ideas. I find myself spurning light reading like biographies and history, and turning to ever-denser material. Could it be that my impatience with video is a consequence of my own intellectual development, and that younger people need to have the material provided at a less than torrential rate? Somebody once said that learning at MIT was like trying to take a drink from a fire hose; could it be that I have become a fire hose, pushing people too hard and too fast?
I prefer the compactness, austerity, and intensity of well-written text. I can pack lots of ideas into a few paragraphs. But are modern readers less capable of digesting high-protein text? Would I be more effective using the more measured pace of video, boosted by the twin benefits of animated illustrations and the emotional power of human facial and vocal expression?
Another consideration: good video requires a great deal more effort. I can slap together one my class lessons in a day or two. The three lectures (starting with Lecture #1) describing the Encounter Editor consume about an hour of time, but occupied a goodly portion of my energies over a five-month period. I estimate that I expended more than a hundred hours of effort to obtain one hour of good video. Is that the best use of my time? In a hundred hours, I could probably produce 30 to 50 pages of well-illustrated textual explanations. Would that offer better instruction?
Even More Thoughts (April 26th)
A number of correspondents have urged me to use video to communicate my lessons. I previously described a few of my objections to the use of video. Here’s yet another, although it is speculative. Let’s talk about selection effects in audience sampling. Imagine two overlapping audiences. The first is OK with text; the second requires video. I speculate that the latter group is not as intellectually intense as the former group. To put it rather grossly, highbrow people read books and lowbrow people watch video. That overstates the case, but the fact is that with video I will reach a larger audience whose members are less likely to be able to actually put to use the abstruse ideas I present. Here’s an even crueller way to put it: anybody who is uncomfortable reading text is probably too dumb to be a pioneer in the world of interactive storytelling.
This line of reasoning is speculative in that I am assuming that there’s a correlation between intellectual acuity and reading. That’s a hunch on my part, not an established fact.