I have re-joined Medium. It has some material on interactive storytelling. I intend to post some material there in a preliminary attempt at recruitment. This experiment might give us a better idea of how much interest we can generate in forming a community for interactive storytelling founded on the encounter system platform. But many questions plague my thinking.
If I announce Le Morte D’Arthur, should I first take a few weeks to improve it?
Should I first offer a new version of my class on “How to Make the Computer a Medium of Artistic Expression”? If so, should I take a week to improve the lessons there?
Here is the first draft of the post that I would place on Medium:
The computer as a medium of artistic expression
Computers have changed everything: banking, selling, buying, communications, entertainment, and on and on. They truly have wrought a revolution on society. They have certainly had a huge impact on the arts. Music, for example, has enjoyed substantial improvements because of computers. Not only is the creation of music much eased; its delivery to consumers has also been accelerated by music services. Writers have also benefited from computers, although not to a degree as great as experienced in other media. No more white-out, no more balled-up sheets tossed into the trash can. Manuscripts are transmitted across the country in a flash, and editing text is a neater and cleaner process. Image creation has been revolutionized by computers. New tools permit artists to easily create effects that were otherwise impossible. And the rise of image-generating AI has turned everything upside down; even a talentless schmuck like me can generate usable images on Midjourney.
Midjourney prompt: "a talentless schmuck uses his computer to generate an image on Midjourney"
The most sensational changes have been in cinema; computers have made it possible to generate cinematic wonders that would otherwise be unthinkable.
But we must realize that, for all these vast improvements, the computer is a tool for creation, not a medium of artistic expression. All of these wonderful new artistic creations can be delivered and experienced without use of a computer.
In order for the computer to be a medium of artistic expression, the artist’s creation must specifically utilize what is unique to the computer: interactivity. Interactivity is the sine qua non of computers. A word processor without interactivity is just a typewriter; a spreadsheet without interactivity is just a calculator; the Web without interactivity is just a pile of documents. Hence, using the computer as a medium of artistic expression, as opposed to a tool for artistic expression, requires that the work of art be interactive.
Moreover, the artistic content of the work must lie in the interactivity. Showing the Mona Lisa on a computer screen and adding a few buttons for interactivity does NOT comprise interactive art. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the greatest works of art in human history, but playing it on a computer along with some interactive buttons is NOT interactive art.
Interactive Storytelling
This is our most promising candidate for interactive art. For thirty years now, people have dreamed of interactive storyworlds in which the user is able to play as the protagonist, making the dramatically critical decisions. People have been building interactive storyworlds since the early 1990s. We would expect such early efforts to suffer from failures, but interactive storytelling seems to have been cursed with a surfeit of disappointments. People charged into the field with clever new ideas and, after battling the challenges for a few years, fled with their tails between their legs. Blessed with an abundance of cranial hardness, I refused to yield, persisting for thirty years. I lay claim to having discovered every conceivable unworkable technique for interactive storytelling. In the meantime, others accomplished some important milestones. The most important of these was certainly Facade, by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. These two are the Wright brothers of interactive storytelling: they got the first working storyworld into the air. Sad to say, their design relied heavily on hand-crafted material that did not point the way to future developments. I don’t know of any designs that built on the concepts used in Facade.
There were many other projects, each with its own innovations and flaws — but nothing cracked the problem. Lots of people presented their results with much hype and fanfare, but they all failed the acid test of success: giving rise to imitations and variations. The history of interactive storytelling is one of grand ambition and stark failure.
But this time is different!
Having amassed a mighty pile of failures, I think that I have finally stumbled upon success. I call it “Le Morte D’Arthur”; it is a storyworld based on the defense of the Romano-British people against the invading Saxons in the early sixth century. Please humor my claim that this is the first work of substantial interactive art; I devoted the last 32 years of my life to this effort and feel that I deserve some self-congratulation after all those failures.
Le Morte D’Arthur is about the meaning of life in its relation to death. This is serious stuff. It has no knights in shining armor, no dragons, no damsels in distress, and no magnificent castles. Instead, it depicts the wretched lives of a people struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic medieval world. The Roman civilization of their grandparents has been destroyed by invading Saxons; now they live in hovels on fortified hilltops. The player, as Arthur, wears no crown; instead, he dresses in homespun wool and sandals. He struggles to hold together a society on the verge of collapse. Death is the only constant in his world.
Arthur is periodically visited by Merlin, who challenges Arthur in Socratic dialogues about the meaning of his experiences. Herein lies the artistic content of the storyworld. Merlin’s questions probe, needle, and stab at Arthur’s beliefs, forcing him to confront harsh realities he has buried in balm. Only at the very end, when his illegitimate son Mordred rebels, does Arthur reach the culmination of his moral trek.
To build Le Morte D’Arthur, I threw away mountains of technology that I had painstakingly developed over the years. I resorted to a much simpler technology that I call the “Encounter System”. The player reads a short anecdote presenting some sort of social or moral dilemma. The player is given some options for responding to the situation; selecting an option triggers a reaction. Then the player moves on to the next encounter.
The Encounter System does NOT use a branching tree structure, as is common in interactive fiction. Indeed, progress through the storyworld is primarily linear, with only occasional small branching shrubs. The key to the system lies in the minor adjustments to crucial variables made in response to the options that the player selects. There is no single crucial or decisive decision for the player to make; the end result is determined by the cumulative effect of many decisions on the player’s part.
Le Morte D’Arthur is the culmination of my life’s work. For years, I feared death because it would rob me of the opportunity to achieve my life goal. Now that Le Morte D’Arthur is completed, I face death with greater equanimity. There are still plenty of worthy goals to pursue, but I have met the dragon, done battle with him, and fought him to a draw. I have built genuine interactive art.
But wait! There’s more!
I earlier wrote that the acid test of a technology is its utilization by others. There are already several people developing storyworlds using their version of the Encounter System. For the technology to succeed, it is incumbent upon me to build tools enabling writers to create their own storyworlds with my technology. I have already begun design work on these tools. My plan is to make everything available directly on the web. An author would access the tools on a page on my website. There they could create and edit their storyworld. When it is ready, the author could publish it.
I emphasize that this is a non-commercial effort. I am retired and have no need of income. My only fear is that this project succeeds so well that the costs of hosting my website become onerous; in that case, I’ll have to come up with some scheme to make it sustainable after I shuffle off.
Resources
If you’re interested in any of this, here are some resources:
My website: www.erasmatazz.com
I host a monthly seminar on Zoom about interactive storytelling; message me if you wish to attend.
We have a discussion group for interactive storytelling on Discord; message me if you wish to join.
You can see Le Morte D’Arthur at www.erasmatazz.com/LeMorteDArthur.html. It costs nothing to play. There are no ads or in-game purchases. This is a completely non-commercial project. But take seriously the warnings in the preface. Le Morte D’Arthur is not for everybody.