My meditations on the problem of interactive storytelling have revealed a fundamental obstacle: the difficulty of presenting sufficiently detailed information about the characters. This is what stumped me with Siboot; I tried to build a display that would clearly show the relationships among the different characters. Perhaps I should have built something similar to the clever hexagonal diagram I built for Gossip:
Here, the arrows show the pBad_Good values for the character relationships. Red means negative value; blue means positive value; the saturations of the colors show the magnitude of the feeling.
Instead, I tried a more prosaic system and it just didn’t work. It was clumsy and difficul to use.
The problem is absolutely fundamental to interactive storytelling. In real storytelling, the audience quickly figures out how the various characters feel about each other. The story is full of subtle cues to tip off the audience. But those cues can’t be done in interactive storytelling, at least not yet. Thus, the player in an interactive storyworld is forced to perceive the characters intellectually, not emotionally. Until we can make the audience FEEL the relationships, interactive storytelling will be futile. I think I see a way to make this happen in Le Morte D’Arthur; I shall pursue the experiment.
February 10th, 2020
