Abstract:
Over the winter of 2005-2006 I substantially revised my thinking about interactive storytelling,
and this lecture presents the results. I start by discussing three key assumptions that have held
us back for years: that an interactive story should be a universal sandbox; that an interactive
story will not have an internal economy; and that in a computer game, the player need not know
the rules. I then introduce Ken Perlin's Law, a mechanism that provides the solution for the
Problem of Internal Consistency that I highlighted in The Challenge of the Interactive Movie.
Next I propose a new approach to designing interactive stories, by treating the player as a
role-player (regardless of genre) and following up the implications of that choice. The
second half of the lecture looks a game that takes an entirely different tack on interactive
storytelling, King of Dragon Pass from A-Sharp. It abandons the branching tree structure and
treats situations as functions and characters as parameters to those functions. I show how
neither the branching tree nor the pure social simulator will do the job, but King of Dragon
Pass creates a hybrid that may be the future of interactive storytelling.