I took fairly detailed notes on the Glassner talk, but am way too
sleepy to organize them coherently right now. Will try to do so in
next couple days. If you haven't heard from me on this by Sunday,
somebody drop me a reminder note, 'kay?
Very brief summary:
o He's writing a book, which will incorporate the material from this
and a couple of other talks. This material will also be on his Web
site soon; he just got Dreamweaver 4. :)
o He's a very dynamic and energetic (and kind of silly) speaker.
o He talked about story structure, then explained why interactive
stories are mostly doomed (with some harsh dissing on Myst and Riven,
among others), then gave a suggestion as to a particular kind of
computer-based interactive story that could work, given enough
technology. (Gist of that: let the players/interactors perform
ordinary actions and say ordinary things; computer translates those
into appropriate in-character actions and statements, to provide
illusion of reality without all that difficult role-playing stuff.)
o He said that there were no good interactive stories, and
elaborated on that point at enormous length and great detail, but
completely failed to mention roleplaying games. I just about
screamed. At the end of the talk, though, I mentioned RPGs to him,
and he said "Oh, yeah, I only left those out for time reasons, you're
absolutely right." ...But it didn't really affect his main point, as
he was talking about stories accessible to the masses, and to large
groups at once; since most people probably aren't interested in doing
real roleplaying, the audience for RPG-like interactive games may be
small, and handling a large group is very difficult.
...I said I'd be brief, so I'll stop. More soon.
--jed
