Len wrote:
>A generic term is hard because it depends on what
>role the *actor* is playing in the story.
And this, I think, is a key point in interactive stories. In adventure
games (even in Myst), it's not entirely clear just who the audience
member's character is supposed to be, and so motivations have traditionally
been very simple and totally goal-oriented: find the treasure, solve the
mystery, understand the ridiculously poorly designed user interface :).
The generic character one is assumed to be playing has attributes like
"greedy" and "clever" but no real personality...
(Which is why I was so impressed with the beginning of the Infocom game
_Trinity_ -- for once, the things you were required to do were fairly
reasonable things for a real person to do.)
So another question rears its head here: how do you get audience members
to play the part of a particular character? Or, if you don't, how do you
work around that?
In Irishspace, I was uncertain at first whether my character was the
captain, or just some random crewmember, or whether I was just a ghost
moving through the world, a fly on the wall (just like in a book or movie
or play). Is it a good idea to assign characters to the audience? Will
they object? Some folks love to roleplay -- witness the SCA, MUSHes,
roleplaying games -- but others would rather be more passive observers,
even in semi- interactive settings.
On the other hand, a lot of the appeal of much fiction/drama involves
the audience identifying with one or more characters. If you're going to
go that far, is it much more of a step to ask them to take a role?
--jed
