Wow. Just got back from Chris Crawford talk at Interval Research (in Palo
Alto); he's a dynamic and entertaining speaker, with totally fascinating
things to say. A lot of it is exactly the kind of thing we've been
discussing here on this list; I'd love to have him join us, and if I hadn't
been (a) running late and (b) rendered incoherent by the number of things I
wanted to say, I'd have asked him to do so. Will send him email about it.
I don't have time to summarize the whole talk right now, but I'll try and
give a general impression:
As a couple of people have described here already, what Crawford is
building is an authoring tool (Erasmatron) to create interactive stories
(to be viewed using the companion viewing software, Erasmaganza). The
authoring tool is multilayered and complex; it provides a programming
language with which to specify lists of actions that a character can take
under a given set of circumstances.
The circumstances and character state are satisfying complex -- you can
have characters interfere in situations going on between two other
characters, for instance, and you can keep track of emotional state, and
characters can report past interactions to each other (and lie about them)
-- all that good stuff.
The resulting stories are unfortunately a little less satisfying, from what
I've seen so far. They're in choose-your-own-adventure format (list of
responses to a given situation), and they focus on interactions between the
interactor and a single NPC -- conversations, basically. The response
lists do vary, so it's not a strict CYOA kind of thing, but they don't vary
quite enough, and they mostly seem to just provide a range of response from
positive to negative. So the options for what you can do at any given time
seem kinda limited.
...which I hate to say, 'cause I think there's some very cool stuff going
on under the hood here...
Anyway, will provide a description of talk, plus my comments, soon, but not
right now.
Oh, yeah: and he gave out home-burned CDs of, essentially, the Web site --
two sample stories, the story-viewing software, demo Macintosh version of
the authoring tool, documentation. Haven't had a chance to fully peruse yet.
--jed
