...Okay, I wouldn't normally recommend a movie to a mailing list, and I
wouldn't normally even *watch* a Jim Carrey movie. But I just saw _The
Truman Show_ and couldn't resist bringing it up. Viewed from one angle, it
can be seen as a description of the ultimate in interactive storytelling...
Really nicely put together, and worth watching.
One interesting thing in particular: it underscored a point Chris Crawford
made about spatial relationships. In movies, we're used to jump cuts --
the protagonist gets a phone call, says "Okay, I'll be there right away,"
and the next thing we see is the protagonist arriving at a destination.
Crawford said in games (and I would say in VRML in particular), the
temptation is to have the character put down the phone, walk ten feet to
the door, turn the door handle, open the door, leave the room, close the
door, walk twenty feet down the hall, turn a corner, go down the stairs...
And so on. Yet another thing that IrishSpace did right: there was no
attempt to build one giant all-inclusive world that maintained spatial
relationships between locations and forced the interactor to experience
those spatial relationships. Having some way of saying "Three months
later..." in a story is immensely useful; there's no need to make the
interactor actually experience three months of boredom while a spaceship
makes its trip.
(Crawford's story engine doesn't *have* spatial relationships between what
he calls "stages" -- the characters depart one stage and arrive at another,
with time (optionally?) elapsing between departure and arrival but no
events during transit. At first I was put off by this idea, but I'm
beginning to think it's pretty elegant -- if you need events to happen in
transit, I assume you just create an "inside the car" stage, or a "grassy
plain" stage.)
--jed
