I too am looking forward to this book, especially because I have begun work on my own book on interactive storytelling.

Chris

(As a point of reference, Michael and I briefly list our design criteria for our current project here. To our knowledge, nothing has been built to date that satisfy even these minimal criteria.)

The bigger vision some of us have for what a interactive story would be, would require a much larger database of content — dialog, behavior, character animation, etc. etc. — than what we see in today’s games. Today’s games have relatively huge amounts of content compared to older games, but it seems that an decent interactive story will require even more.

It’s probably not possible to build that much content in a brute-force way. We’re going to have to make systems that have some ability to generate dialog and behavior, in collaboration with human authors. My guess is that without that kind of assistance from the system, the bigger vision is probably not achievable.

I think you’re right that you’ll never brute force this. Take your example where the player becomes uncomfortable and asks for a drink to change the subject. Now imagine the number of other ways the player might try to change the subject – He might ask for a cigarette, comment on some object in the environment, mention the weather, mention some current event (there’s a whole other bag of worms), talk about his medical problems or any number of things. You could spend months trying to anticipate the player’s response for this single beat. Now, the standard approach to this is to have some sort of stock reply to non-revelent input but really this is not good enough. No matter how many variations on the stock phrase you use it ends up sounding like “I am not programmed to respond in that area”.

What really interests me about your ideas is your approach to the protagonist. In drama or fiction a story happens to a set of characters who behave, ultimately, as they must given who they are and our experience is of coming to understand the characters through seeing what they do and say in a series of events designed to display those very qualities. What you seem to be getting at is injecting the player, in his proper person (i.e. not “Role-playing” as someone else) into a story with other, program controlled, people and the experience is to find out how YOU would respond to a given series of events designed to get at some aspect or aspects of qualities you may possess. This seems like an important difference to me, a genuinely new thing arising organically out of the nature of the medium. Very interesting.

Alas, I suspect we are in the position of Charles Babbage in respect to this sort of fiction, able to see how it could and should work, but lacking the basic technology to make it happen.

Our answer to that question is yes, by developing some better-than-Eliza natural language processing and decision making technology, and a story design that works within the still severe limitations of that technology. As stated before, we’d love to see future research on more generative architectures, to reduce those limitations from “severe” to “less severe”.