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Cheers.

I’ll read more and do a top level post about your group soon.

And, the year 2003 comes up again!

One response: Matt Gould in Joe Schmo had license to change the story as well, he just didn’t know he was in a story centered around him. (It’s true the directors / drama managers were trying to manipulate him into a certain story, but they had to re-plan when he went outside what they planned for.)

The world is filled out by trained inter-actors who play characters in the story. IPL inter-actors are trained in improvisation, dramatic acting, digital media, social psychology and story. These people have the skills to create investment and confidence on the part of the participant such that he/she feels comfortable to take control of the story. They are not guided in the moment by the director, but are allowed to improvise off of what the participant contributes. This provides a dynamic element and the ability for the story to truly go anywhere immediately.

There have been two Simu-lifes so far. The first one was called The Game, and though the genre was similar to the Michael Douglas movie of the same name, it was a completely new story. It was a mystery thriller in which the participant’s in-story girlfriend was kidnapped, his best friend was murdered and he exposed a plot to control an election. The story was covertly captured by a separate team of technicians and later edited into a film record.

The second one was called The Voice (www.nextart.floridafilmfestival.com) and it featured two participants, both of whom thought the other was an inter-actor and it used the opening of the Florida Film Festival as one of the scenes. The story centered around a reporter and a businessman whose new venture was being hidden from the public. The Voice involved a fictional court trial and a fugitive from justice, and the story was carried almost live over the web, and also later turned into a documentary film.

These have not been done for a rich person but for free to willing participants. The interesting thing is how the community around Orlando has come together to support this new form of art. Businesses and city leaders have made these interactive dramas possible and are currently helping to make more happen.

Didn’t the ARG “I Love Bees” have a few lucky players interacting with live actors over the phone? Maybe that was another game, but I think things like that have been done. All told, I think interactive drama and ARGs are two closely related topics. Perhaps one is a subset of the other?

Now, to rein in the acronyms for a minute:
LARP: Live Action Role Playing (game)
NPC: Non-Player Character
GM: Game Master (alternatively, Dungeon Master (DM) in Dungeons & Dragons (D&D))
MMO(G): Massively Multiplayer Online Game (also Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG))
ICT: Institute for Creative Technologies (at University of Southern California (USC))
CMU: Carnegie Mellon University

I was going to leave out AI, TV, and R&D, but that may be a little short-sighted of me. Aside from the issue of making assumptions about all the fellow humans who might read this today, what if this webpage, in near or total isolation, ends up in the hands of some far-future alien anthropologist? So, for completeness:
AI: artificial intelligence
TV: television
R&D: research & development

I personally strive to clarify (or even avoid) acronyms every chance I get, because being fast & loose with them can needlessly obfuscate, especially when our (often implicit) assumptions about audience are violated. Sure it may be redundant a lot of the time, but I’d rather be redundant than misunderstood.

Funny, they were done in 2003 and 2004, around the same time Joe Schmo first aired. 2003 was a great year for interactive drama, it seems. (We gave our first public Façade demo in late 2003 as well!)

Andre, yeah, the more I think about it, the more I realize that my suggestion about multiplayer interactive drama = LARPs, when the number of human players is greater than, oh, 4 or 5. With more than 4 or 5, you start to run into the same problems as LARPs / the attempts to do non-linear story in MMOs — you can’t make everyone the star. So, this multiplayer interactive drama idea probably would only work in mini-shards, or small subsets, of an online world, with only up to 4 to 5 human players, and dozens of NPCs. If the AI were good enough, human players may wonder who is real and who isn’t, upping the intensity of the drama with the (drama managed) NPCs.

Joe Schmo was fully enacted — table-top is not, and one-on-one probably isn’t;
Joe Schmo is single player — live-action is not, table-top rarely is;
Joe Schmo is drama managed — one-on-one is not, correct?;
the drama management itself in Joe Schmo is taken to greater level than I suspect you’ll find in live-action roleplaying (but table-top has surely achieved this);
the ratio of crew-to-player in Joe Schmo is 20:1 or more, whereas table-top is usually around 1:5, live-action I’d guess 1:2 at best, one-on-one is, well, 1:1, or 0:2.

The point is, Joe Schmo takes the Holodeck vision much closer to its full realization than any past events I know of, and therefore I suspect Gould had an unprecedented experience. This is also signficant to me since we’re trying to build that form, in the digital medium — enacted, single-player, drama-managed, high crew-to-player ratio, minus the holograms. (I couldn’t fit all those descriptors in the title of the post. ;-)

Please let me know of any other events of a similar magnitude and form, that I’m unaware of! For example, I could imagine a case where some rich person hired an entire theater crew to give him/her such an experience.

-E

That said, these are tangential points, because for single-player digital interactive drama, there is no audience we are concerned about entertaining. We only care about the player.

But, from Gould’s (the player’s) perspective, those moments were not the most dramatic; he was purposefully hidden from the turmoil he was causing behind the scenes. I’d argue that the carefully engineered moments — the successfully drama-managed events — like how Gould reacted very emotionally to Earl’s (fake) heartfelt speech when being booted off the show, or when the Hutch bragged about sleeping with Dr. Pat, or when Molly’s boyfriend makes a cameo appearance only to find her handcuffed to Gould in the hot tub, and of course the ending — were among the most intense for Gould. (Note the bragging about Dr. Pat was an improvised event, since Gould had previously unexpectedly extracted himself from being Dr. Pat’s roommate.)

It’s true the “game” part of the show is scaffolded by (parodies of) reality TV contests. But the core of the show’s story and drama are the interpersonal tensions and conflicts between the people. I could imagine coming up with some other reason for a group of people to stay in one location for a period of time, with various forces put on them to build tension and create drama. Oh, like a dinner party, for example…

I’ll be very interested to hear/read about the improv theater experiments at ICT, and what you’re focusing on there! Cool.

Brian, good question; the plethora of women in bikinis probably helped a lot. (Joe Schmo was aired on Spike TV; warning, the rentable uncensored version gets a bit raunchy.) But seriously, the show was much longer than The Bus Station, with more plot twists and emotional build up. And of course it was edited, filtering out the slow or boring parts. But probably the biggest reason was that Gould himself was well-cast — a really nice guy, who won over everybody — and it was fascinating to watch him deal with being manipulated without his knowledge.

That having been asked, I’m ordering this video today.