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Authors: Chris Crawford
Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (71 page)
Indeed it does, but the revolutionary school acknowledges this problem as the primary one it must overcome. The thrust of the argument is that no evolutionary path exists from the “here” of games to the “there” of interactive storytelling—at least, not in marketing terms. Any deviation from the well-defined market for games will encounter resistive forces that prevent expansion of that deviation. Therefore, there’s no advantage in using games as the starting point for reaching interactive storytelling, and indeed that marketplace will hold us back. Better to start from scratch than try to crawl out of the hole that games have dug themselves into.
These marketing considerations lead me to conclude that a new infrastructure must be built up if we are to find customers for interactive storytelling. We need to build a completely new marketplace with different developers, different publishers, different distributors, different retailers, and, above all, different customers. Indeed, the most important factor in developing this new industry will be the clear differentiation of interactive storytelling from games. People confusing interactive storytelling products with games will be the kiss of death; they’ll dismiss them as quickly as they dismiss games. Perhaps some sort of high-falutin’ terminology to emphasize this distinction will be necessary at first: “interactive literature” or “interactive cinema” or some such. I suspect that bookstores will be the preferred retail outlet for these products; they have a tone and atmosphere that will help differentiate interactive storytelling from the games industry.
What about the Internet? Isn’t it better for guerilla marketing?
Yes, but retail outlets remain absolutely necessary to the development of a mass market. Given the high costs of developing the retail channel, the first companies in the industry will probably establish a market identity via the Internet, develop a revenue stream from that source, and use that revenue stream to obtain venture capital for the jump to retail. The danger with this strategy lies
in the Internet’s tendency to attract specialized audiences who demand product changes that would move the product away from the mainstream. If an interactive storytelling company acquiesces to this market pressure, it forecloses its option to move into retail channels; if it stands firm, it will eventually lose those aficionado customers. Therefore, the jump to retail must be carefully timed.
Nevertheless, I think this Internet-first approach is the most likely means of getting the interactive storytelling industry off the ground. It doesn’t cost much to develop small concentrations of customers on the Internet, and high marketing costs are often fatal to startups.
Isn’t it a little rich for the infamous prophet in the desert to be advocating a market-driven argument for the development of the industry?
Not in the least. I consider my arguments to constitute a quite reasonable, middle-of-the-road analysis. It is the games industry that has moved to the extremes of crassness, short-termism, and narrow marketing. I seek a mass market for interactive entertainment, not the hobby market for games we now have. I have incessantly nagged for greater breadth of appeal. Many years ago, in what was perhaps the finest speech I have ever given, I said at the Computer Game Developers Conference:
I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable medium of artistic expression—an art form. I dreamed of computer games expressing the full breadth of human experience and emotion. I dreamed of computer games that were tragedies, games about duty and honor, self-sacrifice and patriotism. I dreamed of satirical games and political games; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, and the serene and mature love of a husband and wife of decades; games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young. I dreamed of games about a man facing truth on a dusty main street at high noon, and a boy and his dog, and a prostitute with a heart of gold.
It is the mass-market approach that I have always advocated and that the computer games industry has rejected. I am surely the prophet in the desert, but the games industry lives in an oasis isolated from the rest of the world, and I am pointing the way to the wider world. Hence, there’s nothing contradictory about
my emphasis on a marketing-based approach—I’ve been pushing that line from the very beginning.
Given that our strategy must be to build a new marketplace, how are we to proceed? As I have suggested, the first companies will likely make their appearance on the Internet. How long will this take? That depends primarily on what I’ll call
technological shakeout
. At the moment, there are too many competing technological strategies for interactive storytelling and too few actual technologies. This book has presented many of those strategies, and it should be obvious that many of them are as yet only partially explored. It will take time for people to examine and develop their strategies. As they do, some strategies will be revealed to be dead ends and will be abandoned. This will permit greater concentration of effort on the remaining strategies, thus accelerating their development.
Another important factor driving the development of an interactive storytelling industry is the increasing awareness of the topic’s importance. When I first began working on the problem in the early 1990s, most people reacted to my explanations of interactive storytelling with incomprehension and incredulity. What was the point of interactive storytelling? Why would anybody ever want to buy such a product? They simply could not see any future in my efforts.
However, a number of strands were already in place, as I explained at the beginning of
Chapter 19
, “Research.” Andrew Glassner’s book,
Interactive Storytelling
, appeared in 2004 and as I write this, Lee Sheldon’s book,
Character Development and Storytelling for Games
, is in preparation.
Figure 21.1
is a timeline showing the acceleration.
The pattern is clear: The pace of work on interactive storytelling is heating up. More and more people are becoming aware of this topic, and its importance is becoming increasingly obvious. That can only help the process.
FIGURE
21.1
: Timeline of events in the interactive storytelling industry.
What judgments can be made about the future of interactive storytelling? My guess is that the first genuine interactive storytelling product will make an appearance sometime between 2006 and 2008. There will, of course, be plenty of fraudulent claims, products with overblown claims to interactive storytelling; such fakes have been appearing for years. We probably won’t recognize the real thing when it finally appears because it will be lost in the marketing noise. But 50 years from now, historians of interactive entertainment will have no problem putting their finger on the true pioneer.
As more true-blue interactive storytelling products appear, the snake-oil products will be pushed out of the marketplace. I believe that by 2010 we’ll definitely have a nascent industry, with several small companies jockeying for position and developing the market. The decade until 2020 will be devoted to market consolidation as big companies buy out little companies, the market matures and expands enormously, and interactive storytelling becomes a mass medium. If I make it that long, I’ll be 70 years old, and I’ll be able to look back 40 years to the beginning of my dream of computer entertainment becoming a mature medium of expression.
A Behavioral Language (ABL),
318–319
Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folktale,
148–153
Abstraction,
81–90
free will vs. determinism and,
86–89
higher levels of,
84–89
justice and,
82–83
playing God and,
86–89
science and,
83–84
Acceptability (violence),
204
Accordance variables,
186–188
,
192
AccordAttractive,
192
AccordIntegrity,
192
AccordIntelligence,
192
AccordPower,
192
AccordVirtue,
192
Adams, Scott,
336
Additive weighting factors,
115
Adjustments (relationships),
194–196
Adrenaline,
191
Adventure games,
336–337
Adventures (graphic/text),
336–337
Agents,
140–141
Alexander the Great,
95
Algorithmic capabilities,
271–280
. See also Development environments
attraction formulae,
277–278
loop elimination and,
274–275
overviews and summaries of,
271–272
All of Me,
68–69
AllAudience situations,
220
possibility tree,
252
Anecdotes and jokes,
149
Anger,
194–195
Anger/Fear,
189–190