Interactive Fiction/Drama - Josephine Anstey

• The Fantasy - Star Trek's Holodeck - Games meet Hollywood
• infinite freedom/choice, we can do anything
  
• Reality checks
  
• Games and Story are different, maybe incompatible?
• Infinite choice = infinite branching narratives
  
• Infinite Freedom - is it interesting? is it dramatic?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
  
• Brenda Laurel - Computers as Theater, 1992?
  
• suggests that Aristotelian theatre can be seen as a useful model for interactive design
  
• and an approach to interactive fiction
• Janet Murray - Hamlet on the Holodeck, 1998
  
• importance of agency for interactive fiction
• users sense that she can act and that actions are effective
• Creating Compelling Interactive Fiction remains a challenge
  
• theorizing of problems/issues
• practical experiments in making Interactive Fiction/Drama
  

• Mateas - useful synthesis of Laurel's and Murray's work to theorize how we should build interactive drama
  
• Summary of useful Aristotelian concepts
• concept of catharsis if most famous
  
• Properties of dramatic stories rather than narrative stories that evoke catharsis
  
• Enactment vs. Description  - drama uses action not description to tell story -  gamelike
  
• Intensification vs. Extensification - incidents arranged to condense time and intensify emotions - not gamelike
  
• Unity of Action vs. Episodic Structure - incidents causally relate to central action - not gamelike (or TV-like)
  

formal cause - what the author creates - abstract plan or goal to which something is headed a plot, which needs certain characters, with specific thoughts, speaking particular lines, creating certain patterns (of behavior, a logic of cause and effect in the action), creating the spectacle material cause - the material out of which something is created what the audience/participant experiences and de-codes McGee and other "how to" write a script books very based in this view of drama character driven - character arcs plot points

• Mateas also refers to Janet Murray's work on elements for interactive drama -
  
• immersion - sense of presence in the virtual world - being willing to suspend disbelief
  
• agency - being able to effect the world, act
  
• transformation - being able to take on another self
• Murray; a concept of scripting the interactor: Laurel's concept of constraint
• ways to use a narrative to create a situation that shapes the user's actions
• address the problem of endless branching narratives
  

• cartharsis - building up of emotional tension that is finally released 
  
• audience/participants identify or play with powerful and perhaps dangerous emotions, explore them, experience them in a safe place, rehearse their own responses to these emotions
• emotions are attached to a message that can be most powerfully communicated if the emotions of audience/participants are engaged - which is also the way propoganda works
  

• Bertolt Brecht, German playwright and drama theorist (1898 - 1956)
• "He detested the "Aristotelian" drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a kind of trance-like state, a total identification with the hero to the point of complete self-oblivion, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and, ultimately, an emotional catharsis."
• Theatre should not immerse, seduce, reassure but be used as a political force, to waken people to the problems around them, to engage their thinking processes not just their emotions
• Brecht's theatre emerges at the same time as the Nazi government are very deliberately exploring ways to use propoganda, and especially ways in which to engage emotions not thought
  
• Central to Brecht's dramatic theory is the alientation effect: ways for actors to act, and scenes to be set up, that encouraged the audience to continually keep a distance from the emotions of the play
• The Causasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage and her Children, Threepennny Opera (Mac the knife)
  

• Moves even further from the idea of a passive audience identifying with a hero, to the idea that the audience must be interactively engaged in the drama - be active, have agency - starting in the 60s
  
• works with local communities, mostly  in Latin America
• communities suggest controversial themes - maybe personal, local, political
• actors act out - community makes suggestions on how to resolve, and these are acted out, consequences becoming apparent
  
• Stresses the engagement not just of the mind but of the body in this process - break down wall between actors and spectators
• how ideology is inscribed in actions and psychology
• example
• one participant uses bodies of other participants to sculpt the situation - (participant's village)
• next step - idealised 'sculpture' of situation
• third step - imagining solutions that take you from the first sculpture to the second
• Breaking away from norms, identifying moments when oppression happens, re-enacting
• Theatre that is not finished - but in rehearsal

• Wants to use Boal's and Brecht's theories rather than Aristotle's as a basis for making video games/interactive story
  
• suggests modifying the Sims so it can be used following Boal
• Video Games as excellent conveyers of ideology
• Sims ideology is to consume - " the number of friends that you have is in direct proportion to  the amount of things that you own."
  
• "The role of ideology in videogames is more complex than in  traditional media because they not only represent actions, but they also model behavioral rules. If  narrative is about description then simulation is about legislation."
• Sherry Turkle suggests simulations could be used to explore rather than reinforce ideological assumptions
• Frasca hypothesises that if we could change the Sims behavioral rules rather than their clothes (skins), we might have a Boalian forum for discussion
• Online Community that develops different characters - i.e. more realistic characters
• eg. Alcoholic Mother, Greenpeace activist
• needs some open-source character/behavior development tool
• level of skill needed to accomplish this?
  
• Meta-simulation - a simulation that allows the development of simulations