Interactive Drama

Prom Week is the creation of a group at UC Santa Cruz that includes Michael Matteas, one of the people involved with the creation of Facade. Like Facade, Prom Week is an attempt to create interactive drama, a sort of theatrical story with multiple characters and some agency by the player to shape the path and outcome of the story.

True interactive storytelling is, of course, an enormously difficult technical problem that many have attempted to solve without great success, despite the efforts of some of our most creative designers. Facade succeeded, in a limited way, its success and also its limitation dependent on the fact that it did not try to solve the general problem, and instead create a single, hard-coded, and specific work.

Prom Week is an ambitious attempt to solve the problem more generally. In a fashion reminiscent of Crawford's Trust & Betrayal, it tracks the social graph among a handful of characters, particularly how much they like or dislike each other. The underlying engine also tracks specific traits of the characters, and how they respond to traits of others, and provides a dialog system, not unlike the story-telling system of Tales of the Arabian Nights, that interpolates specific terms into generalized but prescripted dialog in response to certain conditions.

To all the diehard indie snobs out there spooked by the “casual” label: Don't worry. [Together] is an art game masquerading as a casual game, so go ahead and crank your snob-meters up to 11.

Located somewhere on the emotional spectrum between Braid and Passage, [Together] casts the player as a blue Boy who emerges from a mysterious cave to take his pink Girlfriend on a majestic flight of fancy. The couple chases down a variety of evasive flying hearts while being pursued by the smoke monster from Lost (here known as "the beast"). The creator's descriptive blurb sums up the mood: "Fly to the depths of the ocean or to the ends of the galaxy, together. As long as you have each other, there's no limit to where you can go."

My Life With Master is as seminal a work in the history of tabletop role-playing games as Frankenstein was for literature. It's a game designed around not a narrative, but a dramatic scenario that you act out, producing your own unique narrative. From a game designer's perspective, it's something that must be studied, it's something that must be played.

Some years ago, at Fastaval in Århus, Denmark, I had one of the most splendid, if brief, roleplaying experiences in my life, in a mixed company of Danes, Swedes, and Finns, who partially in my honor and partially because English was the only language they had in common, chose to play with me in a language I found comprehensible. The game we played was The Upgrade; and it's a source of some little frustration that, reading over the materials they've used to present it to the world, my main emotion is a sense of dissatisfaction that the prose itself does not impart a clear notion of the pleasure to be gained by experiencing this remarkable ouevre. In part, perhaps, this is because it is translated from the Swedish (and for those who read it, a version in the original tongue is also available via the link above); but in part, it is also because some things that can be experienced in play are impossible to express in the more mundane form of the words used to describe their rules. Not always, to be sure; in reading, say, My Life With Master, you obtain a sense of the genius that likes within; but in the case of The Upgrade, surely, you do indeed need to play the game to understand what it has to offer.

The Witch's Yarn is a graphic adventure with a difference. Rather than being an exercise in puzzle-based problem solving, it's more of an interactive drama--your choices in terms of actions and exposition affect the reactions of the other characters, and the direction of the story.

For decades, true interactive fiction--an application in which characters' responses to a player's input are determined algorithmically rather than via prescripted sequences, and in which valid stories emerge regardless of player action--has been a holy grail for AI researchers, digital artists, and game developers alike.