Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

I cant fault chris's passion. And he has given me much to consider in his portrait of the overall landscape of interactive storytelling. However i disagree strongly with where this book lands. Essentially that what we need is a better algorithm for storytelling. I think his direction overlooks the most obvious and simple way forward for interactive storytelling which is human to human interactivity rather than human to machine. The hard mountain to climb he alludes to is made thousands of times harder by the algorithmic way forward he proposes. For the foreseeable future we as humans are going to possess the most sophisticated decision making capabilities in existence. Start there and see where the math takes you.

How do we design games in which players, if they so choose, need never step into the same game world twice? Not in the trivial sense of setting, but on a deeper level: plot, character, place, meaning. Crawford's book fits into the genre of works that clearly see the issues that make a problem insanely-hard, but can't offer much in the way of solutions. This is not a criticism. Such works are essential. They help us fail better.

Je n'ai jamais parcouru un livre aussi long. Je le lirai en détail peut être plus tard, quand j'aurais le temps, mais là, je n'ai vraiment pas la patience. Plus précisément, après une lecture rapide, je ne vois pas où veut en venir ce livre. Pas sûr que j'aie fait un bon achat.