(I mean, aside from it nearly destroying the Enterprise every six weeks.) I guess it's clear that the Star Trek writers had no deep notion of what interactive drama would be - they just stuck a subordinate static narrative into the static narrative of their TV show. (I am, as you will soon see, thinking about this talk from an IF-author's point of view.)Īs a distant spectator to the academic world, I don't know what narratologists think is problematic about the holodeck idea. But even as a fictional ideal, the holodeck has been problematic.) (The usual notional model is Star Trek's holodeck - thus Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck and so on. The text adventure (Zork) is close to what Mateas is imagining.
I'm putting my notes under quote bars, but please take them as my interpretation of what I heard. (My notes, to be sure, were not anything like a complete transcript of the lecture. So nifty, in fact, that I will transcribe all the notes I took. Fortunately Mateas started by showing a trailer (youtube link), so I wasn't lost. (Admission of guilt: I never got around to playing Facade before I went to the lecture. The interface is a real-time, free-form, natural language text prompt the characters respond in spoken text and animated movement. They then proceed to have a horrible nasty argument and drag you into it. (What? Click on the link.) ( What? Okay, here: Facade is a short game in which two friends, Trip and Grace, invite you over for dinner. The talk naturally centered around Facade, an interactive drama released in 2005 by Mateas and Andrew Stern.Ģ005 was a long time ago now, which saves me the effort of explaining what Facade is. Mateas runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. This past Thursday, I went to a talk by Michael Mateas: "The Authoring Challenge for Interactive Storytelling".