A new type of book

I don't believe that reading is a "passive" activity.

"[Tom] saw a new girl in the garden--a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long-tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes." (Tom Sayer, by Mark Twain)

Reading this, we all pictured the girl in our minds. But I believe the exact image of the girl I have is different from yours. This is our mind working and filling in the gaps of the information that it believes to be missing. Some people may see the girl vividly, filling it with details like some freckles and an embroidered dress while others will simply see a blonde girl with blue eyes. But our ming WORKED to make that.

In the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, he says that the most import place in a comic book is the place between the pannel, where our mind rushes in to fill in the gaps, to connect the action.

Even movies have this. We have the jump cut, that can be considered a jump from one panel to another (with the implicit "space in between"). We also have the "places outside the scene". If someone goes away to get a coffee, we can picture it happening. If the scene is being filmed in a room, and we can only see 3 of the walls, we KNOW there is a fourth one.

And, besides it all, with every medium we consume, we have the "baggage" we take with us. Our knowledge of previous stories, movies, songs, books; our own opinions on the theme and even if we had a good or bad day will influence our experiencing of the "object" (book, movie, etc.)

It isn't because we're not moving our hands that the medium becomes "passive".

Books are what they are. And they are good at it. The author's fault is that he is trying to change books while what he should really be doing is creating a new medium.

I think this is really interesting, though in many ways it sounds more like a game than a book. A book (to me) has a single story line based around a structure which the author intended you to follow. Even a 'choose your own adventure' had a basic story the user followed. I admit, technology now allows us to now have as many stories intertwine as we like, it still doesn't make it a reimagination of the book.

It does make the reimagination of a story. What I find most facinating about this idea is how it relates to an amazing skill I've noticed in two of my friends. Whoever they meet, within a few minutes, they are able to ascertain what makes that person tick, what they're interests are, and what makes them special.

If you're picking up a story and intertwining with different characters at different points, you'll need to be able to do that in order to make the story interesting.

BBC Radio 4Extra has run a couple of experiments that feel like early iterations of some of those ideas.

One was a drama where listers could vote on a couple of out comes at the end of each episode.

The other was a crowd-sourced drama. They'd start with an episode, then invite listener-written followups. List ers would write each episode. (The episodes were short and the plots got twisty fast).

But the idea in the article sounds like how some games should be. It'd be great if games could use more, better, writers.

I'm not sure how easy it would be to allow a person to follow a path and not have clashing incongruities when different paths merge.

I've been thinking along these same lines. It's going to be very tricky to simultaneously get the rich language required for interesting reading and make it sufficiently interactive. It will be pushing the state of the art in natural language processing, because portions of the story will need to be procedurally generated as you go. Or possibly have a team of writers modifying the story in real time as you go, which is also intriguing. To make it interesting and interactive, there will most likely be too many branches to do it any other way.

By the way, nice diagrams.

He's trying to re-invent the MUSH without knowing what a MUSH is or the early experiments with MUSHes linked to the web and such.

From my experience with MUSHes in the mid-early 90s the biggest problem is the general public is not terribly creative. A general cultural desire for drama and formulaic entertainment. Look at how big the Second Life world was, but how the population density was about 75% clustered around the spawn point talking, regardless of the world being nearly limitless in size.

I can't see how the fact that other players can modify my story with their decision could be somehow more fun that a pre-scripted story. I mean, yes, it sounds somehow fascinating, but it doesn't really impact the fun on the game. And what about the tradeoff with the quality of the story? You can "easily" make 1 epic\awesome story, you can't do that with hundreds of forks.

Like a visual novel? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel)

Very interesting!