Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

Chapter 18 The Erasmatron

I FIRST BEGAN GROPING IN the direction of interactive storytelling in the early 1980s, while running the games research group at Atari. Of course, at that time, the 8-bit, 1MHz computers we were using were completely inadequate to the task of interactive storytelling, so I wasn’t even thinking in terms of such a grandiose objective. Instead, I wondered if I could design a game about interpersonal interactions. The videogames of the time were all quite simple-minded and impersonal— couldn’t something be done to get some social interaction in games?

Early Efforts

My first crack at the problem was a little game I called Gossip, with eight actors: the human player and seven computer actors. Each had a telephone. The player ...