Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, Second Edition

Introduction

Interactive storytelling is a young field; first conceived in the late 1980s and first experimented with in the 1990s, it did not attract substantial attention until the new millennium. By 2010 it had become a hot topic. The field’s youth has endowed it with a diversity of ideas and a cacophony of discussions. Like the proverbial elephant, everybody perceives it from his or her own vantage point. Moviemakers see it as a form of cinema, video-game people claim it as an extension of their own field, computer scientists think of it as part of the broader field of artificial intelligence, and experts in the art of improv consider it to be the computerization of their skills.

The truth is that interactive storytelling is not an extension ...