Computers as Theatre, Second Edition

Preface

In the early 1980s while I was still at Atari Research, I began talking with Alan Kay and Don Norman about a particular idée fixe: the notion that when people were using computers they were interacting in representational worlds, much more like plays in which they were characters than computers on which they ran programs. What a funny idea—at once both obvious and strange. The idea got its hooks into me. At first, I wanted to develop an approach to creating games that might imbue “the system” with enough intelligence about dramatic theory and structure to generate dramatically interesting “next actions.” That was what I was trying to think about in my PhD dissertation.

Through a painful process of learning what I could about artificial ...