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Adventures in StoryMOO or who
killed texton #219 Lisbeth Klastrup klastrup@it-c.dk Department of Digital Communication & Aesthetics, IT-University at Copenhagen |
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to program |
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| Within a multi-user virtual
world, how can you design an interactive experience that on one hand provides
the on-line participants with the possibility of moving and communicating
freely plus exploits the MOOs abilities to create a feeling of scenery
and geographic space - and on the other hand, through the use of the computer's
capabilities, makes possible the emergence of an experience, which is
both coherent and compelling, though not strictly a narrative, nor a game,
nor necessarily an aesthetic experience of Shakespearian quality? Even
though such an experience is restricted to a timed performance, I believe
the staging of one such can help us move towards a more empirically based
understanding of how to script cybertextual events in a virtual environment.
Hence, this paper briefly discusses the theoretical foundations for and the provisional results of the attempt to stage a Murder Mystery Dinner Play in the Danish MOO "StoryMOO". Theoretically, it seems logic that we need to have concepts that describes and makes a distinction between the more stable and the more "transitional" objects of the programmed text and their part in the text production. However, when trying to understand virtual worlds, a simple distinction between text-producing machinery and textual output seems too limited. Hence, I propose a tripartite distinction between a.. the permanent text-producing objects (the stable elements of the
world, generic objects) Empirically, the provisional results of 3 stagings of the Murder Mystery show, that there is a pronounced clash between navigational and communicative interaction during these events. This will be illustrated through text examples in the latter part of the presentation and the presentation concludes with a brief discussion of how in the future to use the impermanent text-producing objects to overcome this problem. |
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| Visit StoryMOO and the
House of Mystery at http://diac.itu.dk:7000/ The author's homepage - with links to further research into this project
- can be found at |
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