Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Andrew Glassner

Creating First-Person, Interactive Narratives

Wednesday September 27, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Room 3875, SFU Surrey Campus, third floor Central City Tower in the Research Labs

abstract

There are hundreds of first-person video games available today, offering players the opportunity to do everything from driving and shooting to driving while shooting (and casting magic). Although many contemporary games have a veneer of narrative laid over them or presented periodically during the gameplay, they fall far short of the sort of richly interactive narratives that took place on Star Trek's Holodeck. If we step back and observe that writers and technologists have been trying to create a form of "interactive fiction" for hundreds of years, the fact that there still isn't a single mature, mainstream example of the form suggests that either we're going about it all wrong, or that it just can't be done. I believe it's the former, and that the Holodeck is actually a Philosopher's Stone: an appealing but unrealistic fantasy that is pulling us in the wrong direction. I'll suggest a type of first-person interactive narrative that doesn't require the equivalent of transmuting lead into gold.

bio

Dr. Andrew Glassner is a writer, director, and a consultant in video game design. He carried out research in 3D computer graphics at Bell Communications Research, the IBM Watson Research Lab, Xerox PARC, and Microsoft Research. He has written many papers and books in computer graphics, including the textbook "Principles of Digital Image Synthesis" and the three volumes of "Andrew Glassner's Notebook." He created the "Graphics Gems" series, founded the Journal of Graphics Tools, served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, and was Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH '94, where he created the Sketches venue. As a writer-director, he created, wrote, and directed the multiplayer Internet game "Dead Air" for the Microsoft Network, as well as the animated short "Chicken Crossing" and several live-action short films. His most recent book is "Interactive Storytelling: Fiction for the 21st Century." When not writing fiction, Andrew reads, paints, composes music, plays games, and hikes.