LINKS

Purple Moon

Interval Research

Joe- Tell me a bit about your history.

Brenda- I was a theater person for many, many years, I think I started acting when I was six. And in the late sixties was very involved in improvisation and agit-prop. Participatory theater was all the rage as you recall. At about the same time, I met my first computer in about 1974. About that time I met Otto Muller and a bunch of wild and crazy interactive theater guys. I was asked in 1976 if I wanted to script some interactive fairy tales for a new home computer people were working on. Since I had been doing what I considered interactive theater at the time, working on this seemed like a no-brainer, it seemed like a very natural transition. In fact in 1974 I wrote and directed an interactive outdoor production of Robin Hood. I had been doing what amounted to interactive storytelling in an outdoor environment so it just made perfect sense to me. So literally the first the thing I worked on on a computer was both the script, the graphics, and the interaction for a bunch of fairy tales. So that's how I got into this business.

Joe- So then what happened, you eventually got more involved in computers than theater.

Brenda- The first company I started working for was called Cybervision, and when they went belly up in Ohio, everyone that was working there migrated out to Atari. So I worked out there. And I actually was still doing about two theater shows a year until about 1987, when baby number two started to appear and I thought oh shit I can't do this anymore. So somewhere about 1983, I got deep into the idea of using artificial intelligence as a way of doing interactive drama. Previous to that we had all been doing really simple branching because all anybody could think of, especially on those itty bitty machines with 2k of Ram. So at Atari Research I started learning about AI and started talking with all those hot young people from MIT who had come to work for Alan Kay, and turned that into my dissertation topic and so went down that path a pretty long way. And so after I finished my Ph.D, I continued working pretty much in that direction working with Joe Bates consulting on the OZ project at Carnegie Mellon, and working on the Guides project at Apple with Tim Oren and Abbe Don. The issues these two things had in common was the constructing of artificial characters and stories with some level of machine-based intelligence driving the construction of the story.

I have gone back to idiot branching more recently for a couple of reasons. One reason is that I have come to understand over the last ten years in my work as a researcher about how people construct stories in their heads as a result of materials that you give them. So I have come to have a lot more respect for projective construction as something that a participant does with a story. The other reason is that I also become a little bit disillusioned with Artificial Intelligence. I am 47 years old and I can't wait another 20 years. I have things I have to do here, and I have to figure out if there are better ways to go about this.

Joe- I guess its time to pass the baton to the younger generation on that one-

Brenda- Well its funny, because I guess we all thought that AI was just around the corner, but I still haven't seen anything that is even embryonic of what I would consider to be promising. I guess I think Joe's [Bates] group did a lot of interesting work in character construction but it is still not robust enough to stand on its own two feet.

So at Purple Moon we have come full circle. We have decided to divide the story space into two, now its three, places. In one space, yep, we are doing branching. The idea is to give a child a sense of parallel universes that they can hop among. That's such an old idea, but the person that made it crystal clear to me was Tom Snyder. Tom Snyder productions did a bunch of games back in the eighties that were very successful in the educational market. And he had a little game where the only interaction was that you got to decide whose shoulder you got to stand on to watch the game unfold. And it was very much like the interactive plays that were coming out at the time like Tony and Tina's Wedding, where all you really did is decide which character to follow. That was a revelation to me to see how that worked and how much fun kids had with it.

We are doing something a little more complex than that in Purple Moons' products but not much. So one story space is just that braid of possibilities, where it's always braiding back, there are lots of converging nodes, but what's different is the quality of the experience as you move through the braid.

Another level of the story experience that we broke out is what we called the Inner Domain, at least in the Rocket Series. The Inner Domain is a literal representation of a space that contains a bunch of backstory in the form of objects, notes, flashbacks, pictures, all kinds of stuff. Just to give you an example, I think there are like 100,000 elements in the Inner Domain in our most recent Rocket product, an unbelievable amount of material in there. The program orchestrates which parts of that space you can go into and some of the things that are in them on the basis of the choices you are making over in the branching narrative. What you get is another dimension blown into the interactive story in that the backstory is moving around and its really deep.

The third story level we have added in the last two Rocket series is what we call the Truth Glasses. When you apply the Truth Glasses to a character in a scene you can also have access to what the characters are thinking, which may be different than what they are saying. If you think of that as the work I am doing, I am trying to dimensionalize stories in a different way that is not quite as daunting as artificially generated plot and characters. And there are some other interaction paradigms that we worked here in the Secret Path series and that case it's a couple of interwoven stories that you get through via portals, and the relationships get clearer as you solve puzzles.

So I just keep fooling around with it.

Joe- There is no question about you have come a long way with your work. Let's come back to Purple Moon and how the users have responded to the products later in the interview.

Our work is about personal storytelling, about the relationship between conversational storytelling and a more mastered, self conscious effort at telling stories, about the role of the storyteller, and what happens to a person when they take on the authority of the storyteller. As a result we tend to be more interested in authoring tools than story spaces. But your work crosses both these areas. How much do you think our work is going to emphasize a person's need to be in someone else's story versus a person's need to tell their own story? In a larger sense, if we were given great authoring tools would all stop watching TV?

Brenda- I think we might stop watching TV, but we would all still watch feature films. I think it's a question of quality mostly. Except what I visualize, and I bet you would agree, is that both answers are right. We see as storytellers, as bardic people, a storytelling culture which is not a consumerist culture, but which is a culture where stories are a mode of exchange, a way of soliciting information but also a way of gifting, a way of healing, a way of asking, and a way of telling. And that implies a sense of both receivership and authorship. That's how I see it.

So a positive output when a kid plays a story I made is when they say Òlet me tell a story about what happened to me that the game's story made me think of.Ó Or they do a Òwhat if riffÓ. Or they speculate aloud about one of the stories in the Secret Path about what is happening to one of the girls whose problems they are hearing about. So that's a receiving, but that's also a giving, a constructing. So I would like to see us becoming more of a culture that speaks story as its language. And that speaks personal story, and maybe that's where the authoring part comes in for me. Because although of course grand cultural mythologies have there place, and we are all thrilled to death that we have managed to extrude one here in the twentieth century with Star Trek, its still the case that a real storytelling culture that takes advantage of our narrative intelligence, and pushes us toward spiritual growth, has a lot of personal stories in it. It's a great when one of those little personal stories makes to the big screen and we can all feel empathy with it, but the circle is not completed until we feel empowered by that experience to tell stories of our own, with or without technology, to each other. So to me it's a question of values and sensiblities.

And the thing that is the most scary to me about the people on this earth right now- you know how we talk about welfare families, people who have generations of families living under welfare- well we have television families who don't know how to take action in the world, that literally don't know how to make decisions, who don't, as Barry Lopez says, don't even know how to use a hand tool. We have people who aren't curious about the names of trees. That kind of awful passivity is hereditary and I think we have that to blame for how even an empoverished toy like Barbie has moved from 12 year olds to three year olds as its primary audience, because the projective fantasies, the playability of children, is being squished out of them earlier and earlier by this culture of passivity and consumerism.

Joe- That kind of nailed it right between the eyes, I appreciate those sentiments.

Brenda- That's how I feel about it. So we can't stop giving stories. You can't hand people a blank piece of paper and empty stage without providing examples and making story a conversation, a language that we can all use.

Joe- As you suggested, a lot of the creation of a culture of story has to do with the giving and taking of the most intimate memories we have. Making intimate relationship is all about that exchange, by showing each other the most intimate parts of ourselves, by showing another person the most vulnerable part, the part that is not what I seem to be. But even those stories have a history within the popular culture of a crafting, of a skill developed in a culture of story exchange, that we have lost because of the passivity that the television culture has engendered. We have to have to create contexts for our storymaking to continue. I moved from theater to new media because I felt it represented opportunities that were being closed off to me in the non-profit theater world.

Brenda- I hear that.

Joe- So we are in a discussion with a larger community about what those possibilities are.

Your research work at Interval focussed on girls-

Brenda- Boys and girls, but progressively we focussed on girls because that is what I chose to work with? We studied boys play patterns too, and at some point I would like to turn my attention to that, but that's not what I working on now.

Joe- The reason I bring this up is our own experience in teaching has suggested some fascinating things about gender in relationship to women using the technology for a purpose like telling family stories, and how that empowers women to combat a sexist culture that says that technology is simply not their ÒgigÓ. I am interested in your take on the gender politics of technology in relationship to storyelling.

Brenda- At the beginning of my work back in 1992 , my Ò socialÓ motivation was to encourage girls to feel good about using technology, to get their hands on a computer. And it did not take much to figure out that the strongest vector for figuring out how to get girls excited about computers was through story, play and narrative intelligence just as you said. Now that the world is a little bit evolved in that regard we have the opportunity to branch out a little bit from the areas that we started out with to areas that look a little bit more like action games, but which have very strong narrative characteristics, as in characters and motivations, not just doing something for the sole purpose of achieving a high score. So as we get better at supporting girls and technology as a culture, I think that we will find that girls have really broad and diverse taste for interactive stuff. And that is already beginning to show up in things like the Laura Croft phenomena.

Joe- So we are dealing with a different cultural moment, some have described as post-feminist. Personally I don't think it's appropriate to call it a Òpost-feministÓ moment. We are in a moment that is essentially informed by the new culture that feminism helped to create.

Brenda- That's a good way to say it.

Joe- We are looking at all sorts of options that avoid putting women/girls into any sort of ÒbagÓ in regards to technology and story, anymore than we want to bag all boys as being solely interested in Òdrill and killÓ games.

Brenda- Exactly, but it has been a rough ride. I drew a lot of fire from both traditionalists and feminists at the beginning of this work with Purple Moon. We said we know that girls are interested in peer relationships. Emotional navigation is something that's comfortable for them and we are going to take this vector in because we know this works as a play pattern. Well people get all over you because you are stereotyping. But stereotypes don't come out of thin air. If you are trying to build a gateway you try to build it where there is something large on the other side that you can get to. Once that's done, once the pressure is equalized we can move around that stage a lot more freely. I think that this is such a cheap ass problem, access to technology, compared to really deeper issues involved in sexism. And sexism itself is a smaller issue when you get down to the real problems that have to do with power, and partnership versus domination as ways that we live. If you keep peeling the onion back, eventually it won't have anything to do with gender and it won't have anything to do with race it will have to do with the construction of power, and it has been perpetrated by sexism and racism for many years but the only antidote to it is good narrative and good mythology.

Joe- Which resonate deeper than those power constructs-

Brenda- Right. Roger Shank has important things to say about narrative and narrative intelligence. We solve problems in narrative ways, we construct ourselves and our institutions so much by constructing representation. So at the end the day, the fight is bigger than about sexism, it's a fight about what kind of representations will we construct and who gets to construct them because these are the ways that we order ourselves. And the values that we have as a culture come right out of that. Blah, blah-

Joe- It's not blah, blah.

Brenda- tired old liberal shit.

Joe- It's not, it's clearly something central in the culture. Because if you look at theater and the novel in the 90s, so many of the narratives are about precisely these kinds of relationships, and not surprisingly, central in almost all of the discussions is a woman's personal self, personal story, autobiographical story, relationship to power and recovery from the effect of misapplied power, in brutal childhood or adult relationships. To me this stuff is pretty much at the core of what this culture is having to deal with so we are trying to develop a language that doesn't have the baggage that the old language has. We are dealing with core issues. The Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton thing wouldn't play out like this if we weren't dealing with some core issues.

Brenda- No kidding, but that's another story. As a footnote, let me just suggest a book by a woman named Riane Eisler, called Sacred Pleasure. She is the woman who wrote ÒThe Chalice and the Blade.Ó I really recommend this book to people in our field because it really has to do with this issue of how we construct power through representations. I learned a hell of lot from that.

Joe- Let's talk a little bit about the response of the girls using your product. What surprised you, and what validated your thinking.

Brenda- Well it's surprising that I don't get bitched at for it being simple branching that often. I'm sort of quaking in my boots thinking everybody in the business knows how low tech this is and how soon and I am going to get busted. In fact, I got busted almost immediately by a couple of little girls in Indianapolis, who said, ÒThis is simple branching isn't it,Ó and I said yes, and they said, ÒOh, cool.Ó Luckily they are not architecture snobs. So that was a pleasant surprise.

In general what we were able to validate is that emotional navigation does work as a way to move through a story space. That is instead of making substantive causal decisions, do this/do that, our approach has been to make decisions that determine what attitude, what mindset you are going to carry into the next moment. And what flows from that may or may not look particularly causally related. So you have to understand is that at the age group we are working with, 8-12 year old girls, one of the challenges, especially at the younger end, is that girls have difficulty understanding that you can feel one way and act another. In effect we do that all the time. And they have trouble imagining that they are going to ever have a choice in how they are going to respond to a situation. Life seems to be happening to them.

Part of learning process that has to occur for a healthy child in pre-adolescence is learning that we can influence to a certain extent what goes on by what we bring into the next moment. That's a real different way of making choices than the traditional adventure game, go left, go right, turn over the rock. And I think its very interesting, and I think it leads to much more projective construction, that is, it is a very generative technique. Girls have a lot of conversations, and they talk constantly while they are playing these games. And you start to hear them talk differently about their own lives, and that is the most rewarding part for me.

About 94-96 per cent of the press feedback has been positive. Four per cent has been pretty brutal. And one of the surprises to me its what strange bedfellows don't like what I am doing. The worst attacks we've had has been from hyper-feminists in Ms. Magazine and from a middle-aged white male who wouldn't show the game to any little girls, in the New York Times. Wow. What do these folks have in common. Well what I think they have in common is they are not talking to little girls. And there is some denial going on, either denial or ignorance, about what young girls' lives are really like at this age, or what their experience is like. So that was a surprise. So it's like finding fundamentalists and dope-smokers in the same boat.

I have gotten some surprising mail from people. One story is that two little girls wrote to me after an interview appeared in the Sacramento Bee, and one of the things I said is that girls don't overtly compete as boys, that they compete in a different way. And I said that winning and losing isn't the most important thing. And these girls absolutely beat the crap out of me. They said, Òyou're out of your mind, winning is absolutely the most important thing, we play sports all the time, we are extremely competitive, etc, etc.Ó Which is frankly why I am releasing the first ever girl's sports game this Christmas.

The other fun thing that you would enjoy is that I got email the other day from some guy who said, ÒI'm a thirty eight year old male. I realize I have been raised without many social skills. I have difficulty making friends. Would it be OK if I play your product.Ó That's all right. You go!

Joe- Looking out at other efforts, outside your company, what work excites you?

Brenda- Well I know a lot of interesting work that is going on at Interval, but unfortunately I can't talk about it. But I think there is a heartening resurgence for an appreciation of good ethnography in the halls of business. Gasp. I think people are coming to the light that ÒGod what if we actually noticed what people's lives were actually like? And talk to them, wouldn't that be something.Ó That's not just at Interval, I see that at a lot of places. I don't see enough competitive product. I am really ashamed of myself, but I have my head down so much doing my work. I am sure there are millions of gorgeous things out there that I haven't looked at. I'd hate to pick favorites when I have such a small sampling.

In the younger children's category, we have some really outstanding work from both Humongous and Headbne. Humongous in particular, I think Ron Gilbert is a storyteller, he has done an amazing job, in terms of understanding children, and creating games that are really projective, and seem to acknowledge the fact that kids are going to construct stories about what they are seeing and doing. So that work I would characterize as certainly some of the best work I have ever seen.

In terms of characterizing the moment, we are clueless. We are in such as outrageously transitional time, not just in new media, but in everything, the culture, the economy, everything is up in the air. It's really hard to navigate right now. Everybody thought they could brachiate to the web faster than they could. Wall Street and other investors had great love affairs going on with the potential of the internet, and yet nobody has the golden business plan yet. There is still is resistance up in the 90 percentile range of consumers willing to give their credit card out over the internet. Online services that you have to pay for are not getting over the plateau that they have been on for the last year or two.

At the same time the CD ROM business is not circling the drain but it is really close. It's really crazy out there. A couple of reasons are the madness in platform land and also everyone waiting around for the web to happen. So they are not buying stand alone software products. And then you have noise like the DVI in the system, which is reminding me an awful lot of the hype and failure of videodiscs as a medium. And interactive TV and Web TV and blah, blah, blah,

Those of us who create either content, or facilities for other people to create and share content, have a real difficulty figuring out which way to turn. With the Web it's especially problematic, not only because the business model is not there yet in a consistent way, but because every hot young start up has some new hot technology that you fucking have to keep up with. You are breaking your neck. You have to redo everything every two months.

So it is a very difficult moment for the industry in general. Because of the audience that our products address we have to assume a pretty low level of technology, it's a bit of a fortuitous moment for our company. Our customers have slow modems, if they have modems at all, and they have maybe 486 PCs. We are not out at the bleeding edge where you have to kill yourself to keep up. It buys us a little time, but it is certainly the most confusing time in this business, certainly the most that I have lived through.

So I think I challenge for us as a community of Digital Storytellers is to talk about would be what should we be doing right now. If we are not chasing rainbows is there some fundamental work, some basic cultural work, with some sector that we could be focussing our energies on productively given that everything is in flux.

Joe- The communitarian impulse leads us to link the work in Digital Storytelling to the ever-present needs we see in the social matrix. I think Purple Moon has done that for girls. Perhaps if we can't shape the industry, we need to find out what ways are we can have little victories with little audiences in small locales-

Brenda- -that will teach us something.

Joe- The communities of interest on the internet, as well as the way people are doing local projects in digital storytelling, that stuff is really exciting. And the more I look around, the more I see that there are enormous numbers of people doing that work.

Brenda- I am really happy that you are doing the work you are doing. I think Purple Moon is a stop on a long strange trip for me. I hope the company will succeed and live forever. I will need to do some new work in some new context. And we are meeting a need that is pretty bounded temporarily and culturally and it will be interesting to see what we become as a company and what I individually end up doing next. Which about now, going to bed for a long time seems like a really good idea.

Joe- Let me end with this question, returning to your history of work in virtual reality, if you could live, create narrative in a virtual world, what world would that be.

Brenda- I would make a landscape for myself and I would do with it what I do with my landscape at home but it would be richer. I have 5 acres of woods. I am a very lucky person. I never tire of planting things, of putting little pieces of pottery, a feather, stuff that comes to me in arrangements, and watching how they change with time, which get carried off by little animals. And there are storiesÉ. It's a memory palace. I would make myself a memory