Interviewer: Well, that's an interesting travel. When we collaborated you had a great deal of vision about where interactive narrative on the web was heading. So, before we throw the baby out with the bathwater--

Jon Sanborn: No, no, I still believe in that vision, and if you sit down and you start to play Paul Is Dead, everybody who looks at it loves it. The issue is not the quality of the experience or the experience itself, it has to do with the business side of things.

Interviewer: What were the problems that you felt you were trying to solve in approaching Paul Is Dead, in terms of using an interactive narrative form?

Jon Sanborn: The more we got into interactive narrative, the more we realized that the story component is not as important as the world you are creating. And, if you look at episodic television, as an example, the worlds that are created for X Files, Star Trek, any successful episodic show, the worlds are incredibly important, and the episodes themselves , in terms of the treatment of characters and development of characters, can vary in quality.

The more we got into interactive stories, the more we realized that people really like the story part of stories to be told to them, but it's the world that fascinates them. We had done a lot of work trying to attack story structure, character development, a lot of the basic components of story telling, but breaking down the components of a story was relatively easy. Deciding how to let the audience assemble that story, was also easy, but bringing the sense of the world across to the audience was more problematic.

Paul Is Dead is the most successful solution so far. I our testing at Microsoft, people were just completely captivated. The story telling experience was scaled in three different ways. If you want to just sit back and watch Paul Is Dead, it's just a one button click and the story will move forward, and a very strong, central voice is telling you the story. If you want to dig in to Paul Is Dead, where most of the clues and mystery information is, you can do that too. Then there is an even deeper level of involvement, where you come across a chat bot character, that was developed by Extempo, that extends one of the characters. And if he pops up--he's integrated very deep into the story-- he will give you an opportunity to ask questions and get more clues and information. We also found a way, through appropriating the language of the web, of extending the character development by creating alternate web sites outside of the main story site for a handful of our ancillary characters. Those elements went a long way to broadening and deepening the character development for four of the characters.

So those were techniques that we discovered with the basic understanding that if you wanted to just watch the story, you could just watch the story. People liked that a great deal. Every time we come to a new set of tools and a new set of technologies, the granularity of how the story is being laid out changes. With Psychic Detective, if you get to be a developed player, you will play that story very differently each time you play through. However, the downside of that is, you might have to see the same movie fragment over and over and over again. That's just a quality of the medium in which we were working.

With the web, you don't necessarily have to do that, but we're asking you to look at several story pieces over and over and over again, because the fun is in re-examining what somebody said when you think it's not correct.

Interviewer: The mystery format is particularly well suited to this exploratory approach, because it mixes aspects of gaming narrative with strong story narrative.

Jon Sanborn: Ironically enough, ICM is now involved in selling Paul Is Dead as a television series. I was just in their offices the other day with a bunch of agents, and I did my demo of Paul Is Dead, and they went, "Oh my God. Let's show this to Fox, let's show this to MTV. They'll go nuts." But again, it works as an idea because we attacked a world. We fleshed out a world.

Interviewer: In traditional story telling, there is a kind of flow between linearity, meaning the audience hears a direction that a story is going, into interactivity. A traditional story teller is listening for where they want to take tonight's story, in any direction. And then the successful storyteller takes you a bit deeper and envelopes you into their world. This flow of linearity to agency by the audience to immersion in the world is something that authors such as yourselves are beginning to really understand. Can you expand upon that?

Jon Sanborn: I think, to a certain extent, that's all very, very trueYou're talking about a human scaled experience versus a media experience. My interest has always been in the media experience because I can't be there, nor do I want to be there, for every story telling. This is not to discount the personal story telling or personal media story telling. In the media context, I have been disappointed by the limitations of the audience. To a certain extent, the audience wants to rise to meet a challenge. Yet there are entire areas of story telling that they don't ever want to be challenged by.

From Psychic Detective to virtual worlds to Paul Is Dead, some of our experimentation with story structure was probably ambitious. People can manufacture a certain emotional set from a world, but the real one-two punch in story telling comes from tremendous, strong emotional communication.

There's all sorts of ways to create that level of connection, from pure design, which can set a mood, to the intricacies of puzzle solving, which can also stimulate an emotional call and response--to, finally, real character and real story. And, the best times, for me, in any of the work that we've done, is where someone else finally sits down and plays it and you watch them connect with something that you've done. And they connect in a way, in some cases, you've never expected them to connect. And that, as a media story teller, is probably the key thing.

The question then is, is it a form that has a future, is it inextricably tied to the technology of the day, or are we always going to be waiting for the next level of technology to be able to decrease the distance between story teller and story. One thing that happens in interactive story telling is that you have to put a great deal of distance between yourself as the storyteller and the story that you're putting forward.

Where as we go to shoot this pilot for Comedy Central, funny is funny. We start with a really funny script, and now it's my job to make sure that, in the direction and the execution, all the gags pay off. And then it's up to the audience to meet the material head on, and at that point there's no room for discussion. It's a seamless transfer between steps a, b, c, and finally d, where the audience grabs it.

In interactive story telling, you have to make the pieces float so successfully that sometimes the audience--and you have to anticipate this too--the audience is not going to put the things together in any predictable way. And, so, you have to look at the honesty of each individual element. What does it look like? What does it sound like? What is each screen trying to achieve? What beat, what moment, what fragment, what element are we sketching in here?

Because the main story in Paul Is Dead is printed fairly strongly, there is an anchor for the audience. If I demo Paul Is Dead, and people will laugh. People laugh when the movies play. Well that's what I want, I want people to get the joke, and to be like, "Oh God, this is so cool." Because then they are going to say, "Well, what else is there? I just looked at x, y and z, and this was really cool. What else is there?" And then they'll stumble upon something that we've thrown in that they didn't expect, or they'll get something that's just pure enjoyment. Or then there's something that leaps out at them as a clue. Psychic Detective was a 550 page script. Paul Is Dead is well over 1,000 pages of scripted material. All those assets are meant to assist people in just getting lost in the world.

In the beginning of this year, we worked on something that was a VR and Avatar based story system in which there were some pre-programmed Avatars, and and live Avatars that were going to be played by actors, like the Neal Stevenson/Diamond Age "raptor" characters. That had a level of success that was interesting because of the live parameters. But I don't know if I want to wait for the technology to get there so that we essentially can recreate improvisational theater or Comedia Dell Arte in electronic form. That will be interesting? Vibrant? Will it be a mass medium? I don't know. Is theater a mass medium? I don't know.

Is the Internet a mass medium? Will Paul Is Dead attract a million viewers a day? Or will a million viewers see the whole thing throughout its release from now till March? I don't know.