Interviewer: Your background is in theater, like mine, but yet we both find ourselves working in multimedia, trying to develop new contexts for our work in storytelling or narrative. We have used the term digital storytelling to describe our work, but it seems to mean many different things to many of us. How would you define digital storytelling?

Mark Petrakis: The term is confusing, it has become a techno-rubric for what a small group of people are defining as their work. If we want to expand the definition, we need to think of interactivity. Because if it is just using a computer, everyone is using a computer. I mean, if you make music on a computer is it Digital Music?

The branch of this definition that is interesting is not the video, film, novel; but the hypertext, games, interaction. That's the branch that leads to something which is going to be a more vital definition of digital storytelling.

My personal definition of Digital Storytelling is when the computer is a character in a story, a narrator, or an interface. In other words, "Where would you like to go now" in the games tradition, like Living Books (by Bröderbund). They all present a little crow or little rabbit that is standing in place of the narrator. When I push my mouse over its ear or face and its ears stand up, that tells me its a Digital Story, because its responding to my input. In that sense"Digital" could be replaced by any number of synonyms; multimedia story or electronic book. At least I know there is a kind of pathway or something that is available to me as the user.

As an example of the "computer as character" is the recent project with the Institute for the Future around health care issues. I created a scenario for the health care consumer of the year 2005 interacting with the ubiquitous computer in his home, named Milo. So he here's a ding, and a voice comes out, and I say, "What is it Milo?"

Now I could choose to use or not use voice activation, but I would probably choose to, so now I am interacting with this character that I can't see. But if I wanted to see him, he could come up on a screen. In the end of the scenario, we take a blood test, he goes off and finds a health care agent, someone I can schedule appointments and tests. In the end, we get into this little banter back and forth and we are obviously joking, I ask, " What am I doing in Cleveland?" and he says" You being inducted into the Rock N Roll hall of fame," so I say "Okay, Shut up, leave me alone, just make my reservation, order me lunch, help me find my keys." He says, "Sure thing Mr. Big Stuff." At that point, he pops up on the screen as a kind of representation that I can interact with.

So there are multitude of forms that the computer as character can take. And those are completely programmable. At that point, we are talking about a completely different kind of interaction, sort of like Hal in 2001. We are talking about the evolution of that impulse off the big screen and into the home. That is one way the direction of Digital Storytelling makes sense for me. That's a unique direction and that is going to spawn a number of applications.

Interviewer: But what you are talking about is an artificially intelligent character, something that is dependent on how much programming can be done, and the improvements on voice recognition and response.

Mark Petrakis: Yes, it will generate dialogue in a format not very different than Seinfeld, or ordinary life. Or perhaps more like his Majesty Intel XIV, or whatever you want to call it. We name our harddrives and now were going to name this host of little Pooh characters that live around the house in intelligent appliances. We will personify these characters. That's a natural tendency. I think the personification of the technology is a lot of what drives our wanting to play with it.

The other things that drives it is a macho sense of individuality, like, "look at all this cool hardware, I can tell stories with it, I can show off with it, sort of like a HotRod."

Interviewer: So let's look at a definition, what is the difference between conversation and storytelling? What you are talking about is having a conversation with an intelligent agent.