Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

Introduction

Many years ago I was a bigshot in the games industry. I led the games research group at Atari. My face oozed over the covers of magazines; store shelves sagged under the weight of the fourteen games I created. Five books (before this one) bear the scarlet letters of my name as author. I founded and ran the Computer Game Developers Conference in its early years. But in 1991, dissatisfied with the ever narrower stance the computer games industry had taken, I decided to stop working on games and instead focus my energies on interactive storytelling. It was unknown territory to me, but with my generous assessment of my ability to conquer all problems, I pulled out my machete and began hacking my way forward.

At that time, only a few ...