Digital Storytelling : A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainmen

Foreword
By Ken Goldstein
Something Happened.
‘Twas round about the mid ’80s, just about the time we were all truly starting
to grok the impact of Apple’s once-run Super Bowl spot that sounded the war
cry to dismantle Big Brother. Almost ancient history now, but in retrospect
it seemed to have a lot to do with the PC world taking a lesson from the Mac,
replacing the monochrome monitor with 8-bit color, and there you have it, we
decided we were all making interactive movies.
My own journey started almost entirely by accident, as any writer tempered
by honesty is likely to share, largely due to too much time on my hands. Still
looking for a crack in the armor through which I might find an excuse to force
my way into ‘‘The Club,’’ I attended a conference at UCLA called ‘‘The Future
of Television.’’ Speakers on the keynote panel included one of the foremost executive
producers of all time, and if He had something to say about the future of
television, I needed to be His disciple. Besides, I knew if I could ask just one
intelligent question, I could leverage that into a post-conference spec script reading,
and within days, the calls from my student loan officer would no longer be
troublesome. Still new to town and terrified that traffic would come between me
and my soon-to-be-acquired nest egg, I arrived much too early at the conference,
hours before the keynote (curious, since I had always understood keynotes as
kickoffs for conferences, but back then L.A. was too hip for anything important to
start too early in the day). As fate would have it, we were offered a warm-up
panel, and given that it was in an air-conditioned auditorium and I couldn’t
afford the French toast special in the cafeteria, I parked myself in the mini-audience
and started to learn about something called interactivity.
What I remember most about that panel was that no one had a single example
of any work they could show. They tried to make us believe this was because
their work was so secret it could not be revealed in public, but I soon learned it
was because none of their musings had yet been created. What they were saying
sure sounded interesting, though—getting the audience into the story as a participant,
technology allowing responsiveness to audience choice, a future where stories
had unending endings or no endings at all. It was a revolution still in the making;
the theorists were theorizing before there was reality to evaluate. There were only
two possible outcomes: Either this was reject material for Saturday Night Live, or
this was opportunity. To this day I thank the Force that I guessed right.
One thing has remained constant in the business of interactivity; there has
never been a shortage of conferences. For the next several years, as the dour ’80s
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