Unispace by Living Visions Ensemble (review)

on the kinds of stories they can be used to tell; but in fact, the constraints are severe. The activities of non-reader characters cannot readily be described in such a static framework; nor are all kinds of scenes amenable to description in terms of nodes and links. An even more serious problem is the exponential branching of storylines. If the first scene offers a choice of two doors, the author faces the task of writing two complete sequels instead of one; in each case, another choice appears soon afterward and the situation can quickly become unmanageable. Oz, a new interactive fiction system under construction at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) byJoseph Bates and his students, vastly extends some of the creative options offered to the author by Adventure, while limiting others. Like Adventure, Oz can be used in an "expressionist" mode to simply construct an interesting world for the reader to explore. But the richer structure of an Oz document actually inhibits this sort of use. In Adventure, the author is free to use all the expressive resources of English to describe a scene. In Oz, it is the system that describes scenes to the reader: the author's job is literally to build them, gluing predefined pieces into larger edifices. This done, the system generates textual descriptions that take into account factors such as the reader's focus of attention and the rearrangement of props during the story. In 1992, the Oz group at CMU decided to bring their ideas together with real-time animation. The result was the world of the woggles, imaginary land creatures with expressive eyes and shells of brightly colored putty, living in a storybook landscape on the screen of a state-of-the-art graphics workstation. Because they lack mouths, their means of communication are simple: bobbing up and down to signal greeting, hopping back and forth, sulking and, when angry or threatened, gathering themselves up into menacing discs. Some of the woggles are controlled by the Oz system, using a simple model of their goals, habits and emotional states to determine their visible actions. One of them is controlled by a human reader sitting at the workstation: pointing with the mouse makes the woggle hop to the indicated place on the screen; pressing buttons produces greeting or threatening motions that the others can see and respond to. In a strict sense, this is not interactive 364 Reviews fiction: we are free to impose a narrative reading on the events unfolding on the screen, but this is entirely a matter of interpretation after the fact; there is no story designed into the system itself. Even so, the immediacy of a graphic presentation evokes the creative possibilities of the new medium much more powerfully than its text-based predecessors have. Besides demonstration pieces, the Oz project has produced solid scientific results , including Mark Kantrowitz's work on automatic generation of realistic English and Bryan Loyall's modelling of characters with emotions. Moreover, as pure entertainment this is clearly a technology of the future; it is no accident that Oz has received substantial funding from Japanese game manufacturers. But what, artistically speaking, does it come to? Is the simple sequence of events really such an important element in the stories we enjoy hearing and telling? When reading a Shakespeare play or a yarn by Mark Twain, we respond to the narrator's wit, verbal music and skill in showing characters from revealing angles. These qualities may also be present in a work of interactive fiction, but they do not depend on its interactivity for their effect. Of course, there are literary forms in which a use of interactivity in the literal sense might enrich the reader's experience. Authors of mystery stories go to great lengths to let readers second-guess the super sleuth-why notjust let the reader be the detective? But even in these forms, the difficulty of writing interactive fiction may seriously limit its uses. A system like Oz is an experiment in illusion. The linguist William Croft once remarked that the famous computer psychoanalyst, Eliza, which succeeded in fooling a surprising number of people by using a tiny set of stock responses...