As to whether the user will ever be satisfied with the finite number of options he’s
given, I don’t see a problem there at all. Certainly you’re not permitted nuance in such
an arrangement. But you should have all dramatically reasonable options. Besides, if
we gave you some system where you could apply nuance so that you could say, “I’m
going to say this with a slightly sarcastic tone of voice,” the infrastructures for that
would be ghastly. It would make the game very tedious. So I feel that the only way to do
this effectively is to confine it to a menu structure. In fact, there are some games that
have implemented nuance as their primary modality of interaction. In these games
you’re interacting with someone and you’ve got these sliders: one is for forcefulness,
one is for humor, and another is for charm. But that’s all you get. You respond to some-
one with this much forcefulness, this much charm, and that much humor. I’ve been
tempted for quite some time to build something like that into the Erasmatron. But the
problem is, first, coming up with some generality, and second, keeping the interface
clean and usable. Right now, with the simple menu you need merely look, see, and
press. I think that’s important for a mass medium. The sliders for tone are for game
aficionados.
The system thatSibootuses to construct sentences with icons and the inverse
parser is an interesting one. Why did you opt not to use a system like that for
the Erasmatron?
Because the vast number of sen-
tences in Siboot are self-
completing. InSiboot, you could
click on just one icon and often
the rest of the sentence would fill
itself in because that’s the only
option available. The way to do
that nowadays, by the way, is
with pop-up menus. I could do
this with the Erasmatron. For
example, suppose you had a con-
ventional menu item that said,
“I’ll give you my horse in return
for that six-gun.” The words
“horse” and “six-gun” could be in pop-up menus providing other options for the trade.
This would require some expansion of the Erasmatron system, but nothing very seri-
ous. The only reason I haven’t done it yet is my unwillingness to add complexity. I
believe that the system has all the complexity it needs and then some. It’s always easy
to add complexity to the design, but I’m thinking in terms of simplification.
Have you had a chance to playThe Sims? It seems that a lot of people succeed in
using that game as a sort of tool for interactive storytelling.
The Simsis not an attempt to produce interactive storytelling. I had some e-mail with
Will Wright aboutThe Sims, and he acknowledges that it isn’t an interactive storytelling
platform, but he pointed out that many people use it that way.The Simsis exactly what
Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 277
Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot