It would be interesting topic of conversation to discuss whether his conclusion that interactive storytelling is (was) the future is really true. From a business point of view, I think all his attempts to create such games are failures. However, I would classify a recent game such as Beyond Two Souls as Interactive story telling. Maybe not in the way Chris Crawford envisioned, but similar. Is there a whole new genre of games, which potential is not fully discovered yet?
I was very surprised by the concept "quit game design to do interactive storytelling" since I normally consider interactive storytelling to be a subfield within game design. I consider Skyrim and similar recent RPG/FPS games in the Fable tradition to be at least rudimentary interactive story games.
In fact, for him (if I remember correctly), "interactive storytelling" is something about people, and not things. The core of Skyrim and any another RPG is not the people who live in and the story it tells, that's how you improve the character you're playing. Branching-tree stories are at best very rudimentary "interactivity stories". An interactive storytelling world is quite like a sandbox, an universe which proceduraly create a story in reaction to how you're playing. And the main thing you do is to speak to characters, and have social interactions. And a very refined AI (which he calls Fate) is able to recognize how everything goes and to "improvize" the story, like if it were a very good Dungeon Master in a traditional paper RPG.
And that's the way which in, for him, art can be made. By carefully building the "sandbox", the world, you can teach specific things to the players, and not in a harsh way, because he can try and try again, in different ways, and learn from what happens in the game. And it also means by loosing.
I always take the same exemple to explain it : consider a game in which you are hiding in a cellar, somewhere in northern France, during the WWII. The nazi soldiers are making a raid against the town you're in, to arrest and kill saboteurs. You're a resistant, maybe the saboteur, or a thief, or anyone who want to escape the nazi soldiers, and you're stuck with the owner of that cellar and a jew who hide here. The last one didn't told the owner he was a jew, and the owner risks his life, and the ones of his family, by helping both of you. Maybe he is antisemitic, or maybe he his a jew himself, but never told anyone, and he thinks that if he gives you, or one of you, to the nazis he'll be safe... How do you react ? Try again, change the owner by a woman, or the jew is a little boy, or he's also an awful killer ? What can such a "game" teach you about mankind, about social relationships ?
The term "interactive storytelling" is very specific for him, and I guess it will soon be possible to make such a game in a way that is not a huge financial failure, with voice and face recognition and such technologies, we'll be able to bring his dream to life ^^
Thanks for your help Meatsack, there isn't a lot of things left to "recognize" I guess, all the things in bold :
For the "capacitor" part, I don't know who added "tantalum", but it seems to be what he says.
