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Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling

Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."

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The literary critical term that covers the phenomenon of one character trusting another more than the reader knows he or she should is dramatic irony. This term doesn’t apply cleanly in Deikto stories, however, given that a character’s trustworthiness (or another attribute) is assigned a numeric value. Unlike traditional conceptions of dramatic irony in which the reader knows more than the character, here the apparatus of the story itself bears the knowledge that the character lacks, but the reader does not have such insight.

The literary critical term that covers the phenomenon of one character trusting another more than the reader knows he or she should is dramatic irony. This term doesn’t apply cleanly in Deikto stories, however, given that a character’s trustworthiness (or another attribute) is assigned a numeric value. Unlike traditional conceptions of dramatic irony in which the reader knows more than the character, here the apparatus of the story itself bears the knowledge that the character lacks, but the reader does not have such insight.

‐ Ben Underwood

programming code quantification drama constraint

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