As the World Wide Web continues expanding pell-mell, dramatic entertainment forms are being co-opted from tv and film and showing up on the Web in various incarnations. Developers and media companies as well as advertisers are taking a hard look at the emerging opportunities to see if interactive drama might not be the next thing.

Now a number of Canadian companies are pioneering interactive dramas for the Web, and for the most part, they are finding there are no rules but many limitations in terms of working around bandwidth constraints, dealing with creative issues, and finding a way to make it pay off.

Despite the fact that some form of interactive entertainment on the Net has existed for years, the form is still, for practical purposes, in its infancy, both in terms of the technological and the business sides of the equation.

Users of computer networks began to amuse themselves interacting with one another in the early ’80s through Multi User Dungeons (muds), versions of which are still immensely popular, occupying about 10% of the Net’s bandwidth.

Current manifestations allow users to take on a persona and move through a 2D or 3D environment where they can chat and even erect virtual homes.

While interactive entertainment tends to be an amalgam of game-type genres, interactive drama has largely taken the form of soap opera-inspired formats transplanted from tv. Web sites like The Spot, and more recently, Ferndale and East Village, have had success combining Internet attitude with adult drama sensibilities in serials which allow access to the ongoing pastimes and peccadilloes of resident characters.

While the form has been around several years, there are ongoing technical and creative impediments to interactive entertainment delivered in a reasonably sound format becoming widespread. Bandwidth issues are theoretically being addressed, with cable and phone companies battling to bring high-speed Internet connections – the kind that can affordably deliver full-motion video – to the computer of everyman but still linger to provide a barrier to interactivity in its familiar form.

Developers face the challenges of creating a truly interactive and interesting graphical interface that allows a connection to be made with fictional subjects and/or other users. Many current efforts entail a cd-rom component to complement the online experience and provide a richer graphical experience and an extension of play.

‘Not many people are seriously pursuing this now, mainly because people don’t know how to lick it,’ says Bill Sweetman interactive producer at Toronto’s MediaLinx Interactive and ideaguy behind Multimediator, a Web-based multimedia information source. ‘People see interactive drama as watching chunks of video and having a choice between this and that. It’s not perceived to be very compelling.’

Sweetman says many of the efforts of game developers to develop interactive drama haven’t contributed much in the way of legitimate examples of the art.

‘Some of the game developers have announced they’re creating virtual entertainment or interactive drama, but it’s more often just a game with video sequences in it or a game with a Hollywood actor.’

Sweetman says he began his interactive exploits 15 years ago, programming interactive text games like muds and moos, and attests to their continuing popularity. ‘People think graphics and sound are essential, but there is a strong argument to be made that sometimes those things get in the way,’ he says.

Even with cd-rom technology, it’s difficult to completely buy into the experience, Sweetman says. ‘The goal is to make it more compelling, more seamless, so you don’t have to wait to see a window or a button pop up in order to act.’

Sweetman cites the Johnny Mnemonic cd-rom interactive game, developed for about $2 million by Douglas Gayeton at Propaganda Code, a division of California-based Propaganda Films.

‘The game is considered an ambitious failure,’ says Sweetman. ‘There was a limited choice of interaction, you had to wait up to a minute for a letter box sequence which allowed you to react, and there was repetition of sequences. It shows how much money you can spend and still not solve this problem.’

Tom Jurenka, director of Disus, a Toronto-based systems development firm and content manager for the Intercom broadband test in Newmarket, Ont., says technology is not the complete answer to delivering worthwhile interactive entertainment.

The four-year Newmarket test, set to begin this fall, will initially entail about 150 homes, increasing to 400 to 500 homes as more houses are built within the test area.

Intercom is a consortium of communications computer and media companies, which includes Bell Canada, Apple and ibm. Test homes will get fast atm networks capable of about 10 megabites per second, sufficient to deliver full-motion video.

Jurenka says the test will see cd-rom-type content sent over the network and experiments with custom-made narrowcasting applications.

Cable companies are also promising high-speed cable, modem-based undertakings, and telephone companies are scrambling to provide relatively speedier isdn connections, which utilize existing copper lines.

Yet, according to Jurenka, the concept of a shared experience, not technological milestones, provides the key to dramatic projects.

‘Each medium has a set of advantages and limitations. There has to be a learning process by artists and creators to understand what the network is good at,’ Jurenka says. ‘A lot of efforts are focused on more bandwidth or developing virtual reality engines or solving other engineering problems; it all boils down to a reasonably finite set of results. But art, or content, has an infinite number of potential results. It makes it harder to solve intrinsic problems.’

‘Nobody knows a lot about how to pull this off,’ says Paul Hoffert, head of the CulTech Research center at York University. ‘You can get people to help you with the technical problems, but in terms of creative problems, there aren’t a lot of people out there who have that base of experience.’

Nor are there any established guidelines for business relationships on Web ventures. Game developers are often paid development fees and royalties for a title, which they hand over to a publisher. Sweetman says sometimes developers retain the rights to some of the art or 3D models used in the game or to a particular game engine, which they can license out for use in other titles.

‘There is no standard,’ says Alfredo Coppola, head of Ottawa’s Animatics Multimedia, which is currently developing an interactive drama project with Corel (see p. VI-12) and which will retain ownership of the project’s concept. ‘Everyone can negotiate their own scenario.’

Mark Ury, head of development for Ottawa multimedia developer Digg Design, says the company is talking to Paramount Digital Entertainment to back its interactive drama project Hotel Geneva, the pilot episode of which will cost about $300,000 to produce.

According to Ury, the copyright for contract work done by Digg for other corporate work is owned by the publisher, but in terms of a Web project, a relationship with a publisher isn’t cut and dried.

‘The actual online series will be a codevelopment deal, but ultimately we want the ownership to stay with us,’ says Ury.

The plan is to establish the Web game as a brand and spin off cd-rom titles and other products from it. ‘We’re talking about a longer term commitment. If they buy into it we’re helping them build the infrastructure for a complete network. It’s a more intermeshed relationship.’

Chris Crawford, a u.s.-based games developer has spent the last five years developing a technology that attempts to accommodate true interactive entertainment within current technological standards.

Crawford cites Socrates who, in his dialogue with Phaedras, opined that once words are written down they are effectively killed and one learns most effectively by talking to a live person. By extension, Crawford says once video is put in the can it is dead and cannot be part of real interaction.

‘The only way to make imagery worthwhile is to put life back into it,’ says Crawford, and to that end he has developed a framework called abstract graphics which he will license to developers to use as the basis for their interactive projects.

Crawford’s framework consists of basic text, ‘smart text,’ which incorporates facial display technology, allowing a range of responses from characters on screen, and abstract graphics which use symbolic representations of actions and reactions rather than depictions. Crawford is backed by The Markle Foundation based in New York and expects to release the system this summer.

Tamara, an interactive project being developed by Toronto’s Atlantis Films, is an attempt to bring the elements of human interaction and a compelling story together within an innovative technological framework. Tamara will be based on the stage play of the same name, which has been performed around the world without interruption since it was written 15 years ago.

The play, which Atlantis executive producer Marty Katz describes as a sweeping epic about art, history, politics, sex and love, revolves around events that may have occurred one day in history when now-fashionable artist Tamara deLempicka visited the Northern Italian villa of Gabriele d’Annunzio.

The play encourages audience members to choose players to follow, thereby gleaning only parts of the enigmatic story, and at intermission to share information on the threads of the story they have seen.

Katz says Atlantis plans to stretch that experience globally via the Web. ‘A breakthrough we can expect in 1996 in interactive entertainment is a redirection of interactivity from interacting with your machine to interacting with people,’ he says.

‘At its core, Tamara wasn’t interactive theater – the story is untouchable – but you do get to interact with people who know things about the story that you don’t. That’s what made Tamara so successful and I think that’s the key to immersive interactive experiences online,’ says Katz.

Atlantis is currently talking to Sun Microsystems about using Sun’s object-oriented programming language Java to bridge the bandwidth gap and allow richer graphical elements than are commonly found on the Web.

Atlantis is also experimenting with hybrid cd-roms where high-volume graphic elements would reside to be triggered by Java’s ‘Applets’ on the Web site, thus creating the impression of downloading images and sound when they are in fact being uploaded from users’ disc drives.

‘Assuming everyone had the Tamara disc in their cd-rom drive, they would all see the same movie at the same time and have the impression of a global interactive telecast,’ says Katz. ‘We think it’s doable and we think Tamara is the best project to do it with.’

Katz opines that this will be the means of delivering a robust interactive experience until bandwidth ceases to become an issue, a situation he doesn’t believe to be imminent.

‘I think it will be years before the versatility of this approach will be matched by interactivity over the Web given the persistence of bandwidth problems. Even with isdn lines, it takes time to download the kind of information you can store on a cd-rom.’

Katz says deals are in the works for Tamara characters to turn up enigmatically in the chat groups of online services to stir up discussion about the story and interest in the project.

‘We plan to infiltrate the Web with characters from the play who will reveal certain details about the story to create intrigue, just as it did in the play,’ he says.

Atlantis will team up with an interactive design company and has begun talks with consumer labels to publish the cd-rom, decisions Katz says are expected to be made this year. The budget for the project, which will include live-action shooting, will be in the $1 million to $2 million range.

Katz says Atlantis will also be producing a Tamara tv movie to coincide with the release of the online version. ‘It’s a big project and it’s never been tried before,’ says Katz. ‘It’s not an easy sell but it’s an exciting challenge.’