Interview

To be interactive drama, an experience should have rich, emotive, socially-present characters to interact with, and a strong sense of story progression that is organically and dynamically shaped by the player's interaction.

To keep things minimal, from both an aesthetic as well technical perspective, we wanted to find a scenario that would have the least number of characters while still delving deeply into issues about people's inner lives. It's amazing the scarcity of satisfying interactive experiences that are actually about people's lives--subject matter that is, of course, the heart of the best literature, cinema, theater and television.

I continue to be amazed that I exist. Or that I seem to; the question is not settled to my satisfaction. It seems highly unlikely that what asks the question is made of matter, grey or not. The very fact our matter thinks makes its credentials as matter suspect.

The existence of the author is a necessary flaw in this (every?) story. But this project makes me keenly aware that I am not the only, or even always the dominant voice in it. I recently took great pleasure in watching three "words" coach a fourth, nascent word through her first tattoo: "Have you eaten anything? Here, have this apple. Do you want us to hold your hand?" My presence was a comfortable irrelevancy to them at that moment.

With the writing finished, my role as author shifted from one of writer to conductor, or producer, or director, or grant writer—and sometimes mediator, music and art director, and programming director.

A poet once told me that novelists are lucky because they only have to come up with one idea every five or six years. I always thought that I must be even luckier than that as it seems like I’ve only had to come up with one idea at all, as all my novels seem to deal with different aspects of representation: how we depict ourselves and each other, who has the right or power to depict others, and how this plays out both across time and within the different means we have to do so, be they scientific, literary, visual, or whatever . . . So TOC is an extension of this.