The following is a bit more rantlike than it was supposed to be. Bear with me, I’m blowing off steam.
We are in a fairly novel position, as researchers into Interactive Storytelling(IS). For the first time in history we are engaged in discourse around the future emergence of a narrative medium, rather than analysis of a pre-existing one. Other sophisticated narrative mediums did not have a community of theorists debating the potential narrative applications of their new technologies as they developed. Film, for instance, was a medium of cheap thrills and documentation for years before it became a narrative medium, and even then it took years before the narrative conventions adopted from theater gave way to the poetics of the new medium. These poetics grew out of the affordances and limitations of the emerging technology, when placed in the hands of a number of revolutionary filmmakers. As the early experimenters in the medium learned how to tell stories in a new way, the public slowly learned how to view those stories and enjoy them. The discourse of film studies and criticism grew up in order to describe this phenomenon, and understand it.