In this children’s story, Salmon Rushdie aptly portents a world in which narrative is no longer defined by the single, perfectly articulated linear strand but rather by a rich web of interconnected strands of story that float together in a “tapestry of breathtaking complexity.” For the past 25 years, many researchers, artists and designers have worked to realize a dream of creating complex narrative experiences using the computational tools and input devices. While resulting work -- as seen through realized artifacts such as web-based documents, electronic games and place-based installations – has shown promise, no narrative language has yet emerged which can be used for a wide variety of content and which can communicate emotionally with any audience, anywhere in the world. Making narrative artifacts at this moment in history -- in the midst of rapid shifts of technology -- is exciting but daunting. In this first Sutra publication, it is appropriate to examine trends that seem to be moving us ever forward in our quest for a new narrative medium and to ask whether this new medium can foster narratives that are "more personal and complex, as if in conversation with the audience."

At its core, the new medium is computational and heuristic. While it draws from the language of film, print, sculpture, architecture and live performance, the computational narrative uses explicitly constructed levels of behavioral abstraction that allow the system to monitor not only the progress of the narrative but also the state of the perceiver as expressed by local and global ambient conditions.

In reality, this new medium poses enormous aesthetic and technological challenges to its creators. By its very nature, the story is "steerable:" it presents an ocean of content and provides some audience-controllable mechanism for navigating though it. To be successful, the model for what makes a story arc must be adjusted to include complexity, interruptability and a multiplicity of narrative potentials. It also requires that the authors engage the narrative imagination of the audience via some interface that is at once intuitive, metaphorical and unique.