Writer and Director
Richard Lachman
Glorianna Davenport
In most interactive titles, the interaction is limited to navigation
through an information space. The idea of this piece is to encourage several audience members to adopt a style of thinking for the story framework, downplaying navigation and encouraging communication and cooperation among widely dispersed participants. A fictional scenario of utmost importance to "hackers" and computer-network "lurkers" at a certain unnamed institution of higher learning. A real-time implementation played out over the World Wide Web. The primary mode of interaction is exchange of E-mail among live players and fictional characters; video clips and robotically-dispensed e-mail messages from fictional characters are periodically posted to insure that all players are served through the asynchronous interaction. Story playout takes 5 days; along the way, there are several sub-problems to be solved before the mystery can be concluded.
Lurker was limited by slow video transmission speed across the WWW.
Implementation and Development
Research Supervisor
Morgenroth L (1995).
Movies, Talkies, Thinkies: An Experimental Form of Interactive Cinema
MIT MS Thesis.
Morgenroth L, Davenport G (1995).
Lurker: A Thinkie for the Society of Audience,
IC Technical Report.
Davenport G; Morgenroth L (1994).
Video Database Design: Convivial Storytelling Tools
IC Technical Report, April 1994.
Morgenroth L; Davenport G (1994).
Let's See That Again: A Multiuse Video Database Project
IC Technical Report.
Morgenroth L (1992).
Homer: A Video Story Generator
MIT BS Thesis.