I have come to apologize to you on behalf of the entire MarsDawn staff. Either we have not clearly communicated the philosophy behind the design of MarsDawn or we have misjudged the needs of you, our audience. We hope to address these issues now and allow you to choose how MarsDawn evolves.
Some background: In developing MarsDawn, we looked back at Eon4. Eon4 presented itself as an interactive, science fiction story. In practice, we found that the episodes were written days and weeks in advance - effectively eliminating any opportunity for the participants to affect the story. For this reason, we feel this model does not provide true interactivity and went a different way.
To move beyond the Eon-4 passive-audience model, the MarsDawn staff create each episode daily after reviewing the input you (our audience) provides. With this new model, the audience can be granted two levels of control over the story: Reactive or Proactive.
In a reactive environment, the audience is allowed to choose a solution to individual, immediate situations. An example of this type of reactive situation would be the selection of which of three hallways to explore. At this level, the audience is involved, but does not control the story. This seems to be the level of participation which the MARSupials are most comfortable.
In a proactive environment, the audience is allowed to develop the long-term plot of the story itself. This level of audience participation requires much more analysis, foresight and leadership from you, our audience. You are given complete control over all resources in the story and decide how to utilize each element effectively. You are responsible for evaluating the facts which are presented from a number of sources and develop strategies for dealing with future situations. You control the amount of action by identifying the tasks which the probes are assigned. You control the pace of the story by deciding if the probes will work on many separate tasks or stay in groups which work on fewer tasks. Sitting back and waiting to see what will happen almost guarantees that nothing good will happen in this model. Ultimately, as a group, you write the MarsDawn story using props and story elements provided by the staff. This is the philosophy with which MarsDawn was created.
At the beginning of this long letter, I indicated you will be given the opportunity to choose how MarsDawn evolves. I have outlined for you three levels of interactivity which can be utilized. MarsDawn staff are in agreement that we will provide entertainment to you at any of the three interactive levels which YOU choose (passive, reactive, proactive). Again, we apologize for being unclear in our intent or for providing a product which required a level of interactivity which you did not want.
T-Bird