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We don't have to part company yet, but there are definitely some aspects of the space you'll find more interesting than others. Yes, there are some people who think about the nodes of interaction as being pretty tightly controlled -- the illusion of an open system that really guides you to a single choice. I'm not sure we should throw out that thinking completely.

One example is the historical fascination with puzzles with the ARG genre. Puzzles have one solution: the audience knows when they got it right, it isn't really an issue of interpretation or choice. That seems to have an important benefit, though, for the community -- they are goals that can be set, assaulted by a group, that come with a built in reward of "getting it right" at the end. This can help produce a sense of achievement and advancement that more interpretative aspects are muddier with.

At the other end of the spectrum, though, are models from theater that are exactly like what you are talking about (such as Jeff Wirth's work at the iPlay interactive theater lab at the University of Central Florida.) In those models, everything is almost exactly the opposite as an ARG -- the main "power" in authoring is concentrated into a single "spectactor" who doesn't know what is happening, and a broader set of "interactors" who help keep the spectactor from derailing. In that model, if the spectactor says, "I'll have to check with my police contacts," the interactors scramble around and make that happen -- the spectactor will end up getting a call from their police contact, who will pretend that they've known each other for years.

I shouldn't present this as a dichotomy, though. I tend to approach these things from the direction of community, which are techniques and tools not confined to fiction (do a Google for Barry Joseph's essays on "the Delimna of Invisible Man Culture".) Under that model, the most important thing to accomplish is participation, to break down the traditionally passive consumption model of the Web which turns static media into living, breathing dialogs. The elements that make up a piece of chaotic fiction or interactive theater or alternate reality game are really just "activities" that the group can participate in. Those activities create shared experiences. Shared experiences help a community bond with each other, and that increases the synergy of that collective experience. Theoretically, at some point the author could walk away completely and the community could entertain themselves -- author become moderator and facilitator.

All of those things, though, tend to rely upon casting the audience members in one of a few kind of roles, and experimenting with that is a state of the art issue in the community. Many of those rely upon what I've started calling "forensic narrative" -- the narrative assembled by the people trying to piece together another story (like the narrative of the investigators in C.S.I. as compared to the narrative of the crime they are trying to unravel.) This makes some kinds of role natural -- researcher, investigator, collaborator, defender, archeologist, etc. That, of course, starts to create narrative cliches (so many ARGs start with "I don't know you, but I need your help!" or "Help! I've been kidnapped! Only you can save me!") Granted, though, if one of us figures out how to tell a massively collaborative romantic tele-novella ...

You'll also get no argument from me that part of this is really ancient. I've flippantly argued in the past that storytelling started getting messed up as soon scribes and writing got involved, each layer of technology after that has tried to mediate the reach of our voice with the intimacy of the oral tradition. We are wired for storytelling, it might in fact be one of the key methods our brains use to store and sort information. We've got a "suspension of disbelief" gene :)

Web geeks, though, love to think they invented things. *yawn* That why the community of practitioners need to make as many connections as possible to academics (and, sadly, in like a ton of different fields to cover all the strange wrinkles of the form, like its similarity to both the novel and the stage play.)

Speaking of Web geeks, I'm going to invite some of them here to this fascinating conversation (so don't surprised if more people start showing up.)

Brian