Wow! Thanks to a link from another blog (Dave Winer's Scripting News) I just learned about a new company/site named Skotos.

Here's how they describe themselves:

About Skotos Tell Me A Story: Stories live within our hearts. Through them we immerse ourselves in the tales of events and people we do not know; we see conflict rise and be resolved; and we revel in all of the other surprises comedy, tragedy, and drama can offer. We also have a deep need to be storytellers: to express our own ideas; to wrap people up in the tales we spin; and to build worlds for others to play in and explore. Storytelling is a hardwired part of how humans learn and pass on their culture. Stories speak to the meaning of life. Like myth, fictional stories are often false on the outside, but true on the inside. They express our deepest selves beyond the level of conscious knowledge. Though storytelling is as old as the human race, in fact an essential part of what it is to be human, how we tell stories changes. For most of human history, stories were expressed as spoken words. Then came poetry, then writing, then printing, then novels. Now we have movies, radio, TV. Skotos takes its stand in the early times of a new way to tell stories - interactive fiction - a hybrid of story and game that will play a large role in the way stories are told in the future. Interactive fiction allows the "reader" to play a role that changes the story as they play. Multiplayer interactive fiction allows many players to simultaneously inhabit and change the story space. Thus people, from all over the world, connected by the Internet, play with each other and the creations of the storyteller. Skotos Tech is about this new way of telling stories. Skotos Tech offers a theater for multiplayer interactive fiction. It hosts a community of StoryPlayers, who enjoy playing in other people’s worlds, and StoryBuilders, who enjoy creating worlds for them. Skotos’ technology, in the form of the StoryBuilder Server, brings them together.

If you poke around in the site, you'll see that they're using the latest, coolest XML to design the gaming environment. Instead of leading people through a pre-scripted story, they've created a world filled with objects whose characteristics are already written, but it's up to the players to do things with those objects (which include non-player characters). It's through that interaction that the story unfolds.

Just think about the possibilities: if we had a way to describe life in Ancient Egypt using these tools, and turned kids loose to "live" in that world... .what would they learn? I'm guessing that they'd learn a lot that would apply not just to that time and place. They'd acquire experience and skill at making sense of strange new places and an appreciation of how a culture, any culture, hangs together. And it would certainly stick with them better than the usual, superficial stuff about mummies and pyramids that they get in 6th grade now.

Amazing stuff.