Re: The problem with process

[Kenneth Lu <kenlu@MIT.EDU>]

At 2:37 -0500 2/5/01, WFreitag@aol.com wrote:
>Authors
>hesitate to give up control not because they're fanatics obsessed with
>pounding their personal creeds into the reader, as Chris's essays accuse, but
>because they're artists, craftsmen, and entertainers who want to be certain
>their audience experiences something beautiful.

At 2:37 -0500 2/5/01, WFreitag@aol.com wrote:
>What can we achieve with process alone in the forseeable future, extrapolatin
>g current tools, technology, and understanding of the medium? Simulate the
>macroscopic dramatic aspects of human behavior? Almost certainly. Embody
>messages including messages about human behavior? Definitely. Generate
>narrative beauty? No. Not one iota of evidence have I seen.


I respectfully disagree.  Process itself can be beautiful.  Just take 
a look at Conway's Game of Life.  It conveys a message about how 
complexity can rise from simplicity in a way that is more effective 
than practically anything else I've seen.. and it does so in a way 
that is incredibly beautiful.

It all depends on where you look for beauty.  For a course last year, 
a friend and I wrote a simulator of an iterated Prisoner's Dillemma 
with a rudimentary form of memetic evolution (where units of strategy 
would be passed around at random, with more successful players more 
likely to pass on their memes).. We plotted graphs of the end result, 
which looked hauntingly like a graph you might see in physics or 
ecology.. graphs where we could see very organic-looking trends of a 
few sucker-strategy players who didn't learn, and getting taken 
advantage of by mean-strategy players.. as well as various levels in 
between.

The graphs were, imho, beautiful.  As beautiful as any complex system 
of process.. cloud formation, waves at the beach, smoke plumes, 
predator-prey cycles...

I'm sure that if we had tweaked the constants more, we could have 
achieved behavior that sent a message as well.  And there you'd have 
it.. a system of process with a message and which is beautiful.

If we are to imagine a "storyworld" with webs of NPC interaction, I 
can certainly imagine that web of interactions to be just as 
beautiful as a predator-prey system or the Game of Life.. Perhaps 
clusters of relationships would develop.. perhaps there would be 
swindlers, and suckers who don't learn..  Perhaps social structures 
would emerge.  I call that beauty.

In any case, I also don't see why narrative and process has to be an 
either-or proposition.  It seems to me like they'd complement each 
other.  (which, of course, is far easier said than done.)

-ToastyKen

-----------------------------------------------------------
| Kenneth Lu - kenlu@mit.edu - http://www.mit.edu/~kenlu/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------
| "Life is far too important to be taken seriously."      |
|                                                         |
|                                          -- Oscar Wilde |
-----------------------------------------------------------