RE: A response to Walt

[Wally <wally@sub-zero.mit.edu>]

> (along with new elements, perhaps) into something new. You mention
> Erasmatron: Is it not obvious that creating the Erasmatron required
> Chris to analyze the nature of character interaction in stories with
> far more clarity and detail than any academic literature course would
> ever attempt? If we get

Allow me to point out that (as much as I love chest-thumping) you're wrong
on this point; literary studies has already wasted its time with an
extended period in which dogmatic structural analysis and an obsession
with flowcharts and graphs were the order of the day. Just wanted to
provide today's friendly reminder that the jargon-heavy writing of many
literary critics/philosophers doesn't render useless or invalid the
unbelievable insights to be gained from the best critical writing (same as
the best fiction). Losing faith in literary criticism because of a bad
experience reading The New Criticism in college is like being turned off
of contemporary fiction because of Stephen King.

As for contemporary IF -- its lack of technological innovation
notwithstanding, there are some really *beautiful* works produced from
time to time.

A final point: your interest, it seems, is in producing linear narratives
that can be told 'interactively', that is, produced dynamically in
accordance with influences from the user/users, drawing on a *realm* of
story possibilities created by a single author. In other words, you want a
single person to create multiple narratives worth telling (rarely do
authors produce a half-dozen works of lasting worth in their lifetime),
you want the reader to bear the burden of determining What Should Come
Next (which is placing an extraordinary amount of faith in the ol'
reader), and you want the suppleness and textual richness of great prose
works (barely 1% of Good Old-Fashioned Novelists produce anything that's
not shit in their lifetime, and you want computer science students to do
it)?

Your optimism is utterly astounding. Computational structures for creating
*fairy tales* are unsatisfying. This, then, is today's friendly reminder
of how far the field has to go to catch up, aesthetically, with even the
most basic of Good Stories. (The game that came closest to feeling like a
novel, in my experience, was 'Total Annihilation' -- a ridiculous
overhead-view real-time strategy game some number of years old now. There
are no characters in the game.) My inclination is to say that few human
storytellers have EVER created a world as wide-ranging and fully-imagined
as you're describing. [Tolkien? Dave Sim? There *are* people who've
generated a vast store of stories in richly-drawn worlds, but they take
*decades* to do so.] Roleplaying gameworld creators don't write stories,
they concentrate entirely on SETTINGS, then slap stock plots onto them for
group performance. [Creating Middle-Earth is not the same as writing 'The
Lord of the Rings'.] I don't doubt that you can create a world in which
hundreds of characters interact according to tables and charts and the
results of a couple of constraint-propagation routines, but to make even
ONE of these characters memorable and 'human' is to achieve the life's
work of some novelists.

(Saying that 'Shakespeare did [this or that]' is like saying that God did
it: so what? He's God. So, as far as counterarguments go, he's not
usable!!)

Anyway, little of this is either here or there. But authorship, the world
of creative acts, changes through evolution interrupted by revolutions.
And talking about interactive drama does not constitute a revolution. :)

Oddly short-tempered at this time of night,
Wally