re: beat glue

[apstern@ix.netcom.com]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>
To: "idrama" <idrama@flutterby.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 8:56 PM
Subject: beat glue


> > However, if the beats are cleverly designed the AI can
> > re-use them in a variety of different places, reducing the amount of
> > required authoring.  The system can potentially play beats and
> > beat-clusters in different orders, leave things out, etc.
>
> And what if your AI system doesn't do a particularly good job of "glueing"
> these beats together?  Then your human authors are going to backpedal,
> trying to indirectly control the complex system components to get some
> result that's beyond their precise control.

I agree, it is difficult as an author to use a tool which takes away
control.  But in our case, we are both the authors using the AI and the
people implementing the AI, so if the AI doesn't behave correctly or do what
we want, we can tweak it and modify it.  Our primary goal with this project
is to build a complete story experience, and publish our methods and
results, but not necessarily to create an authoring system for public
consumption.  If others happen to find it useful to create their own
stories, great, but if not, that's okay with us, because we built it for
ourselves to use.  In fact the AI may be appropriate for only performing a
particular style of story.

Your point reminds me of a different but related topic: a reason I am
skeptical of using a-life approaches to controlling behavior of characters
or stories is because of the authorial control you may have to give up.
It's hard enough as an author to share control with the user, let alone a
neural net. :-)

Andrew