RE: Higer-order plot abstractions

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>]

> From: owner-idrama@flutterby.com.mail.flutterby.com
> [mailto:owner-idrama@flutterby.com.mail.flutterby.com]On Behalf Of B.
> Fallenstein
>
>
> Hi everybody!
>
> I believe this is my first post to the iDrama mailing list,

Welcome aboard!  And I see you've adopted to local culture nicely by making
a terribly long-winded 1st post.  :-)  Cutting to the essential of your
concept, regarding your abstractions (which I do agree are necessary):

>   o An Erasmatron verb, say "AccuseOfAdultery." This is a
>     template for an event; it has 'slots' for the subject
>     and the object of the action, i.e. who is accusing and
>     who is accused. Both are characters, not plot elements.
>     The verb is thus a first-order plot abstraction.
>   o A conflict; say "X suspects that Y, their significant
>     other, is having an affair." Again, this is a template
>     where we can fill in different characters; again, we
>     cannot fill in plot elements.
>   o An event template "X asks Y to do Z for them." (In this
>     generality, this isn't supported by the Erasmatron.)
>     Besides the character slots, this has a slot for
>     some other event template: for example,
>     "Jill asks Tom to fire Mr. Gadwick," or "Tom asks Mr.
>     Gadwick to call the Vice President and arrange a
>     meeting with her," or "Mr. Gadwick asks Jill to tell
>     Tom not to fire him." This is higher-order because
>     there is a slot for another plot element; in fact, in
>     the last example we see an example of a higher-order
>     element inside another higher-order element:
>     "Tell Tom not to fire Mr. Gadwick" is an instance of
>     "X tells Y not to do Z."
>   o A conflict "X is threatening to do A if Y does not
>     do B," for example "John is threatening to kill
>     her mother if Ana does not tell him who has stolen
>     the crown jewels" or "John is threatening to set
>     Anas house on fire if she does not give him the
>     crown jewels."

But what are these meta-plot conflicts *worth* ?  What do they *mean* to the
audience?  Really, they don't mean anything.  They are completely empty
semantic placeholders.  They have not done the essential job of
storytelling, which is getting an audience to *care* about your story.  To
recognize your story as something meaningful and worthwhile.

I think the abstractions that you/we are going to have to concentrate on,
are abstractions of meaning, motive, value, and audience buy-in.  Without
such entities you do not have drama.  You have a Punch and Judy pantomime
where someone screams "I accuse you of adultery!"  "Well what if I did
bugger your wife??!?"  "Have at thee!"  Events are reduced to obvious,
mercenary, wooden economic transactions, it is boring simulationism.  If we
do not have a reason to care, then who cares?

You can't just state that somebody cares.  "X is angry at Y" is not a
motive.  It doesn't sell anybody, it doesn't set the audience up to *feel*
anger at Y.  I think what we need to do, is look at cinema/drama in general,
and encapsulate the devices by which they get an audience to care.  I don't
have any precise answers right now on how to do this.  But generally there
are 3..5 semantic things that we have to know about a character/situation to
care, and those 3..5 things also have to be delivered with a certain timing
in order to build our interest/acceptance in them.

Letting players randomly walk around a world in free-form action does not
work.  A conventional screenplay provides constraint, and it is this patter
of constraint that causes audiences to be compelled.  Wandering around in
empty space is boring.  Wandering around amongst too many possibilities is
also boring, there must be a point to the plot, it must have a trajectory.
In the information-theoretic sense, "nothing is happening" and "too much is
happening" are equivalent: you're losing information in both cases.  One
through absence, the other through noise.  We must construct *constrained*
plot trajectories that people actually care about.  Understanding how these
plots must be constrained, is part of the puzzle of getting people to care
about them.

"Caring" is not and can never be an abstraction, except perhaps for schlocky
genre characters like Steven Segal, and only if you actually enjoy that
whole paradigm.  "Caring" is a cultural or ideological specific, that you as
an author must provide.  This is where the human author *has* to do
something with the software.  The software might provide a framework for how
the "caring" objects will be delivered, but it is a human being who must
decide what we are going to care about.  Will we care?  Only if the author
has compelling concepts *and* those concepts are deliered with good timing.
A good authoring system would assist with the timing.  A bad one would leave
timing to chance.  The mere presence of materials does not drama make!  They
must be timed.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.