RE: How about "situations" as a plot abstraction?

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

> Deals Yet Again
> December 9th, 2001
>
> I am once again struggling with the concept of deals. These are crucial to
> the design, yet they seem so difficult. The problem today is that
> the value
> of the deal to each actor must be evaluated at the time of formulation of
> the deal -- the offering actor must be able to estimate the other actor's
> likely Benefit to the deal. Since the deal is an event, it cannot be
> calculated by a simple lookup. For example, what if Actor1 asks Actor2 to
> support a proposal to blockade Actor3 in return for Actor1's support for
> Actor2 entering the WTO? Actor1 must be able to evaluate Actor2's
> perceived
> cost to support the proposal, and perceived benefit of joining
> the WTO. This
> could get very complicated, as Actor2 would want to evaluate Actor3's
> Benefit toward Actor2 for supporting the proposal.

How many of these deals are you expecting to be made in an authorial work?
In a movie or a play, there might be 1 deal between actors that forms a plot
point or pinch point in the work.  Maybe there are 2 deals, where the 2nd
deal is a startling reversal of the terms of the 1st deal.  But there aren't
going to be deals after deals after deals.  At that point you're not
authoring a story, you're simulating Wall Street.  I'm arguing once again
for dealing with things in terms of human authorial meaning rather than
abstract mechanism.  You need to consider how often a human author will
actually need deals to create meaning in his work.

Of course, if you're envisioning the length of an Erasmatron work to be
quite different than a play or movie, if it's more of an epic, I'm not sure
what to tell you.  Epics run the profound danger of becoming episodical.
The Lord Of The Rings is a good example, IMHO it's a damn boring set of
books because they wander through all sorts of unrelated sub-stories.
Aristotle commented in the Poetics that following the daily life routine or
history of a hero does not make a Tragedy, it does not contain the requisite
elements of a Tragedy.  In modern terms, we really don't want to know about
the hero brushing his teeth or buying lemons at the corner store, unless
those things exposit something important to the story.  (Or alternately, set
up a smokescreen so that the story exposition isn't so transparent, but in
that case you're still dealing with what the story is, it's not gratuitously
random.)

> This looks for all the world like it requires a recursive structure.

That sounds like ducking the problem.  The core problem is what is going to
be meaningful to the actors in the work?  Perhaps you should be defining
things like "Primary Significance," that are compared in a table between
actors.  If the table slots are empty, hey guess what, this deal doesn't
mean anything.  In your terms, you should poison it.  Or else make a note to
the author that he's got more work to do, he needs to fill in the table.

Maybe you will recoil in horror from what I'm suggesting as it is basically
a data-driven approach.  But my point is, the table of possible deals should
be small in a medium that resembles a movie or play.


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.