Re: Computer generated Art and Story

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

Joe Andrieu wrote:

> After fifteen years thinking about story in an interactive context, I feel I
> am just barely beginning to get a wisp of an aroma of the real matter
> underlying story.
I think anthropology and history have a lot to say about story.  More 
broadly, the social sciences.  I have a sense of 'story' as coda for our 
evolutionary survival.  I'm not convinced we're all that complicated, 
evolutionarily speaking.  We screw, we block other mates from screwing, 
we secure resources, killing each other is a useful tool to that end, we 
manipulate each other, etc. blah blah blah.  Many of our actions are 
determined by our environment.  Part of the problem of 'story' may be 
that we think rather too much of ourselves.  We don't sufficiently 
embrace "our inner cockroach," our triviality.  Of course, the other 
problem is we're so elaborate.  The driving processes may all be very 
simple, but they're elaborated into minutiae of detail that we have to 
deal with.  It's mitigating all this detail that's hard.

So perhaps if details are eliminated, as they are in The Sims, we could 
get more 'stories' done.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

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