Re: designing socially-constructive spaces

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

Nicolas Szilas wrote:

> David Galiel wrote :
>
> > Even when talking about procedurally-generated visuals, such 
> > artifices should be employed, in my understanding, only when the 
> > human-generated alternative is highly impractical. It makes sense for 
> > Spore's terrain, less so for a virtual art gallery. We should not be 
> > so hasty to automate for automation's sake.
> Yes, one should not. In Interactive Drama, automation is not used to 
> replace human-generated alternative but to do something different: 
> letting the user act upon the system (again: interactive, not generative).

I think we should be hasty to do any and all kinds of things that can be 
done hastily.  We need to get iDrama products to market, guys.  Get them 
past the theory stage.  If you have a team of dozens of animators to 
compete with the latest greatest AAA eye candy offerings, great.  You've 
got something I don't have, and won't anytime soon.  Necessity is the 
mother of invention and all that.  Or as someone I know once said, 
"desperation is the mother**cker of invention."  Now, I'm not telling 
you that I have a visual art generation system yet, that I've whipped 
one up, but I see it as a much easier problem than story generation.  I 
am prinicpally concerned with the plight of the lone auteur.  I think 
we're going to have "not enough people or funding to do this work" in a 
commercially viable sense for awhile yet, so I'm looking for any 
possible means to cheat, cut corners, and produce a viable product.


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

T-shirt that landed someone a job:  "I'm not an asshole,
I'm a Shaper!"  http://www.teams.org.uk/shaper.htm