Grand Text Auto

Speaking of books, today in the mail I just received my copy of Narrative Intelligence, from John Benjamins Publishing. If you’re interested in “the confluence of narrative, artificial intelligence, and media studies,” this book is for you. It’s an edited volume that collects together some of the papers from the Fall 1999 AAAI symposium on Narrative Intelligence organized by Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, with additional new papers by Brenda Laurel and Phil Agre. And, it’s got a cool lime green cover.

I thought this sounded promising… If you’re looking for a way to get into developing your own small graphical virtual worlds for your own interactive stories or games, but aren’t sure how to get started, this might be of help. Flipcode, a great site for independent game developers, recently posted a link to the Reaction Engine, described as “a hobbyist game engine designed specifically for beginner programmers, making small fun games, or prototyping game ideas quickly.” It’s $60.

Thanks to the link from Greg Costikyan’s latest post, I just discovered the intense debates underway on the Games Research Network listserv, recently established by DiGRA. Lately the discussions there have revived classic debates such as “what is interactivity” and “ludology vs. narratology”, as well as debating lots of other really interesting new topics and ideas contributed by some very bright people. Requires registration.

Meanwhile, a parallel debate apparently continues to rage down-under at DAC over the identity of ludologists.

Damn there’s a lot to read on the web these days.

[several of the other bloggers are traveling at the moment, not easily able to post for the next day or more, so I will continue to hog the blog]

No one has complained (yet), but in my blog posts so far I wonder if it appears like I’m bashing some of the approaches to digital fiction-making, e.g., hypertext, or IF.

We didn’t start this blog to bash, or be negative. If my posts have appeared that way, let me say that’s not how I intend it. And if possible, I preemptively apologize for bashing I may appear to be doing in the future. :-)

While I’m definitely critical (no apologizes there), my intention is to offer what could be fruitful directions towards making deeply interactive digital fiction.

See, there I go again, implying that what has been built to date has not been deeply interactive. Well, sadly, from my perspective, that’s true.

An interesting debate about the current new crop of online worlds can be found here on Slate.com.

In the comments of last week’s Expressive AI thread, Noah and Nicolas both make great points.

I think Noah is right that, for the foreseeable future anyway, lots and lots of human authoring will be required to make rich, quality digital fiction. Story generation AI is still in diapers.

But Nicolas is quick to point out that watching / reading chunks of human-author-created content – i.e., non-computer-generated, “canned” content – whether that be a paragraph of text, a snippet of video, a cutscene, what have you – makes the player / reader feel like the fiction is limited, too inflexible, too rigid, too prescripted. Doesn’t it? Fixed chunks of content make me feel like too much of the possibility and potential of the scenario have been sucked out of the experience, too often leaving me only a few table-scraps of variation, of agency. (If anyone feels differently about this, please disagree!)

My guess is that a way to progress towards richer, more deeply interactive fiction, will be, as usual, somewhere in between the ends of the spectrum – somewhere between large-ish chunks of hand-authored content and pure procedural generativity.

Take Route 66 to Arizona next month for the Digital Storytelling Festival, “a three-day showcase (June 12-14) that features ground breaking projects created and implemented in a variety of areas of Digital Storytelling. Digital Storytelling is recognized as a creative movement that uses digital technology to create media rich stories to impart meaning. It is successfully being used in areas of education and training, entertainment and creative design, personal and legacy storytelling, community building and corporate identity through branding and marketing. … The Festival program appeals to: practitioners, visionaries and enthusiasts of new media, educators, historians, genealogists, storytellers, community builders, activists, artists, journalists, corporate creatives and technologists.”

At the Chicago Humanities Festival last winter, I heard Richard Powers give a reading called “Literary Devices”. Powers is an unusual writer, perhaps best known for his humanistic novels about artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2) and virtual reality (Plowing the Dark).

Hi world. I’m Andrew Stern, happy to be making the first post on our new group blog, grandtextauto.org. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Nick Montfort, Michael Mateas, Stuart Moulthrop and I have been meaning to get this blog started for some time now. We’ve got lots of stuff we need to discuss about digital narrative, poetry, games and art, with each other and anyone who wants to join in.

We’ve been greatly inspired by the other wonderful, thoughtful, substantive blogs out there on digital practice and theory, such as Gonzalo Frasca’s ludology.org, gamegirladvance from Jane Pinckard / Justin Hall / et al, Jill Walker’s blog, Greg Costikyan’s blog, etc., just to name a few.

For me this will be a chance to have a focused public discussion about where things are going with digital fiction, and some ways to get there. By digital fiction, I *don’t* necessarily mean what one might call stories, or games. More generally, I mean deeply interactive experiences involving characters, situations, and conflict, in whatever new forms these experiences may take.