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breeder approaches to iDrama

Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:

 Automatically generating art is clearly possible in many fields.
Samples, remixing, and algorithmic blending of melodies lend themselves
well to computer-generated music.

In fact, a guy at Microsoft Research has a project to make remixing more consumer friendly. It seems they noticed that lotsa people do spontaneous things with iPods. Their approach is to create a tool that alleviates the DJ of the tedium of mixing. It's still the DJ doing the mixing though, just at a more advanced level of automation. Gee, if Microsoft actually shipped such a product, I'd feel better about the company. They haven't done anything I cared about since Windows 2000.

There are software-generated poems
and stories, and I've been entertained by them in a few cases, which is
more than I can say for many meat-based writers.


Any URLs?

Consider <http://www.random-art.org/>, which is often surprisingly
good. I've used many of them as desktop backgrounds over the years.


That's interesting!  I'll have to try out something like this for 3D models.

 All of these still have an artist, of sorts: the person who wrote the
program.

I would also choose to function as the breeder / selector of "good" artworks.

 But your belief that every single work of art must be manually
generated by an *ARTISTE* is clearly false.  The assertion that modern
impressionists are not artists is more than just false, it's openly
insulting, and you need to think long and hard about why you'd say such
a horrible and monstrous thing, why the notion of people making art that
is simply there to be pleasant to look at is offensive to you.  I can't
stand the work of Neil Diamond, yet I'd never assert that he isn't an
artist.



I must admit, I had that reaction too, I just didn't choose to express it quite that way. Many artists develop a thick skin to other people's baloney, and I'm no exception. I think some points of view about 'Art' are not worthy of much comment, being as prejudiced and removed from practical reality as they are. It goes with the territory. Critics hated the Impressionists once upon a time; now they're canon.

The goal of the interactive fiction/drama/storytelling movement (which
this list exists to serve) is to produce storytelling entertainment
generated or mediated by software. If you're not interested in that,
it's probably not going to be of any use to you, and assertions that
it's impossible and not art are probably not going to be of any use to
anyone here.


Hey, if it's not so tough to breed 2D and 3D images, can we breed stories as well? In the same software framework! The UI would present the breeded story snippets, the breeded artwork, the breeded audio clips. It would probably need to work at the level of story elements, and patch 'em together ala King Of Dragon Pass or something.

Anyone already doing this, that we know about and can publically observe?


Oh, great Cthulhu. Please, not another "Let's take a bunch of
strangers with radically different tastes and make a game! Online!
I've got an idea, and you can all work for me for free!" thing. Those,
we know to be failures, every single time they've been tried.


Well, they teach the participants a lot of things about software development and project management. I feel myself a bit beyond the need for such learning curves though. I've tried my hand at such things enough times to know their dynamics. You get similar problems for open source projects too. That's the dirty little secret of open source: the projects are really about people and their interpersonal problems. When there's no money on the table, it's very difficult to put up with assholes. The best open source project I've seen is the Eclipse project, in part because they recognize the importance of the social dynamics, and because for many of the contributors there is actually money on the table. Money focuses people. It gives them a sense of personal restraint.


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

Taking risk where others will not.