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theory vs. tools

WFreitag@aol.com wrote:


If, however, by "more manual labor" you mean "more actual development, less theorizing and/or waiting for someone else to develop better tools for you," I couldn't agree more. You did manage to convince me of that much, in our heated exchanges a few years ago, even though I still maintain that theorizing isn't without value either.


I theorize a lot. I've even got hate groups devoted to me in the High Level Language newsgroups. They hate me 'cuz I don't produce enough code for their tastes. Of course, their problem is all they like is code. They don't like dealing with either tools infrastructure or high falutin' visions. I've been bogged down in tools infrastructure for a very long time. It's the main area I think needs improvement to get things done. If you're going to do a bunch of manual labor, you really need proper enabling tools for it.

I think Chris has gotten lost in a very difficult system of tools. Maybe that's necessary for some things. Maybe he'll pop out the other end of it someday. I'm certain he knows more about the difficulties than most people on the planet. Whether there are simplifications available, or simpler paradigms, are issues to work through.

I don't take my idea of "Hey, let's breed stories!" as anything more than my idea-of-the-week, just yet. I see far more viability for visual art than for storytelling. Still, "breed the story" is a paradigm that might bear fruit.

I just think humans are better and faster at composing dramatic rules systems than computers are. I call that sort of thing "writing skill."


Well, of course. Though I think of the problem just a bit differently. Composing dramatic rules systems is something I'd think the author-programmer would do. The hard part, for computers (and often, human writers too) is instantiating. Even when you've got a formula (such as Dramatica, or a brand name romance style guide, or My Life With Master) telling you that in this chapter the hero should suffer a setback that will bring him emotionally closer to the mentor character, not everyone on every try can write something good to fill it in -- and a computer's hopeless at the task. What, exactly, should the setback be? A lot of common sense knowledge about the real world and how real people react is required to be sure that the instantiation is even plausible, let alone a good fit to the rest of the story. And as soon as you say "common sense knowledge" in a computer system, you know you're in trouble. Erasmatron has made some great progress on the character-reaction side of the problem, but it's not solved. Ahab nails a doubloon to the mast: an event and image of great power in its context in the story. But if you have a "nail doubloon to mast" verb in a Storyworld then even if the right moment for it happens to come up, Ahab won't be standing by the mast or he won't have a hammer with him. The 'tron isn't designed to "push" toward specific events happening. And if you generalize it to "[character] nails [something] to [something else]" it's even worse: you now need a whole slew of additional rules to prevent the whole cast from going around nailing teacups to cannonballs at odd moments.


I think the prototyping and metaprogramming problems of authorship will go on forever. Hence, it might be more productive to look at things from a 'shotgun' perspective. Maybe push towards some events, but allow the system to belch / barf / breed other events. The difficulty I think is having an "attention span" metric. Has the audience fallen asleep yet? This is one of the core problems of commercial viability. You can call it 'Art' all you want; does it keep people's attention?


So, anybody who talks about things being "rich and engaging" ends up sounding like a Microsoft Tele-Evangelist to me.



Sorry about that. It was a case of my using personal jargon without defining it in the post. "Richness" is part of my guiding schema of five usually-desirable qualities of recreational virtual worlds (along with "objectivity," "accessibility," "attractiveness," and "responsiveness" -- quote marks are to warn that those are idiosyncratically defined personal jargon words too. By "rich" I simply mean "able to hold a visitor's interest for an extended period of time."

But you said "rich and engaging." Why not just "engaging?" I'm having a George Carlin moment here.

So we have this triangle: author, audience, computer. Many strategies can be tried within this engineering triangle. Some of our religious arguments are no more than people advocating different points in the triangle. Anybody into Barycentric coordinates? :-)



An excellent assessment. Let me just clarify one thing for the benefit of other readers: I gather that by "telling the story" you also mean "generating the story," not just dispensing a story that's already written in advance. I think that's what you mean, because we all know that a computer can play a DVD, or railroad a player through an adventure game with a good story built in -- but that doesn't count as "telling the story" in the sense you're talking about.


It's all a question of where on the triangle you want to be. Well, maybe there's more dimension than a triangle. I'll let someone else figure that out for now. I still haven't acquired lunch. Dammit, I'm about to be evicted and I'm supposed to be out gathering signatures. Why did you guys have to pick *today* to be interesting?


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

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.