Re: Welcome

[Morbus Iff]

At 05:02 AM -0700 8/3/99, Dan Lyke wrote:
>We've had a huge influx of people from the Erasmateers mailing list.
>Welcome. Maybe now we can get this mailing list flowing again.

Glad to see there's a possibility. I had almost given up hope on 
entertaining conversation at all <g>...

Speaking of Erasmateers - I still haven't felt "connected" with the 
Erasmateer software as of yet - to me, it doesn't feel like a good 
environment to create something on... Anyways...

>One of the common mistakes of the first novel writer, and I've done this,
>is to develop background on a bunch of characters, fully flesh them out,
>then put them into a universe and see what story develops.

Oh yeah, this is fun. I've done this as well - I spent a month or so 
determining the character's story and what they could tell me before 
I even started playing with them in the world I wanted them in...

>My current quandary is: If we offer the audience control over character
>revelations, how do we find a story?

Good question. I have no clue, so I'll ramble and jot:

It'd be remotely impossible to create all the events that could 
happen if our audience decided to take their loving character and 
make them a truck driver that moves to Minnesota.

At the most, we'd have to define generic specific (ha!) events that 
will happen whatever their decision. If they're older then 21, they 
get into a car accident. If they're younger then 21, they get beat 
up. If we don't know, they get hit by a car. An event that could 
happen to anyone, regardless of type.

Sure, that's a specific event, but it's generic enough that it won't 
have lasting impact on our story unless the audience/character 
decides to deal with it. If he just pushes the "Rest" button 24 
times, he's back to driving trucks and delivering chickens.

Perhaps, Dan, that we don't need to... We've got the Internet. We've 
got the know-how. Why don't we work with a client/server model for 
interactive fiction? We have our client shell, which defines that the 
story is a romance, has three main characters, and we want the 
character to get hurt in his lifetime. Ok, there's our loose plot.

We have some story builders in there, but the key is that when the 
client doesn't know what to do, or even when the client is showing 
info to the reader and isn't doing anything, in the background, it's 
connecting up to our server.

Our server is the Mr. Atoz, who looks at all the previous info from 
all the other different stories, looks at the information that the 
client sent him about this specific story, and then automagically 
chooses a circumstance that interacts well with this audience member.

We don't deal with the events, the other users of our client does.

Anyways, I got more messages. Talk amongst yourselves...

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