narratology WAS Re: [MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds

[Angela Ferraiolo]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Zak Jarvis" <zak at voidmonster.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2000 7:59 AM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds

> > From: Angela  Ferraiolo [a.ferraiolo at worldnet.att.net]
> > Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2000 12:52 AM
>
> > >From: "Zak Jarvis" <zak at voidmonster.com>
> > >Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 2:03 AM
> >
> > > What I want, ultimately, is for the biography of a sizable
> > > portion of the player population to contain the puzzle
> > > pieces which tell a series of larger and larger stories
> > > - stories which are not mapped out beforehand,
> > > but flow out of the interactions between each other and their
> > > environment.
> >
> > Slipping out of lurk mode to say that, unless I'm
> > misunderstanding you, this is not so hard to do, it's
> > called embedded narrative, and it's been around for at least twenty
> > years...take a look at Potocki.
> > You need an event db that supports it, is all.
>
> How much for another clue? :)

yeah, it can be described by narratology 
as pointed out elsewhere on the list...
generally, you create worlds that are isolated.
but those worlds each produce some type of narrative 
(the biographies or some form of biography)
these are your embeddings
what usually happens next is that the story choices
generated by these embeddings 
begin to operate across all the worlds.
if you don't know the potocki book,
how about salinger's THE LAUGHING MAN?
that's an embedded narrative that is much
shorter and easier to take apart, though
it doesn't use biographies in the way you
wanted, instead salinger uses a story
hope this helps
--- angela





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