[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Bruce Mitchener]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Bruce Mitchener wrote:

>> For the storytelling people out there ... What would you like to
>> see in a system to help you tell your stories?  What sorts of
>> stories would you like to tell in a multiplayer environment that
>> the technology doesn't make easy enough to do today?

> This may sound like chops busting, but I can honestly only reflect
> on my experiences running freeform PBEM RPG games for periods of
> 1.5 months fulltime at 7 different times from 1998..2001.  The
> core issues are: I would like to deal with only 5 players max
> including myself. I would like those players to be inherently
> talented writers and actors.  I would like them to all have the
> same level of energy for content production.  I would like them to
> be in a similar ballpark of authorial goals.

This would appear to be a dream state.  Having 20% of the population
of a system enabled, willing and engaged in creating content for a
game is probably unheard of, much less thinking about managing them
and keeping them all working in the same direction and with the same
set of authorial goals.

> I do not see that a technology can ever resolve these issues.  I
> believe if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself.  If I
> gotta do it myself, I don't need an AI technology.

So, I think Narrative technology as a whole has some value.

 From the introduction to the dissertation by Michael Brooks:

     "The storyteller will need to invent new creative processes and
     work with new tools which support this new medium, this new
     narrative form. I propose a name for this new narrative
     form--the metalinear narrative. The metalinear narrative is a
     collection of small related story pieces designed to be
     arranged in many different ways, to tell many different linear
     stories from different points of view, with the aid of a story
     engine which sequences the story pieces. My thesis is that a
     writing tool which offers the author knowledgeable feedback
     about narrative construction and context during the creative
     process is essential to the task of creating metalinear
     narratives of significant dimension."

      http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~brooks/dissertation.html

and later in introduction to the dissertation:

     "The metalinear narrative is a narrative form which addresses
     the problem of authoring and presenting multiple stories from
     multiple points of view. It provides the author with a web-like
     structure for storing story parts, from which many linear
     stories can be constructed.  The metalinear narrative form is a
     collection of small story pieces stored in a semantic network
     and designed to be sequence and arranged in many different
     ways, to tell many different linear stories."

      http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~brooks/dissertation.html

So, this dissertation and related research would seem to be speaking
directly about problems that we all face in creating and telling
stories within a multiplayer world, and not as much about the idea
of generating those stories automatically.

The paper that was originally mentioned on Lambda the Ultimate that
I'd mentioned was, similarly, about providing support, by way of a
domain specific language:

     "This paper describes a declarative model for simple
     narratives. The model describes what it is about a sequence of
     events such that reporting the sequence constitutes a
     story. Previous work in story generation has followed one of
     two tracks: (1) declarative, or isolating the regular structure
     of stories and then creating text which conforms to that
     structure, and (2) procedural, that is, modeling and recreating
     the processes used by human authors. Frequently, researchers in
     first track were unable to point to a concrete implementation
     based upon their model; researchers in the second track did not
     directly address the question of what constitutes a story. By
     implementing a story grammar, we address both these
     difficulties.

      http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/michaelm/www/nidocs/Lang.pdf

Given that they're talking about the same problems that we face and
that they're producing some interesting techniques to deal with
those problems, and that they're more broadly applicable, like for
assisting with quest/mission systems, it wouldn't really seem
sensible to ignore this research or to dismiss it out of hand.

I think that these sorts of things could also be interesting in
not-quite-storytelling sorts of ways.  For one, creating an ontology
for modelling virtual worlds is a very demanding and difficult task.
Formal analysis of the structure of narrative provides some good use
cases for that sort of ontology in that things present within the
structure of a narrative need to have some form of representation or
equivalent within the ontology.  Another potential use would be to
create atmosphere within the world on demand, where the server
realizes that not a lot is going on for me at the moment and creates
instant-atmosphere, turning my current location in the forest into
an idyllic glade with nice lighting and some squirrels chasing each
other on a tree branch.

  - Bruce


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