[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Ok Bruce, I just spent 2 hours perusing the papers you cited and
writing this e-mail.  I think you could have saved me the effort by
simply stating "Yes, all these stories suck," but maybe your
paradigm and focus precluded that.  Do you know of any writing tools
along these lines that have acceptable writing of non-trivial length
associated with them?  Otherwise, I don't see the point of
discussing any of this stuff from the standpoint of "What does a
writer need?"  Frankly, a writer doesn't need any of it!

For all you folks that want automated or semi-automated user
engagement: what's so hard about having your writing guy sit down
and spit out a pile of plot summaries?  Then go implement 'em,
leveraging game objects you've already built.  Why do engineers put
so much energy into trying to avoid the writing?

I mean hell, I argued on c.s.i.p.g.rpg until I was blue in the face
that Morrowind's writing sucked, and why.  A meandering, badly
written backstory + FedEx quests in the foreground, basically.
Plenty of people agreed with my critique, but an alarmingly large
contingent said "This story is fine!  It's just your taste!"

On this mailing list, what problem are you guys trying to solve?  Do
you care about writing quality, or writing quantity?  Given that so
many people will defend a pile of crap story like Morrowind's, I
don't see how the latter can even be an issue.  You could write from
the entrails of toilet paper, people would still buy it!

Bruce Mitchener wrote:

>      "A Declarative Model for Simple Narratives"

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

An output sample:

  [sic] "once upon a time there lived a dog.  one day it happened
  that farmer evicted cat.  when this happened, dog felt pity for
  the cat.  in response, dog sneaked food to the cat.  farmer
  punished dog."

This may represent a great achievement for narrative AI, but as
writing, it sucks!

> A survey:

>     http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mlee/research/papers/msc_thesis.ps

Forget stories, this is a researcher saying how badly *AI* sucks.

> Another thesis:

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

I skipped to the Stories section.  They contain vignettes of trivial
length, and you can't demonstrate a whole lot about technology with
that.  This is the problem with a lot of R&D: an elaborate
technology shows off a trivial piece of writing.  The work has left
me uninterested in whatever the technologist was trying to
accomplish.  I read nothing that couldn't have been done with a few
hours of writing and a video camera.

Most of the writing is not good.  6.2.4 is better but could use
work.  For all I know these pieces might have been well *acted*,
since the scripts are transcripts of videos, but I can't say that
much for the scripts.  The main interest value of the vignettes is
to see 3 different perspectives on the same event.  I got a chuckle
out of reading the last sentences 6.2.3's "ghost" with the first few
sentences of 6.2.4's "The Bathroom Wants Che Guevara."  I don't
think that was the intended reading of the works, but it does prove
the hands of a dead clock tell time twice a day!

I think most of these works lack character buy-in.  Why should we
care about these characters?  I find I only care about the
characters when I've heard the 2nd half of the story.  That's
interest in the puzzle of their interactions, not the characters
themselves.  Maybe the actors are capable of being much more
engaging as they tell the stories on video.  But that's acting, not
writing.  I think these writers present choppy experiences from
moment to moment, and after a few paragraphs of that, I start to ask
why I should care.

> Another paper:

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

This is a survey.  No stories.

> And an implementation and even more writing:

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

This is a duplicate of the URL above.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev