Friday
Nov062009
My Narrative Lab
Friday, November 6, 2009 at 2:23PM | in Events So, both for fun and in my ongoing effort to find a university homebase, I'm going to teach a course called Narrative Lab at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program next semester. You have to be in the program to take it, but I'll try to keep some component online for the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, though, here's an example of me actually doing interactive narrative - and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we're after:
But a Vancouver-based studio named Smoking Gun Interactive may be about to merge the worlds of console and alternative reality gaming into one experimental new form. The team has yet to announce a name for the project – its codename is currently X, and there's an intriguing online preview named, Exoriare, a title drawn from Virgil's 'Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor' – let an avenger arise from my bones.
Reader Comments (13)
The author seems to mean "Universal Grammar" when he says "universal linguistics"... Interesting narrative concepts. You might want to consider face-to-face tie-ins. Imagine picking a your favorite mom-and-pop operation in every city. Convince them to sell a small pamphlet, an "ancient manuscript", with special information that will help players progress through the game. The content of the pamphlets may be ambiguous. Make one of the next steps for holders of the pamphlets to post what they've learned from the pamphlet. You might be able to create cooperative incentives to do this if people can benefit from others' interpretation of the text. For example, they might actually have to e-mail an archaeologist or go to a library to figure something out. This should generate a participatory narrative.
One way to go would be a fragmentary part of a lost work of Hermes Trismegistus, recovered by Condorcet and translated by Thomas Paine or something like that. Another way to distribute fragments could come through donations to public libraries or to used book stores.
Another physical interaction tool might involve clues hidden in public scheduled lectures at universities.
...the lecturer doesn't have to know that they're in the game.
true....
Shhhhhhhhh. Rushkoff doesn't know that he's in the game. ;-)
This is a really naive question: Are decision tree representations ever used to classify narratives?
I think you are very much on the right track Anthony! All i can add: there are bound be certain balances and imbalances in these arrays of source material. This should emphasise and articulate the need for the varieties of community to risk and share. Being the key master for various linear aspects of the narrative, Douglas might be interested in a decision tree that maximizes play. I have a suspicion that the more discrete the "clues" the more communities will be spawned. And, to conclude this dialectic, i think nothing more need be said.
:-)
mason
The question about decision trees was more general, I wasn't actually thinking about the game. Over the past few years, when I sit down to watch a movie, it's seemed easier and easier to predict what's going to happen next because the writers allows themselves only so many moves. For that reason, I was wondering whether fine-grained taxonomies of narrative had been attempted using decision trees. Presumably you could differentiate subclasses within different genres (e.g. comedy) this way. It might be easier to see the unexplored narrative terrain when the constraints on more typical narratives are represented graphically.
Yeah. i follow you concerning the added constraints on narrative in the graphic format. I am primarily interested in the flexibility of narrative progress from the point of view of assembly, tho. But your are right about the experience of the narrative as a (more or less) passive viewer. In certain films i reach a point where i can fairly clearly see the array of possible outcomes. Thereafter, timing and sequence is everything for me. I am looking forward to seeing this project play out.
If you could generate estimates of the most representative or standard decision trees that writers use, you would also have a tool for assembly. To assemble a standard narrative, just follow a path in the tree. To assemble a novel narrative, violate the assumptions in the tree. You could also construct hybrid graphs from the standard graphs.
The reason that I find the decision tree representation interesting is that it might have the potential to reveal the extent to which people's life expectations are affected by the relative frequencies with which they encounter certain kinds of narrative. There are also interesting questions about the effects of exposure to compressed forms of narrative (the romantic comedy occurring in a gum commercial), the human nervous system's tendency to learn through simulation, and mood (which creates cognitive biases).
Folks don't just "encounter certain kinds of narratives," and have their "life expectations change," unless there is a large and/or continuing exchange with the preexisting set of narrative assumptions. A christian colonist's bible narrative may change the life expectations of certain Indians until the offspring of some of these indians may be influenced by your gum commercial. Despite the fact my post no longer echoes in the phlosophy helmet, i still find the padding elegantly placed, etc.
-mason
I think I agree with you.