Robot Soul

It's been a while since I last visited Dr. Robert Zubek's blog; in the meantime, he put up his dissertation. Congratulations. 200 pages. Too much for one sitting. Got to page 23 today; the last thing I read:

However, the designer cannot shape the dynamics or aesthetics directly - only the mechanics are available for manipulation.

Not sure I agree. What if I substituted "dynamics" with "plot", and "aesthetics" with "character"?

Must read further.

Update 26.May, 12:10: I've been dreaming about this shit tonight. Nobody could understand the equation Spectator = Actor even in my dream! How bad is that?

See, as long as I accept what I take to be its Premise, MDA (PDF format) makes perfect sense. What I mean with Premise can be written like this:

Premise 1: Designer - creates -> Game <- consumes - Player

My interpretation of this line of text - is it the one that the authors (Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek) intended me to have? - is that it shows me three systems, two of which are acting on a third: one by creating it, the other one by consuming it. In this case, MDA theory explains the system that is acted on, labeled Game, perfectly well to me.

However, my Premise is:

Premise 2: Actor <- acts on -> Actor

This leaves no room for MDA theory per se. However, that theory performs an essential function for Creators, and a System based on Premise 2 will have to be shown to perform the same function.

I will have to show how I transform Premise 1 into Premise 2.

I've already made favorable mention of the Dramatica software, and will repeat this in the future. This might bring up the question of whether I'm a shill for the company that sells it. Short answer: no.

Longer answer: I bought v.2 of Dramatica about nine years ago, and it works for me. It doesn't work for everybody; I know several writers who found that it limits their options in thinking about their stories, and actually, the program is designed to do just that. If your storytelling is inspired, say, by Wim Wenders' movies, I doubt that this is the tool you might want to use. It's also only available for Windows and OS X, which will limit you some more. If you can, try the demo (full functionality, except for Save and Export).

The reason why I find Dramatica an indispensable tool for the design of interactive stories/characters (an application probably not foreseen by the developers) lies in its very limitations: both the program itself and the Storyforms that are its output are designed to work recursively, using a fixed point combinator. I had no idea what this might be, or that I would have to find out about it, when I started learning to use AIML, but my subsequent attempts to use Storyforms to help me design bots led me to the lambda calculus. It took me a while to get my head around that, but then one day, ta-daaa, the lights went on like Hapland: "So this is how it all works!"

It taught me why the Dramatica story engine works, and why each completed Storyform has to have a fixed point (for those who know Dramatica: the value of the Problem of the Subjective Character that is Steadfast is the value of the fixed point), and incidentally, it also taught me why AIML works, which taught me why LISP works - it's all based on the same idea! And - wait for this! now I'm gonna weird you out! - there's an equivalent idea at the foundation of the Meyerhold/Stanislavski complex of acting theory - where it's called "doubling" -, which grounds the all-important identification of the Actor with the Character, and is expressed in the rule "You are your material". Meyerhold used to write this rule as

Actor = Artist + Medium

but an alternative notation he used was

Actor = Actor1 + Actor2

and the latter, to me, started looking damn similar to

f(x): x -> (('x)('x))

which is a LISP expression that evaluates to itself, and the foundation of a LISP (or AIML) interpreter! Alonzo Church used this as a foundation for all computing; Meyerhold/Stanislavski used it as a foundation for all acting: (('x)('x)) is a fixed point, which means it's a point that I can base a Storyform on, which grounds the Characters, which... but by then, my brain had totally turned to cottage cheese, which might explain why this so-called Disclaimer went off the rails the way it did...

Anyway, the good folks that sell Dramatica have no idea of who I am and what I'm doing, and get their product evangelized by me free of charge.

And if you don't know, now you know.

Dennis Jerz linked to this gem of an LA Times article about mathematics going postmodern. Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, shows that certain mathematical definitions drift over time, and proofs of mathematical "truth" (at least those on the level of difficulty where it takes computers to come up with one) are not absolute, but context-dependent, and socially constructed. For instance, hardcore mathematicians feel quite uneasy about proofs that can only be given using the help of computers, and cannot be verified "by hand".

This seems understandable, given the fact that, down on the hardware level, "digital" machines are undoubtably analog (the CPU's transitors are switched on and off by rising and ebbing electrical currents, and that motion is continous), and the famous "1"s and "0"s are really just an abstraction, which is prone to leak.

The notion that mathematics is not as resolvable a discipline as advertised is probably not so new; seems to me that the intuitionists argued along similar lines nearly a hundred years ago already. However, back then they were ridiculed by Hilbert and friends. Nobody is seen laughing about Davis now.

Impact on AI: if mathematicians doubt the correctness of mathematical proofs given by computers even now, then The Dawn of The Ultraintelligent Machines seems to be, erm, at least a good while off.

To make it clear to anybody who still thinks that I fantasize about having solved the "story vs. agency" dilemma - this is not the point. The point is that, by definition, I don't have that particular dilemma. I've reified the system boundary so that the system is the story which includes the client(s)/player(s) as character(s), and any interaction between characters, whether human or virtual, is part of the story. This includes all attempts of the client to "break" the story, and the (potentially infinite) number of cases where the bot simply doesn't understand a word. These are simply moments of "heightend drama" (the basic, but not necessarily the only ones).

Whether the input, or parts of it, are understood or not: the bot always looks at the input and the context to generate an output, and a crucial part of this output is an update of the context. "Context", here, is "the story so far" - the history of the interaction. And this brings us to my dilemma: instead of "story vs. agency", I have "context vs. abstraction".

I start out with one sentence that is my Edge Metaphor (if you missed the discussion where I explained that term, you can catch up here - scroll down to about the middle of the second comment). The Edge Metaphor is a representation of my innermost story problem that is so abstract that it's entirely meaningless when encountered on its own. Then I add potential context. I say "potential" because any response can't really be part of the context defined by a particular client-bot relationship until the client first has said something that made the bot give this response - only then, it becomes part of their (hi)story.

Because humans are likely to respond to utterances of others, the meaning of which they don't understand, with a "wh-question", and because I write in a way that allows the bot to always answer any "wh-question" in context, my bet is that the probalility that the bot will end up making sense to the client will be relatively high. Add to that the fact that, given certain stylistical decisions about how the responses are written, you can treat a lot of inputs as if they where "wh-questions" - for instance, if you don't begin responses to "Why...?" with "Because...", you can also interpret inputs like "You're wrong", "I don't understand", "That's bullshit", etc., as if they were "Why?" -, and you can reveal even more context using that strategy. The goal is writing a text that can seamlessly explain itself. In my more highfalutin moments, I call this "the autopoiesis of meaning".

Of course, there's still a dilemma of sorts, since no matter how much context I provide, I'll never beat the Law of Leaky Abstractions. However, there's a practical reason for why I prefer the "context vs. abstraction" dilemma over the "story vs. agency" dilemma: in the case of the latter, you'll get a system with two interacting variables you have to optimize, and if I'm not grossly mistaken, figuring out what "optimal" is under these conditions is a mathematical impossibility (I think that John von Neumann gave the proof for this, but I can't find the reference any more, so if somebody had a pointer, I'd very much appreciate it). It's like a see-saw consisting of a beam placed over a barrel, with random forces acting on both ends of the beam in random ways - an unstable and unpredictable affair. If, instead, I fix one end of the beam, I only have to deal with one variable, which is much better. My beam might still be too feeble or too rigid to deal with some cases, but in the limit, it should be doing okay. In fact, it looks much closer now to what the Dramatica glossary calls Work - a solvable problem -, versus Dilemma - an unsolvable problem.

I said I would have a closer look at the papers that came up when I googled for documents containing both the terms "narrative intelligence" and "method actor". One was Actor-Role Analysis: Ideology, Point of View, and the News, the MS thesis of Warren Sack, written in 1994. Sack was a member of the Narrative Intelligence Group at MIT, where the monicker "Narrative Intelligence" was coined in the early 90s. Regarding my query, the paper was a blind alley: the abstract contains the sentence "A version of the method, actor-role analysis, is encoded in a computer program, SpinDoctor, which can automatically detect the point(s) of view represented in some news stories", and Google concluded that "method, actor" would probably suit me just as well as "method actor". "Narrative Intelligence" is mentioned only on the Acknowledgments page. I didn't read the rest; 118 pages about a program that could detect the point of view in some news stories eleven years ago are a bit much.

Sack is currently an Assistant Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. If he does anything with the word "narrative" in it these days, I couldn't find it. I've been a subscriber to the Narrative Intelligence mailing list (ni@media.mit.edu) for the last four years; I recieved something like 15 messages during that time, the last one more than two years ago. It looks to me like the originators of the NI meme have pretty much written it off in the meantime.

The other lead my query got me consisted of two papers coming from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, describing another attempt to solve what they call the "Interactive Dilemma": the "inevitable conflict between author’s determinism and interactor’s freedom". They chose pencil-and-paper Role-Playing Games and their Game Masters as a real-life model for their conception of Interactive Storytelling, which results in another one of those man-in-the-middle software architectures that I don't really believe in. It turns out that "Narrative Intelligence" appears only in the References, and "Method Actor", in this case, refers to one of the player types in RPGs, as defined by one Robin Law, who seems to be an authority on that subject. The Spanish researchers let the player choose a type in the beginning of the interaction with their system: "It is hoped that interactors of a specific model will under such conditions choose the type of character most related to their preferences in acting." Seems like they've re-invented the concept of character classes as it is known in MMORPGs.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along...

Nathan Combs at Terra Nova on the practice of zerging:

To the casual observer, zerging may seem a form of virtualized hooliganism. Yet, it might also be seen as a natural consequence of the (arguable) first strategy (above all others) of good gamers: test the boundaries of your world, its rules, discover its patterns, and then pwn!

Which is why I think that griefing should be supported as a standard behavior in interactive stories. If gamers will do it anyway, you're better off using it to provide dramatic conflict than trying to "manage it away".