{"id":38,"date":"2006-05-16T23:42:28","date_gmt":"2006-05-16T21:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=38"},"modified":"2006-05-16T23:57:58","modified_gmt":"2006-05-16T21:57:58","slug":"storytron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=38","title":{"rendered":"Storytron"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Crawford’s Storytron<\/a> is a technology for interactive storytelling. Swat is a tool for writing interactive stories. I’ve been looking at the documentation of this application (Alpha version 0.6). Here’s some ideas I found interesting.<\/p>\n

Every event in the story contains all possible types of reactions to this event, called Roles, and an if statement for each of these Roles. So the actors don’t really think for themselves, they just look at the list of Roles and pick the one for which the if statements evaluates to true. This sounds very similar to our own “AI from the outside” ideas and Richard Evans’ “Activity-things”.<\/p>\n

For each Role, there are several ways of reacting to an event, called Options. A character chooses an Option based on its Inclination. And this is where the (artificial) intelligence of the system resides. The inclination to do each option is scripted by the writer in mathematical formulas that can relate it to the personality of the character, its history, its relationships, etc. The character will choose the option (i.e. perform the action) with the highest Inclination value. One can imagine that there must be a random number to add some spice to this relatively stiff system.<\/p>\n

Swat’s scripting interface (or perhaps even the very use of scripting) requires that a writer breaks down everything into minute elements. Perhaps an extremely clever person can keep the enormous mental picture in his head that encapsulates every element in the scene. But in general, I feel that a lot of the little emotional things that a writer might include spontaneously would get lost in this process. What about, e.g. ambiguity of words, associations, implications of tone? All of these are extremely important for the dramatic impact of a story but how do you express these in formulas that only describe events?<\/p>\n

The single biggest problem of Storytron, however, is how it represents the story. It does so in a subset of English, represented in a symbolic way, called Deikto. Here’s a mockup of that representation:
\n
\nThe part on the left says “Knifer has just issued you a threat: Give your bicycle to him or he’ll knife you.” The part on the right is how you respond.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, even though Mr. Crawford states that the singular beauty of interactive storytelling is not in its representation – it is in the richness, depth, variety and drama of the interactions it allows<\/em>, the representation still needs to be understandable, readable at least. Are readers really expected to learn this new language in order to experience these storyworlds? And how will Deikto translate to other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Crawford’s Storytron is a technology for interactive storytelling. Swat is a tool for writing interactive stories. I’ve been looking at the documentation of this application (Alpha version 0.6). Here’s some ideas I found interesting. Every event in the story contains all possible types of reactions to this event, called Roles, and an if statement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}