Chapter 8, 9 & 10
Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
Eliza’s Daughters
• Chatterbots
• Julia – MUD agent that provides information as
well as entertaining conversation
– Not very believable
– More imaginatively present by demonstrating
dramatically appropriate behavior
– Fails Turing test
• Self-absorbed, evasive, and obsessive characters
are easier to author
• Temporal model of character (salesman)
• Modeling inner life (PARRY and neurotic woman)
– Paranoid person that was convincing enough
• Interviewers intent : Evil, kind, or neutral
Goal-based Behavior
• Intelligent agents (scripts, plans and goals)
– (oz group’s) Lyotard house cat– goals change
over time
• Cognitive simulation combining goals and
feelings
• Challenge of purely mathematical models to
create believability
– Ad-hoc rules and glitches enable most
human/intriguing actions
– Lyotard biting interactor
– Shrimp banging head on ground
Multicharacter Environments
• Simple joining of
chatterbots
– Zippy meets Eliza
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=invgqeawT
0Q
• Each should know in advance the kind of
things the other was likely to say and had a
repertoire of ready responses
– Coherent activity from independent actions of
multiple agents
Multicharacter Environments
• Woggles
– Difficulty of interactor to focus on important
activity
– Too many things are going on once without
staging aimed for focusing attention
– Fore more interactors,
need for staging collectively
or individually
Multicharacter Environments
• Lessons from commedia dell’arte, Italian
theater tradition
– Predictable formulas of
interaction
– Stock characters
– Set of potential
scripts/schemas for action
• Clear entrance, exits
and paraphrase of each scene
– Improvisation
(simulation) for instantiation
Multicharacter Environments
• Stock comic stage business – lazzi
– As soon as a lazzi is initiated by one player, all
of the other players must fall in, so that
performing a lazzi requires every member of
the troupe to know the routine as well as great
teamwork.
– Lazzo of the shoes
– Lazzo of the fly
– Lazzo shut up
Digital Puppet
• To what extent do we allow digital
actors to pull their own strings and to
what extent do we put them in hands of
a plot controller?
– MIT ALIVE Project Silas T. Dog
– Plot controller prod him
into action by command
– Plot controller could
change silas perception
of the environment
Emergent Behavior
• How autonomous we would want a
fictional character to get?
• Autonomous agents, particularly in
combination, can walk away from plot
• Interaction is complex and unpredictable
– Ambivalence and the comically neurotic wolf
Emergent Behavior
• Flat vs. round characters
– Flat are more likely to stay
in character
– Random – flat pretending
to be round
– Round characters exhibit
revelation, learn and grow
– Eliza? Silas, Lyotard, Wolf?
• Consciousness as
emergent behavior
– Minsky’s meat machines
Emerging Formats (Chapter 9)
• Star Trek holodeck –remains improbably
distant, but
• Digital storytelling has aroused appetite
for participatory stories that offer,
– more complete immersion,
– more satisfying agency, and
– a more sustained involvement with a
kaleidoscopic world.
Emerging Formats
• Combining broadcast and participatory formats
– Viewer digital participation moving from
• Sequential (watch, then interact), to simultaneous but
separate activities (interact while watching), to merged
experience (watch and interact in same environment)
• The serial drama archive
and hyperserial
• On-demand, substantial
development of minor
characters and storylines
• Other ideas:
Branching video, thought track,
– Point of view influences
the information they receive
Emerging Formats
• One problem of delivering a
multibranching story over TV would be
the conflicts of who controls the remote
– Take turn of story narrative
– broadcast several times
– Adults, women, teenagers
point of view
• Right balance of common
and divergent experiences
with same central situations
Emerging Formats
• Consensus narrative
– For stories that define the concerns of the
society and present the received wisdom
about these concerns
• Commentary space
– More psychologically
believable
Interacting in Virtual Places
• MUDs (to MMOGs) to
VRs
• Moving from immersion
and navigational
agency to
transformation?
• Tension between author
and participants?
– Multiuser world without
external authoring run
into trouble in
establishing boundaries
of the illusions
Hamlet on the Holodeck
Conclusions
• Narrative beauty is independent of the medium
– It helps us understand who we are and what we are
doing here
• Procedural authorship is key
– Need to move from individual to social authorship?
• Narrative formulas must be refined for great work
in a new media
– Juvenalia stage is necessary to explore formulas
• The computer is chameleonic
– Theater, town hall, unraveling book, animated
wonderland, sports arena, potential life form
– A representational medium