http://www.americansforthearts.org/issues/funding/

Sounds fun. Like those demo parties. The Gathering just finished here in Norway, and no, I wasn’t there. 5000 people were, though.

One problematic aspect of the Character Jam as it’s propsed is the independent authoring of characters that then somehow coordinate together to make a story experience. If one forgets about using the beat manager and having a progression to the story, perhaps this would work – it would be like having a roomfull of chatterbots talk to each other and to the player (kind of Sims-like experience). But as soon as you want progression, then you need the beat manager to coordinate the activities of multiple characters into story units – but if the characters are being authored independently of each other, how can beats do this coordination? How would the beats “know” about the details of the characters and the dramatic potential of coordinating different characters in different situations? This works in Facade because Grace and Trip were authored to work together, with a specific collection of story beats in mind.

I’m imagining not using the beat manager, and in fact not thinking of it as a story; instead, focusing on character, thinking of it as almost-plotless experimental theater. It’s a bunch of quirky characters essentially bouncing off one another in a tense situation. But, we can come up with ways to give it potential for emergent narrative, to be more than a bunch of (state-less) chatterbots talking to each other:

- Characters are designed to reach out and provoke others — to ask pointed questions, make bold statements, to flirt, cajole, rant, etc.

- Each character, as the author wishes, can be designed to have their own internal progression, progressed in some fashion by the stimulus from other characters. Each character could have its own simple internal arc(s), which get traversed in different ways depending on who they bounce off of in any run of the experience. If each character is a bit of a self-absorbed drama queen in their own way, it should be interesting.

- Upfront we all decide upon 2-3 possible “plot points” that each character will need to support.

Things like that could provide enough loose structure to make sure the experience has a feeling of progression. It would probably be a chaotic, sometimes incoherent and absurd but inevitably amusing thing to watch and play. Again, the focus is on character.

As for the lack of a beat manager in the CJ, I do understand that we want to give people a certain amount of room for decoupled development. At the same time, I would like to find some clever way for joint behaviors to still work — and not just by having both characters written by the same author(ing group). Perhaps one writes the joint behaviors so that the other character only has to respond using things from the pre-specified generic repertoire. Or maybe there’s some way of saying, “My response to seeing the casket is to faint with a priority 10. Catching me is a priority 7 for anyone close to me. If you’re not doing anything higher-priority, you catch me.” Hmmm… I know there are others out there who have studied these sorts of systems more than I have. Michael, Andrew, Athomas — are there solutions to this sort of problem from systems you’ve read about (or created) that seem appealing for use in this situation?

I think The Unknown was created in an electronic writing jam of one sort (at least if we believe its origin myth.)

I have to admint that interactive fiction is the first thing that comes to mind for me, so it may be that everyone would like an e-writing jam in their own preferred form. That have been some e-writing jams in that form, such as the one that produced the curious and wacky Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle. I’d certainly be willing to work in another form, however.

I like the character jam, which builds on the sorts of work that Janet Murray has had students do in class, building chatterbots. Collaborations could really improve the outcome there, though. With accessible bots as an end product, and people worthing together to fill out dialog and round out personalities, it could be particularly fun and interesting, even if the bots didn’t all sit in the same virtual environment at the end, even if they were only represented in text.

One of the primary features of the Indie Game Jam that appealed to me was the novelty of the platform they chose each time — putting 100,000 guys on screen, the full-body interface of Shadow Garden, the fully-procedural 2D physics engine. (I realize that for most readers, without having seen these experiments, my mere descriptions of them aren’t as inspiring.) I’d like to imagine e-writing forms that extend beyond what we’ve already seen — to go beyond state-of-the-art chatterbots, IF, etc., or at least use them in new interesting ways.

A reason I suggested a 3D reactive language-capable character platform was, not just because it’s a form I’m used to, but because such a platform has never been used in the way I described.

Had the collaborative network novel The Unknown not yet been made yet, that form would have been a great new idea for an e-writing Jam. Now it’s old hat. (Just kidding. I’m sure there’s plenty of uncharted territory there, of course, that I’d love to explore.)

In the design space of text-based IF, how well do you think it lends itself to a collaborative Jam, or how could it be extended / used in new ways? Can you point us to anymore past examples of collaborative IF?

I notice I’m pushing for a collaborative Jam, which doesn’t have to be the case — the Game Jam created a series of small independent pieces. But there’s something very appealing about having the writing of the participants co-mingle and intersect.

Noah, I think in fact we’d find joint behaviors useful to do any coordination at all between characters in a Character Jam, whether it’s supporting a pre-defined generic repertoire of behaviors, or for specific behaviors that we devise at the Jam itself. Michael wrote the joint behaviors technology with multi-character teams in mind (although so far we haven’t fully exercised this capability beyond just teams of two, Grace and Trip). To keep things sane, we’d probably want not much more than a Breakfast Club-sized group of characters.

Perhaps the Jam could include a process where authors can suggest joint behavior ideas to the authoring group, that they will want the other characters to support; perhaps each participant is allowed to suggest two of their own devising, that everyone must support, and can suggest more that other authors have the option of supporting if they have time.

The truth is, we’re going to have to keep these behaviors pretty simple, to allow us to pull of a Jam in 3-4 days. I’m imagining the primary activity of each character is saying provocative stuff in a theatrical way — yelling in someone else’s face, or expositing to the group, or mumbling to self (and audience) in the corner or whatever, and having the other characters react in character. This is more sophisticated than chatterbots because characters would be more motivated, have more internal state, and of course, be animated with gesture and facial expression. The primary progression of the experience would occur as each character internally progresses, due to the results of the interactions with the other characters. (The other characters include the player.)

I’m interested to hear from e-writers (the GTxA folk, anyone else out there), what do you like or don’t like about the concept? For those accustomed to writing e-lit, does writing e-theater turn you on or off? Does the process described sound too cumbersome?

On the difficulty issue, to make it more feasible, it could be that I and/or Michael (assuming we are among the authors, which I think we’d want to be) would need to do most of our authoring before the Jam, in order to be facilitators / tech support during the Jam. Also, writers who feel less comfortable with minimal programming could bring along a programming buddy…

My students in hypertext are doing something like an Unknown writing jam right now. We generated a set of characters using the “pull characteristics out of a hat” technique, and four teams are each using the same set of characters to write in different “genres” — cyberpunk, noir, over-the-top romance, and reality tv/horror. I should be interesting to see what the end product looks like.

(I suggested similarities between the Thespis system and Facade system in my response to Mark in First Person.)

It strikes me that I’d like to do an EWJ around the rule-based natural language generator for Terminal Time. Michael, what would that take, do you think?

It would be cool to write something for a Facade style work, but I’m guessing that it’s probably difficult to produce something over the course of a weekend that you could just “plug in” and have it working. But if we were able to sort of modularize a project across different modes of electronic writing, we could probably make something interesting that would build incrementally.

Nick also mentioned the problem of certain kinds of projects relegating one or the other of us (or more probably one of you than me given my comparatively minimalist technical skill set) to being “tech guys” or instructors. That would probably be the problem with a Facade style thing, or even an IF. But, on the other hand, if we could take turns being project director in different sessions, maybe that would work. I’d love the opportunity to learn more in that kind of hands-on way in the process of writing an interesting project.

I always like the metaphor of the Band, who during the Big Pink sessions worked with a lot of guest artists and spent a lot of time playing each other’s instruments.

The idea of working a common set of character through different e-writing forms / modalities sounds interesting, I like it.

While I agree a Facade-style Jam would be ambitious, I’m going to think about how to make it possible. Yes, it would be difficult, but accomplishing difficult things can be worthwhile :-). With enough up-front work, it should be possible to make an authoring environment where an author with no programming experience can at least specify a collection of dialog and basic direction for a “smart” virtual actor to perform. Then, if the author has some programming experience and/or teams up with a programmer, you can access relatively easy hooks for customizing existing behaviors. The next level of complexity, should you dare accept that mission, is to create your own brand-new behaviors.

I’ll admit it sounds complex, but if it’s set up to allow participants to wade in as shallowly or deeply as you wish, it could work. And if we pull it off, it could be a very interesting piece to play with.

Also I think the idea of a series of Jams, where each participant is the director of one of the Jams, makes logistical sense.

The Terminal Time generator, on its own, just takes a semantic representation of what you want to say and turns it into natural language. So, to make an interactive something-or-other with it, you’d first have to embed the generator in some interactive framework. What kind of interaction are you picturing supporting? Alot of the work of using the generator involves developing a semantic language (read, predicate calculus representations) for talking about whatever it is you want to generate text about. For Terminal Time, this was representations, based on the Upper Cyc Ontology, of historical events. To use it in a Jam, you’d probably want to provide the participants with a ready-made representational framework for whatever the topic of the Jam is.

One thought that Paul, Steffi (TT collaborators) and I tossed around a couple of years ago was the idea of holding workshops where people could develop representations of their local history (with multiple points of view), throw them into Terminal Time, and make site-specific versions of Terminal Time. This is a kind of Jam, using TT as a mirror enabling people to explore their own history and ideological bias. But we’d definitely need some nice authoring tools that we don’t have right now. As Andrew points out above for an ABL-based jam, an authoring environment that allows one to peel away multiple layers of complexity in authoring, starting simple, but with a nice path to more complex authoring, is key. Neither ABL nor TT has such a (presumably GUI) authoring tool.

One issue for developing a jam is deciding what level of programming background the jam assumes. I think the EGW jam assumes a game programming background (a C/C++ programmer who’s done real-time event-based programming). What kind of authoring tool you need depends on the participants’ background.