Wunderkammer: The Fiction of Physical Things

Typically a shryng, or altar, was set up in the home with commemorative articles from lost family members. Typical articles were a scrap of clothing, a lock of hair, an amulet, or a favorite razor. Pictures of loved ones were rare and treasured, brought out only on these occasions… For ancestors about whom little was known, Tre-manners used a custom they called “Ricing the Soup.” The unknown relation was given attributes common to all of humanity but in such a way as to make him or her sound individual. In this way the thin back-story of the ancestor’s memory was thickened. — Eli Brown, Excerpt from the forthcoming The Feasts of Tre-Mang

The Feasts of Tre-Mang is a cookbook with real recipes from a fake cuisine and a fake history. “Pamatala Jad-zum”, or “Storm Chowder Pie”, is a seaweed-laden dish served traditionally in memory of those lost at sea, appropriate to the memorial services of the Tre-manners described above.

Storm Chowder Pie. Image rights reserved to Eli Brown at Tre-mang.com; used with permission.

This interview with the author reveals an enthusiastic love of world-building for its own sake. In addition to the context-rich recipes, he has also created currency, propaganda posters, and a flag for Tre-Mang. Even though the book isn’t finished yet, the concept has already poked through into the real world in the form of a Tre-Mang evening at a local restaurant.

A History of the Future in 100 Objects is a project by Adrian Hon of SixToStart, imagining the world to come by highlighting specific items that might be invented or imagined in the future. His project is mostly to take the form of images and essays, but he has promised his Kickstarter funders a few physical rewards, including a newspaper of the future (which tells us, I suppose, that he envisions a future that includes paper-based news) and several 3D modeled objects.

Retropolis is a world envisioned by Bradley W. Schenck, built up around art and images, though the website does also feature some branching CYOA-style fiction. Even in the stories, there’s a feelies-rich delight in physicality, however: inventory items are pictured and have their own descriptions, encouraging the reader to take some time off from the narrative progression to check out the tokens that come with it. Retropolis takes the “do art for free, make your money on t-shirts” concept to the maximum, allowing you to buy everything from clocks to blank journals with Retropolis designs on the cover — it’s the most obviously merchandising approach of these three — but they include tourist postcards and similar objects that are meant to “belong” to their world of origin rather than to our world.

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Romance, Hold the Choices

Here’s a Homer in Silicon on Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story — Christine Love’s follow-on (of sorts) to Digital: A Love Story. I had various issues with it, which I discuss in the article, but overall I did like it, especially for the vivid characterization of the anime-obsessed teens. (Also, Love manages to do things with Ren’Py that I wouldn’t have guessed possible and that make it feel much less static than the average visual novel.)

Added bonus: Dirolab has some thoughts on the piece also.

More on Seven Fables: Planning a Conversation Model

The Seven Fables project I covered a week or so ago is now successfully Kickstarted and then some. With more resources available than they initially expected, the authors are thinking about how they might add conversational characters to the project, using some chatbot technology they’ve worked with in the past.

Here Mark Stephen Meadows and I talk through some of the design and tech issues involved.

ES: Why are you looking at adding chatbot technology to this piece?

MSM: Stories are almost always about people. Narrative’s core is about personalities: people, interactions, society, desire, fear, love, weakness. These are the building blocks of narrative and without people in a story it becomes more an exploration of architecture than a drama or adventure. That’s what IF is often about. Sure, it’s fun to poke around in a dungeon and discover doors that open and close. But I find that hearts that open and close are far more interesting.

Gollum? Princess Leia? Kung Fu Panda? Brothers Karamazov? Even great adventures like that are about the people, and what drives and limits them.

ES: Tell me what excites you about the chatbot technology you’re planning to use.

MSM: The problem with most chatbots these days is not the technology. Even simple systems like AIML have enough hooks and gears to work in a piece of IF as a believable character. The problem is design.

Usually chatbots lack context. They’re like abandoned people, homeless wanderers, that awkwardly roam the streets, looking for conversation. “Hi! My Name Is Bob! How Are You Today?” a chatbot might say. I dont want to talk with these chatbots. They’re drek, informational bums. Just like a person walking up to you on the street saying the same thing. “Hi! My Name Is Bob! How Are You Today?” I would do my best to politely brush him off and just keep walking down the street. But if there’s a design and narrative component to this then it starts to get interesting. If, for example, I see a small green man with dragonfly wings sitting on a post office box, asking me to open it because his faerie-wife is trapped inside, then I’m far more inclined to talk with him than the guy named Bob. Chat is not interesting simply because it is chat. It has to have a context. Chatbots are boring largely because they lack that context. NPCs / NPGs and chatbots should be given a context that allows them to serve a function. Give the bums a job.

This kind of design is, like writing, as much about psychology as anything else.

Once upon a time, in 2007, my company HeadCase had developed some technology that showed how a personality could be distilled from a conversation. We did it with Arnold Schwarzenegger. We were using ‘scrapers’ – an automated system that would traverse websites, search for first-person interviews, drag those back into a
database, snap off chunks of the interviews that were relevant to similar topics, ideas, and categories, and then rank that stuff according to frequency. Then we asked the system a question. So, for example, we asked the Arnold Schwarzenegger system, “What do you think of gay marriage?” and it answered, “Gay marriage should be between a man and a woman, and if you ask me again I’ll make you do 500 push-ups.”

It was Arnold. Like a photo, it was his likeness. This was, really, an authoring technique for NPCs. The goal was to take interviews and be able to generate NPCs from them.

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Choice of Romance

Choice of Romance is a piece from the Choice of… series: not exactly new, but I’ve been too busy to look at it until recently.

I wonder a bit about the marketing strategy of calling the stories “Choice of [blank].” It makes the stories sound more generic than they actually are, especially when the thing that goes in the blank is as sweeping as “Romance.”

In this case, the title is deceptive. “Choice of Romance” isn’t a generic romance story. On the contrary, it (like Choice of Broadsides) is set in a slightly alternate version of a historical setting, designed to allow the player to play as either gender, seeking a partner of either gender, and to give players with female characters the opportunity to exercise more agency than would otherwise have been available.

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Seven Fables: an Interview with Mark Stephen Meadows

Mark Stephen Meadows is the author of several books on interaction, including Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Mark is currently in the process of Kickstarting his new project “Seven Fables”, an interactive ebook with a companion volume in old-fashioned codex form. (Leather-bound, no less.) Being a sucker for retellings of classic stories, I was curious about the project. Mark has kindly agreed to talk a bit here about the interaction in “Seven Fables” and what he hopes readers will take away from it.

ES: Who is your ideal audience for “Seven Fables”?

MSM: The same folks that read the Grimm fable collections, back in the 1800s. I’d like those folks to be reincarnated, iPad in hand! That would be adults, mostly in their 30s. In the 1960s and 1970s Disney did a fine job of both sterilizing and infantalizing fables like Snow White, but the real, undiluted fables are pretty intense. There’s real horror and joy in old fables, so I like to think that we adults can read them, too. Fables have generally been read by many generations, because they can be read on many levels, so I hope we can span that gap.

The Grimms did it, and I’m mostly copying them. I went out and collected nautical fables from Japan, India, Europe, North America (generally while visiting those countries), and I’ve rewritten some of the words, changed a few of the characters, illustrated them, and now i’m trying to get them into a modern outfit. But the stories are wicked old, and
already quite popular in some ports, so I like to think they’ll be enjoyed by many people as they’ve already been proven to be valid tales. I think this will naturally both attract and filter an audience.

Ideally, I’d also like hard-core fans of fables to read this work. There’s a terse language, a tight form, and a meaty metaphor in the fable genre, which is why I like them so much. From a literary perspective, a good fable is a bit more like poetry than anything else (there’s often even repeating stanzas), but if that’s true then it’s a lazy-poet’s poetry, and its for a reader that wants a little sugar with his philosophy. The genre is very constraining, and I look forward to knowing how people think we’ve done, if we’ve preserved that tightness and form in these interactive versions, or if we’ve flopped by expanding reading options. That’s a big challenge, and it will also determine who our readers are.

So it’s an experiment for those of us that were raised outside of Disneyland.

ES: What is the experience you want to create for your player/reader through the interaction?

MSM: Exploration punctuated by moments of surprise. I want the reader to enter an amazing world, a world where even Jim Woodring would be wide-eyed, and to explore things, test things, evaluate their actions, and try to suspend judgment until the outcome of their actions are clear.

There’s this fable about the old Chinese man whose horse ran away. All the villagers said, “Oh, that’s bad!” and the old man said, “We will see, we will see.” then, two weeks later, the horse came back, and it brought another horse with it, and all the villagers said, “Oh, that’s good!” and the old man said, “We will see, we will see.” Then, two weeks later, his son was out riding the new horse, and it threw him, and he fell and broke his hip. All the villagers said, “Oh, that’s bad!” and the old man said, “We will see, we will see.” Then two weeks after that, the army came and they were recruiting young men for a war, but the old man’s son could not be recruited because he had a busted hip. All the villagers said, “Oh, that’s good!” and the old man said, “We will see, we will see.”

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