Comment by WhyOhWhyQ
2 days ago
"inhabited by characters ACTUALLY living in the computer"
It's hard to imagine these feeling like characters from literature and not characters in the form of influencers / social media personalities. Characters in literature are in a highly constrained medium, and only have to do their story once. In a generated world the character needs to be constantly doing "story things". I think Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on why video games are a bad medium for stories, which might be relevant.
Please share! Computational literature is my main area of research, and constraints are very much in the center of it... I believe that there are effectively two kinds of constraints: in the language of stories themselves, as thing-in-itself, as well as those imposed by the author. In a way, authorship is incredibly repressive: authors impose strict limits on the characters, what they get to do, etc. This is a form of slavery. Characters in traditional plays only get to say exactly what the author wants them to say, when he wants them to say it. Whereas in computational literature, we get to emancipate the characters! This is a far-cry from "prompting," but I believe there are concrete paths forward that would be somewhat familiar (but not necessarily click) for game-dev people.
Now, there's fundamental limits of the medium (as function of computation) but that's a different story.
Just so I understand who I am talking with here, when you say authorship is a form of slavery, is that because you believe the characters in a written story have a consciousness/sentience/experience just like animals do, or are you just using the word 'slavery' to mean that in traditional literature the characters are static? One of the strengths of traditional literature is that staticness, however, because the best stories from literature are necessarily highly engineered and contrived by the author. Great stories don't happen in the real world (without dramatization of the events) exactly because too many things can happen for a coherent narrative to unfold.
I'm a huge fan of Dwarf Fortress, but the stories aren't Great without imagination from the player selectively ignoring things. Kruggsmash is able to make them compelling because he is a great author
The latter, and as I said in prior writing—it's not that I don't believe in constraints, I simply don't believe that this "staticness" is a feature of contrivance—rather, I would say it's a side-effect having to do with limitations of the medium.
> Kruggsmash is able to make them compelling because he is a great author
This is how all good plays come to be, from great authors. The question is whether AI could be "great," is that which I'm ill-equipped to address in any shape or form, but given some priors I would say it's more likely than not. However, I'm mostly interested in enabling the human authors themselves. For example, if you're familiar with interactive fiction, you know there's a complexity explosion going around branching. The first approximation of comp-lit is to assist with that complexity by allowing the author to de-couple story constraints from text itself. This requires a form of metatext, or hypertext, if you were to venture into Alternate reality games.
> Characters in traditional plays only get to say exactly what the author wants them to say
But the human actors sometimes adlib. As well as being in control of intonation and body language. It takes a great deal of skill to portray someone else's words in a compelling and convincing manner. And for an actor I imagine it can be quite fun to do so.