Comment by WhyOhWhyQ
2 days ago
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.