A new story engine - a software program that creates works of fiction - has been developed for authors of interactive fiction that takes plotting the story out of the composition process and puts it entirely in the control of the reader.
Noted videogame designer Chris Crawford spent the past six years analyzing the basic elements of storytelling and turned it into his patented story engine, the Erasmatron. What he believes this invention will do to the world of interactive fiction might be deduced from his naming of it - as well as his company, Erasmatazz - after Dutch writer Desiderius Erasmus, father of the Reformation.
The Erasmatron is not intended for simulating virtual worlds, but for creating fiction. "The laws of dramatics are very different from the laws of the real world," said Crawford. "In the real world, people have to go to the bathroom. In the dramatic world, that never happens."
What makes the Erasmatron different from other interactive-fiction engines is its handling of plot - the author has no direct control of it. Instead, an author uses the Erasmatron to create a "storyworld," which Crawford explained as the dynamics of the story, the set of freeze-dried rules that are eventually used to reconstitute any number of stories in direct interaction with a reader.
"It's only in the last ten years or so that it's even become an idea in the realm of AI to try to do this, to try to boil down story structures into something that's computer-programmable," said Jorn Barger, a software designer who has had preliminary access to the engine. He believes its importance is "the fact that it takes storytelling and boils it down to a finite number of dimensions. Nobody has really done that with any level of seriousness."
While all storytellers use abstract constructs - such as protagonist, antagonist, and plot - Crawford said that one has to carry the abstraction further if you want to create a truly interactive computer fiction.
"Storytellers have one level of abstraction that has served them well for several thousand years, so they have refined and polished that level of abstraction to near perfection," said Crawford. "But interactivity requires us to move to another level of abstraction, which is nowhere near as well developed."
An author can define abstractions as densely as possible, which will form the basis of all stories in that world. Personality is modeled with 21 traits - Timidity, Dutifulness, Magnanimity, Gullibility, Loyalty, Enviousness, Pride, Love, Hunger, Insecurity, Integrity, Lovability, Dominance, Competence, Loquacity, Initiative, Greed, Libido, Sexiness, Nurturance, Temper, and Joviality. There are also four moods - Anger, Arousal, Joy, and Fear - and eight dimensions of relationship, as well as other definable attributes.
Using these factors, "actors" for the storyworld are created. Two non-human actors, Fate and Nobody, can also be defined. Then, stages are set and populated with objects. Everything is brought to life with perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the engine - the creation of a large web of verbs, different actions and their causes that are to be part of the storyworld. Once all this has been completed - and early trials have shown that this can take a year of work - the author is ready to turn the storyworld loose.
The interactive story itself includes text as well as high-resolution facial images of the actors in the story, putting it somewhere between text-based fiction and comic books. Visual cues denoting the expressions of the actors are central to its working.
The facial algorithms generate expressions utilizing such things as the shapes of the lips and chin and skin color, said Barger. "What it does is it has an algorithm that sets the eyebrow position and the twist of the lips, and it just does an incredible job of capturing a very wide range of facial expressions," he said. "It's like an interactive comic book, although all you see is the faces."
And "interactive" is the key point, as far as Crawford is concerned.
"Interactivity is far more important than most people realize," said Crawford. "It will do more for artistic expression than printing did. It will work profound changes in the way we think, allowing us to see the universe in more operational terms. We're at the nativity of a profound intellectual revolution - what a privilege! A century from now, they'll look back on us and laugh at our misconceptions even as they mythologize our achievements."
Research scientist Dr. Ashwin Ram - whose research has included AI and story understanding - warned that while the Erasmatron may in fact be good, such a work must first be published in the AI community before it can attain credibility as a valid piece of scientific research. "The reason I am saying this is that, as you know, AI is a field that has been riddled with hype since the 1970s, and it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff," he said.
"It is not a general-purpose storytelling machine. It's geared toward character-based fiction," said Dr. Phil Goetz, a computer scientist who has written about interactive fiction. "If the Erasmatron is a complete success, it will still leave interactive fiction with a lot of unexplored territory."
