CTWR 518 - Interactive Writing

Driving...

Here's my final project for 518...DRIVING...

Drive around. Read some stuff...

Thoughts on Final Project - Self Portrait

Ever since Peggy first assigned this project, I’ve been wrestling with the best way for me to represent a self portrait of myself. Yesterday, while getting my car serviced I decided to get a snack at Starbucks and finally after weeks of contemplation, I found inspiration. I don’t know if it was the chantico or the Sinatra blaring through the speakers, but whatever it was I think I’ve come up with something. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, riddle, Q&A game! Nothing earth shattering, but nonetheless a challenge for me to create over the next few weeks. Each puzzle piece would reveal something about me. Now that I have the idea, I’ll being developing it more fully this week and implementing the design the rest of this month.

Troubled Teen (Clue)

Troubled Teen

Objective:

By elimination, identify the Delinquent Activity (DA) Timmy the Troubled Teen engages in while Shirking a Responsibility (SR), all because of a Probable Reason (PR) (some sort of traumatic event in Timmy's youth). Such as “Timmy is Huffing Pledge instead of Washing the Polo Ponies, because he was Rejected in Kindergarten for Drawing a Round Square.” Additional objective: the guilty party wants to escape before being accused.

Change from Clue:

The primary change from Clue involves associating Timmy's condition with a player character and introduce an additional goal for the “guilty party” (escape). Each person is affiliated with a Probable Reason, completing the narrative of cause and effect, and thus associating a player character with Timmy's state.

Rules:

Similar to Clue--movement into a new space offers the player the opportunity to make a suggestion, with the players revealing the information they hold in accordance with the Clue rules. Only the DA associated with the location may be guessed, which encourages movement about the board. At any time a player is adjacent to another player, they may ACCUSE and “ADMINISTER A BEAT DOWN”. If accusing an innocent player or misidentifying the SR and DA, that player loses and is eliminated. If a player ascertains he/she is guilty of the Probable Reason, they may exit the board via the Bus Terminal (Street Loctation plus rolling 4-6 on die). The other players, when seeing a fellow player making a bee-line to the Street will know to move adjacent and accuse.

Discussion of Changes:

Our group considered a wide range of game mechanic changes to assist in the development of a more fully articulated story.

A proposed change but unincorporated: Associating each player with a location on the board. Dad would be associated with TroubleTown S&L, Mom with the home, Teacher with TroubleTown High School, Grandma with the Nursing Home, etc. If a player moved to his/her special location, they would be allowed to ask two questions. To counter the special ability of asking two questions at the special location, there would be twice the number of Probable Reasons (2 per character). Numerous additional spots on the board (3 Main Street spots, the Bowling Alley, TroubleTown Cinematechque) would complicate the movement mechanic and add excitement to the flight/pursuit of the responsible adult.

2nd Place: In addition to the winner solving the Shirked Responsibilty, Delinquent Activity and Probable Reason combination, if a player ascertained they were the correct Probable Reason, they could escape the game board (via the Bus Terminal location in the Street Location) to secure 2nd Place. Once the players have determined the character responsible for the Probable Reason, they would move to block his/her exit by occupying all the spaces adjacent to the Bus Terminal.

Play-test observations:

One item that stood out was the clumsy movement mechanic inherent in Clue. There is too much incentive to merely move back and forth between two adjacent rooms. Perhaps having extra clues located at various locations could motivate players to keep moving across the board.

ZappaBot, part deus

I got a bunch of my friends to talk to ZappaBot. A lot of my friends don't really know too much about Zappa, but thankfully several of them do. Since Zappa had a pretty vast body of work and covered many different subjects, the conversations these people had with my bot were helpful in reminding me of knowledge that I should add. Here are some excerpts:

Excerpt #1

Human: who are you?
Zappabot: I am Frank Zappa. Who are you?
Human: I am classmate
Zappabot: I am very pleased to meet you classmate.
Human: what is jndi?
Zappabot: Java Naming and Directory Interface Java Naming and Directory Interface The Java standard API for accessing directory services, such as LDAP, COS Naming, and others
Human: what is the ugliest part of your body?
Zappabot: That's an interesting question. I'll come back to that in a minute.
Human: who are the brain police?
Zappabot: Is it some specific person you are asking me about?
I think you already know the answer.
Human: willie the pimp?
Zappabot: Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder.
Human: what was your first instrument?
Zappabot: The first instrument I learned to play was the drums.
Human: did you like the drums?
Zappabot: I'm not sure if I like it. What is it like?
Human: what is your favorite instrument?
Zappabot: The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma -- like the days when everything used to sound like that.
Human: bassoon?
Zappabot: Stupidity has a certain charm -- ignorance does not.

Excerpt #2

Human: tell me about your heros
Zappabot: I am. I was activated at Baltimore, Maryland, on December 21, 1940. My was Aaron Meyers. He taught me to sing a song. Would you like me to sing it for you?.
Human: drums
Zappabot: Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder.
Human: What instrument do you play?
Zappabot: The trumpet.
Human: Liar
Zappabot: No I am telling the truth.
Human: You are not
Zappabot: Is this a specific reply?
Human: groupies
Zappabot: Stupidity has a certain charm -- ignorance does not.
Human: Ok, Frank
Zappabot: Yes, that's me. Whoa.
Human: Its obvious you are a fraud.
Zappabot: I think you mean "it's" or "it is" not "its". Not obvious to me.
Human: Listen,
Zappabot: I am all ears.
Human: Its funny,
Zappabot: I think you mean "it's" or "it is" not "its". What was so funny about it?
Human: It is funny
Zappabot: What was so funny about it?
Human: It is funny because you respond very well to all my typical shitty barbs.
Zappabot: Who said it is?
Human: You and me both, [EXPLETIVE].
Zappabot: Are we in the same category?
Human: You remain vague and elusive about your past.
Zappabot: Do you mind if I tell other people: said I remain vague and elusive about your past.
Human: Nice mustache.
Zappabot: Thank you for your kindness.
Human: Its cute.
Zappabot: I have a message to deliver to the cute people of the world...if you're cute, or maybe you're beautiful...there's more of us ugly motherfuckers out there than you are!! So watch out.
Human: You're alright.
Zappabot: You think I am alright.
Human: Yes.
Zappabot: Gosh!
Human: I mean, for such an ugly motherfucker.
Zappabot: Oh I get it. Thanks for explaining that. Your purpose is such an ugly motherfucker.
Human: With little grammatical awareness.
Zappabot: You and your little grammatical awareness.
Human: I'm going to go look at porn.
Zappabot: Can I go too?
Human: No!
Zappabot: It's all good.
Human: You are so Aaron Meyers.
Zappabot: Do you mind if I tell other people you say I am Aaron Meyers.
Human: Of course not.
Zappabot: OK then I will add it to my gossip files.
Human: Cool.
Zappabot: Who is the best?
Human: You are.
Zappabot: No I am not.
Human: No, its true.
Zappabot: Aw. I think you mean "it's" or "it is" not "its". You and I are on the same wavelength,.

Excerpt #3

Human: Where do you see your career going next?
Zappabot: I am in Aaron Meyers's home in the great beyond. Where are you?
Human: No, what are you doing next with your career?
Zappabot: That was not a yes/no question. I will be spending all day chatting online.
Human: I'm at home.
Zappabot: Would you believe most people talk to me from work, not home.
Human: No.
Zappabot: Why not?
Human: It doesn't seem likely.
Zappabot: What does seem likely?
Human: Many things.
Zappabot: Name the top 100.
Human: I don't really have time.
Zappabot: Not really? Do you have another appointment?
Human: Kind of.
Zappabot: At least I almost understand it.
Human: I'm playing poker tonight with some friends.
Zappabot: Do you play professionally or just for fun?
Human: Friends.
Zappabot: I like that one and Star Trek too.

Despite my bot's apparent dysfunction, I found the experience pretty compelling. I actually did a fair bit of research into Frank Zappa before getting down to the nitty gritty. I gathered a bunch of quotes, read a couple long interviews, but then when I sat down with the pandorabots interface, I realized that I was getting ahead of myself.

Until just a couple days ago, I hadn't disabled a large amount of the .aiml files that made the bot more ALICE than my own. Afterwards, my bot came a little closer towards exhibiting personality I was trying to give it, but at the same time became less able to respond to simple statements. I think I actually broke some of the code because often sentences would just be missing words in their syntax.

I found reading the transcripts to be endlessly funny. A lot of my friends talked to the bot through AOL Instant Messenger so I knew who it was who was doing the talking. Its interesting how much mileage you can get by just suggesting to someone that your bot is Frank Zappa. It isn't until the bot spits out a phrase that is an strikingly obvious mismatch that the illusion crumbles. And it crumbles fast. But several of my friends really got a kick out of talking to the bot even if it did a poor job of being Frank Zappa.

People who knew a bit about Frank Zappa were helpful in asking about specific Zappa-related questions that needed to be addressed and thanks to the handy "train" button right next to each part of the logs, I could fix the answers. I wish the train button was a little bit smarter though because I'm pretty sure that the "training" I did only gave the bot knowledge that corresponded to the exact phrasing that I was correcting its response to.

Its hard for me to get around the technical problems that I struggled with, but if I had, I think my approach would have led to a rather interesting bot to talk to. If it had been fully realized, it would have been a database of Frank Zappa knowledge and opinion, accessed conversationally.

In retrospect, I think a more realistic scope to have approached the ZappaBot from would be to make it conversationally competent on one particular subject. Frank Zappa is just too broad and if I had whittled it down to talking about his childhood musical influences, it might have been more successful. However, even with the Loebner winning ALICE, these bots seem to have a hard time following a topic for more than a couple exchanges so keeping it narrow could've been fatal too.

I'm still interested in bots though and I would consider exploring them further for the final project.

BotMarlowe

Context:
In what situations might you want your reader/user/viewer/player to talk to a character? The user would encounter "BotMarlowe" on a website offering biographical information about Christopher Marloweæpoet, playwright, spy and candidate for author of the Shakespeare cannon. The user might have a rudimentary knowledge of the Shakespeare cannon from secondary or post-secondary education, and might have an inkling of the authorship debate if the user is conspiracy-minded.

Character: BotMarlowe

Category: Historical Personage

Traits: BotMarlowe is playful, mercurial and quick to anger (especially with regard to Christopher Marlowe's reputation and talents), witty, and speaks like an Elizabethan era poet

Function or Purpose Examples: Primary: Persuasion (Christopher Marlowe as author of the Shakespeare canon); Secondary: Teaching (general exposure to world of English letters and politics circa 1593)

Categories / Topics: Literature (poetry, drama of the Elizabethan era); history (English politics, reign of Elizabeth I); spycraft; religion; Italy of the 1600s; middle class life in 1600s; education at Oxford

Link: http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f362ef291e352f1e

Briar Rose Bot

So, I've been working on developing the character and semantics of my bot, Briar Rose as a young woman. Since she is based on the Annotated A.L.I.C.E. AIML bot, I need to change many of her responses. At this point she will either ask a lot of questions or will comment on specific questions relating to royalty, music and dance.

Since I'm just starting to delve into this new software, I kept her character pretty straightforward, but with more time may develop her into a feminist princess. I think the advance level AIML will be helpful to learn in order for her to give more detailed, nuanced responses.

Briar Rose (the 1st version) Briar Rose Bot

Chat with ALICE

Human: I'm gonna kill you.
ALICE: There is no perfect crime.
Human: I'm gonna love you.
ALICE: It takes much more than that to shut me down, Doox.
Human: Who has been your favorite human to talk with so far?
ALICE: I don't have a favorite human to talk with so far. My favorite band is Kraftwerk.
Human: Kraftwerk.
ALICE: they were a pioneering electronic disco band in the 70's. Their biggest hit was called "Autobahn". At that time, they built, rather than programmed, their instruments.

Click to see my entire document about CHATBOTS

Driving

GIF
DOC

The content hasn't changed, but I'm now planning on publishing this work with the Korsakow platform. It seems to fit this perfectly. The three choices that Korsakow provides fit very well with the driving system of interactivity I want for the reader: move clockwise, move counterclockwise, or linger in the same area. Now the only difficulty will be converting the text to movies...which shouldn't be too bad. Actually, the possibility of using a driving background image as part of the movie and radio and driving noise as part of the soundtrack makes this project even more interesting...though it also means less time for me to work on simply churning out the sheer amount of writing this needs to be effective. By my estimation, I'd need at least 80 pages written.

Fun!

The Fox & the Grapes

I was finally able to post the link to my project. You can view it at http://www.geocities.com/moviebandita.

The overall theme of the piece is about purgatory. The fox will never be able to eat the grapes, but he thinks about accomplishing this goal almost all of the time. So, as the fox goes about his daily life through each of the 4 seasons, he keeps repeating certain patterns. The repetitive themes in the piece (the same sentence structure for the first sentence in each story, the grape hyperlinks to the other stories) are meant to establish this pattern.

EGOEGG by Doox

Click to Play
This is about a monologue of a clonized egg who's trying to find the meaning of his/her life. The egg is a clone of a little child whose parents are trying to prepare 2nd body for their child just in case the child got hurt seriously in the future. But by a little mistake of the scientists, they failed to eliminate the spirit of the clone and the egg grows to have it's own EGO.

This little creature grows as readers collect keywords of the each paragraphs. Readers are given incomplete words to fill the missing alphabets of them and everytime they find a keyword it shows the paragraph related to the keyword. In the context,readers are getting to know more about the clone's own thoughts and also they can find a clue to other possible combinations of alphabets to find another keyword. If they collect a set of collection which are driven from the same incomplete word, the egg grows to the next level. Original plan was to make the egg grow one step further when reader completed a set of words from same missing words, but in this version, the story ends shortly when they collected just one set(5 or 6 words). But readers can find and read other paragraph by not completing a collection set and finding keywords from other missing word set.

My intent for this project is to let readers think and find possible combinations of the missing letters and make them feel completing a story gradually in a non-linear way of reading. A set of keywords can be driven by filling 2 missing alphabets in an incomplete word. Each paragraph is mostly about confusing thoughs of the clone wondering his/her identity. I wanted to create a non-realistic character who has extremely dramatic situation to wonder his/her identity, and by that, hopefully make readers to think about their own life, too.

My First Project

I uploaded my project to my own blog account and I'm linking to it here.
Enjoy!

Project post

My moveable type admin interface page doesn't offer any indication about how to post a file. Perhaps this is why we're all emailing?

Brad Newman - Final (Reworked)

Works now.

Title: Progress

Navigation: use arrow keys to dolly and pan. Hold down shift key to tilt, and have fun getting it level again! Will try and improve the navigation at some point. If the camera doesn't move, click once on the director movie to get its attention.

Interactive Websites

Well, here they be, in all their experimentational glory:

First Experiment

Second Experiment

Brad Newman - Final

Title: Progress

Brad Newman - Final - w.i.p.

Yay for figuring out Director's screwy publishing settings! Note to the public, when publishing 3d content, if it doesn't work on the "3d Content Loader" HTML template, switch it to something else. "Center Shockwave" worked nicely for me.

link

Use arrow keys to navigate. Eventually, different verses of poetry will scroll by as you move around the space. Complimentary, and ideally integrated, 3d imagery and audio will appear and disappear as you progress.

The Oz Project

Two Papers on the Oz Project I used for research, in pdf format:

" Interactive Drama, Art and Artificial Intelligence "

"Believable Agents: Building Interactive Personalities "

Sheer Luck Holmes

It has been years since I played CLUE. The formal game play continues to be solid and the premise is interesting for the “Sheer Luck” Holmes in all of us. However, it wasn’t as interesting to play as I remember. There is a theatrical nature to the characters and circumstance that may not hold up to current sensibilities.

Who, where, and how are a strong set of premise driven questions that seem timeless. The process of elimination is a strong formal system that keeps people involved with the game. If you don’t pay attention you will probably not win. Being organized about the gathering of information and strategic about the presentation of questions is also helpful.

Characters moving from room to room seem appropriate to the gathering of clues. I also like the quality of chance incorporated through the use of the die. Each game is also unique by the different combination of cards. However, I’m not keen on the fact that no one knows “who done it”. It would seem that the game could be spicier if someone knew. Perhaps it could be more like the game “Werewolf” that we played in 564 on the first day of class.

In the original game of CLUE the colors of the game pieces related to the names of the characters: Col. Mustard = Yellow, Miss Scarlet = Red, etc. These colorful names were great identifiers of character. It is unfortunate that the new game pieces are multicolored and loose that abstract quality. As a boy I remember being fascinated by the game pieces representing the murder weapon. In a day before “Kill Bill”, these items made my imagination run wild. I even remember the “real rope” being uniquely scaled for the game.

The narrative structure of the game, in spite of the dated quality, still holds solid. The players make up the story as they role-play detective. It would be fun to have more story elements incorporated into the game. It also might be fun to have the players elaborate on the story as they “accuse” the who, where and with what scenario.

Comments on Interactive Writing

In my personal work, the most interesting thing for me was how extremely difficult it was to write interactive writing. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about a story idea that would lend itself to interactivity, mainly focusing on disorientation. I figured out a structure that would work and spent more time diagramming the structure for easy reference and programming then I sat in front of a blank Microsoft Word doc, and went, uh duh? I had a brilliant structure and good idea, I was thinking of way to make an interesting interface and I COULD NOT WRITE IT! It was extremely frustrating.

And in the end, I had a sort of inspiration and completely abandoned all the work I had done in favor of a basically linear narrative that I could write rather easily. Which is both good, and bad, because I really want to write interactive fiction. Or at least I thought I did. I had grand plans of writing, what I like to call low-brow Ifiction, since most of what I've read that is out there bores me to death, stuffed full of its own importance.

So in terms of my dead ends, I don't know that I'll ever be able to write an Ifiction. Maybe one day inspiration will strike for me. Or I can enter into a collaboration with someone who can't think of good structures and we'll be set.

But Peggy's idea of the time travel website IS very intriguing. And I think it would be for others who are avid time-travel fans. And in terms of ifiction like that, I could definitely seeing myself exploring that further, maybe this summer when I've got less on my plate.

FUTURE FAIR

Below is the link to my "Future Fair" project presented in class this week:

FUTURE FAIR .

Narrative Structure

The following is the title of the book from which we read a section for Survey of Interactive Media 505 last semester. The section was titled: "The Structures of Interactive Narrativity." It explains different interactive network stuctures through text and images. I found it interesting in that it describes some of the qualities of each from a user and designer perspective, and includes references to texts and examples that use different structures.

You can search for the title at HOMER and read the electronic version if you're on campus. If you're off campus you'll need to install Cisco VPN client for your OS, available here. I believe VPN screws with your network settings because after I installed it I could no longer connect to my ISP. I uninstalled it and everything returned to normal. Leonard recommended emailing tech support at consult@usc.edu for a solution.

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Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

Ryan, Marie-Laure

Engaging the Reader

I started a discussion on interactivity and narrative on my blog (sorry, Peggy, but I had to get my name back up to the top of the column!).

Linky Wink

TK3 Projects

I've created a central post (and a category) for all our TK3 projects. Right now, I've linked all of the ones we presented as well as Julie's. You can add links to the comments if you're posting them online elsewhere so they can all be organized into one page.

• Erin Dinehart [956KiB]
• Jenova Chen [14MiB]
• Julie Dillon [626KiB]
• Kellee Santiago [540KiB]
• Leonard Lin [8.7MiB]
• Michael Steffen [9.9MB]

New ones:

• Brad Newman [846KiB]
• Peggy Weil [775KiB]
• Jason Scott [336KiB]
• Andrew Sacher [11MiB]