Some Free Association

Despite having intended to post frequently, I've been lazy and so must scold myself for delaying this entry for the past three weeks. For the most part though I feel like I remember everything that was on my mind, so I'll start from the beginning:

After realizing the difficulties of modeling a system in which to implement a proper storyworld, I decided to take a walk and think about my artistic goals for this project. In the end, the system should be supporting the interaction with the user, and thus I'll need a good idea of what that is on the surface, to an extent. As I took my walk, I decided to really look and listen, see what kind of sights and sounds came to me that I never noticed before. Even only a couple of blocks away from my house, I felt that I noticed things that I hadn't before, a great deal of hidden private housing blocks, cellars, alleyways; viewpoints that really gave new perspective to a place I've lived in my entire life. It was moving to see that how a slight change in perspective could bring out the ominous qualities I've been seeking in a game about introspection.

I felt myself brought to another idea of how this game all works out, that what defines how images are connected will not be spatial continuity but associations. Because of this thought, I wondered to myself whether this would best be abstracted more or less into a type of poetry. Yes, it could be verbal poetry, but more likely than not I'm thinking that this, much like a highly abstract film, would be a piece of visual poetry; in that the images carry across ideas and emotions rather than a representation of something physically or mathematically continuous. This game may be prototyped with verbal poetry, but in the end, I feel that one thing I want to get across is the fluidity of imagery. It's all vague now, but the image in my head to demonstrate this is being in a room, able to travel to another place altogether simply by looking into a picture on a wall or an album of photos, perhaps everything changes if there's a piano in the room and you play songs on it. Everything sort of has its own power as a memory, and is capable of affecting things significantly, perhaps.

This helps me answer an earlier question, "how would one go about creating a narrative?" I am nowhere near answering any of these questions solidly, but a start may be that as the user explores and plays with the storyworld, the storyworld in response changes, and thus do the answers that lie inside of it as well. A few inspirations have brought about this idea of gameplay. For starters, this falls somewhere in the vein of the idea that when we change something, it will be different, and therefore will give us a different experience that changes us differently than it would have otherwise. This is the sort of feedback cycle that governs this idea of the gameplay, that as we're searching for truth in the storyworld, the very truth in the storyworld changes.

In thinking about things this way, the programming language LISP (otherwise known as Scheme) serves as an appropriate model. LISP is fluid in that a value is simply a value, whether that value is from a function, a variable, or a constant, and so just about anything can be built, as well as easily modified in most cases. Using a language similar to this may be the answer to forming the core of the storyworld, with variables as particular "images", and functions as the various processes that connect/modify/etc them. I will admit that this is far fetched, and that I am too tired to really verify if this makes sense as a scheme, but if it does work, then it would mean that the core of the storyworld could be implemented as a system of procedures and variables. Everything that is outside of the core, specific, and part of the user's interaction could be defined as triggers for particular procedures in the core. The core's bank of variables could be evaluated if needed, or perhaps only at the end, in affecting the outcome of the game's runthrough.

An important step to this of course would be to brush up on my knowledge of LISP and its abstractions. Despite having taken a course on it as of last semester, I failed to see the benefit of grabbing onto the heavily theoretical, and it seems I'm now paying a price. That aside, it will take a great deal of discipline to go somewhere beyond the vague notions of "visual poetry" and procedural storyworlds, but I feel that I've gained something of value by knowing that rather than the player "scavenging" anything, that it will be a world that the player truly interacts with, in that as he plays with the world, the world will play with him; only fitting for a game purely about the self. This allows for a much more free-form style of play, not confined to a series of puzzles to say the least; but that's for another time.

Abstract for "In Memory" (continued)

In the last post I gave a simple abstract and talked about two important problems to be dealt with regarding it; how narrative can be represented, and how the world should be manipulated. These problems should be seen naturally as something interconnected. We could view them as concentric circles, with the concept in the center, representation of narrative in the middle, and means of interaction as the periphery, but this runs into many problems, most notably that it marginalizes the importance of interactivity and the user alike.
More importantly, I would say that these are ill-defined. How the narrative is represented is very closely tied to the processes by which it is re-defined by the user. In turn, to create the right kind of representation will take some idea of what the player might be doing when exploring the world. Therefore, I imagine that it will require carefully looking at both at the same time, oftentimes going back and forth in altering the two problems. With that in mind, I will now address the issues:

Representing the Storyworld & Narrative

This is a heavy task in many more ways than one. Interactive storytelling has been written about a great many times, and very few of these books offer more than wish lists and general gobbledygook. Even these few have had a lot of trouble getting very much off the ground at all, meaning that any kind of a fully-equipped storytelling engine is not an option. However, there most likely is no need for an engine of this complexity. Instead of explaining this, I'd like to for now leave it at the fact that we are working only with images and how narrative is constructed with them. The concept may grow, but it's safe to start here and see what kind of system emerges, therefore I will start with the most basic solutions and go outward:

The most simple solution that comes to mind is one based purely on connections between images. If we imagine images as neurons or modules of neurons, depending on how precise or approximate we want to be, then all information and function is based on the connections between parts (this is admittedly presumptuous, so any neurologists out there, feel free to bash me). Similarly, what if we defined a storyline as an ordering of some selection of images. For those familiar with graph theory, the graph S would be the storyworld, the vertex-set I would be the total collection of images stored in the storyworld, and the edge-set N would represent the narrative created by the player. This is obviously an inadequate model, but it's a good place to start from, and thus I'll further elaborate before continuing.
How would the player interact in order to create this set? Already, there's a question of how the user's interactions are related to the data structure chosen. What images would be appropriate for a player to explore through, which ones could he collect to make a narrative out of? Perhaps there is a space he walks through with memories picked up as items. But then again, how does he put them in order? Is it simply in the order he picks them up, or does he determine the order even after he's picked them up?
Furthermore, how would this series of images be interpreted? Without any context, it's nothing more than a slide-show. How would context be taken into account? Using a ton of if-then statements regarding specific contexts so that no matter what order its in it would make sense would be a nightmare. Even a storyline of 10 images would mean a total of 10! (10 factorial) different total permutations to take into account. For the less mathematically inclined reader, that's 3628800 different ways 10 images could be ordered into a story. There may be some way to simplify the patterns, but nothing obvious. The idea that connections between images is the key is arguable, but for the time being, this over-simplified version of it should be snuffed.

Seeing how many questions about the user's interaction the previous proposal for a model made, it would probably be a good idea to take a detour and think a little bit about what the point of the user's interactions are. I won't name anything too specific, because in the end, what the player "does" in a layman's sense is an interface that should reflect the inner processes of the game. However, on a deeper level, it would be wise to look at how the player functionally interacts with the system.
The first question that comes to mind is "what is the player trying to accomplish?" Clearly, the player is not trying to just construct a narrative out of thin air. Well, if the player is jettisoned into a world with no precedent, and that world is the world of the protagonist's mind, then the player's goal is to re-establish a sense of self. To get that out of the way is both a load off of my shoulders and a doorway to a myriad of different possibilities for gameplay.
The next logical step would be to explore the possibilities for how the player could interact with this world to create a "self". From there, we can agree upon what units this can be measured in, and in turn once again look at possibilities for modeling the system. The problem is surprising me with how interconnected everything is, and I'm finding my brain somewhat tangled. Excuse me for a somewhat abrupt and vague ending, I'll return to writing after a little bit of time sleeping on it.