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.