Booth’s seminal work looks at fiction as rhetorically oriented. That is, that it serves to persuade, to make a point. In the preface, he cautions the reader that he is not interested in didactic fiction, which is explicitly intended to be rhetorical, but rather ordinary and conventional fiction. The bulk of what is discussed are novels, although many of his arguments can be extended beyond the form of the novel alone. Booth is aware, seemingly painfully so, of the arbitrary isolation of technique from the dynamic of authors and readers. That is, Booth isolates technique as the intentional and motivated product of the author, something which is in contrast to someone like Barthes, who challenges the primacy of the author’s intent. This analysis of technique is cautiously done, not posing the author’s voice and ideas as absolute, but the careful hand that guides the intercourse between the author and the reader.

Telling and Showing

The substance of this chapter is the role of telling and showing within authorship. Early narratives speak in an authoritative and absolute voice, leaving little room fo the questions or doubts of the reader. One can see this absolutism in biblical narratives, as well as in classical epics, such as Homer’s Odessey. These works convey as absolute fact, without perspective the events described. Internal views are given revealing information unknowable even about one’s closest friends. These views are presented factually and not as the products of any one person or character’s perceptions, simply as facts. Modern narratives tend to offer internal perspectives. This is regarded in theory, clumsily, as the difference between telling and showing. Showing requires a perspective, and transfers the burden of judgement from the author to the reader. It is the role of the reader to interpret and judge the characters and events as they are seen, rather than being told how to feel. However, even in this view, the author’s role is significant in terms of what to tell, in what depth and what light to tell it. Just as the cinematic lens is neither neutral nor objective, the author’s showing of a narrative does not make it impartial. The line between showing and telling is arbitrary, as the author always imposes some sort of perspective.

General Rules, I: “True Novels Must Be Realistic”

Booth discusses realism, and the tendency of criticism of fiction to establish a dogmatic order of genres. This dogma imposes hard boundaries and requirements and constraints between what may be permitted to be classified as what. What is a novel? What is a romance? A book may fail as a novel but succeed as a romance, and so on. These boundaries form a system of “great traditions” that define the criteria and lineage of the literary genres and forms. “The novel began, we are told, with Cervantes, with Defoe, with Fielding, with Richardson, with Jane Austen–or was it with Homer? It was killed by Joyce, by Proust, by the rise of symbolism, by the loss of respect for–or was it the excessive absorption with?–hard facts. No, no, it still lives, but only in the work of…. Thus, on and on.” (p. 36) Such dogmas are hostile to pluralistic (as per Frye) and general systems of genres; they are about authorizing works, and giving them legitimacy.

There are three general categories of judging fiction, in traditional criticism. The work itself: the arbitrary imposition of standards which range from “realism” to “purity.” The author: who must be either objective and detached, or present and engaged. The reader: Who may be either detached or immersed, passive or critical. These are discussed in this and the following two chapters.

The realist agenda of conveying the fictional world in excessive and weighty detail eventually becomes taken to an extreme with Sartre, who suggests that not only should the author be objective and impartial, but should seem not to even exist. Otherwise, the fictional characters will seem to be puppets, and by denying the author’s role and existence, the characters are given some form of independence from the control of the author. This view is essentially simulationist, but Booth points out that the characters are really not free from the author’s influence. I would go so far as to say that the independence is illusory, and that the author’s simulation is still explicitly composed. Instead of writing the plots of the characters, the author writes the rules of the simulation. The influence is still present, but it is less visible and covert.

The modern novel (in Booth’s timeline, the novel of the mid 20th century) is a system of simulation, where the story tells itself free of intrusion. But this neutrality and objectivity is still false, as the author still takes on the role of determining what is dramatized versus curtailed. Booth explains that this practice is the art of authorship, and his interest is in the criticism and judgement of the author’s skill in this practice.

General Rules, II: “All Authors Should Be Objective”

This section addresses the idealized objectivity of the author. Objectivity is treated not as in inevitable consequence, or as a natural thing, but rather as an aesthetic, a goal to which one should strive. The goal in this program is impartiality, an emphasis on fairness, but this is arbitrary and necessarily absurd. Why do novels need to be fair? Authors inevitably take sides. Subjectivism at its extreme can ruin a novel, though. Booth draws a distinction between the author and the implied author, who is not the same as the literal one, but becomes the voice of the narration in the text. It is the implied author who the reader hears, and whose opinions and judgments are read. The author may speak through the implied author, but Booth emphasizes a separation between these. After all, the implied author’s stated opinions may be the opposite of the author’s, the contrast used for ironic commentary. The implied author may be seen in an interactive medium as made up as the rules that underly the world, which is what directly conveys or denotes how things work and occur. These rules may not be how the real author literally imagines the world to work, but is the perspective of mechanics through which the user engages with the world. Booth sees the subjectivity of the implied author as the stuff of real fiction: “The emotions and judgments of the implied author are, as I hope to show, the very stuff out of which great fiction is made.” (p. 86)

General Rules, III: “True Art Ignores the Audience”

Classical criticism puts the novel as a “pure art,” that is, one which ignores the audience. Booth criticises both the feasibility and the desirability of such an agenda. The idea of the work as neutral and self-sufficient, not requiring the support or interest of readers to stand on its own, is a half-truth if not an outright falsehood. Actual authorship must involve acknowledement of both the author and the reader. Aristotle makes the argument that drama should use as little rhetoric as possible, but the dimension of authorial communication is to reproduce in the reader some intended reception or understanding of an event or scene, but this is not possible without some use of rhetoric.

General Rules, IV: Emotions, Beliefs, and the reader’s Objectivity

If the novel is to be seen as non-rhetorical, then the reader must have some distance from it, but, on examination, distance is a difficult and problematic concept. Literary interest and distance can be distinguished into several kinds: (1) Intellectual or cognitive, where the reader is intellectually curious about the facts or true interpretation of a scene. (2) Qualitative, Where the reader is interested in seeing a pattern or development completed. (3) Practical, where the reader desires success for loved characters, punishment for disliked ones, as well as hope and fear. This last category is the most human, while the rest seem somewhat more artificial. There is a such thing as intellectual interest, or a desire for completion of qualities, where there is a genuine desire for knowledge or wholeness, which is something of the completion of an aesthetic arc. The pleasure of the satisfaction of qualities is akin to the resolution of a model, or a completion of a puzzle, where everything falls into place.

Booth gives four examples of qualities that can be completed: Cause and effect, where the reader wishes to see the effect of a cause, to see the impact of some sort of perturbation of a norm. Conventional expectations, where the reader knows how a thing will end, but wishes to see it performed and enacted out. Abstract forms, such as balance and symmetry, where the reader takes pleasure in the formal events of the narrative. “Promised” qualities, which are things such as irony, profundity, and so on.

Fulfillment in fiction depends on desires and expectations. There are realistic portrayals and melodramatic ones, the real issue is what the reader cares about. “There is a pleasure from learning the simple truth, and there is a pleasure from learning that the truth is not simple. Both are legitimate sources of literary effect, but they cannot both be realized to the full simultaneously.” (p. 136) authorship is thus a determination of what to include or exclude, and what to simplify, much like the process of building a model.

The communication between the author and the reader is about establishing a common ground, and developing a consistent model. Shakespeare’s world or model, for instance, relies on several core assumptions: “Shakespeare requires us to believe that it is right to honor our fathers, and that is wrong to kill off old men like Lear or grind out the eyes of men like Gloucester. He insists that it is always wrong to use other people as instruments to one’s own ends, wheter by murder or slander, that it is good to love, but wrong to love selfishly, that helpish old age is pitiable, and that blind egotism deserves punishment.” (p. 141) Models are not uniform, and rejection of some elements will cause one to be frustrated in a work. “Bennett asks us, in short, to accept Sophia as a good though foolish person, and Gerald as a bad and foolish one. If we approve of Gerald’s behavior in spite of Bennett’s efforts, if we detest self-pitying, ignorant young girls, or if, to move in the other direction, we refuse to pity an unmarried young woman who gives a “burning response” to “ardent” kissing in a hotel room, we can hardly react as Bennett intends.” (p. 146) Thus, to convey a message, the athor and reader must have some shared beliefs or assumptions.

Types of Narration

There are many modes of narration, but there are listed five forms of discourse effected by those modes. These forms of distance establish a relationship between the narrator, implied author, characters, and the reader. These elicit different kinds of familiarity, alienation, and endorsement by the logic of who is associated with or distant to whom.

1. The narrator may be more or less distant from the implied author, and this distance may be moral, intellectual, or temporal.
2. The narrator may be more or less distant from the characters. The narrator may differ intellectually, morally, temporally, from them and their norms.
3. The narrator may be more or less distant from the reader and the reader’s norms. This distance may be physical, emotional, moral.
4. The implied author may be more or less distant from the reader, a distance which may be intellectual, moral, or aesthetic. A book that expects the reader to accept and share these values is likely to not be well received by its audience.
5. The implied author (carrying the reader along) may be more or less distant from the other characters. Distances can also be seen to fluctuate, where a character might alternate between sympathetic and unsympathetic.

Distance in Emma

Booth discusses Jane Austen’s Emma as an important and striking example of how rhetoric is used to guide the reader’s interpretation of the character of Emma. My notes are not comprehensive, but summarise a few important notes. Emma is a challenging work because of the issue of sympathy. Her character in most cases is unsympathetic and her flaws are frustrating. To create sympathy for readers, Austen reveals Emma’s penitence after each breach of irresponsible behavior. The character of Jane Fairfax is given as a much more sympathetic and heroic character, which is interesting because there is a fictional continuation that tells the story of Emma from Jane’s point of view. In Emma, there is a conflict between drama and irony. Drama requires a showy and sudden dispersal of mystery at a climax. Ironic drama requires revealing the mystery earlier, so that the character’s discovery of the error and misreadings are all the more pleasing.

The Morality of Impersonal Narration

Booth concludes by discussing the important question of why write at all. This is especially significant in the study of adaptation. “The ultimate problem in the rhetoric of fiction is, then, that of deciding for whom the author should write. We saw earlier that to answer, “He writes for himself,” makes sense only if we assume that the self he writes for is a kind of public self, subject to the limitations that other men are subject to when they come to his books. Another answer often given is that the writes for his peers.” (p. 396) The peers are therefore the audience of readers who are liable to share the author’s underlying assumptions about the world, and are liable to be persuaded by the arguments elicited by the fiction. However, the readers do not simply come into being as peers, but they generally become peers by virtue of reading. The author makes the readers, creates his peers by crafting a work which the readers have never seen before.

The Definition of Play

Caillois opens immediately in reference to Huizinga, that Huizinga’s concept of play is enormously influential and important, but also lacking. Huizinga’s work Homo Ludens was important in two respects: it sought to develop an exact definition of play, and it also attempted to establish the role of play as essential within culture. This aim is laudable, especially in the sense of legitimizing play and establishing it as a cultural foundation. However, Huizinga’s definition is both too broad and too narrow. The definition is too narrow because it focused entirely on competitive games, and conspicuously neglected other forms of play, most notably games of chance. Secondly, the definition is too broad because it describes the secret and mysterious as being in a sense equivalent to play practice.

Caillois gives a set of bullets that define the formal qualities of play. He gives an emphasis to rules in all kinds of play, and acknowledges that while playing with dolls and other forms of unstructured play do not have formal rules, they are still governed by a make-believe “as if”. This “as if” function replaces and is equivalent to the function of formal rules in other forms of play. I think that this is arguably a kind of simulative logic, that the rules of make-believe are the rules that govern the make-believe world. In childrens’ play, these are often very flexible and ephemeral, changing rapidly, but they do define a kind of boundary condition. At this point it is also important to make a note of the language, that the French word for play has the same root as the word for game, and they are not as readily distinguished as they are in English. What follow are Caillois’ formal qualities of play: (p. 9-10)

1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion;
2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance;
3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative;
4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, ecept for the exchange of property among the player, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game;
5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts;
6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.

The Classification of Games

The bulk of what I am interested in here are the rubrics of play given by Caillois. His classification divides play into four main categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). Alongside these categories is an axis denoted by the directions of ludus and paidia. Roughly, in Caillois’ terminology, ludus means an emphasis on rules, while paidia is an emphasis on playfulness, although there is a little bit more to it than that. All of these cross between the play and games of adults and children, as well as between physical and mental forms. The four categories are not meant as exclusive and inseparable, in fact, Caillois gives examples of many types of hybrids between the categories. They are well thought of as elemental, they are not components, but they dimensions of any given game or form of play.

Agon is the competitive nature of play, and it is the form to which Huizinga gave the most attention. Agon depends on competition and oposition, so races, chess games, fencing, and any televised sport easily falls under this category. The point of agon is to have one’s superiority recognized, and this superiority maintains a culturally endowed significance outside of the space of the game. In physical conflicts, violence or harm is not the object, but simply superiority. Games of agon frequently require training and investment, to learn and master the rules, and master one’s own power within the game.

Alea is the element of chance, and in these games, it is destiny that governs the outcome. In games of alea, the player is passive, at least in terms of affecting the outcome. Partaking in games of alea is a sign of courage, as one invests and risks, and then waits anxiously for the outcome. The player in games of alea thus has none of the professionalism of the player of agon. The most prevalent forms of alea are games like roulette or lotteries. Card games where the player plays cards are a combination of alea and agon, because elements of competition and chance are predominant. Caillois explains “Agon is a vindication of personal responsibility; alea is a negation of the will, a surrener to destiny.” (p. 18)

Mimicry is about developing and participating in an imaginary universe. Both agon and alea enable a world where the rules of the game are sacred, within which the game is self contained. Mimicry is about becoming another, to participate within this illusory world. Mimicry is about becoming another character and behaving as that character, temporarily shedding one’s actual identity. Mimicry is found in animal behavior, but in animals (especially in insects), the alternate character is integrated into the body, is essentially a mask that presents the creature as something that it is not. Human mimicry is found in ritual and performance, as well as in make-believe. The simulated nature of make believe is the essence of spectacle, and lives on in the eyes of the witnesses in addition to the players. Agon is inherently spectacular (as to prove one’s superiority, there must be witnesses to acknowledge it), and thus players of agon become celebrities. Sports stars maintain a role as-player even outside of the game when dealing with fans. Mimicry exhibits all the formal characteristics of play except for the element of rules. It can be seen to have rules, but these are the rules of performance, which requires maintenance and cooperation of the imaginary world.

Ilinx is a topic described by Caillois that does not tend to have nearly as much attention as his other categories. This is the element of vertigo, and the pursuit of vertigo. Sports of pleasure, where the goal is the bodily experience, are derived from Ilinx. The kinds of examples given by Caillois are games of spinning, voladores, and are associated with vertigo, panic, and hypnosis. I think that this category could easily be seen to include skiing, bungee jupmping, skydiving, driving cars very fast, sex, rollercoaster rides, drug use, mountaineering, dancing, and so on. The pursuit of vertigo from a lucid state is extremely common. Unlike mimicry, where the goal is to don a mask and participate in an imaginary world, the goal of ilinx is to touch a trans-sensual world at the limits of human perception through a visceral and bodily experience. Ilinx and alea are common in that they involve a submission of oneself to forces outside of one’s control. Gamblers often describe their experiences as being totally intoxicating. This can also be seen as a common thread with mimicry, where, having donned a mask, one submits oneself to that masks power (as described by Johnstone). Ilinx can be easily compared to the joy of immersion, where the goal is a sensually captivating experience of being in a world, often being lost within it.

Paidia is defined with some reservation and difficulty. Paidia corresponds to the basic level of freedom within play. Rules and freedom have an antithetical relationship, because play is dependent on rules, but simultaneously is about freedom from rules. Paidia is that dimension of freedom. It is tied integrally to the feeling of pleasure and joy. Pidia is spontaneous and wrapped up in the experience of sensation and response. Developmentally, childrens’ play is paidia (as the word paidia itself implies), but gradually it moves to take on rules, to structure the experience of play, and in doing so play bifurcates from a single activity into the many forms of agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx.

Ludus works very differently. As defined, it is a desire to find amusement in arbitrary obstacles. This is a definition that leads to the sense of what games are, but the definition alone does not imply it immediately. The existence of the obstacle is what is intrinsic to ludus. The intensity of ludus defines the significance and importance of the obstacle, which leads to more structure. Caillois stresses that agon and ludus are not the same thing, though they may have correlation. There are two things that must be stressed about ludus. The first is that it is wrapped up in the idea of amusement. The amusement in overcoming the obstacle is integral. The imposition of an obstacle is not enough to make ludus; there must be pleasure as well. The second thing is that the obstacle is arbitrary. This arbitrariness becomes surprising sometimes when the absurdities of some games are brought to attention, for instance the restrictions on what parts of the body can used to touch the ball in ball games, or the role of the costume in theatre, or the significance of the roulette wheel in gambling. Ludus is how importance and meaning is endowed onto the space of objects within the magic circle and the world of the game.

Linda Hutcheon looks at an adaptation as a work that borrows or references another work while drawing attention to its influence. She sees adaptations as separate from sequels, in that the desire is different. A sequel or prequel or a fanfiction is a desire to continue the world and not let it end. I must disagree on this point. Mainstream games are works that tend to be either sequels or adaptations of films. There is additionally another phenomenon that is more frequent given the technological development in games, and that is the remake. A remake is less a sequel than an adaptation, but within the same medium and context, sometimes with more bells and whistles and so on. I think that all of these, remakes, adaptations, and sequels, are instances of the same phenomenon of continuing a text. This is Gideon Toury’s notion of breathing life into the text. (Although, admittedly, in this age the lives of games are increasingly short.)

Very frequently with game sequels, a plot may be developed and continued (as per literary sequels), but the essence of the game, the mechanics, are adapted. They are adapted to new content, they are adapted to new systems, platforms, and technologies, and they are adapted to new interface conventions. The “text” of the gameplay rules and mechanics is clearly an adaptation and not a sequel. Several interesting phenomena occur in game adaptations, especially in connection to the corpus of game-related films. I say game-related because there are a large body of films that have been adapted into games, and also a large body of films that have been adapted from games. Frequently the members of this latter category are deplored by critics and fans alike, but they take on interesting functions in terms of continuing the world.

A good example is the Silent Hill series published by Konami. Silent Hill is now officially in its fifth installment, but there has also been a PSP game, a comic book, and a film. The nature of the games is that they are not sequels that follow the same characters, but instead present different characters experiences in the nightmarish world of Silent Hill, and giving different perspectives on the same mythology. Both the film and the comic reinvent the mythology itself. They adapt and change not only the plot (which is not surprising, given the diversity of plots of the games), but also the underlying themes of the world. What is most fascinating though, is how the film (which was released after the fourth installment of the game) became a clear influence on the fifth, borrowing at least a couple of visual effects and devices that were used in the film. What is suggested by this is all of the works have something in common that is beyond the mythology alone, and this is an ur-mythology that conceptually links them together.

In addition to game and film adaptations, there are adaptations between game media. Some of the most common games that appear on every new computer that is bundled with Microsoft Windows, as well as on many handheld devices are games of solitaire. In this age of transmediation and media convergence, games appear on many different channels. For instance, World of Warcraft now has its own collectible card game and tabletop roleplaying game. It is also important to remember that Wolrd of Warcraft is a continuation of the original Warcraft franchise, so the mechanics have been adapted from real time strategy, to real time massively multiplayer, to turn based card game, to tabletop roleplaying. Common among these is not only themes and conventions, but also a particular reverence for the canon, the story of the world.

Game adaptations are not alone in their focus on canon. The hit TV series Lost, which is now in its 5th season (again, a work that has been heavily continued), has many sources that are interested in cataloging the canon of the show, and hypothesizing resolutions to the many mysteries that it presents. In addition to the television content, Lost has an alternate reality game that has created web sites for many of the fictional entities in the show, as well as Twitter feeds for the characters. Additionally, there is a video game released for the franchise, called “Lost: Via Domus”, that puts the player in the world, alongside the other characters, in effort to solve more of the mysteries independently. This game is very significant because it introduces a very different approach to the watcher/player’s engagement with the world of Lost. Interestingly, the game itself has been labeled by the authorities- the producers- as non-canon. The player-immersive experience, is thus an element excluded from what is given as the factual history of the show. More interestingly, the experience of playing a game, controlling an avatar thorugh a world, is an immersive experience. The type of experience given by the show, and its many media channels, is very different, this is an epistemophilic experience, not an immersive one. The epistemophilic experience is about learning the complete story about the world, as an external observer. The immersive experience is about being in the world, and learning about the world from within. All games tend to have a bit of both, and cultures around games will nurture both perspectives, but they are very different pleasures. I have not yet played Via Domus, but (being a glutton for punishment) I intend to, to see what it is about.

All of these give many different accounts of the adaptations of games, and the interaction between games and their surrounding contexts. I think that game sequels and the adaptations between the forms of games and between games and other media are different ways of continuing the world, either in terms of immersion or in terms of being able to comprehensively know and witness it. There is clearly not one way to make an adaptation, and certainly not one way to judge one. Of particular interest is the reverence, not for plot, but for canon. However, the space of games is fundamentally about interactivity, and in a sophisticated interactive world, cannon must be broken. Games thus exist at an uneasy junction between fixed factuality andinteractive freedom.

Right now I am working on a prototype of a conversation game. Basically, since my adaptation project is focused on a literary world where there is so much dialogue, it is important to look at possible dialogue mechanics right away. I have some ideas as to how the mechanics should work, and the point of this exercise is to test it and see if 1) it makes sense, and 2) if it is fun to play.

The system as it stands allows characters to perform “discourse actions” which are simple spoken acts. Discourse actions have parameters as well, so a discourse action is essentially what one says, and the parameters are how one says it. Discourse actions can leave expectations, so the speaker makes an inquiry, then the listener is expected to respond and give some sort of answer. Expectations can be satisfied in a variety of ways, some ways are more conventional than others. The key differentiation in how they are satisfied is the level of awkwardness. So, disagreement is always a little awkward, but pausing or gossiping in attempt to change the topic of conversation is much more awkward, and usually considered rude.

This is what I have now, the next steps are going to be figuring out how to encode the conversation state, and how the different discourse actions and their parameters affect it. Then it will be a matter of figuring out how to execute goals and create conflicting goals in characters.

However, over the course of working on this, I discovered something interesting. Most conversation has a straightforward pattern and expectations are largely followed through. Most of the characters will do this, but not always. Occasionally characters will instead repeatedly not say what is expected of them, or rearrange or divert or misdirect the conversation. This is particularly noticable in the case of the in-dance conversation that Elizabeth and Darcy have in the Netherfield ball scene in Pride and Prejudice. There seems to the the root of a general game mechanic in this. There are two types of conversation, mundane conversation and intelligent conversation. Mundane is a “safe bet” but is unlikely to get one very far. Intelligent conversation is much more potentially rewarding, but is much more risky. A character can be good or bad (at least in terms of producing their desired effects) through the different kinds of conversation. Well executed intelligent conversation raises one’s status (which becomes a currency), but failures lead to embarrassment and status loss.

• Elizabeth and Darcy both use intelligent conversation and are good at it.
• Bingley, Jane, the Gardeniers, and others tend to be mundane, and are good at it.
• Mr. Collins is mundane and bad at it.
• Caroline Bingley uses intelligent conversation, but is bad at it (or at least, is not as good as others).

Bal’s goal is not to develop an entirely new narratology, but to introduce it generally. Bal wishes to do this without adhering to a specific existing theory developed by an author (Genette, Chatman, etc) or a school of thought (such as structuralism, deconstruction, or what have you). However, in order to do this, she must develop a new theory as a consequence, one that introduces terms on a general level. The review here gives three elements to narratives: text, story, and fabula (which others refer to as sjuzet or discourse). The contents of the fabula are events, which are organized and structured by elements: actors, time, location, and so on. The story itself is formed by its aspects, which are points of view, sequence, traits of actors and such. The text itself is dependent on the medium. In contrast to a number of other narratologists, Bal emphasizes the role of characters, which is what I shall focus on in my analysis of her book.

Story: Aspects (From Actors to Characters)

Bal discusses character and actor as aspects of a story, and in doing so makes an argument against the confusion of a character with a person. Specifically, she introduces the question “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” in order to critique it as impertinent. That particular question was discussed and criticized by L.C. Knights, and was later defended by Chatman. The argument is that the story character is not a person, and thus has no meaning, and no significance outside the context of the story. Bal gives the example of Proust’s Albertine, who appears as the object of Marcel’s love, has no depth beyond what is necessary to motivate the topics of jealousy and love, and when those topics have been satisfied she dies in an unlikely accident. Bal defends this depiction as instrumentally sufficient. Expecting Albertine to be a “real girl” makes the character frustrating, “irritating and antipathetic”, and also portrays Marcel as a selfish monster. These criticisms are disparaged, as essentially missing the point of what characters are and are there for. In Bal’s view, the character is only an image.

The section is introduced with the truism that narratives are “written by, for, and about people”. Characters resemble people, but are not people, as they have no life outside the page. However, it does not make sense to deny the reader’s interpretation of a character as a person. Bal compares this activity to the myth of Narcissus, falling in love with an image that lacked a body. The willingness to make a character into a person is a kind of “naive realism” on the part of the reader. But if narratives are for people, and readers are interested in people, why should anyone disregard or deny the reader’s desire to imagine personhood in a character? This fascination and desire is pervasive, far more than in the circles of literary critics. How can narratologists make the argument to readers everywhere that the essentially human activity of imagination and anthropomorphization is wrong? The warning is presented more as a fable that if readers (or literary critics) are to imagine personhood in characters then something awful is bound to befall them, as per Narcissus. But I do not see this is as an intrinsically dangerous activity.

Beyond this discussion, Bal discusses how characters are introduced as initially blank, and that through the course of reading, we are able to identify more of their characteristics, and thus predict their future behavior and responses. Characters are constructed by filling out parts of what we know about them, to further predict their behavior and to understand similarity and differences between characters.  Observations lead to the construction of semantic axes, which are often found as binary pairs. A character may be either strong or weak, diligent or not, and so on. These have a direct relationship with how the characters may be expected to respond to events. This leads to a surprisingly systemic way of thinking about characters. Characters can work according to roles and functions. The emphasis here is on how the information that describes these characteristics is revealed to the reader, but this model could be applied to thinking about the characters behavior within simulations.

Fabula: Elements (Events)

Events are elements of the fabula. The discussion that follows in this section is eerily similar to Schank, at least in terms of theme if not goals. The discussion revolves around how events are understood and processed by a reader in order for the reader to construct a story out of the fabula given. So, for instance the sentence “John is ill” has a different significance than “John falls ill” because the latter implies a change. Other formulations can imply causality, a discussion very relevant to Schank’s story comprehension system. Events are given three criteria for how they imply structure in the world: change, choice, and confrontation. Change demonstrates changes in the state of the world, while choice implies that a change is the result of an actor’s agency. Confrontation resembles something closer to verbs linking a subject and direct object.

The flow of narrative events leads to a cycle of possibility, realization (event), and conclusion. This leads to several schemas. For instance, an as processes of improvement, “the fulfillment of the task”, “the intervention of allies”, “the elimination of the opponent”, “the negotiation”, “the attack”, “the satisfaction”. Or, with negative processes, “the misstep”, “the creation of an obligation”, “the sacrifice”, “the endured attack”, “the endured punishment”. These are mentioned on pages (p. 192-193), and the concept of the narrative cycle derives from Bremond. These sorts of possibilities, or at least a few of them, may be organized and seen as a system of narrative tropes, much like Polti’s dramatic situations. Events can also be organized in terms of other themes, the subjects, the nature of the confrontation, the time, and the place.

Fabula: Elements (Actors)

Bal gives a functional account of how actors operate. This is purely teleological, to derive what the goals and functions of actors are. This leads to the use of an actant theory. Actors fit into different relationships, in subject-function-object relationships, helper-power-opponent relationships. These are mechanically significant, but are very dry. The focus on function also feels like a throwback to Propp, but this may not have been intended. Examples of functions in subject-function-object relationships are things such as “wants to marry”, “wants to become”, “wants to know”, “wants to prevent”, “wants to have”, and so on. This discussion is formatted in a way that suggests it can be integrated into Schank’s discussion of states, enablement, goals, and plans with relative ease. This does is not the intent, clearly, but the proximity is startling.

Roger Schank is a big influence on AI. In comparison to many other voices, his writing is along the variety of traditional AI and cognitive science, but a close reading of his work suggests that, while his influence on AI concepts has been profound, his approach is more cautious than that of Newell and Simon, advocating computation as a means for testing a theory of cognition, rather than asserting that minds are computational.

This particular book is generally about cognitive science, but more specifically about the understanding of stories. When one hears the sentence “I was hungry so I went to the restaurant,” it is easy to figure out the meaning, given what we know about hunger and restaurants and whatnot. Computers lack this background knowledge, so Schank works to articulate how that knowledge might be captured and represented computationally. There are two ways of looking at this knowledge, the first is the perspective of scripts, and then there is the perspective of plans. Schank moves from scripts to plans, finding the latter more robust and powerful, but I think that scripts are much more promising, especially in context of social interaction and a situation-centric view of cognition.

Introduction

This book was written after Newell and Simon, and after Weizenbaum, but before further development in cognitive science. Schank reveals a belief in the overlap of problems between computers and humans, which is the conceptual apparatus. However, Schank does not necessarily assert that computational and cognitive concepts are the same (as does Newell). I think that the overlap is smaller than Schank suggests, but his caution is encouraging given the period of circumstances.

The foundation of this work is the Conceptual Dependence Theory, which is composed of five main rules, the first two of which are important and I have copied here: (p. 11)

1. For any two sentences that are identical in meaning, regardless of language, there should be only one representation.
2. Any information in a sentence that is implicit must be made explicit in the representation of meaning of that sentence.

These give a strongly linguistic foundation to language, and suggest that meaning and cognition should come through the understanding of concepts and sentences. I find this to be a dubious supposition. The assertions also suggest that the meaning of a sentence can be non-problematically separated from its form, which is also contestable. This suggests that it is even possible to express statements analytically and completely, without implicit information, which is also problematic. Schank organizes conceptual dependency as deriving from several primitive acts. These are:

1. ATRANS: Transfer of possession, ownership, or control
2. PTRANS: Change of the physical location of an object
3. PROPEL: Application of a physical force to an object
4. MOVE: Move of oneself or a part of oneself
5. GRASP: To grasp an object
6. INGEST: To “take in” or consume something into one’s body
7. EXPEL: To expel something from one’s body
8. MTRANS: Transfer of some mental information
9. MBUILD: Construction of new information
10. SPEAK: To produce sounds and say something
11. ATTEND: To focus one’s senses on something

Note that the phrasing of these asserts a kind of literalism and preoccupation with physical situations. On one hand, that is good, because it suggests some sort of anchoring in embodiment, but it also pre-loads the conceptual system with many anchored terms revolving around production, physical movement, and ownership. This does not, for example, suggest of ways to express emotions, build relationships, or change one’s mood or disposition. These could all be expressed within the system, but secondarily, whereas physical movement and ownership are built in at the first level.

The theories of cognition in AI must be specified fully. Schank gives an example of someone asking how to get to Coney Island, and being told to take the ‘N’ train to the last stop. These instructions are described as inadequate, at least for a computer, because all kinds of background knowledge are required to make sense of how to use the subway in the first place. This is a good example of the difference between situational and top-down models. Schank is proposing a top-down structure, where a general plan: go to Coney Island, is made up of smaller and smaller parts: take the ‘N’ train to the last station (which consists of going to the metro station, getting a fare card, going through the gate, getting on the train, etc etc etc). I agree that an AI simulation of cognition must know how to deal with this low level knowledge, but in a situational system, this knowledge really should be secondary. In context, the directions are certainly sufficient, and at the right level of abstraction, the finest granulation of instructions are not necessary.

Causal Chains

This chapter discusses ways of interpreting sentences with a distressing degree of literalism. The logic is used with a kind of causal chaining. Interpretation is described as a filling in of the blanks in a causal chain. For example, Schank gives the sentence “John cried because Mary said she loved Bill.” This sentence, with its face value taken at the most literal level, is absurd, John cried because Mary’s speaking. However, this is not the meaning of the sentence, at all. Schank argues that the reader constructs a causal chain behind the contents of the sentence, that Mary speaking to John transfers factual knowledge of Mary loving Bill to John, and this is what made John cry. The degree of chaining in this is ridiculous, as much as in the supermarket example given by Cohen, Morgan, and Pollack. I think that understanding of these sentences has much more to do with common usage an practices of use, or even in a sense of internalized “grand narratives” than causal chains. Schank gives a calculus of causation which is built from actions, states, reasons, and enabling.

Scripts

The chapter on scripts is rather hilarious from my perspective. To me, scripts are the most productive thing to be gained from an analysis of Schank’s book, however, in context, they are used only as a stepping stone to the discussion of plans in the next chapter.

Scripts are very useful structures to analyze. Scripts structure information that is relevant in the context of a particular situation, and organize new inputs and events in context. This is consistent with my understanding of models, and also with Goffman’s sense of framing. The discussion Schank gives is still preoccupied with story comprehension, especially as relates to included versus excluded information. For example, if someone is comprehending a set of sentences and knows what script is being followed, it will be easier for the reader to identify and contextualize the meaning of each sentence.

Schank explains scripts as being composed of props, roles, states, entry conditions, and resulting conditions. The goal of developing this formulation is the SAM program (Script Applier Mechanism), which understands (presumably) scripted stories, and is able to answer questions about them. The script described is the “restaurant script”, where a customer can go to a restaurant, order something, eat it, leave a tip, pay, and leave. Given gaps, it is still possible to piece together what might be happening in a story that abides by this script. Narratively, these are still very uninteresting, but I think they have the potential to be more meaningful. For instance, scripts could be annotated with other layers of meaning that give some sort of narrative value to how a character might act within the script.

Scripts are fitted with metadata, specifically that which describes how, based on events, the ssytem will recognize what scripts to use. Script headers describe the preconditions, instrumental relations, locales, and so on, used by scripts. This helps a script analysis program understand what script might be in operation at a given moment. This is not complete, but gives some background to the situation and ambiguity problems that come up with a situational model of interaction.

Schank moves to examine how to handle statements that are not immediately relevant to the script. Notably, he examines breaches and distractions. Distractions are not especially relevant to me, but breaches are extremely useful. Social situations are full of scripts and breaches in those scripts. From the perspective of simulation, when breaches occur, agents scramble to recontextualize and reground themselves in some sure footing of knowing how to interact. Scripts designate social rules, procedures, and conventions. Usually what is interesting narratively are the breaches. Frequently breaches allow scripts to interact simulaneously and play off each other. Schank gives a listing ways to handle unexpected inputs within scripts: (p. 53)

1. Does it specify or imply the absence of an enablement for an impending script action? (Obstacle)
2. Does it specify or imply that a completed action was done in an unusual manner, or to an object other than the one(s) instantiated in the script? (Error)
3. Does it specify an action which can be understood as a corrective resolution of an interference? (Prescription) This question would be activated when an obstacle is inferred from or described directly in the text.
4. Does it specify or imply the repetition of a previous action? (Loop) This is activated when an error is inferred from or described directly in the text.
5. Does it specify or imply emotional expression by the actor, likely to have been caused by an interference? (Reaction)
6. Does it specify or imply that the actor will have a new goal that has nothing to do with the original script? (Distraction)
7. Does it specify or imply the motivated abandonment of the script by the main actor? (Abandonment)

Note that emotional responses are “unexpected inputs.”

Schank poses scripts as a powerful component to cognition and to understanding the world. People adapt and transform scripts, but this does not mean that they fall under the general category of knowledge transfer (something we know to be flawed, eg Lave). This is precisely because scripts are known and learned from experience, and by being experienced. This dimension is not discussed (Schank may not even agree with it), but I believe this is a potent observation.

Plans

Turning to planning, Schank makes a claim here that I totally disagree with: that scripts come from plans. As described, plans are means of satisfying goals. In execution, plans make use of several low level behaviors. For example, the plan “USE(x) = D-KNOW(LOC(X)) + D-PROX(X) + D-CONT(X) + I-PREP(X) + DO”, where each of the D- expressions are subgoals that can be satisfied by other actions. The focus of discussion is still story comprehension, so the object is to understand the plans of story characters.

Goals

Schank introduces several types of goals:

1. S: Satisfaction: satisfying a basic need
2. E: Enjoyment: doing something for the sake of pleasure
3. A: Achievement: attaining some desirable outcome
4. P: Preservation: maintaining some desireable state
5. C: Crisis: responding to a sudden pressing emergency
6. I: Instrumental: a goal that realizes the precondition of another goal
7. D: Delta: effects a state change in the world

This general system of goals has been influential and used by others, notably Ortony, Clore, and Collins. This is still bound in understanding stories, but is reasonable as a general scheme of understanding motivation. The goal system alone is consistent with the idea of having conflicting goals.

Themes

Schank introduces the idea of themes, which make sense for story understanding, but are totally neglected within conventional AI. This asserts that goals and plans work in context of some broader theme, which guides the goals that occur and the plans to achieve them. In terms of stories, they are what a story might be about, for instance, success, interpersonal relationships, and so on. This serves as a filter or model to focus on select elements of a story world.

A Theory of Adaptation presents a comprehensive and general theory of adaptations. Adaptations are widespread and universal. They seem common and nautral, but pose curious problems in content, structure, and intertextual politics. The work here looks to develop a theory of adaptations in general, not just with novels to film. Hutcheon wishes to consider adaptations as lateral, not vertical. One does not experience adaptations successively starting from the original work, rather the works are a large collection to be navigated. One might see an adaptation before the original. Hutcheon also wishes to view adaptations as adaptations, not as independent works. What makes them work and desirable as adaptations? There are three ways of story engagement: telling, showing, and interactivity.

One dimension that is missing from this, I think, is a critical aesthetics of adaptations. Given a set of adaptations, how can or should one judge them with respect to each other and the adapted work? In my study of games, I think that aesthetics can come from thinking about the mechanics and models of the narrative worlds, but this is, of course, just one perspective. Hutcheon avoids judgments specifically for the purpose of opening up literary acceptance to legitimize adaptations in the first place. This perspective comes particularly from translation studies, which generally places the original work and language on a pedestal, asserting its supremacy to any translation or adaptation that may be made of it. Only recently has the perspective changed to view translations as weaving the original text into the culture of the target language (Bassnett), or seeing translation as breathing life into a text (Toury).

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation

Adaptation always exists in a secondary relationship with the original, but despite their supposed inferiority, adaptations are pervasive. Adaptations also dominate their own media. The most heavily awarded films are adaptations. Hutcheon suggests that the pleasure of adaptation from the perspective of the consumer comes from a simple repetition of a beloved story with variation. Far from losing it, adapted works keep and extend Benjamin’s Aura. Adaptations nonetheless add a financial and economic dimension to production. Adapted works are popular among content producers because they are “proven” and already have a culture and fan base that are likely to be interested in the adaptation.

To help steer clear of the common practice of devaluing adaptations, Hutcheon foregoes the use of terms such as the “original” or “source” text, but instead calls the text from which adaptations are made the “adapted text”.

To borrow Michael Alexander’s term, adaptations are palimpsestuous works, works that are haunted by their adapted texts. Hutcheon wishes to avoid resorting to fidelity criticism, which originates in the (often false) idea that the adapters wish to reproduce the adapted text. There are many reasons why adapters may wish to adapt, which can be as much to critique as to pay homage. There are three dimensions to looking at adaptations: as a formal entity or a product, as a process of creation, or as a process of reception. Adaptation is simultaneously a process and a product.

Hutcheon distinguishes between adaptations and sequels and fanfiction. Sequels and fanfiction are means of not wishing a story to end. This is a different goal than the recreation done by adapting a work. There is a legal term to define adaptations as “derivative works”, but this is complex and problematic. Adaptation commits a literary heresy that form (expression) and content (deas) can be separated. To any media scholar, form and content are inextricably tied together, thus, adaptations provide a major threat and challenge, because to take them seriously suggests that form and content can be somehow taken apart. This raises another difficult question: what is the content of an adaptation? What is it that is actually adapted? One might consider this to be the “spirit” or “tone” of a work. Adapting a work to be faithful to the spirit may justify changes to the letter or structure in the adaptation. In my perspective, the content of adaptations is (or should be) the world of the adapted text.

Hutcheon specifically addresses videogames and how they engage in activity beyond problem solving. She suggests that if a film has a 3 act structure, then gameplay is only the second act. Excluding the introduction and the resolution, gameplay is tied up with solving problems and working to resolve conflicts. Games adapt a heterocosm: “What gets adapted here is a heterocosm, literally an “other world” or cosmos, complete, of course, with the stuff of a story–settings, characters, events, and situations.” (p. 14) A game adaptation shares a truth of coherence with the adapted text. The format may require a point of view change (for example, in the Godfather game, where the player takes on the role of an underling working his way up). Other novels are not easily adapted because the novel focuses on the “res cogitans”, the thinking world, as opposed to the world of action. This is a point that I would disagree with Hutcheon’s assessment, I think that even the thinking world of a novel abides by rules and mechanics, that these mechanics may be simulated or expressed computationally, but they may not be suited to the conventions of action and spatial navigation popular in games right now.

Hutcheon notes that some works have a greater propensity for adaptation than others, or are more “adaptogenic” (Groensteen’s term). For instance, melodramas are more readily adapted into operas and musicals, and one could extend that argument to describe how effects films tend to get adapted into games. This may be due to the fact that there are genre conventions that might be common to both media.

Adaptation may be seen as a product or a process, the product oriented perspective treats it as a translation (in various senses), or as a paraphrase. The product oriented perspective is dependent on a particular interpretation. As a process, it is a combination of imitation (mimesis) and creativity. Unsuccessful adaptations often fail (commercially) due to a lack of creativity on behalf of the adapters. There is a process of both imitating and creating something entirely new, but in order to create a successful adaptation, one must make the text one’s own.

There is an issue of intertextuality when the reader is familiar with the original text. But there can become a corpus of adaptations, where the subsequent works are adaptations of the earlier ones, rather than the adapted text itself. This has been the case of texts which have had prolific series of adaptations, such as Dracula films (Hutcheon’s example), as well as Jane Austen’s works. These works are “multilaminated”, they are referential to other texts, and these references form part of the text’s identity, as a node within a network of connected texts.

A final dimension is the reader’s engagement, their immersion. Readers engage with adaptations with different mdoes of engagement. “Stories, however, do not consist only of the material means of their transmission (media) or the rules that structure them (genres). Those means and those rules permit and then channel narrative expectations and communicate narrative meaning to someone in some context, and they are created by someone with that intent.” (p. 26) Adaptations are frequently “indigenized” into new cultures. When texts supply images to imageless works, they permanantly change the reader’s experience of the text. For example, due to the films, we now know what a game of Quiddich looks like (and due to the games, we now can know tactics and strategies), or what Tolkien’s orcs look like.

What?

This chapter gives a through account of the way adaptation operates on the different forms of media. Hutcheon does give an in-depth discussion of the different media transformations given by many adaptations, and discusses games in particular. The section is very useful for considering the experiential modes of engagement with adaptations. Hutcheon’s treatment of games focuses on the dimensions of interactivity, kinesthesia, and dependence on the player for the story to reach a happy ending. I think what is missing is a discussion of the mechanics of the narrative worlds in the adapted texts, and how they are transformed into the mechanics of the games. This is what I would consider the content, whereas the structures of interactivity and kinesthesia I think are part of the form of games. As it stands, this discussion is missing, and seems worth considering.

How?

This chapter discusses the reader’s pleasure in adaptation, and here (p. 135) focuses on games and interactive narratives. She discusses these primarily in terms of the media content, for example, sound, visuals, the 3d environments. Again, missing is a discussion of the world or the model underlying the adapted text.

Right now I am working on transcribing Linda Hutcheon‘s A Theory of Adaptation. This book has been great. It looks at adaptation as legitimate, universal, and pervasive. It’s great because so much of what I am doing is entrenched in adaptation, and it’s great to see it legitimized. Indeed, adaptations are often viewed very negatively as leeching off of the original media, corrupting it, and mining or wringing it out for money. Just today I came across an article by Alan Moore on some of his current projects, and he discusses the practice of adaptation in very negative terms. Considering his background and experiences, I am not all that surprised, but having read Hutcheon so soon, I spent a little bit of time thinking about exactly what is at stake here.

Moore views adaptation as a corporate practice whose motivation is the capitalist goal of maximizing capital. He doesn’t explain it in exactly those terms, but his perspective is focused on the adaptation producers. The practice of adaptation (in context of his books) frequently involves large special effects budgets, and is reprehensible in his eyes due to the focus on spectacle as opposed to the mastery of media affordances. Essentially, he writes a narrative in comic form because it is best told through comic form. He writes a novel because the story is best told as a novel. Adaptation is pointless to him because it disregards the bond between narrative and medium. To him, the Hollywood film industry is attempting, though the use of its formulas to turn the narratives of his stories into Hollywood narratives. Because form and content are so intertwined, an adaptation that changes medium will necessarily be a change in content, detracting from its original meaning.

I can clearly understand Moore, but I think that it would be fruitful to consider another perspective, which is that of the reader, or the audience, or the consumer. Moore’s outlook is that of the Author, in the Barthes sense. This view is not uncommon, but neglects the role and engagement of the reader. Readers are anxious to make meanings from works, often meanings that the author may have instilled but not stated, or meanings which the author instilled but was not aware of, or meanings that are entirely personal to the readers themselves. Readers do not see the meaning of a work as tied to its medium, or even necessarily its content. When readers take charge, they appropriate and extend and (to borrow Jenkins’ term) poach texts. When a work is introduced to an audience, adaptation is inevitable. This is not to say that Hollywood adaptation is great, but rather some forms of adaptation are inevitable.

It is interesting to compare how Moore describes his own works, as being carefully crafted and interwoven with particular influences, to specifically create commentary on both the original texts and contemporary events. Moore’s collaboration with Kevin O’Neil on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is itself interesting as an adapted work because it borrows so many established characters from English literature. It is not an adaptation of another text, but it weaves characters and conventions from other texts to assemble a work. Perhaps because the script itself is original, Moore does not consider it to be an adaptation. When compared with something, such as Jane Austen’s novels, which have themselves spawned an entire textual universe of adaptations, some of which borrow from one specific novel, and others which borrow from multiple, the lines definitely begin to blur.

This book is meant as a successor to Epstein and Axtell’s Growing Artificial Societies. I was highly critical of Growing Artificial Societies due to what I found to be a lack of necessary attention and inquiry into the models used for the social simulation. In the context of this book, I think those shortcomings are meant to be seen as not the central focus, rather that different models could be plugged-in to a simulation and the simulation would do something. This book takes teh previous as a call to arms, and actually fleshes out the theory of social simulation with a large variety of examples. These are diverse and do work to serve as analytical tests of the rules that govern the simulation. In particular, there is substantial discussion of a model of the Anasazi collapse, which is compared with actual archaeological findings. A number of other simulations discuss diverse topics such as retirement, class emergence, social norms, and civil violence. A few of these suffer from the problems found in the original book, that they are abstract to a degree that they are self enclosed and cannot relate to the real world, but the several chapters that discuss the Anasazi serve to redeem this somewhat.

The use of social simulation can be seen as a way to discuss and analyze a model of social behavior. The slogan from Growing Artificial Societies suggested that “If you didn’t grow it, you didn’t explain it.” This does not mean that if you did grow it then you did explain it, but rather that the growing is necessary for explanation to be possible. The shift in focus of the book is primarily about the nature of scientific explanation, that a theory that comes from observations should be simulated to verify that theory. Computationally, this makes sense. Simulation is widely used in natural science and engineering, but rarely in social science because of the enormous complexity of human culture. The use of the computer in the simulation is not the goal, but rather the explanation is the goal (nonetheless, computation generally makes simulation easier).

The goal of these simulations is thus to test and show the emergence of certain structures via demonstration. This is similar to my work in the simulation of literary worlds, but my goal is different. My goal could be made more similar if my focus were primarily in the construction of an accurate model that reflects the author’s narrative world. As it stands, this is really a secondary goal, where my primary one is in the experience of the player. It is interesting to compare the purely emergent and generative project with the structures of drama management, where the role of a drama manager is to take control and exert influence over a simulation, while the agent based approach is about providing simple rules and letting the larger phenomena attend to themselves.

Narrative Intelligence is a bridge between narrative and artificial intelligence. The book is a compilation of papers that touch on the theory of computation and narrative in various ways. The approach to AI is heavily influenced by Schank, particularly in the sense that to develop a computational model of something is to develop a theory of it. Working with narrative crosses many disciplinary boundaries, and borrows from several conventions of computer science. Additionally, the papers in the book borrow from many other disciplines, such as art, psychology, cultural studies, drama, and “humanistic AI”. The approaches and goals may be wildly different. Ultimately NI is many and not one, and the richness and diversity of narrative intelligence is consistent with the richness and diversity of narrative.

Jerome Bruner: The narrative construction of reality

The subject of this article is how reality is constructed. This originates as a philosophical question, namely: how does one achieve knowledge of the world? Dominan approaches to this are empirical and rationalist. Both of these assume an immutable world ready to be observed. This ties again to psychology and cognitive science. Bruner’s goals are to look at the cultural and personal dimension to constructing reality, which is very different. Bruner uses narrative as a framework for the construction of reality. To do so, he outlines ten features of narratives and outlines how they relate to this central theme:

1. Diachronicity: Multiplicity of dimensions of time.
2. Particularity: Narrative is about the specific and not the general. Lessons may be gained from it, but not general schemas or rules for knowledge generalization.
3. Intention: The reader of a narrative is interested in the intentions and motivations behind the characters: reasons rather than causes.
4. Hermeneutic composability: There is an interdependence between the whole of the story and its parts. The structure is not organized in a clear context-free tree structure.
5. Canonicality and breach: Narratives tend to focus on breaches of canonical behavior and circumstances.
6. Referentiality: Narrative creates an independent and internal world, where truth is defined by verisimilitude, rather than verifiability. Logic is about internal consistency, not factuality.
7. Genericness: Narratives frequently fall into genres, which structure human plights and circumstances, and present a formula for interpreting the meanings of events and circumstances, as though they were within the genre’s model.
8. Normativeness: Narrative is concerned with conflicts and breaches, but ultimately these result in a return to a normative state. Narrative shapes cultural legitimacy. While it may not resolve real world problems, it may articulate plights (Kermode’s “consolation of narrative”), which does not provide comfort of happy ending, it may make a plight bearable by being made understandable.
9. Context sensitivity and negotiability: Narrative is dependent on context and its interpretation is negotiable, not absolute.
10. Narrative accrual: Stories are put together to shape whole worlds.

Brenda Laurel: Vital narratives

Laurel’s paper is on the types of narratives found in culture and how they affect individuals’ understanding of the world. These are understood with respect to three axes: Personal relevance, strategies and outcomes, and epistemologically. Laurel reviews several kinds of narratives that are culturally present and shape the listener’s relationship to the world outside the story. There are a variety of these: religious, folk and spiritual, scientific, historical, journalistic, political and geopolitical. She challenges the tendency of many of these to generalize and provide a narrowing of ways of looking at the world, which are made more prevalent by the pervasiveness of these kinds of stories.

Steffi Domike, Michael Mateas, and Paul Vanouse: The recombinant history apparatus presents Terminal Time

This gives a general description of both the architecture of Terminal Time and its motivations. The project adopts and parodies the “cookie-cutter documentary” format, which uses presentation of historical narratives to convey presentational assertions as facts. These documentaries make use of filmic conventions of juxtaposition, the “Kuleshov effect”, to convey biases with authority. This is emphasized with an example of two documentaries, “The River Ran Red”, and “The Richest Man in the World”, which presented very different perspectives of Andrew Carnegie’s influence on the steel industry in Pittsburgh, though they used much of the same footage.

Because Terminal Time makes use of the generation of these narrative segments, it arguably lacks a preexisting bias in terms of its narrative construction. Additionally, the means for engaging with it is participatory and forum-like format, inviting interaction and then discussion. This is very different from the generally passive format of documentaries, where the viewers are not invited to be critical of the conclusions being drawn by the documentary itself. While Terminal Time does not take inherent positions on the material out of which it composes documentaries, it can be said to have a meta-intention as a critique and deconstruction of the documentary format.

The architecture of Terminal Time is quintessentially recombinant, it is not at all a simulation of a world or story, but a reordering and a presentation of one. It could perhaps be argued that it simulates a documentary alone. It uses rules of telling, but not rules of the ideological content. Instead, history is presented as content, as evidence of an ideology. History is presented as though it were the result of a systemic simulation, where the visible material was the result of a whole self-contained simulation. This format is different from simulation where, having adopted an ideology, a new history would need to be written that is the product of that model.

Chris Crawford: Assumptions underlying the Erasmatron storytelling system

An interesting observation in this essay is that the format of choice and interactivity implies a certain kind of agency within a story, and requires an action-oriented story structure. It is possible to compare Crawford’s valuing of player choice (as verbs), with other narrative domains, for instance Pride and Prejudice, where much of what a player might do is dependent on emotional responses. The role of emotional responses does not seem to be as sturdily supported as other means of interactions.

R. Raymond Lang: Story Grammars

This section describes a story generation system via grammars. The format of this consists of a world model and a story grammar. The execution of this model is through “rational intention”, which has a structure of arranging episodes. The system is still problematic because of its uninteresting world and the general vapidness of the stories. This uses emotions, but as tokens. Emotional responses need to be deeper as having an affect on characters, more than being mere justifications for behavior.

The use of story grammars also needs to address the question of human relevance. Why tell stories in the first place? Stories must have some value to somebody. Turner addresses this, but through moralizing, which is fine for what it is. Many story worlds have value and meaning in them already, and may be conveyed ironically or genuinely to convey authorial intent.

Andrew Stern: Virutal Babyz

Stern’s discussion presents Petz and Babyz as narrative systems, but I do not think that is accurate as a general structure (nor should it be). Rather, it is a simulation system, composed of many pieces, which may then emerge into narratives. They contain a degree of flexibility, ambiguity and cartoon referentiality that helps scaffold narrative emergence. Dimensions of emergence can come from long and short term behaviors, but primarily live in the head of the user. This raises the question of how a simulation system needs to be “pre-loaded” with a narrative basis.

Pheobe Sengers: Schizophrenia and narrative in artificial agents

Sengers presents the problems of agents as that they miss a narrative dimension to their interactions. This problem is similar to the handling of schizophrenics by psychiatrists. Schizophrenics suffer from a certain lack of narrative consistency in their behavior, they see themselves as machine-like, composed of many pieces that do not quite work together, often very painfully so. However the psychiatric institution seeks to mechanize the treatment for them, looking at their symptoms individually as separate problems to be diagnosed. The state of the schizophrenic is one of dissociation, mechanization, and a lack of interrelation between behaviors.

Sengers argues that the problems suffered by schizophrenics are eerily similar to the problems experienced by AI controlled agents. They are jumbles of behaviors and systems, that often do not quite come together. An agent’s plans might shift when one goals is dropped in favor of another. To seek a resolution to this problem, she turns to look at the anti-psychiatric movement which suggested a change in treatment for schizophrenics. This movement sought to instead of looking at patients as being composed of symptoms, to look at them as phenomenological wholes, and constructed narratives in the process of working through problems. Sengers uses this as a rationalization to look at agents narratively.

To compose agents narratively, Sengers observes: “if humans understand intentional behavior by organizing it into narrative, then our agents will be more ‘intentionally comprehensible’ if they provide narrative cues.” (p. 266) Sengers identifies three main principles for a narrative agent architecture, which is strongly supportive of the work I have done so far:

• Context-sensitivity and negotiability: Meaning of events is dependent on context, and is subject to interpretation on the part of the observer.
• Intentional state entailment: In addition to seeing what is being done, it is important to see why it is being done.
• Diachronicity: Events and behaviors take place over time, an agent cannot change its behaviors quickly according to what is optimal.

Another interesting observation is that behaviors should be as simple as possible, with minimal cues. The observer should be assumed to do most of the interpretation. The implementation of this system involves a system of signifiers and transitions, rather than plans.

Philip E. Agre: Writing and Representation

Agre is looking to expand and establish the relationship between writing and representation as problematic. A lot of this is oriented toward understanding the contextual dependence of writing, and challenging the idea of world models. He explains that people make symbolic representations as a process of interpretation, and the interpretation of a text is dependent on setting, it is never simply transplanted.

For the most part, the given texts are instructions: recipes, directions, toner loading procedures, and instructions of how to observe a performance. These are not understood properly until given the right contextualization. The problem and content of a text does not lie within the text itself, but rather in identifying the situation, and determining how to connect the situation to the text in the correct way. While Agre is opposed to world models, I have to raise the question of what is the heart of situational understanding? How does one relate a situation to a narrative? I think that model theory is sufficient to handle these circumstances, by abstracting situational cues and elements. The text requires a situational model to be understood.

It is best to see a model as a lens, and not as a miniature.