Mr. Frank looking confused.
Create a work of Interactive Fiction
The assignment should first provide a quick sketch of an interactive story experience
that could potentially be implemented using authoring-modeling story generation techniques, and then provide a high-level description of the architecture and knowledge (e.g. authorial goals and plans, or story event cases + adaptation, or rhetorical devices or something you make up yourself) employed by the system. Include a description of how the player interacts with the system and the nature of the narrative experience. Don't worry about how you would implement it. Feel free to invent your own kinds of knowledge structures - you don't have to use the exact structures from Universe, Minstrel and Terminal Time. View these systems as example points in the space of author-modeling techniques. The point of this assignment is to think about how you would integrate an author-modeling-based story generation system into a complete interactive narrative experience.
PowerPoint presentation
Interactive Frank v0.1 - Sources and Binaries
Interactive Frank v0.2 - Sources and Binaries
Joe Frank. Described by The Guardian as "by far the most brilliant comic in America..." Also one of the only comics that is more likely to make you cry than laugh. It is this tension that makes Joe one of my favorite writers.
It is hard to categorize Joe's work, other than to say that it is a radio show (which has aired on WFMU and NPR, among others), sometimes featuring fictitious narrative monologues, sometimes drama, sometimes "real life" phone conversations, and often (my personal favorite and what I will concentrate on here) all of the above. Each show is an audio montage, organized loosely around a theme. But the one thing that is consistent in Joe's work is the overwhelmingly dark quality. From the phone conversations featuring a painfully dysfunctional father and son, to the (fictional) monologue about the catastrophic death of Joe's parents, the show isn't for the faint of heart.
When I began to think about what it would mean to "interactive" a typical Joe Frank radio show, one of the first things that came to mind was a man called Charles Marks. Mr. Marks was a cubist/impressionist painter in Paris in the 1950's, friends with Giacometti and other famous artists of his day, former Disney animator, Air Force photographer, and grandfather of my ex-girlfriend. When I was in college, my girlfriend and I would visit Mr. Marks once or twice a month at his apartment in uptown Manhattan, and then go out to dinner. For some reason - perhaps because he had no grandsons, or perhaps because I twice suggested Christmas presents for the guy that "changed his life" - Mr. Marks took a liking to me, and would all but ignore his granddaughter during our visits to tell me about his glory days in Paris or the Air Force, or his family life in Long Island in the 70's.
Why am I rambling on about this guy? Because it occurred to me that my conversations with Mr. Marks were very similar to Joe Frank's radio shows, only interactive. Like Joe Frank's shows, my conversations with Mr. Marks consisted of a string of loosely associated anecdotes, connected by the fact that they may or may not have (Mr. Marks is a creative guy entering his 80s - his memory is not all it used to be) happened to the same guy. Only, in the case of my conversations with Mr. Marks, the progression of anecdotes is determined by the brief comments or observations that I make between stories - "hooks" that trigger a set of memories. Likewise, my comments would be inspired by his stories, which creates the feedback loop that Crawford speaks about.
This interaction is anything but balanced. Mr. Marks - who, at this point in his life is nearly blind and a self-described "grumpy old man" - does not engage my comments nearly as much as I engage his stories. He likes to talk and I like to listen. My brief contributions are little more than strings of words, any of which he may latch onto as inspiration for his "narrative". It is a somewhat lopsided loop, but a loop nonetheless.
Also like Joe Frank, my conversations with Mr. Marks have an overall theme, which would usually be determined in the first 10 minutes of our conversation, when I would tell him what has been happening in my life. After that point, since Mr. Marks has such a vast pool of anecdotes to share, he can easily fill an entire three-course meal with stories relating to that topic, taking a break only to eat a bite of steak or yell at the waiter for bringing his espresso before his crepe suzette. It might be a stretch to call this a "narrative" in the traditional, Hollywood/romance novel/soap opera sense, but I don't care much for that sense anyway, so I am happy making that stretch.
Unlike Joe Frank, my conversations with Mr. Marks were not set to music, nor did they involve any other cast members. If we were to only consider the monologues without music, Mr. Marks would be a perfect model of interactive Frank, but to work these other elements in, it will take a bit more work. It shouldn't be too much of a problem to work the other cast members in - we simply treat them like anecdotes. For the music, we will have to introduce a set of values to go along with the "hooks". In Joe's show, the music is never too intrusive, and it is always reflects the theme - if not literally, then ironically. For instance, when Joe is interviewing a sharp-tongued Baptist minister, peppy Jazz music plays. While Joe tells the story of the death of his parents, relaxing, New-agey music plays.
So if we consider Joe Frank to be the "author" who we are simulating, and use my conversations with Mr. Marks as the model for our interaction, then the process would go something like this.
Defining how to determine the "meaningful" words is one important task that I will chose to ignore here. But basically, this can be done any number of ways, including stripping out articles, and doing web-searches to determine importance.
The algorithm that determines "fit" is equally important, but also not something that I will get into here.
To see how this was carried out, visit the project page.