But Curveship is first and foremost about creating better narrators rather than improving how actors function, and I’m hoping to get the system out the door in a few months rather than a few years. I’ll soon explain more about what it means to have better automatic narration, and will describe some of how Curveship is able to offer that to IF authors.

P.S. Any ideas about how gameplay for a story using your system might look? What type of interactivity do you expect to see?

What I’ve always imagined, though I’ll have to wait to hear more to find out if this is how it works, is being able to set up a story where the actors have knowledge of the events, both past and possible, according to their own perspectives and personalities (concepts). Then when the player interacts with these actors in conversation you get their interpretation of events ‘for free’ as an author…you don’t need to script their perspective like you would in Inform or TADS because their perspective is embodied within the Curveship concept. Similarly with actions, the actors could act based on their concepts of the actual world, which is integral to the system. As a player then you get actor ‘personality’ from the get-go. This is just my interpretation though based on the details I’ve read.

The best existing writings on the system are probably my two previous posts related to Curveship (scroll down).

If you want to read on past those, there’s an 8-page paper, “Curveship: An Interactive Fiction System for Interactive Narrating,” written to accompany my invited talk at the CALC-09 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, 4 June 2009. I have changed the string-with-slots formalism and some of the terminology, but the basic workings of the system are described accurately there.

And if you want to read further, there’s my 228-page dissertation from 2007, “Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction.” Again, the research advances are described well (and in much more detail, in this document), but it doesn’t make for a very good Curveship manual since names, syntax, and other details have changed.

I’ve been writing these Post Position posts because those last two documents are now a bit outdated, and because they are addressed to particular audiences that don’t include, for instance, IF authors.

I love the idea of having an overarching spin connected with a virtual, object- and contextually-linked world, but I’m curious, how do you plan on implementing it?

I don’t plan on it – I did it more than two years ago in the research system, called “nn,” that Curveship is based on. What I’m working on now is releasing a well-documented, clearly-coded system with a reasonably good programming interface, suitable for IF authors, AI researchers interested in narrative, and teachers of subjects ranging from narrative theory to electronic literature.

As for your other questions – they will supply me with a good outline for several future posts. Thanks again for them. I’ll answer them as soon as I can, dealing with any necessary preliminaries along the way.

Clearly, the ability to have narrative style control in a sandbox-like environment is a holy grail for interactive fiction, but I have no sense of how the system works from your article.

Actually, that is not true, you do give a sense of how it works, except that directly after you give us a glimpse of your system, you immediately negate the advantage you have described Curveship having by saying that other systems to this quite well already. Then you downplay how your system links the different styles of dynamic game-story-telling, especially when you said that it “adds to the significant power of [something other then what you are presenting]”

All that being said, I like the angle you are taking on this type of fiction, and I think all the ideas you have presented sound good. I want to see more of how your system works; how do the semantics and action-objects link together? How might a story be told from being able to use actions as an object? What does it look/feel/seem like to interact with objects (physical and actionable) using the interactive grammars (if you will) that you described in your previous article.

If you can pull off the enhancements/integration you are talking about (and can show it off well), this sounds like a great project.

P.S. Any ideas about how gameplay for a story using your system might look? What type of interactivity do you expect to see?

ACM DIGITAL LIBRARY
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1557914.1557920

SLIDES AND PAPER
http://www.markbernstein.org/Jul09/OnHypertextNarrative.html

I still find your successionist rhetoric unconvincing, but there’s nothing new about that. Curveship *is* new, and we’re all looking forward to seeing it!

(That said, I think the claim that the framing story of Odyssey is central to its lasting appeal is perhaps not the strongest argument you could advance. Indeed, compared to Illiad, Odyssey’s narrative strategy seems fairly straightforward. Worse, when we see Odyssey reimagined — for example, in Rinde Eckert’s _Highway Ulysses_ — the framing story is seldom preserved. Compare “Heart of Darkness”, which adopts a similarly prominent frame, and “Apocalypse Now”, which adheres to Conrad but dispenses with the frame completely.