Kevin, the time of narrating is just one aspect of what Curveship can change. It’s discussed by Gérard Genette as being part of narrative voice. Curveship implements control over aspects of narrating in all five of Genette’s categories: order, speed, frequency, mood, and voice. It can flexibly generate text from a simple but abstract representation. The idea is to do for the narration, the telling of the story, what interactive fiction (starting with Adventure) did for the textual simulation of space and action, the underlying storyworld.

That said, would people want to use it if they aren’t interested in working with how the story is told? Maybe so. People use Inform to implement one-room games, even though Inform has a great deal of machinery for dealing with multiple rooms. If Curveship is good enough in general at IF or turns out to be good for certain platforms (perhaps Python-based ones such as OLPC and Nokia phones), I’m sure that people who want to use some of its capabilities will be interested in it.

In any case, I’ll be following along to try a release when it’s ready, best of luck!

Seit drei Jahren arbeitet Nick Montfort an seinem IF-Autorensysten Curveship, dessen Eckpfeiler er nun auf der von ihm geleiteten Electronic Literature Organisation’s Artificial Intelligence Conference Anfang Juni 2010 vorstellte und in seinem heutige…