Making Memorable Characters

1
Making Memorable Characters

• LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media

2
What does Character Maker Do? Why use it?
3
Multilinear Narrative through Interaction

• Story where many endings are possible
• User learns about character through interacting
  (conversing) with them
• Story unfolds through process interacting
• The story is replayable

4
The Rules of Chatterbots

• An experience that lasts for a single sitting.
• Based around conversation with short answers,
  not long drawn out responses.
• Utilizes Character
• Worth the users time (entertaining or
  informative)
• Dont break the rules until you can successfully
  implement them

5
Scripting the Interactor

• What information are you giving about your
  character?
• How long does it take to get from one topic to
  another?
• Is the experience too obtuse or frustrating?
• Are the keywords/interactions obvious?
• How long is the experience?
• Is the interactors character obvious? Fun?
• Play test.
• Think aloud.

6
Creating characters

• What type of character are they?
• Are they interesting?
• How do they talk?
• Are they archetypal is it someone that is
  easily accessible or understandable?
• Do they have a story or are they just being
  difficult?
• Whos the main character?
• Eliza the user is the main character

7
Other Chatterbots

• Julia
• A MUD character
• The benefit of a rich context to script the
  interactor
• The character breaks down more outside the MUD
• Formulaic responses make sense
• The most successful characters have been those
  who are self-absorbed, evasive, or obsessive in
  familiar ways. For instance, the first set of
  characters students created included several
  politicians in the situation of a press
  conference (Sound familiar?)
• How do we create broader emotional experiences?

8
Literature and Film as Procedural?

• Word-masses (E.M. Forster)
• Montages of camera shots
• Visual and verbal grammars
• Identifying patterned and predictable behavior

9
Authoring Tools

• Writing Programming (Inform, VoiceXML,
  Chatterbot)
• Does not require programming ?
• Much opportunity here
• Procedural authorship still requires procedural
  literacy

10
Modeling the Inner Life

• ELIZA and her progeny
• Agents behavior toward goals
• An interpretation of the world
• based on rule-based models of behavior
• Commedia dellarte

11
Beyond characters, beyond literature?

• Murrays Casablanca example
• Henry Jenkinss Micronarratives
• Localized incidents
• Small-scale story units
• Beyond the narrative progression of the story
• Texts as configurative systems built from
  expressive units
• Casablanca as narrative Ilsa and Victors
  struggle to escape Casablanca
• Casablanca as system Rick Blaines struggle to
  escape cynical bitterness
• Outside and before specific creative strategies

12
Embracing rather than lamenting gaps

• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
• The gutter - the space between borders
• Most important narrative structure
• Invokes closure imagination melds multiple
  frames into one idea
• Will Wright, The Sims
• Simplify characters
• Abstract them
• Allow users to project themselves

13
Conversations with Characters

• Free text input creates high expectations
• Façade
• www.interactivestory.net
• Moving beyond the multilinear plot to the
  configurative plot
• Drama manager
• Beats and goals
• Expressive AI
• A closer interpretation of Turing
• Procedural representation of a biased perception
  of the world

14
Office Plant 1

• Robotic Contemplation
• Alien Presence
• Artificial intelligence as non-human
• Contrast with computer as the ultimate human
  intelligence, human-gone-bad (2001, etc.)
• http//www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/pagina
  s/v2/ebohlen.html

15
Terminal Time

• Ideologically biased documentaries

16
Ideologically Biased Videogames

• AI that reasons about ideology
• Our political/social thinking as a process
• Ideology as a gap
• Artificial Intelligence reasons about a systems
  plausible responses to a problem, based on a
  worldview

17
Single vs. Multiplayer

• Multiplayer
• Socialization
• More credible, but less predictable behavior
• Extensions of the material world
• Virtual worlds as spaces
• Single player
• Representation
• Less credible, but more predictable behavior
• Contemplation
• Interruptions of the material world
• Videogames as procedural texts

18
Stanislavsky

• Russian theater and acting theorist
• 1863 - 1938
• The Stanislavsky System for the development of
  realistic characters
• The actors Emotional Memory imbues the character
  with realism
• Actors would think of a moment in their lives
  when they felt the required emotion
• Replay that emotion in the role
• Very influential a method for analyzing the
  characters motivations
• The magic if asking questions of their
  characters
• Fast Food Stanislavsky a ruleset for improv