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Making Memorable Characters

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User learns about character through interacting (conversing) with them ... ELIZA and her progeny. Agents behavior toward goals. An interpretation of the world... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: 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
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