In 1967 Ted Nelson described the concept of “StretchText” — a body of text that compresses down to successively more compact abstracts in response to space constraints. <\/p>\n
I was having a conversation recently with my colleague Noah Wardrip-Fruin in which we realized that he and I share an interest in doing something similar in spirit, but in some ways quite different: Using a generative narrative engine to selectively expand what starts out as a compact abstract, so that it expands to a desired level of detail.<\/p>\n
It goes without saying that this is a hard problem. It presupposes some kind of engine for directed narrative generation, such as the research being done in the Expressive Intelligence lab at UC Santa Cruz (run by Noah and Michael Mateas), or the system Emily Short and Richard Evans have been building to tell interactive stories in the style of Jane Austen.<\/p>\n
But it also demands that the text that is generated be both dramatically interesting and narratively consistent, no matter how or where one “zooms in”. If Ted Nelson’s original concept is analogous to Google Maps, then this would be analogous to that zoomable procedural planet<\/a> I created in homage to Richard Voss.<\/p>\n Wouldn’t it be interesting if this constraint were actually to help. The need to generate a consistent narrative at all levels of detail might lead to new approaches to narrative generation — perhaps better in some ways than the current state of the art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1967 Ted Nelson described the concept of “StretchText” — a body of text that compresses down to successively more compact abstracts in response to space constraints. I was having a conversation recently with my colleague Noah Wardrip-Fruin in which we realized that he and I share an interest in doing something similar in spirit, … Continue reading “Generative StretchText”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9526"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9526"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9528,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9526\/revisions\/9528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}