New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age

5 Curveship

103 5 Curveship An Interactive Fiction System for Narrative Variation nick montfort Interactive fiction is a venerable, well-defined category of computer programs that includes the canonical Adventure and Zork as well as work by established literary authors: Mindwheel by Robert Pinsky, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, and Amnesia by Thomas Disch. These programs are often correctly called games, but they can also be rich text-based computer simulations, dialog systems, and examples of literary art. Unlike many other new media forms, interactive fiction (often called “if”) computationally simulates a world underlying the textual exchange between computer and user. Theorists of narrative have long distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user). While if development systems have offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers, they have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is told. Developers have not been able to use separate modules to control the content and expression levels independently, so there has been no easy, general way to control narrative style and create variation in the narrative discourse. This chapter reports on a new interactive fiction system, called Curveship , which does allow this sort of control. (The system was originally called “nn,” and early writing about the system refers to it as such.) First, I provide a brief introduction to interactive fiction, as a particular form with a history. Then, I describe how ideas from narratology can be applied to interactive fiction. After that, I sketch a new architecture for interactive fiction that abstracts the expression level from the content level by specifying different modules. The Teller module, which is responsible for producing different sorts of narrative discourse based on the underlying 104 Curveship simulation of the if world, is described in detail. Although implemented in the context of interactive fiction, this module was designed to offer a general way of narrating in natural language. It is hoped that it will provide insight into how computers can automatically narrate in other, nontextual modalities and in other contexts. The Teller module is offered as a concrete example of how narratology can inform and improve the generation of natural language by computer. Some Interactive Fiction Essentials Interactive fiction is an intriguing digital media form with a rich history. It may be less familiar than hypertext to many people in the humanities, but it was very popular among minicomputer users and early home computer users. Because it involves the explicit computational simulation of the content or story level, it is particularly interesting to those who study narrative theory. As a brief example of how interaction in interactive fiction works, a transcript of few interactions from Michael Gentry’s Anchorhead (1998), a large-scale interactive fiction work that draws on the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, is supplied below. There are only two actions carried out in this excerpt, but they are very representative ones: moving objects around and interacting with characters accounts for much of the activity in interactive fiction generally, and this often reveals interesting information. This part of the transcript occurs after the player character (the character controlled by the user’s typed input) walks into the vacant lot, encountering an old man she had previously met. It is important to know here that the player character is wearing a coat and that she is holding a newspaper and has a gold locket in her pocket, items that have only been obtained after exploration of the environment and some effort on the user’s part. Vacant Lot Where once a building stood, there is now only cracked pavement and rampant weeds. A high chain-link fence surrounds this vacant lot; the only breaks lie to the west and southeast. The old man looks up at you with fawning admiration. >show the gold locket to the man Nick Montfort 105 (first taking the gold locket) (slipping the newspaper into the pocket of your trenchcoat to get a hand free) The bum starts to reach for the locket, but his hand stops a few inches away. His fingers are trembling. He gazes at the woman’s picture with grief and regret, and a hint of something akin to love. “Why,” he whispers, “that’s the...