natural language

Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story. Among the mechanics discussed are Blue Lacuna's streamlined keyword-based system for entering commands, its attempts to match a much broader range of input styles than traditional IF, and various techniques to adapt the story to include the player's narrative goals, such as tracking which character the player thinks the story is about. I'll also discuss the design of the story's central character, a mentally unstable castaway named Progue, who evolves into one of twelve archetypes (such as friend, mentor, lover, or sycophant) based on the way the player treats him during 70 potential scenes across ten chapters of story.

There is a moment that can happen when reading/playing an interactive fiction. The system just presented some text, perhaps quite engaging or even beautiful. And then one tries to reply, using some of the same language, only to receive an error. The underlying system doesn't can't hear the language with which it speaks. The language it displays is written ahead of time, while the language it receives must be parsed and acted upon at runtime.

There is something uneasy about this disjuncture, and one response is to try to avoid all such problems. Will Wright's Sims speak only in gibberish sounds and visual icons, so that the surface representation of language matches the very simple internal representation of what they can discuss. Chris Crawford currently plans for his new storytelling system to avoid the construction of English-like sentences found in Storytron — instead moving to an icon language intended to help players better understand the internal representations (much more complex than those in The Sims) on which his story system will operate.

But surely there must be alternatives. Much of the power of writing is in the construction of natural language — not simply the conveyance of plot structures, characters, and other things such an icon language might help convey. Can't our field pursue both?

One alternative is to remove language from what a responsive system acts upon. In node-link hypertext, the system operates on nodes and the (potentially evolving) connections between them, with text displayed as a function of the current node. In systems such as Text Rain (or my Screen collaboration) the system operates on physical objects with text mapped upon them. These can create powerful experiences, and are perhaps the most artistically successful options at the moment, but they also seem like sidestepping the problem.

So what might a responsive language alternative look like? I think there are two. One is to find ways to engage interactively with language itself, language that somehow follows linguistic rules, rather than language that operates like physical objects. I've been involved in some collaborations in this direction.But what if we want language in systems that operate according to the logics of their fictions? What if we want language to work with a system that doesn't just operate thematically in a manner in concert with the fiction, but perhaps allows interactions with characters or shaping of plots?

I am currently involved in two projects exploring this direction. One, Prom Week, is discussed in detail in a separate proposal from Aaron Reed. It uses a template-driven language system. Another, Character Creator (a collaboration with Marilyn Walker and others) is a project attempting to make deep natural language generation (NLG) technologies useful for writers, enabling them to have characters respond to a much wider variety of potential situations than it would be possible to write dialogue variations for by hand. I hope to present some of our current results and then talk about some of my intuitions for the future — including my belief that successful NLG for writers may look something like successful procedural animation for visual artists.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

This workshop presented a hands-on introduction to the RiTa.js toolkit
It is a toolkit for digital literature designed to work natively
in web browsers.

RiTa.js is an easy-to-use natural language library that provides simple
procedural tools for experimenting with digital literature. The philosophy behind
the toolkit is to be as simple and intuitive as possible, while still providing
adequate flexibility for more advanced users. RiTa.js is written in 100%
JavaScript and runs natively in popular web browsers. It is both free and opensource.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

People draw on many diverse sources of real-world knowledge in order to make up stories, including the following: knowledge of the physical world; rules of social behavior and relationships; techniques for solving everyday problems such as transportation, acquisition of objects, and acquisition of information; knowledge about physical needs such as hunger and thirst; knowledge about stories their organization and contents; knowledge about planning behavior and the relationships between kinds of goals; and knowledge about expressing a story in a natural language. This thesis describes a computer program which uses all information to write stories. The areas of knowledge, called problem domains, are defined by a set of representational primitives, a set of problems expressed in terms of those primitives, and a set of procedures for solving those problems. These may vary from one domain to the next. All this specialized knowledge must be integrated in order to accomplish a task such as storytelling. The program, called TALE-SPIN, produces stories in English, interacting with the user, who specifies characters, personality characteristics, and relationships between characters. Operating in a different mode, the program can make those decisions in order to produce Aesop-like fables.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Digital poetry uses both the machine and natural language, therefore the experience of digital poetry always lives on the borders of artifice and art or appearance and essence, where the borders fades. The essay searches for a native experience of poetry within digital media which is not a translation, representation or Ecphrasis of an existing piece of poetry by focusing on inter-activity and programming that make the poet-programmer and reader-player to meet and be involved in a poem; The essay tries to reveal the limitations of the machine language in creating a digital poem by concentrating on the syntax as an open-source consciousness of the natural language and the non-open-source nature of operating systems and compilers in the instant of writing poetry as the consciousness of the machine.