Let's be serious

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to literature and drama. One view is that it’s entertainment, it should be fun, and it shouldn’t challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable. That’s a strain that’s developed in Britain and America particularly and used to be known as the Young Lady Standard. The term is particularly unfair seeing as Emily Bronte wrote one of the most uncompromising novels of all time. Nowadays we’re hopefully less sexist and young ladies get the same educational benefits as young gentlemen, so let’s instead call it the Cosy Standard. In TV broadcasting it’s the equivalent of pre-watershed content.

On the other hand, fiction can take you right into the depths of the human soul to confront both the marvellous and the terrible. It can shake you up. Read Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine” or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Nabokov’s – oh, well almost anything by Nabokov, in fact. You’ll face some profound truths. Like all great art, these works can change you. But you’d never say of them, “Oh, it’s entertainment, it’s just a bit of fun.”

That’s even more true of games, where the very name of the medium leads people into assuming it has to be frivolous and jolly. When Profile Books published my interactive version of Frankenstein, one reviewer complained that she didn’t want to be complicit in the creature’s murder of 6-year-old William Frankenstein. Too bad. Every reader of the novel who finds themselves sympathizing with the creature is going to have to face that moment. The game version just really rubs your nose in it. There are games like Papers, Please and This War of Mine that are trying to be L'Armée des Ombres rather than a boys'-own romp like Kelly's Heroes.

This is the point Jim Desborough was making with his widely (and often deliberately) misrepresented article “In Defence of Rape”. If you’re a grown-up, you look to fiction (including games) to tell the truth, not wrap the world up in a comforting nursery blanket.

This exact point came up recently in the case of a motion capture performer who refused to act out a rape scene for a game. That is their right, no question about that. And I have no idea what the game was, so I don’t know if the performer was correctly judging it when they said, "It was just purely gratuitous in my opinion." But it wouldn’t have to be gratuitous. Suppose this is a WW2 game. You’re sneaking into a Nazi-occupied village to plant some explosives or steal the attack plans or whatever. Stealth is the watchword. But you pass a window where you see an enemy soldier raping a villager. (Or torturing a villager. Or even in the act of murdering them, since this isn’t Victorian times and we don’t buy into “the fate worse than death”.)

Now here’s the question. Do I shoot the Nazi soldier? In doing so I’ll save the villager but I’ll give away my presence in the village, jeopardising the mission. Or do I pass by, hardening my heart to the villager’s screams because many lives hinge on the success of the mission and so it’s more important than one innocent person? It’s the Trolley Problem but not presented in the dispassionate context of a philosophy lecture. The decision is brutal and I’m going to have to live with it. The choices that confront you with challenges to your most fundamental moral principles are the ones that fuel the most powerful stories, because they make us think hard about who we really are.

As I said, I don’t know if that’s what the game’s designers were trying to do. But you would expect good literature or cinema to confront you with raw and disturbing situations like that. Games are an art form no less capable than literature or drama of addressing difficult moral questions. Games can be simple uncomplicated fun, of course, and many are. But that’s not all they can be.

Theatre of the artificial mind

Picking up from last time, another entertainment use for AI will be in staging plays that we otherwise wouldn't get to see. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, for instance, which Coleridge regarded as one of the three "most perfect" plots in all of fiction. (If you're anything like me you'll immediately need to know that the others were Fielding's Tom Jones and Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus.) You can find amateur versions online like the one above, but no fully staged production. Likewise for many plays of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Stoppard, Coward... The list is endless. 

To illustrate: lately I've had a hankering for the plays of Martin McDonagh, but just reading them isn't enough. I want to see them performed. Until now, if all you had was a script or audio file, the only way you could see a performance was if somebody went to the trouble of animating the whole thing by hand, the way the BBC did with "The Power of the Daleks" having (curse them) wiped the original videotapes.

With AI, animation of a play no longer need take a dozen-strong team working for months on end. It can be improvised on the fly using the script. With a little set-up the AI could even base the performances on digital twins of famous actors from history.

If the last couple of posts haven't exhausted your interest in AI, it's one of the topics I recently discussed with Riccardo Scaringi on his podcast. We also talked about Blood Sword, Fabled Lands, Dragon Warriors, Elon Musk, Vulcanverse, Cthulhu 2050, Shadow King, Jewelspider and the films of Woody Allen, so there's plenty there for the non-AI buffs:

I appreciate that using AI for entertainment is mere frippery compared to the applications in healthcare, environmental measures, materials science, energy technology, and pure science. And beyond that, and far more important, is the eventual role of strong AI not merely as a new human tool but a whole new companion species. But on the way there a little digital alchemy won't hurt.

An audience of one

There's Matthew Berman reminding us that future is coming up faster than you think. He's talking about videogaming, but the same principles apply to movies, comics, and literature.

The novel – at least, the genre novel – may well go the way of the epic poem, to be replaced by something more like an RPG session which an AI will run for the reader. (Or, more likely, the listener or viewer.) The top authors will devise the elements of the story, the characters and timeline (perhaps more like creative directors than old-style authors) and the AI will use that to tell a story that gives prominence to the bits that interest the individual reader. Did your parents make up stories to tell you when you were little? Like that.

You'll still discuss the story with friends (an important feature of most entertainment) but the specific events in your version may vary from theirs. Initially such on-the-fly stories will be trite because roleplaying has been infected by a lot of Hollywood pablum about act structure and story tropes, and that’s what the AI models will learn from. But eventually it may shake that off and become a new independent art form. "Not a line, but a bolt of lightning," as C W Longbottom puts it:

In the meantime, a market will remain – small, though, and shrinking – for grown-up fiction that doesn’t pander to YA tastes. Genre fiction falls in predictable patterns involving plot, and so is easily copied by novice writers and neural nets, whereas literary fiction is harder to fit to a formula because it usually concerns itself with the unique outlook and choices of the characters. But don't assume that because the AI hasn't experienced human emotions it won't eventually be able to write Lolita or War & Peace. Conrad didn't personally have to hack his way through an African jungle to learn how to write Heart of Darkness. It's only a matter of time before those more complex story patterns are learned and replicated by AI, just the same way that most authors do it. And then we'll be in a whole new world of entertainment.

An old soul reborn

We'll have an in-depth report on this in a month or so in the form of a guest post by author Paul Gresty, but I couldn't let the summer pass without letting you know that The Castle of Lost Souls has been completely reworked as a Fabled Lands Quest.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that it was originally published in four parts in White Dwarf magazine from April to July 1984. I revised it for the Golden Dragon series the following year, but those changes were nothing beside the transformation that Mr Gresty has wrought. The book is now more than twice as big at 700 sections, the action takes place in Golnir in the Fabled Lands, and you have the option of dropping in and out of the adventure at several points.

To quote from the blurb, this edition of The Castle of Lost Souls sports "a huge amount of original content, including resurrection rules, the ability to travel back and forth between this book and others in the Fabled Lands series, a range of completely new magical items for the Fabled Lands setting, and much more." And that's without mentioning all the scrumptious Leo Hartas illustrations, which haven't been seen since the original 1980s edition.