Books that you explore

I'm not sure about the term "ergodic" literature. It's derived from ergon (= work) + hodos (= path) and supposedly refers to a book for which "nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text". But that's true of a lot of academic textbooks and some novels. I'd certainly have to exert nontrivial effort to make it through a Lee Child or Harlan Coben book. Ergodicity already had a meaning before it was appropriated for tricky books, and it doesn't help anyone if terms end up with multiple meanings (see also: confabulate) so, if we're looking for a fancy-sounding term for gamebooks and other lean-forward texts what about polyhodal?

Whatever term we use, "Lost in the Labyrinth" on the Beautiful Books website provides a very comprehensive guide to such books, from Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler to Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone by way of Choose Your Own Adventure, Fabled Lands, and even Tristram Shandy. There are titles here I'd never heard of, presented in a form that's an exploration in itself. Set off (no need for a map) and see where the journey takes you.

In related news, Riccardo Scaringi, host of the podcast Il Gioco in Tavolo, has just released a book of interviews with such gaming stalwarts as Ken St. Andre, Sandy Petersen, Kenneth Hite, and Shane Hensley. I'm in there too. Narrative at the Crossroads is on sale now.

Also on the subject of gamebooks, Paul Gresty was writing the eighth Fabled Lands book, The Lone & Level Sands, but had to abandon it because of other commitments. That was a shame, The Serpent King's Domain being regarded as perhaps the best in the series, but the good news is that Paul handed over around 750 finished sections. By the standards of most books that's almost finished. We're now looking at bringing in writers to help complete it. The book should eventually round out around 900 sections and will hopefully be the basis of new add-on content for the Prime Games CRPG. To whet your interest, here's the flowchart.

How our new gamebook came to be

My Whispers Beyond The Stars co-creator Paweł Dziemski sat down with podcast host Riccardo Scaringi recently for an in-depth discussion of the print gamebook, the app, the story, and the Storm Weavers online shop where you can buy it and other gamebooks. I found their discussion amazingly informative -- and I was one of the authors!

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. It could also help to make movies that are considered too niche or too expensive for traditional production.

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.