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.

Not fading, sea-changing

I wonder what it's like for Woody Allen or Mick Jagger. Maybe not so bad for Jagger. People might keep screaming for him to sing "Sympathy For The Devil", even though we all know it's never going to be as good as this again, but nobody expects the next Stones album to be a follow-up to Their Satanic Majesties. Woody, though, must get pretty cheesed off with well-meaning fans quoting that Stardust Memories line.

I experience a much-diluted form of the same thing whenever I'm asked to write another Fabled Lands book. That is not a gripe. I'm very glad that the FL books connected with so many people. It's what you aim for as a writer. But you can't step twice into the same stream. Twenty years go by, you've got a whole bunch of new experiences, new influences, new concerns, new things to say. You're a different person. Ridley Scott is never going to make another Duellists - more's the pity.

This blog ranges far and wide but it mostly tends to stick to either roleplaying or interactive storytelling. I never tire of the former, the hobby I love and that is the crucible in which everything I work on is first reacted. My storytelling these days is usually of the traditional variety (ie you sit back, I'll tell it) and when I do mix in some interactivity I'm interested in character rather than puzzles. The old dungeon-style gamebook is all about closing the narrative back onto a linear path. Look, here's an orc; get what you will from it, or kill or bypass it, and the adventure flows on with barely a ripple. On the other hand, if you've been having an affair with your best friend's wife and you have to decide whether to confess - well, whatever you choose to say, the story is going to spin off in an entirely different direction after that. This is more interesting but it makes for a more complicated design, more suited to digital than print.

A very simple example: in my interactive version of Frankenstein, Victor can end up referring to his creation as "he", "it", "Adom" or "the fiend" depending largely on some very early choices that have far-reaching implications. That was easy for me to implement in the markup language I used to write the book, given that you'll be reading the book on iPad, but it would make for a fine old mess on the printed page. Digital gamebooks and print gamebooks are moving into different places. Speciation is inevitable.

Hence if I write a gamebook these days, it won't be Fabled Lands 7 or the sequel to Heart of Ice. (All right, in HOI the universe blew up, which I have a habit of making happen in my books, but even if not I wouldn't be going back.) I might not even end up with something that a purist of the medium would call a gamebook. And much of the time I'm working on other things in other media: novels like the Dark Lord and Starship Captain series, which I co-created with Jamie, or comics like Mirabilis, the labour of love that I work on with Leo Hartas on the rare occasions that our different schedules permit.

Just because you like one thing a person creates doesn't mean you're going to enjoy the whole oeuvre. The Sandman is probably my favourite comic book of all time, but Neil Gaiman's prose fiction doesn't work for me. Hounds of Love still gets played regularly chez Morris, but the Moon would have to go ultraviolet before I'd willingly throw on 50 Words for Snow. So when my other projects leave roleplayers or gamebook fans indifferent, I get it. And don't worry, I'm not going to be bursting into a rendition of "Jumping Jack Flash" any time soon.