[Crosstalk] HyperStudio Talk - Nick Montfort on Curveship: Interactive Fiction & Interactive Narrating

[Suzana Lisanti]

HyperStudio Talk

CURVESHIP:
Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narration
Nick Montfort
Assistant Professor of Digital Media, MIT
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Friday February 20th, noon - 2 pm
Lecture and lunch
Room NE25-373 (GAMBIT Lab)
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Interactive fiction (often called "IF") is a venerable, well-defined  
category of computer programs that includes the canonical Adventure  
and Zork as well as some work by established literary authors and  
recent independent developers. These programs are often correctly  
referred to as games, but they can also be rich forms of text-based  
computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of literary art.

Unlike many other new media forms, interactive fiction 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.

Nick Montfort will discuss a new interactive fiction system, called  
Curveship, which draws on narrative theory and computational  
linguistics to allow the transformation of the narrating.

Nick Montfort is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Program  
in Writing & Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of  
Technology.  Nick is on leave Spring 2009.  More information at http://nickm.com

RSVP to hyperstudio at mit.edu would be appreciated but not necessary.
website: http://hyperstudio.mit.edu