Posted by Graham on April 20, 2000 at 09:12:25:
In Reply to: What ever happened to my speech on MUD generated fiction posted by Callowin on April 19, 2000 at 15:36:09:
> It went... well. Much better than the one I did on narrative theory and video games, 5 people showed up for that, and one left halfway through.
>
> Basically, at a linguistics conference I presented the paper in a session on narrative discourse. I showed them logs of istendil's marriage, and istendil and ilecytra's retelling's of the marriage, and some other game logs, and matching stories, including zorszaul and palan's takes on what happened with them.
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> I'll post the paper when I get it done (it's in two shitty papers right now), and I might be able to get it published in one of those crappy online mud journals, or better i dunno.
>
> Here's the short version:
> I called role-playing muds an example of "emergent narrative," where the story emerges from the interaction between people playing roles within a fictional world. The roles that cf (my, umm, sample mud of choice) prescribes just happen to fit into a conflict structure that some theorists have argued is in all narrative. Plus, all the retelling of character's stories that goes on here is intrinsically interesting to theorists because it offers an example of how people use cognitive processes of understanding stories to piece together all the text into meaningful epics and episodes, and how we're able to see the competing points of view. I've analyzed all you guys real good =). Of course, it's just an excuse to legitamize my mud addiction, but hell.
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> I used Greimas' theory of actants to base my argument on. There's a structure of three diametric actantial roles all characters will fill at different points in a story:
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> Subject - You, the main character
> Object - Your goal (to kill your enemies, to protect your friends, advance rank, blah blah)
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> Helper - Characters who help you achieve your object
> Opponent - Characters who oppose your object
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> Sender - One who charges you with an object, usually you, the subject, also, but in Zorszaul's case, the imm that told him to kill palan
> Receiver - Pretty much you, the one who receives the object, but it can be sender who made you find a walnut to be accepted in sylvan
>
> You can see all the fun I had with Good/Evil, Order/Chaos, Might/Magic
> I really simplified it all, cf is a far more rich fictional world than just the above, but it can be whittled down to these principles I think for generating engaging narrative interaction.
>
> if you got more questions, go ahead, I love talking about this. Oh yeah, thanks to everyone who sent me their roles. The role command is going to be a lot of fun to deal with, and thanks to the imms and everyone for making cf a suffocating unseverable part of my "life"