I’ve been weaving in Godzilla comments here partly for fun but they’re also great for demonstrating how storytelling is nonverbal. Most of the important beats are screams and fights.
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Whenever I tweet about story stuff there’s always one reply along the lines of “have you heard of Joseph Campbell?” 🤣
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I’ve concluded the best answer is debt, so stringing debits and credits together.
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2 replies have pointed out interesting tangents, that there are specific American and Japanese forms of story distinct from the European Campbellian base. 🤔
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This Mark Twain essay claims the rambling humorous story, told ‘in character’ (so really a second order story/performance) is uniquely American in origin.
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Replying to @adamgurri and @vgr
Btw have you read Mark Twain on this twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/how2te
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This essay claims Japanese narrative is not conflict driven but I guess a sort of cosmic-causation-relevation process? twitter.com/Aelkus/status/
This Tweet is unavailable.
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I’m sympathetic to this idea that there’s culture-specific narrative forms rather than a single hero’s journey. Polymyth over monomyth. Kinda like Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for language. Not a catalog of tropes/basic plots but actual structural variation.
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The Arabian Nights features a form common to India and the Middle East — 2-3 levels of stories within a top-level frame story, where characters tell each other stories to make points.
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As in:
A: Give me a loan
B: No
A: Why?
B: Let me tell you the story of B and C
{escape to story of b and C}
... and that’s why I can’t give you a loan
Etc.
Story as recursion of moral justification.
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Interesting 2x2 generator function/differential equation
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Replying to @PeterW__ and @vgr
Each generation of the game is an episode, and scenes are driven by 0/1 logic like so.
Checkhov is a stand-in for any kind of half story beat. Might need a seed scene that introduces 5-10 for runway, but every story does intros.
(I hope this is a format you can understand
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Not sure if it’s exactly what you’re going for, but there are some narrative-oriented role-playing games that can arguably do this when played by a few people. “Fiasco” is probably the best known. I guess the question is whether it’s an algorithm or structured improv?
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This is a whole field of research! Here’s a paper from 2017, “A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for
Authoring Computational Narratives.”
cs.uky.edu/~sgware/readin
Replying to
Can't speak to GPT-3 (though I'd be very interested to see!), so here's Roald Dahl exploring the question:
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