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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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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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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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Overall tldr question... can you think of a way to auto-generate stories the way we can fractals, or generic text with GPT3? Doesn’t have to be *good* stories. But does have to be *only* stories, not non-stories. Atomically well-formed. That algorithm would embody story.
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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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