| A Guide
to Emergent Narratives For a narrative to be ‘emergent’, as in digital or even social systems, a set of complex behaviors arise from the interaction of many simple parts. Simple rules cause complex behavior to arise, rather than imposing the behavior from ‘above’. What strategies can be used to produce emergent narrative? How might approaches employed in other fields and for other, more abstract art forms be applied to designing emergent narrative? There are several strategies one can use to produce emergent narrative. The field of performance can act as a relay, something whose approach to a particular problem inspires your imagination, because concepts from traditional narrative theory may not help to find design principles relevant to narrative in networked environments. A networked narrative is a setting where stories and ‘inter-actor personalities’ take shape and change in response to unstable environments. They are affected at every level (structure, medium, and content) by the "generative interplay of randomness with pattern" (N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman). Texture and ambience become more prominent than plot. A system can also have determinate indeterminacy, according to John Cage who foreshadows key ideas about how complex behavior emerges from the interaction of many simple parts. The system is ‘determinate’ in the sense of being governed by rules within limited degrees of freedom; because of the number of potential relationships among the different parts is so large, and because each is affected by the smallest variations, even echoes from variations several levels away, the actual work is indeterminate. If the system was organized hierarchically, each component would not have the same freedom. The system as a whole is capable of global reorganization in cases where enough local changes accumulate. The composer therefore has the responsibility of designing the system but the system gives rise to the "work" in the course of each performance. Optimally, each performance will be unique. As performances open to chance, the "content" merges with "context". The art work becomes a participatory system consisting of material, tools, and cues, within a structure flexible and open enough to respond to the input of participants and the conditions of the context. Artists in this case design systems rather "scores"; tools, cues, and materials rather than "time-objects"; a set of algorithms or instructions rather than results. The key components of a narrative machine system for producing emergent narratives are a database and algorithms: • Algorithms are sets of instructions. The results of an algorithm should be repeatable but in combination with other factors they can give rise to unexpected behavior instead. • Databases are what contain the content that interacts within the algorithm. |