“But these are all tools of expression.”
July 22, 2018 4:34 AM   Subscribe

Sheldon County: A Nothing Place [Soundcloud] [Episode 1]James Ryan, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses code to tell stories. Sheldon County is his current project (a proof-of-concept released to Soundcloud earlier this year can be listened to here.) Named in honour of Sheldon Klein, an early pioneer of expressive artificial intelligence, Sheldon County is an AI-powered podcast capable of generating an infinite number of procedural stories. Sheldon County tells the story of a fictional American town and the people who inhabit it over the course of 150 years. It is the result of two programs that run in parallel: Hennepin, which simulates each day and night in the history of a fictional American county over 150 years, and Sheldon, which in turn sifts through this accumulated history to find the interesting storylines and dramatic nuggets that have actually emerged over the course of the simulation based on narrative patterns authored by Ryan.” [via: Eurogamer]
posted by Fizz (9 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm having trouble finding any info on how this works or evidence that it's not a lovingly handcrafted example (the pilot episode seems to be the only one, and it seems very boilerplate-y). Seems it's based on this previous framework, but I can't find any examples of its output either, just some broad-strokes research papers.

But man, Amazon's TTS is really good these days, no?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:26 AM on July 22, 2018


Looks like it could be very useful for Dwarf Fortress, that is if it does actually work to easily generate a truckload of decent narrative content overnight.
But I can't see myself being that interested in procedurally generated plots unless they are a background for a procedurally generated game, where there's already a hook and expectations for story are low.
There's no shortage of stories written with purpose and intent, imo.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:24 AM on July 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


I find the idea/creation of this project more interesting than the actual content itself, the episode didn't do much for me. But still, it's cool to think about.
posted by Fizz at 6:54 AM on July 22, 2018 [4 favorites]


idea/creation of this project more interesting than the actual content
For that matter, that's also my approach to DF - fun to think about and keep an eye on but not that fun to actually play for me :)
Also captures why people like to pass around the [dumb jokes, stupid movie titles, character names, monster types] spat out of Markov chains. They're just not that good, but interesting to see a computer flailing around and trying, sort of like watching a baby.
It is interesting to see what people are doing with procedural content generation and pushing the envelope in fairly unprecedented directions, thanks for posting!
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:58 AM on July 22, 2018


BTW: The name of this project is a tip of the hat to Sheldon Klein and his 1970s-era TALESPIN system.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:21 AM on July 22, 2018


There’s a second episode, and like the first, it’s mostly beating around the narrative bush. Lots of vagueness.

Moving my critique up a level, though: is a unique piece of narrative that nobody else will ever hear something we really *want*? I feel like a lot of the purpose and fun of fiction is to give us something to talk about with each other. What themes are in it? Who are you shipping? Holy shit did you hear what happened in the new episode oh geez you haven’t okay no spoilers talk to me when you catch up, it’s so good. Stuff like that.

“In the days of binge watching and binge listening, an infinite podcast.” Or so he says on his site. I don’t know if that’s actually desirable. I only want so much of any given series, it starts to lose its allure after a few seasons. Recently I’ve had multiple times where I’ve read three books of a series, come to the conclusion of a multi-volume arc, seen that there is a fourth and just not had any interest in taking another ride on the same setup. Not when there’s so many other things out there and only so many years of life.
posted by egypturnash at 10:20 AM on July 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


"is a unique piece of narrative that nobody else will ever hear something we really *want*?"

Based on my time spent in the improv community, no.
posted by Damienmce at 10:38 AM on July 22, 2018


This sounds like it could be amusing, if it was voiced by Garrison Kiellor...
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 1:34 PM on July 22, 2018


If it's anything like Bad News, Ryan's prior project, it's not so much a narrative generator, but more of a character/history generator. It creates a narrative space, the town, and generates the history not by mad-libbing in things, but by actually going year-by-year and updating the state of the town, the inhabitants, their interrelations and their memories of past events. Bad News did all that, but it was then up to real human actors to play out the parts of the townsfolk.

I had a chance to play around with the Talk of the Town engine (which this and Bad News are based on), and while the games that can be made using it were interesting, the real fun came from doing things like observing the state of things, rewinding time 100 years and changing some small factor, then going back to the present and see how things played out, sort of like a text-based Back to the Future simulator.

So yeah, this seems like more of a demo of the engine's power rather than the killer app everyone will want to play, and any one podcast generated by this will probably not seem impressive as a story on its own. What could be impressive is wondering "but what if this one factor had been different", and then being able to hear the result.
posted by subocoyne at 5:46 PM on July 27, 2018


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