http://liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu/rmy/rmichaelyoung/Home.html

‘Leveraging many models to build interactive learning environments’. Must say I wasn’t too hopeful about this, as the title seemed nonsensical. Seems that leveraging is a word that Americans use far more than Brits, and it seems to mean something like ‘utlilising’ or ’employing’. Can’t find a better definition than that.

Anyway, Michael Young, seriously good speaker and the only person I’ve ever known to successfully integrate video clips within a Powerpoint presentation. I’d go and hear a paper from him again any time.

He was looking at how you can create convincing computer-operated characters within a game environment. Not just ciphers, who have the treasure if you give them the green key, and not just characters which bumble around a limited area, saying the same thing all the time, but characters which are convincing and act convincingly.

He had a way of doing it, but I’d have thought, even with supercomputers at hand to work on it, the amount of decision making required would make anything more than a game lasting a few minutes an impossibility.

Anyway, he illustrated his theory with clips from Star Wars, which were very successful and which clearly demonstrated the workings of an underlying narrative structure. He separated out the story from the discourse, the fantasy and imagination from the technical bits which make it happen. The world in the stoy from the world in which the story is told.

Oh, and apparently, if you’re enough of a Star Wars geek, you know that light sabres are powered by batteries. Who knew?