June 29th, 2026
When I finished Le Morte d’Arthur some five years ago, I was creatively spent. I was proud of my accomplishment, knew that I had completed my life goal of building genuine interactive art, and was ready to retire. I have spent the last five years working on a wide range of projects, many of them outside in the forest.
But two recent essays by Alvaro Gonzalez made me realize that I still have work to do:
The Grammar of Drama
You should read them both; they are thought-provoking. They certainly provoked a lot of thinking on my part, which ultimately led to me this.
I realized that I need to develop a more abstract structure to control the behavior of the Storytron technology. Something higher, something more accessible to non-technical people. I needed something analogous to what FORTRAN or COBOL did for assembly language.
I won’t drag you through the many paths I pursued in thinking all this over; the creative process necessarily visits many dead ends. Here’s where my thinking stands just now:
The Instance technology (previously “Encounter technology”, as used in Le Morte d’Arthur, will be the outer layer of the system. The Storytron technology will be the inner layer. Thus, the player will start and end their experience in the Instance layer, which will occasionally take the player into the Storytron technology, as needed.
Here’s a nifty way of thinking about it: the Instance layer is for plot-level interaction, and the Storytron layer is for character-level interaction. Thus, the two fundamental classes of story design are united in one technology.
The tool for building the Instance layer are already in good shape in the form of the Slubberdegullion technology. This consists of two HTML pages with JavaScript code: Slubber and Gullion. I’m having trouble getting them both uploaded to this website, but I don’t expect the delay to be long. Moreover, I intend to turn this project over to a small team of developers to modify to better fit the needs of people who don’t think like I do; I’ll be recruiting people for that team.
The Storytron part is much more difficult. The current implementation is programmed in Java, a ghastly programming language. It must be converted to run in JavaScript, and despite the similarities of the names, the conversion will be a big job. Once again, this will have to be done by a team.
I will of course provide leadership for the team, but I no longer trust my programming skills; I can no longer write complex code. If I am unable to recruit an adequate team, then I shall have to abandon this project. Perhaps it can be accomplished using AI; I have a good friend with much expertise in using AI for programming, and perhaps he will be willing to organize such an effort.
I’m sure that the team will want less esoteric names for the two components (Slubber and Gullion), and I’ll accede to whatever names the team decides upon. Perhaps something along the lines of PlotSide and CharacterSide; there are lots of good possibilities.
I am still developing my thoughts on this problem; I’ll be posting more essays on it in future weeks.