https://pad.profolia.org/s/chekhovs_gun
/The plan was to write a description for a series of lectures and
conversations at Merz Akademie in upcoming semester, but it became a
manifesto, I'd like to share with you.
/
Disarming Chekhov’s Gun
The mantra passed down from generation to generation “you can’t put a
loaded gun on stage if no one means to fire it” first appeared in a
letter Chekhov wrote to a young writer, criticizing the way his
vaudeville was structured:
"Dear Alexander Semyonovich!
I received your vaudeville and immediately read it. It’s
beautifully written, but its architecture is obnoxious. It’s not scenic
at all. Think about it. Dasha’s first monologue is completely
unnecessary. It stands out like a sore thumb. It would have fit if you
wanted to make Dasha more than just a supporting role, and if this
monolog – that promises a lot to the audience – had anything to do with
the content or the effects of the play. You can’t put a loaded gun on
stage if no one means to fire it. You can’t make promises. Let Dasha be
silent altogether – that’s better."[1]
Dasha, her first monologue and its unkept promise did not go down in
history, but the analogy of the loaded gun left on stage unfired did:
Chekhov’s Gun – the dramaturgic principle that advises authors to remove
irrelevant elements from their stories, be it in novels, theater plays,
or later in films and television scripts. Closer to the end of the 20th
century, the concept also entered the digital realm, from interactive
fiction to Extended Reality.
But it is not only in literature and entertainment of all genres and
media where playwrights’ rules are applied. Dramaturgic principles have
long taken over the socio-political spheres of our lives that are
computer mediated since digital environments like Aristotelian drama
happened to be an “imitation of an action with a beginning, middle and
end, which is meant to be enacted in real time”, as Brenda Laurel
pointed out in Computers as Theatre, 1991.
A century after Chekhov warned against leaving unfired guns on stage,
Laurel recognized the same pattern – “gratuitous incidents”[2] and the
unwanted effect it can have in the design of software, when on staging
an interactor’s experience. To properly script user’s expectations and
actions no minor detail standing in the way of “constraining what is
probable”[3].
30 years later software got more sophisticated, complex, and literally
invisible. It means that today these constraints need to be tighter than
ever before. Designers of chatbots, robots, and immersive environments
take care that guns are fired or nonexistent. To succeed in fully
automated environments, CGR – Chekhov’s Gun Recognition[4] algorithm,
was suggested recently
…and then there is the concept of Schrödinger’s Gun[5], a combination of
Schrödinger’s Cat and Chekhov’s Gun, an algorithm that can render any
numerically represented element from gratuitous to necessary. Everything
can be turned into a loaded gun in computer generated environments.
Outside of tropes and virtual worlds, the playwright’s principle has
become a curse. There is Alec Baldwin’s Gun that was supposedly just a
prop, and currently, there are Putin’s guns that we so much wanted to
believe were just for show, not loaded at all, or at least would not fire.
What if Chekhov’s letter was never written, got lost or was simply
ignored? What if the unimportant Dasha had a chance to recite her
unnecessary monologue?
Imagine a world where our lives weren’t shaped by the predictable laws
of drama and we were not a part of Aristotle’s tragic progression.
Leave the guns unfired and give the stage to Dasha!
--
Т. 3. Письма, Октябрь 1888 — декабрь 1889. — М.: Наука, 1976. — С.
273—275. [my translation] Source
http://chehov-lit.ru/chehov/letters/1888-1889/letter-707.htm ↩︎
Laurel B, Computers as Theatre, 1993 p.74 ↩︎
Ibid., p.76 ↩︎
Tikhonov A., Yamshchikov I. Chekhov’s Gun Recognition, 2021
https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13855v1 ↩︎
Robertson J., YoungR.M., Finding Schrödinger’s Gun, AIDE, October
2014 ↩︎
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