I'm glad someone else got the willies while watching this movie. After
all, Truman's world is identical to that of a virtual world. Who are we to
say that we aren't being god-like when we create virtual worlds (and bots,
specifically)? All sorts of moral dilemmas pop up here, but I'm not sure
this is the right list for that (but would love it if I were mistaken)
Definitely a must-see for VRML people.
-John
At 01:41 PM 6/15/98 -0700, Jed Hartman wrote:
>...Okay, I wouldn't normally recommend a movie to a mailing list, and I
>wouldn't normally even *watch* a Jim Carrey movie. But I just saw _The
>Truman Show_ and couldn't resist bringing it up. Viewed from one angle, it
>can be seen as a description of the ultimate in interactive storytelling...
> Really nicely put together, and worth watching.
>
>One interesting thing in particular: it underscored a point Chris Crawford
>made about spatial relationships. In movies, we're used to jump cuts --
>the protagonist gets a phone call, says "Okay, I'll be there right away,"
>and the next thing we see is the protagonist arriving at a destination.
>Crawford said in games (and I would say in VRML in particular), the
>temptation is to have the character put down the phone, walk ten feet to
>the door, turn the door handle, open the door, leave the room, close the
>door, walk twenty feet down the hall, turn a corner, go down the stairs...
>And so on. Yet another thing that IrishSpace did right: there was no
>attempt to build one giant all-inclusive world that maintained spatial
>relationships between locations and forced the interactor to experience
>those spatial relationships. Having some way of saying "Three months
>later..." in a story is immensely useful; there's no need to make the
>interactor actually experience three months of boredom while a spaceship
>makes its trip.
>
>(Crawford's story engine doesn't *have* spatial relationships between what
>he calls "stages" -- the characters depart one stage and arrive at another,
>with time (optionally?) elapsing between departure and arrival but no
>events during transit. At first I was put off by this idea, but I'm
>beginning to think it's pretty elegant -- if you need events to happen in
>transit, I assume you just create an "inside the car" stage, or a "grassy
>plain" stage.)
>
>--jed
>
>
