Reading Schedule/Syllabus

A Tentative Plan, by Zach Tomaszewski

for ICS 699, Spring 2005, directed by Dr. Kim Binsted

Proposed Schedule

• Week 1: [planning/intro]
• Week 2: Meadow's Pause and Effect (IN)
• Week 3: Aristotle's Poetics (Narr)
• Week 4: Freytag's Technique of the Drama (Narr)
• Week 5: Laurel's Computers as Theatre (IN)
• Week 6: [buffer: catch up/follow up]
• Week 7: Martin's Recent Theories of Narrative (Narr)
• Week 8: Abbot's Cambridge Introduction to Narrative [?] (Narr)
• Week 9: Johnstone's Impro (Inter)
• Week 10: Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (IN)
• Week 11: [buffer]
• Week 12: Norman's Design of Everyday Things (Inter)
• Week 13: Wardrip-Fruin's First person (IN)
• Week 14: 3 journal articles (post-facto stories; computational theory of narrative)[?]
• Week 15-16: Synthesis, completion, and final paper.

Possible Journals/Conferences for Final Paper

• [Pending.]

First Week's Discussion

• Narrative and storytelling as evolutionary adaptation. Conveying teller's internal state, along with past and future actions leading to and resulting from that state. Promotes more effective community living through understanding others' behavior.
• What makes a good DM? Assuming the same rule set and initial scenario, some are still better than others.
• Plot == series of events. Narrative == plot + (author's?) perspective?
• How to form a rule-based system that generates or promotes a narrative? Essentially, a world that tells a tale.
• Post-hoc story generation verses "quests" and pre-planned stories. Quests involve a goal from the outset.