2024-09-27: Introducing... Carpe Noctem

An Explorer’s Guide to Collaborative Imagination

Good evening from Los Angeles. I’m a creative technologist and a role-player, and I’m on a mission to help people navigate the cultural multiverse. Hopefully, we’ll be leaving good stories in our wake.

What’s This All About, Then?

Carpe Noctem (loosely translated as “harvest the night”) will be a series of articles and letters about storytelling, good gaming, alternate realities and roleplaying of all kinds, but especially digital storytelling and computer-assisted roleplay (CARP).

The Cultural Multiverse

In physics, the term multiverse refers to a “patchwork quilt of separate universes all bound by the same laws of physics.” It’s not so much that anything is possible, but that everything possible actually happens, somewhere.

I use the term cultural multiverse to refer to the complete set of worlds and world-fragments that have ever been conceived and shared. It includes representations of “real” reality (e.g., a news story or a recounted memory, accurate or otherwise), but also the representations of more fantastical realities in folklore, literature, film, video games, and roleplaying.

The cultural multiverse is a lot smaller than the physical multiverse, but as evidenced by books like Flatland or games like Bioshock Infinite, the laws of physics have way more flexibility.

Simple Roleplaying

“Playing pretend” with roles is something that kids start doing by the age of 18 months. It emerges spontaneously across cultures, which suggests that role-playing is an intrinsic part of human development. It seems to serve the evolutionary functions of developing empathy and social problem-solving skills.

Simple roleplaying reaches its peak in the preschool years (ages 3-6), where children start to create elaborate scenarios. From the ages of 7 to 11, kids become more focused on structured activities.

After that, playing pretend usually becomes internalized or just fades away.

But for some people, imaginitave play and simple roleplaying evolve into creative writing, acting, or organized role-playing games, also known as RPGs.

Tabletop Roleplay Gaming

Even if you’ve never tried it, you probably know what’s involved with pen and paper (“tabletop”) roleplaying games like old-school Dungeons & Dragons: folks sitting around a table, “inhabiting” a fantasy scenario with characters of their own devising, figuring out what those characters should try to do, and rolling dice to add an element of chance to their imaginary efforts. A facilitator, commonly known as the Game Master (or GM for short) sets the scenes and keeps things moving while the players keep track of their characters’ statuses on pieces of paper known as character sheets.

Tabletop roleplaying grew out of the combat-based board games of the late 1960s. Dungeons & Dragons (1974) is commonly credited as the progenitor, but it seems more accurate to say that one of D&D’s co-creators, Dave Arneson, established the genre with his Blackmoor game on April 17, 1971.

For a great short history of the subject, I highly recommend Dungeons & Deceptions: The First D&D Players Push Back On The Legend Of Gary Gygax.

CARP

You can think of computer-assisted roleplay as digital Dungeons & Dragons, but any genre will work. Alien space horror, cyberpunk dystopia, and supernatural gothic are some of the more popular flavors. But also, and more practically: psychotherapy, job training, and language learning.

Producing a role-playing campaign is analagous to making a TV series. After an initial flurry of developmet (i.e., planning, writing, and finding the right players), you settle into a session-oriented (episodic) rhythm: pre-production, production, and post-production.

In preparing for a classic tabletop RPG campaign, the players might have to break out the Player's Handbook if they're not already up on the rules. The GM has to either create an alternate reality with maps, notes, and illustrations, or purchase a ready-made module and get familiar with it. The GM might want to distribute a "pre-read" to set the stage for the players. And the players have to create their characters, one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole experience.

Computers can help us create alternate realities, concoct role-playing scenarios, manage characters, and teach the rules, and those are just a few examples.

Then, before each session, the GM prepare handouts, sets up battles and maps, maybe practices some voice acting, and tries to imagine some of the places the players might try to go. Computers can help with all of that pre-production.

As the session begins and the GM shepherds the players along, computers can provide a simulation medium where “in-game” events transpire. They can help trigger visuals, audio, and special effects. They can support public and private communication. Dynamic maps are a popular recent innovation. And filling the role of metaphorical camera, computers can record the happenings on multiple levels. That’s production.

After the fact, computers can help us shape the experience into good stories and package the results for reflection and to share with others.

There's already a vibrant software ecosystem fulfilling some of CARPs potential. But things are not very integrated, there's not much data sharing, and there's not much orchestration.

So half the dream, and maybe it‘s a pipe-dream, is that you can mix a roleplaying experience with player freedom (i.e., an open-ish world) and the principles of good gaming, sprinkle in a little CARP, and at least get a decent story out of it. And there’s certainly the potential for highly elaborate and cinematic stories, if that appeals. Taken to the extreme: if you’ve seen Cronenberg’s Existenz, that’s where this dream becomes a nightmare.

Ted: Free will is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours.

Allegra: It’s like real life. There’s just enough to make it interesting.

-Existenz (1999)

The other half of the dream is using technology to make the enjoyment and curation of these role-playing productions more accessible.

Right now, CARP is fraught with technical challenges that detract from the experience. It looks and plays a lot like “drama club meets AV geeks meets primitive video games.” Which is great. Beautiful, even! I’m glad we’ll always have “retro-carp” as an option.

But when we start to realize the dream, we’ll have better playability, easy sharing, content marketplaces, and a lot more variety. The cultural multiverse is going to blossom with alternate realities, we’ll see a profusion of play-styles, and improved accessibility will lead to greater player diversity. Things are going to get real.

Modeling the Imaginary

To coordinate all the CARP software and be able to share and sell scenario elements and fit them together, we’re going to need conceptual modeling. We’ll have to settle on some shared high-level vocabularies and think about how to model things as varied as character motivations, trap mechanics, weather patterns and alternate realities.

How do we express these things digitally? One approach involves a controversial data-modeling technology called the Resource Description Framework. We’ll talk more about RDF shortly.

Intellectually and practically speaking, conceptual modelling is a gold mine. Two rich veins concern the modelling of time and space, and how to model change. If you’re not even remotely interested in how to represent imaginary, evolving spatio-temporal entities, don’t worry... you will be!

It All Started Around A Gypsy Caravan Campfire

Campfire Site, Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt

Eight quick years ago I got in on the ground floor of a geographically-distributed Dungeons & Dragons game. Our crew is four players plus a heroic, multi-talented GM.

Because we live far apart, we’ve almost always used a virtual tabletop called Roll20 to facilitate the sessions. Our game (or “campaign” in D&D-speak) is set in a well-known alternate reality known as the Forgotten Realms and our GM kicked things off with a homebrew prelude set around a gypsy caravan campfire before launching us into a popular commercial adventure scenario called Storm Kings Thunder.

(For those who aren’t familiar, the Forgotten Realms is without doubt one of the richest fictional worlds ever brought forth, with its own detailed geography, hundred of settlements, dozens of deities, and a truly fantastical history. The fan base is huge, so in addition to over 300 official published novels, close to 100 different roleplaying adventure modules, and a pretty decent movie, it’s inspired countless works of homebrew content and fan fiction.)

In the hands of our highly-capable GM, the campaign transcended even the vastness of the Forgotten Realms and became a bespoke, time-travelling, genre-bending epic.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for us hapless players was keeping track of all the items, places, characters, factions, plotlines, and quests we came across.

So I started an “as-we-played” written narrative, frantically transcribing memorable dialog, summarizing battles, and generally documenting our adventures from the perspective of my character, an axe-wielding barbarian. After our sessions, I would email these summaries to my eager and grateful crew.

It was a great opportunity to flex my writing skills.

It also allowed me to experiment with different narrative styles and forms. My summaries evolved from simple text into an interlinked wiki where I’ve been trying to capture the relationships between places, characters, etc. It was essentially a semantic web: a textual network of inter-linked concepts, entities, and happenings.

And it helped me realize that role-play gaming and alternate realities in general could benefit from some good conceptual modeling.

Whither the Semantic Web?

My original project to keep track of our Forgotten Realms adventures exploded and seeped into countless gopher holes, including a deep one known as the Semantic Web. With a capital ‘S’ and a capital ‘W’.

What’s that?

The threads of the Semantic Web are RDF statements (known as triples) of the form subject-predicate-object. They look like this:

:ted :likes :allegra

You can say anything about anything with these triples. When they’re backed by commonly understood conceptualizations (which are called ontologies and also expressed using triples), they are an elegant means of representing and sharing knowledge.

To borrow from Gavin Mendel-Gleason, the vision of the Semantic Web is distributed, interoperable, and well-defined data. It’s a solution, in his words, to “literally the most central problem for the current and near-future human economy,” i.e., how to make our data, knowledge and ideas accessible and understandable to each other and our computers.

The Semantic Web has had its best success in the fields of bioinformatics and medecine. It’s also used in library science, healthcare, financial services, and e-commerce.

But despite its promise and having been around for 25 years, the Semantic Web hasn’t caught on widely or lived up to its potential. We can explore some of the reasons later, but in my opinion, it’s a technology that needs a killer app.

Can Alternate Realities Bring the Semantic Web to Life?

Young Frankenstein (1974)

People and their software could use good semantic conceptualizations and shared knowledge to track and understand what happens in games and stories of all kinds.

But beyond this documentary function, virtual tabletops, game engines, reality simulators, and authoring software all based on shared conceptualizations would empower writers, artists, and producers to share and remix alternate realities across platforms and art forms. It’s the “distributed, interoperable, and well-defined” vision of the Semantic Web applied to the realm of imagination, and the results would be magical.

For example, according to Adetayo Oludare Alade, authors “simply make-up or stipulate [fictional] entities and their properties into existence” using linguistic devices like referring expressions and descriptions. With language, we create alternate realities and populate them with imagined creatures. You can call them fictional, but if we can describe those realities and creatures in ways that computers can process and simulate, once we set the computational wheels in motion things take on an life of their own. Arguably, we can literally bring our creations to life and experience drama with them.

As a side-effect, I think the innovations and momentum these roleplaying applications would generate for Semantic Web technologies could bring its promise to life for other domains as well.

Why Is the Metaverse Boring?

In the words of Ian Bogost, “3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.” Realistic graphics don’t make characters and situations interesting. Conceptual depth is the key.

Traditional roleplaying is engaging because good writers author good characters and situations, and then a good GM and the players’ imaginations bring them to life.

Maybe virtual reality and modern roleplaying video games leave too little to the imagination?

But certainly, the metaverse currently lacks other essential elements of D&D as originally conceived: the crafting of interesting scenarios and characters; a framework for collaborative play; the simplicity of pen-and-paper; the ease with which you can transcend the system; and the benevolent shepherding of a human behind the curtain.

With traditional roleplaying, GMs can easily make anything happen, answer questions, change the pace, call for a snack break, incorporate player feedback, and fill in gaps with a little improv and some Theater of the Mind. They run the magic store.

The metaverse needs something like that.

Will AI Ruin the Fun?

With the recent dramatic improvements in generative AI, we can foresee more realistic synthetic dialogue in virtual worlds and video games. We can foresee less-dismaying and less-sterile synthetic artwork. And it’s not too hard to imagine a near future where new innovations will support the generation of synthetic-yet-compelling creatures, worlds, and stories.

But do we want that?

There’s a very tricky tension between getting digital assistance and preserving the joy and humanity we find in the DIY crafting of creative works. You can expect that to be one of Carpe Noctem’s recurring themes.

Who Are You?

My intended audience here is a general one: people who might be interested in storytelling, roleplaying, game studies, alternate realities, or synthetic life.

If you're curious about the technical details of my mission, check out my developer journal: The Old Man in the Cave.

I’m looking to make connections that could lead to collaboration. If our interests overlap, I’d love to hear from you!

Postscript: Why Carpe Noctem?

Baluk Hana and Method of Fishing for the Red Mullet, Thomas Allom

At least since Dead Poets Society, the Latin phrase Carpe Diem has come to mean “seize the day.” Essentially, grab life by the horns before it slips away.

As Jack Shepherd says in “Carpe Diem” Doesn’t Mean “Seize the Day,” a more accurate translation is “pluck the day.” It’s a horticultural metaphor about gathering or harvesting the fruits of life.

But what about the night?

Like most entertainment, roleplaying games are often fitted in after the sun goes down. Typical sessions last three to five hours and often stretch past midnight. All-nighters are glamorized legend-fodder. Pluck those zombies, harvest the magic items, and seize the stronghold before the sun comes up!

Writing also has its nocturnal mystique. James Baldwin wrote in Nothing Personal about how the grim realizations of 4am (a “devastating hour”), could in turn be a source of strength. Kafka wrote ruefully of sleep: “Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed.” Proust, Plath, Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot and George Sand are among the many writers famed to do their best work at night.

Regardless of quality, as the father of a wakeful two year old, night time is often the write time for me.