Smallest Narrative Unit
Adrian Miles, back from Amsterdam, compares Storyspace writing spaces and dynamic links ("guard fields") with a new, experimental video tool called the Korsakow Engine.
This deserves a whole separate conversation because what I find deeply fascinating with this engine, which is basically a system for adding keywords at time points to videos and using these keywords (which boolean rules) to determine which videos are available next), is that its deep structure is identical or nearly so, to Storyspace. I asked Florian about this, and he didn’t know about Storyspace, so it was like convergent development (a bit like convergent evolution). This was the case not only in how Storyspace uses guard fields on links to help manage and produce constrained structures but also in the way that Storyspace operates on the level of nodes where each node becomes a minimal unit in the Storyspace environment. Thalhofer talks about SNU’s - Smallest Narrative Units, and uses this to help others to understand the sort of granularity that is required in these environments (granularity and so on are the ways I describe this).