WRT: Writer Response Theory

Welcome to Bot Blog. As an intro I’ll explain my interest and involvement in bots. I started working on a novel a few years ago and through serendipity came across a software program called Alicebot. It was there that I discovered how I could extend my novel. So now I’m working on the novel and a character in the novel as a bot. It became evident immediately that there were peculiar narrative and technical systems that were needed for working with agents in storytelling and especially bots…and this has resulted (mind the big ellipses) in this blog. Mark, over to you.

Thanks, Christy. A few years ago, I was teaching a course called the New Media Workshop with Stephanie August of Loyola Marymount U. In the class, we grouped computer science, English, and digital arts students to produce story-telling programs. Alicebot and other chatbots offered one avenue. At the time, I was also increasingly frustrated with the limitations of hybertext-based branching fiction or link-based hypertext narratives. Since then, I’ve built some bots of my own in Barthes’ Bachelorette and am working on a dissertation on them. Jeremy?

Thanks Mark. I didn’t start thinking about autonomous bots until 2001 when I was writing a graduate paper on the Turing Test - however I’d been familiar for years with bot-like constructions in the form of NPCs from Interactive Fiction works, and I’m currently fascinated with things that lie closest to the intersection of the two - works like Emily Short’s Galatea.