Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narrating

Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a typical world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) and also allows the narration and description of that world to change. For instance, computer narrators in Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters, based on their perceptions and understandings.

I have been writing about Curveship on my blog, Post Position. You can read about the system and leave comments asking me about it there.

So far...

The basis for Curveship is the research I did and the code I developed when I was working on my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Mitch Marcus and Gerald Prince, "Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction." The good news, then, is that most of the interesting investigation of narrative and computational linguistics has been done and the "hard" problems have been solved. What remains includes documenting, refactoring, refining, and reorganizing the system so that the system's code and the programming interface will be clearer to IF authors and researchers.

When will it be ready?

There is no set deadline or goal for a Curveship release, although I, too, would prefer to release it soon. Currently, a small group of people are using, reviewing, and commenting upon a pre-release version. A public release under a free software license will follow, as soon as the system is ready.

Where does the name come from?

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Curveship is being fashioned to model the essential qualities of variation—the curve of a story through its telling—just as friendship and authorship represent the essence of being a friend and author. The word "curveship" was first used by Hart Crane (1899-1932) in the last line of his poem "To Brooklyn Bridge."

—Nick Montfort, 27 June 2010