utenzi

Brown University has an interesting little web application up on their server. It's based on some research done in the 1930s by a Russian scholar, Vladimir Propp, who studied the basic plot components of his country's folk tales and came up with a list of the mythic stories' functions. The Web App has a number--32 in case you're curious--of check boxes that you can toggle and then you generate the story. There's a number of possibilities contained within the database so you can toggle the same boxes and get different stories. The more boxes checked, generally the longer the story since more components need to be contained within. In the following story, I toggled "reconnaissance", "trickery", "struggle", and "victory" and that generated the following little story: "Tell me what it is you have come here seeking," he growled through clenched teeth. One man stumbled towards me as if under a drunken afternoon spell. Hi...