“Levels” of Text = Levels of Game
I was reading a discussion of experiences with bots called “unconscious thinking”:
But something feels unduly missing about these artificial minds. I decided to try to understand, why do I have trouble caring about what they have to say? What precisely would they need to do, beyond or instead of what they currently do, to make me care?
this made me think of what kinds of unconscious thinking might actually be useful. AI is a ways off, and in the meantime I’m only able to contend myself with what is alredy out there.
i saw “you do not have permission to read this file” and i thought of the blog and stories and games, and also about a variety of audience, and logins and set permissions… i thought of a story that is like a game, where you get to certain “levels,” in time, levels of permission to read certain texts. I can tell my friends i call it (unofficially) “choose your own adventure, level two.” - go ahead and tell thatm that, sigh, yes, its like one of thsoe choose your own adventure books, except it has a “level two” in it. what happens when you get to level two? you have “permission” to read the level two texts, some of which build on things already past, and some of which are tangents yet to come.
This shouldn’t be too hard to build, though I don’t know how. A text that keeps track of what has been read, which choices were made, perhpas with a watchful eye toward content preferences. Perhpas there could even be a small number of different “kinds” of level two within the text.
I have these ideas, and then i get stuck for a while trying to think of what kind of story would lend itself well to this kind of a presentation.
