23/04/06

Phew! I am so glad that's over with! The workshop actually went okay - though the one on meetings the day before went a bit pear-shaped, probably because I was so stressed. Never mind...

Anyway. I've been thinking about story-telling. Occasionally, I'll catch myself thinking that it doesn't matter that much. Usually when I'm thinking how it would be nice to make money by doing comics - then the engineering bit of my brain walks in and says something like 'but you should be doing something useful, you know you could actually make a difference to the world by doing engineering'. It's a really silly thing to say. For a start, most engineering jobs aren't particularly special - like most jobs in any profession.

But quite apart from that, story-telling is stupidly important just because it gives everyone a way to play. Everyone knows that when we're younger we play at things to learn about them, but the older we get, the less we're allowed to play. We get bombarded with new ideas and possibilities every single day, but we're expected to just understand them and absorb them because we're, y'know, adults now. And adults just know stuff. Which, of course, is rubbish. If you want to really get to the meat of a new idea and how you're going to deal with it when you're finally confronted with it in real life, then you need to play with it. You need to actually put yourself in that situation or place in your head, and not just think about it, but feel what it's like. But you can't just grab some random guy at your office and say 'okay, let's play pretend that you're the first ever A. I. robot and I just built you'. Because he'd think you're a big fat weirdo (which is a shame, but that's the way things are).

So instead, we pay storytellers (TV, film, books, whatever) to play for us - because when you read books or watch films, it is like you're actually there, you feel angry, or happy, or worried along with the characters, just like it was you doing those things. Then when the story ends, you take those characters away with you and they affect how you think about the problem next time - usually a lot more than any intellectual discussion where you might have decided where you stand. Isn't it an amazingly weird kind of alchemy that goes on? Instead of this pure idea - like artifical intelligence - you gradually build up this cast of characters you've played which represent different points of view - like Data, or Skynet, or Joe Pi, or Hal - and they all feel real, like people you've actually met.

Of course, it's incredably dangerous. Partly because it's not the same as when you play when you're little - you're not thinking how you feel about the idea, you're playing somebody else's game and often all the feelings will be mapped out for you.
Annnnyway. Rant over. I know it's all fairly obvious stuff, that a lot of people have made a lot of times before, but I've just been thinking about it lately ...

Man, I wish we could play robots in the office.