Following up to the Narrative Meat Grinder, here goes another trope of Storytelling Futures that was inspired by conversations in the Near Future Laboratory General Seminar session on “AI in Hollywood & The Futures of Storytelling”. This time: Squid Game Cosplay Dungeons.
At the core of this vision lies the hope for AI-generated content to enable a rather old vision of storytelling: Storytelling directly driven by the viewer, adaptive to the viewers preferences and expectations, a story as a place to roam about.
This goes against the classic qualities of cinema, a medium that excelled with it‘s ability to lead the viewers attention in a dark room with a camera perspective exclusively guided by the author. As far as I can tell, this change from author-guided towards self-guided storytelling has been tried several times in the past and were not incredibly successful. But let‘s assume that the bottlenecks for past attempts on this vision were of technical (not cognitive) nature, so AI might bring a new opportunity to make this real.
Assuming that the generation of AI imagery would accelerate vastly, to a degree that real-time generation of cinema-grade video content becomes feasible, this could open up entirely new forms of entertainment. In our General Seminar session, we explored these options and came up with an interesting scenarios that one might call the Squid Game Cosplay Dungeon.
In it‘s mildest version, this scenario could provide a therapeutic collective experience. „Going to the movies“ no longer is a passive act, it is a participative one. The engine behind the realtime-rendered content might be able to sense what their viewers need and react with an adapted storyline, one that allows for a helpful, maybe even therapeutic catharsis.
In a wilder version, realtime AI-rendered Video Content could provide a whole new, much more active form of entertainment. Imagine the traditions associated with Rocky Horror Picture Show, but as embedded actions into the actual storytelling. The viewership might be able to collectively decide, where the story is going, triggering interaction and discussion. The aesthetic interests of all viewers could influence how the story plays out, making re-watching of a particular story more desirable. Individual viewers would become participants to the story, maybe even adhoc additional characters that would take part in the story on screen. At the entrance of the venues they might be handed out specific accessories that would provide them additional options in influencing the story (think of magic potions, a lightsaber, an important piece of evidence…). In this version of the scenario, Cinema and Gaming would merge completely, fulfilling a tendency already visible today.
In it‘s grimmest version, these new entertainment venues would use it options for viewer participation not for having them master a story together, but fight a competition against each other. A VR-based Squid Game fighting arena sounds like a juicy setting for a dystopian Sci-Fi movie, but it is not a future to look forward to or work towards.
I think there is a lot of interesting stuff going on with the Squid Game Cosplay Dungeon-Scenario that emerged in our General Seminar Session:
- It addresses the future of Cinema as a medium: Will author-driven on-site storytelling with exclusive attention on one screen only be a viable concept in the future? I think there are many reasons for this form of entertainment to persist, but it is easy to imagine other offerings to emerge.
- AI-generated content will create new quantities of aesthetic variation, we already see it today. Recombination of existing styles works quite well and because a lot of aesthetic innovation always has been recombination of existing things, this seems to work well for many usecases. Some say this might lead to stylistic innovation accelerating siginficantly^[„Inside the community, you have a million people making images, and they’re all riffing off each other, and by default, everybody can see everybody else’s images. You have to pay extra to pull out the community — and usually, if you do that, it means you’re some type of commercial user. So everyone’s ripping off each other, and there’s all these new aesthetics. It’s almost like aesthetic accelerationism. And they’re all bubbling up and swirling round, and they’re not AI aesthetics. They’re new, interesting, human aesthetics that I think will spill out into the world.“
Midjourney Founder David Holz, ai-image-generation-art-midjourney-multiverse-interview-david-holz], but I am skeptical of this. My gut feeling (and hope) is that this will prove to be boring and repetitive in the long run. Maybe this will also be driven by our senses and expectations for innovation and originality being sharpened against a flood of synthetic content. - The separation of consumer and producer become more and more porous, it is increasingly easy to create your own content instead of just consuming stuff.^[See Dré Labre‘s Ideas on this: viewer-generated-content-leaves-hollywood] This is super interesting and in general I think a positive development. Even though if all of this is just happening on the basis of dubious AI-companies keeping their servers open and their subscription fees at an affordable level, it would be another example of a boost in Agency traded against new dependencies.
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Last updated: 2023-08-08 %%posted: 2023-08-08%%