Bit by bit they begin to create a character's possible motives, direction and purpose.
Our visiting artist, Marcus, has begun to join these bits by building out a blog within the character's persona. Using the Retweets as the material to inform blog posts, he begins to give the back story, the mythology, the meaning behind the Retweeting.
Marcus is doing what any reader of the character's Twitter feed is doing - filling in the gaps between the tweets - joining the dots - making sense of the facts, as a fiction. As Rob pointed out, the DGR is a tool for storytellers, using probability and online structured data.
To set up the character, Marcus used this cool mind mapping application, MindMeister to map out the emotion to action relationships we use in the character definition file. Here's an embedded version of the map, which you can explore. It's a live file, so you're likely to see Marcus' changes over time.
Further, Marcus wanted to make a video through the eyes of Felix, to develop the persona, with a view to updating the characters parameters. By using Google Maps (Street View), you get a sense of familiarity with a sense of unease: this is the uncanny valley of experience, like the eeriness of the avatars that needs to be fiercely wrestled with at some point.
Here's the video journey of Felix traveling around his place of work in Liverpool Street, London, Music by Airborne Sound.
Bearing in mind that we'd like to play with AR somewhere in the future, this video gives a glimpse of what the DGRs could produce by themselves.
Felix Freeman. Memory One. from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.
These sketches are not so much extensions of the character, but tools to design the character further. The crossover between using these tools to tell a fiction and to design a fiction is where the DGRs get really interesting because the characters are almost unproduct. Their persona flows between design and production as easily as information passes from one web service to another, adding a little more value to the viewers experience every time it's gets passed through a web service with zero overhead costs to the core system.
I say almost, as they are not really generating any new raw information themselves - they're parasitical (but non-physical) spimes at the moment producing metadata. We're still learning / deciding how best to implement their own, self styled, messaging - and for what reason.
But for now, they do seem to be generating droplets of persona every time they Retweet - so they are adding something to something, just by producing simple communications broadcasts.
We are also learning from the bots themselves. But it's a long process, because the bots are live on Twitter and we have to be respectful to the people they Retweet and be careful not to speed up the DGRs Tweeting rate too high. Also the patterns of Retweets are complex to decipher for narrative coherency.
This is where Marcus' sketches come in so useful - it's a form of testing to see where we can maximize the depth of the character's communications whilst keeping the logic of the system to a minimum. Unlike Conway's Game of Life, the simple rules of the DGR are influenced by the streams of social conversation (Blog posts & Tweets), adding infinite variables to our simple rule sets. This should make the character's persona rich, flowing and open.
Marcus' choice of design tools helps explore this context of the character and DGR development because his use of live web tools follow the development rather than inform it. Design as documentation, you might say.
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