[ExI] Future Movie Quality Benchmarks?

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Mon May 30 19:54:54 UTC 2011


On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 4:02 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> How do we callibrate that without too much
> effort?

Perhaps "too much effort" will become some day become affordable with
the continued decrease in the cost of computation. In other words,
what is today's "too much effort" is tomorrow's effortless.

> But the biggest problem isn't really the input fidelity but the ability to
> tell a compelling story or create an immersive environment. Note how well
> told the little story of the ad was - he stopped the action at just the
> right moments to create brief cliffhangers, he moved so that the flames
> looked good, you get the explanation for the initial mystery (why is he just
> sitting there?) gradually. The problem with interactive media is that they
> require a different kind of storytelling, and we are still in the early
> days. Truly immersive interactive media likely require realtime
> storytellers, presumably some kind of AI.

There are two types of entertainment here, passive and participatory.
Today's passive entertainment includes movies, television, even 3D
stuff where you just watch. Our participatory entertainment today is
video games. Group participation in multi-player video games is a step
up from there. What you seem to be getting at here is pushing the
passive entertainment up into a participatory realm. To get to the
right solution, start then with video games, not movies. An immersive
3D environment can still be passive, which is what was shown in the
commercial. Pausing and then playing again (even in another room)
doesn't count as being very highly interactive in my book.

> And of course, then there is the addiction question. We are already
> experiencing many things through our entertainment that are far more
> rewarding than most things we can experience in real life. Better
> entertainment might also mean more addictive entertainment.

Yes, there is a lot of addiction in video games and television. The
video game designers are aware of this, and do things intentionally to
increase the addictive nature of the game. Eventually, I think that
they will pass laws against this sort of thing, but today it's a case
of the technology being ahead of the legislators. It is funny to me
that people go to jail for selling marijuana (which isn't even all
that addictive), but they get big piles of cash for designing World of
Warcraft. I'm not a big promoter of additional laws, it's just funny
that it's currently so inconsistent. The right solution might be to
make the drugs legal, then educate everyone about the addictive nature
of all of these things.

-Kelly



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