[Up: imhofaq-stories] [Robot Wisdom home page]
Many typologies of human personality have been proposed [qv], dividing people into categories of the form A, B, C, ... N. This webpage asks the question, what sort of encounter normally takes place when a person of one type meets a person of another (or the same) type:
A B C ... N A AA AB AC ... AN B BA BB BC ... BN C CA CB CC ... CN .................... N NA NB NC ... NNFor the purposes of computer simulation, the ideal typology A-N will be one where AA thru NN exhibit the widest possible range of human behaviors (ie, of story patterns).
This suggests that one promising way to elaborate personality theories might be by 'reverse engineering' existing theories of story-patterns.
(In the past I would have called these 'relationships' rather than encounters, but I now believe 'encounter' is a more general term, since people of all types can continually encounter each other, without this necessarily resulting in anything we'd call a relationship.)
This webpage is meant to aggregate Web resources about computer modeling of human encounters, especially those models that view encounters as 'molecules' built by combining instances of two or more personality types (the 'atoms'). (I welcome suggestions for approaches I've overlooked.)
The range of models extends from the mechanistic to the literary, with our emphasis here mainly on the literary end, especially the theories of Georges Polti # and James Joyce #.
At the mechanistic end, the evolution of video games (since 1976 or so) has, to a great extent, involved the discovery of new orthogonal dimensions for compactly describing a wide range of game play. In Doom, to take a very simplistic example, the player has a 'health' variable and performs more poorly as it declines, eventually dying. First-aid kits can restore it. Or, in another orthogonal dimension, the Doom player has a selection of weapons that can only be used one at a time-- many of the game's puzzles involve choosing the right weapon at the right moment.
Role-playing games have a larger conventional set of variables for describing characters-- agility, strength, cunning, etc. [random example] When characters do battle, these variables influence the outcome.
Besides doing battle, characters in adventure games can barter items and information. In some specialised games, characters may also become romantically or sexually involved.
What I'm calling the molecular theory of human encounters is the view that characters' personality types are the 'atoms', and that the central challenge of generating story-content requires that we pre-analyse what sorts of typical encounter any pair of these personality types will generate.
(Personality theories usually distinguish short-term attributes like mood or emotion from longterm ones like personality or character. For our purposes, this is not critical yet.)
There's a parallel in those astrological-compatability books that claim to predict how, eg, Virgos will get along with Capricorns. [12-by-12 grid] And Eric Berne had a big hit in the 60s with "Games People Play", that analysed stereotyped mind-games played by adults who choose to act as 'parent' or 'child' or 'adult' in their various relationships. [some examples]
[Here's an intro to Enneagrams that compares types (no compatibility theory though)]
So I'm arguing that the next stage in game/alife theory should involve a search for a typology of personality variables that generates a particularly rich set of potential encounters (interactions).
Anti-Math offers three basic personality types: good-happy, bad-unhappy, and neutral. Encounters in Anti-Math usually involve one 'home team' character and one 'visitor' or intruder.
The outcome of an encounter in Anti-Math may include: one or the other character departs, and/or one or the other changes character. In general (I think), strong characters don't change, while weak ones do.
Since we want this to move in the direction of more-literary storytelling, the encounters we want might be anticipated somewhat among Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations [qv]:
- Obtaining (ie, barter)
Aggressive power-conflicts (emphasis on kinship, and relative strength):
- Victim of cruelty - Supplication - Rivalry between superior and inferior - Conflict with a god - Familial hatred - Family rivalry - Kinsman kills unrecognized kinsman - Pursuit - Abduction - Revolt - Revenge - Vengeance by family upon family - Deliverance
Sexual conflicts:
- Adultery - Murderous adultery - Crimes of love - Involuntary crimes of love - Mistaken jealousy
- An enemy loved - Obstacles to love - Discovery of dishonor of a loved one
Sacrifice and loss:
- Loss of loved ones - Recovery of a lost one - Sacrifice of loved ones - Self sacrifice for kindred
Plus these, that lack any explicit two-person encounter:
- Self-sacrifice for an ideal - Daring enterprise - Remorse - Enigma - Madness - Faulty judgment - Victim of misfortune - Disaster - Ambition - Fatal imprudence - All sacrifice for passion
(If Polti's 36 were a miraculously-perfect schema, they might imply a grid of 6 personality types squared with itself-- ie, viewed as 36 archetypal pairings.)
But the earliest explicit analysis in terms of two-person encounters may be in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake-- my immediate inspiration for this 'molecular' approach. And Joyce definitely refined his archetypes from by far the broadest imaginable range of literary sources. (I've now got an easy-to-read, detailed synopsis of most of FW here.)
None of Joyce's archetypal encounters are simple or obvious-- he's written FW in a style that layers multiple meanings onto the same ambiguous story-sequence (presumably thus expressing a deep relationship among the layers).
Joyce's main enounters include these (some of which are much less encounter-like than others, and none of which are offered here as anything but a very longterm literary challenge):
Museyroom vignette: Wellington fights Napoleon, with a subtext of sexual desire and sexual frustration. [qv]
Mutt and Jute: Sophisticated explorer meets a primitive human, but the primitive turns the tables by shocking the sophisticate with some ancient history (???). [qv]
Prankquean: A pirate queen kidnaps the twin sons of a nobleman, one at a time, and initiates them in some way (one positive, one negative). [qv]
Earwicker: A king gives a commoner an insulting surname. [qv]
The Cad: A hero with a guilty conscience betrays himself to a naif (with the rumor then spreading, person by person). [qv]
The batter at the gate: A drunk threatens the tavernkeeper who's locked him out and gone to bed. [qv]
The fender and the gunman: A man carrying a bulky parcel is ambushed by a gunman, they wrestle, but then suddenly reconcile. [qv]
Shem and society: Joyce himself is the topic of much criticism but remains apparently untouched (though privately paranoid?). [qv]
Shem and Justius: Joyce is explicitly condemned for his sins [qv]
Shem and Mercius: Joyce is forgiven by the mother-principle.
ALP's gifts: A wife gives (deadly?) gifts to her (ungrateful?) children as a way of defending her husband. [qv]
Night games: Two brothers compete for their sister's love. [qv]
Night lessons: Brothers and sister study together. [qv]
The tavern: The tavernkeep is rejected (?) by his patrons. [qv]
Mamalujo: A shy egomaniac steals his first kiss as four old men spy jealously. [qv]
The watches of the night: The four old men crossexamine the potential leader (?). [qv]
Shaun's sermon: A hypocrite lectures a group of schoolgirls on chastity. [qv]
Dave the Dancekerl: The hypocrite leaves the girls in the hands of a dubious new arrival. [qv]
Honuphrius Porter: The naked tavernkeeper attends to a son crying in his sleep. [qv]
Berkeley and Patrick: The voice of experience enlightens an innocent. [qv]
Joyce's analysis of personality types for Finnegans Wake was boiled down to some dozen sigla including Shem, Shaun, HCE, ALP, Tristan, Issy, Sigurdsen, Kate, the Citizens, Mamalujo, and the Letter.
[Up: imhofaq-stories] [Site map] [Robot Wisdom home page] (Feedback)