-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
About
CORVID stands for Consensual Objective Reality: Virtual, Interpreted, Distributed.
Participation in CORVID is always as optional as possible. Just because Eve's servers are malicious doesn't mean you can't share a world with Alice, regardless of how Alice and Eve feel about each other's servers.
CORVID achieves objectivity by making subjectivity objective. Every actor, human controlled or otherwise, has their own version of reality. Conflicts between those subjective experiences are objective in nature. That is, when I say po-TAY-toe and you say po-TAH-toe, both of those sayings are objective within their own contexts and the conflict is objective within the context of our communications and shared culture(s).
CORVID provides a substrate upon which to build a coherent, compelling world. It is first and foremost a means of facilitating automated narrative development. That implies a kind of reality defined by the participants. CORVID supports the development and iteration of such a reality.
CORVID is not a simulator, per se. It is a facilitator of believable interactions, regardless of how realistic they are.
Furthermore, CORVID is an abstraction layer. Its lower half deals with the complexity of persistence, conflict resolution, client<->server communication, availability, peer-to-peer collaboration and everything else that has nothing to do with compelling fictions. Its upper half exposes interfaces which provide authors and audiences with tools for automating their communication.
CORVID operates almost entirely in run-time. Almost everything is derived as late as possible so as to benefit from all contextually relevant changes. The language users speak with CORVID changes with each input. When a user says that by 'X' what they really mean is 'Y in terms of Z', CORVID takes that under advisement, though not as gospel. Interpretation is not a conversion of symbols to meanings via a static lookup table. It is an evaluation of symbols within the latest context.
CORVID is not a centralized reliable service for dictating states and behaviors. It is a protocol and supporting services for facilitating collaborative development of narratives amongst potentially hostile authors. CORVID consists of tools and protocols for negotiating the terms of narrative development and participation and mechanisms for enforcing those protocols.
CORVID gives you a way of developing and interacting with a virtual reality in cooperation with like-minded individuals. You tell CORVID what it's like to interact with your ideal world. You negotiate with other CORVID users to resolve conflicts between their ideals and yours. Everyone gets a kind of 'place' they can go to experience and participate in engaging stories whose 'dream logic' was negotiated by groups of like-minded people.
It's like a text adventure, but behaviors are expressed in terms of relationships rather than logic. In an old text adventure, "unlock door with key" meant "use the one key I have to open the one door I can see" and this behavior was programmed on either the door or the key. If there wasn't a door or key nearby, instead of "what door" or "what key" you got "I don't know how to do that" or something equally context-insensitive. If you enter the command in a room with two locked doors you get "I don't know which door you mean".
In CORVID the meanings of 'unlock', 'door', 'with' and 'key' are all defined by the users who shape the world and in terms of contexts. In a hypothetical CORVID world, typing "unlock door with key" in a meadow with no keys or doors nearby will elicit a response like, "You don't have any keys and the last door you saw was a few minutes walk from here last time you saw it. If you want to unlock that door you should go back to it first." Enter the command in a room with two doors and no reason to favor one over the other (such as one being unlocked already) might elicit a response like, "There are two locked doors here. Do you mean the red one on the left or the green one on the right?" A follow up input of "red" or "left" would open that door. A completely different input like "sit" would leave the question hanging in the air but also find a way for you to sit at your current location.
On the world building side, instead of programming the meaning of "unlock" into every kind of lockable thing, the very notion of locking would be its own object to which objects could have relationships. A given door would be a collection consisting of a frame, rooms it joins, a slab of whatever material the door is made of, a latching mechanism and a locking mechanism. The lock mechanism itself would have a relationship to the "(un)locks" concept such as "(un)locks with keys matching (key pattern)".
- CORVID is a kind of network.
- Participants in the network have ideas about what the network is about and collaborate to develop their ideas.
- Participants are all equal in the eyes of the protocol. There is no SuperUser. Differences of opinion or intent are resolved by the individuals or not at all. Splitting the network is preferable to adjudication.
- Each discrete portion of the network, known as a domain, has an owner and hosts objects.
- Objects interact with each other in terms of story-relevant behaviors.
- Aggregations of objects (containers, piles, things tied to each other) are themselves first-class objects with appropriate behaviors derived from their constituent parts.
- Core
- System
- Setting
- World
- History (sortof)