The Table

SPAG
The Table is an intriguing exercise in procedural prose generation. It captures roughly the effect of a person's mind wandering over a series of memories and sensations, and the clever part is the way it seeks connections between one concept and another. The player types a keyword from the output text, and The Table replies with a bit of prose that concerns that keyword but also connects back to has gone before. It's a little reminiscent of Space Under the Window, or Renga in Four Parts, also submitted in this fair.

Wisely, Weiner keeps the demonstration quite short: the player is allowed only a few moves to traverse the thematic landscape of the work, so that the piece ends with a concluding note of some sort before the text has time to become too repetitive.

On the whole, though, I came away feeling that the experience The Table provides is less compelling than it deserves to be, given the interesting code operating it.

Part of the reason, I think, is that the player is so unmotivated. I don't believe it's necessary for the player to control a character to care about an interactive story; but it helps if the interaction (whatever it may be) somehow reinforces the player's understanding of the story and explored world.

Because The Table accepts any input with more or less equal fluidity, and all the output is more or less equally vague and abstract, there isn't really any occasion for the player to form intentions or hypotheses about what he's doing. The most purposeful interaction I had with the work was when some word in the text made me curious -- there is, at one point, a reference to ghosts, and I typed >GHOSTS back because I wanted to know whether these were meant as literal or metaphorical ghosts, and if so, of what. But most of the time I found myself selecting almost at random, without any particular desire for the outcome or direction to my exploration.

-- Emily Short