Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.
A few weeks ago I was invited to present some of my work at Caméra-Stylo, a fantastic conference run every two years by the Sydney Literature and Cinema Network.
For this presentation, I wanted to start to formalise the experimental approach I’d been employing around generative AI, and to give it some theoretical grounding. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that only by looking back at my old notes on early film theory would I unearth the perfect words, terms, and ideas to, ahem, frame my work.
Here’s a recording of the talk:
Let me know what you think, and do contact me if you want to chat more or use some of this work yourself.
In putting together a few bits and bobs for academic work on generative AI and creativity, I’m poking around in all sorts of strange places, where all manner of undead monsters lurk.
The notion of AI-generated entertainment is not a new one, but the first recent start-up I found in the space was Hypercinema. The copy on the website is typically vague, but I think the company is attempting to build apps for sites like stores, museums and theme parks that add visitors into virtual experiences or branded narratives.
After noodling about on Hypercinema’s LinkedIn and X pages, it wasn’t long before I then found Fable Studios and their Showrunner project; from there it was but a hop, skip and a jump to Showrunner’s parent concept, The Simulation.
Sim Francisco; what I’m assuming is an artist’s rendition. Sourced from The Simulation on X.
The Simulation is a project being developed by Fable Studios, a group of techies and storytellers who are interested in a seamless blend of their respective knowledges. To quote their recent announcement: “We believe the future is a mix of game & movie. Simulations powering 1000s of Truman Shows populated by interactive AI characters.” I realise this is still all guff. From what I can tell, The Simulation is a sandbox virtual world populated by a huge variety of AI characters. The idea is that you can guide the AI characters, influencing their lives and decisions; you can then also zoom into a particular character or setting, then ask The Simulation to generate an ‘entertainment’ for you of a particular length, e.g. a 20-minute episode.
In 2023, Fable Studios released a research paper on their initial work on ‘showrunner agents in multi-agent simulations’. To date, one of the largest issues with AI-generated narratives is that character and plot logics nearly always fall apart; the machine learning systems cannot keep track over prolonged story arcs. In conventional TV/film production, this sort of thing is the role of the director, often in conjunction with the continuity team and first assistant director. But genAI systems are by and large predictive content machines; they’ll examine the context of a given moment and then build the next moment from there, then repeat, then repeat. This process isn’t driven by ‘continuity’ in a traditional cinematic or even narrative sense, but by the cold logic of computation:
“[A] computer running a program, if left powered up, can sit in a loop and run forever, never losing energy or enthusiasm. It’s a metamechanical machine that never experiences surface friction and is never subject to the forces of gravity like a real mechanical machine – so it runs in complete perfection.”
John Maeda, How to Speak Machine, p3
The ML system will repeat the same process over and over again, but note that it does not reframe its entire context from moment to moment, in the way that humans might. The ML system starts again with the next moment, then starts again. This is why generating video with ML tools is so difficult (at least, it still is at the time of writing).
What if, though, you make a video game, with a set of characters with their own motivations and relationships, and you just let life continue, let characters grow, as per a set of rules? Many sandbox or simulation games can be described in this way. There are also some open-world role-playing games that play out against what feels like a simulated, continous world that exists with or without the player character. The player character, in this latter example, becomes the focaliser, the lens through which action is framed, or from which the narrative emerges. And in the case of simulators or city-builders, it’s the experience of planning out your little world, the embedding of your gameplay choices into the lives of virtual people (as either biography or extended history), that embodies the experience. What The Simulation proposes is similar to both these experiences, but at scale.
A selection of apparently-upcoming offerings from Showrunner. I believe these are meant to have been generated in/by The Simulation? Sourced from The Simulation on X.
Sim Francisco is the first megacity that The Simulation has built, and they’re presently working on Neo-Tokyo. These virtual cities are the storyworlds within which you can, supposedly, find your stories. AI creators can jump into these cities, find characters to influence, and then prompt another AI system to capture the ensuing narrative. Again, this is all wild speculation, and the specific mechanics, beyond a couple of vague in-experience clips, are a mystery.
As is my wont, I’m ever reminded of precedents, not least of which were the types of games discussed above: SimCity, The Sims, The Movies, even back to the old classic Microsoft 3D Movie Maker, but also Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, Cyberpunk 2077. All of these offer some kind of open-world sandbox element that allows the player to craft their own experience. Elements of these examples seem like they might almost be directly ported to The Simulation: influencing AI characters as in The Sims, or directing them specifically as in 3D Movie Maker? Maybe it’ll be a little less direct, where you simply arrange certain elements and watch the result, like in The Movies. But rather than just the resulting ‘entertainments’, will The Simulation allow users to embody player characters? That way they might then be able to interact with AI characters in single-player, or both AIs and other users in a kind of MMO experience (Fable considers The Simulation to be a kind of Westworld). If this kind of gameplay is combined with graphics like those we’re seeing out of the latest Unreal Engine, this could be Something Else.
But then, isn’t this just another CyberTown? Another Second Life? Surely the same problems that plagued (sometimes continue to plague) those projects will recur here. And didn’t we just leave some of this nonsense behind us with web3? Even in the last few months, desperateexperiments around extended realities have fallen flat; wholesale virtual worlds might not be the goût du moment, er, maintenant. But then, if the generative entertainment feature works well, and the audience becomes invested in their favourite little sim-characters, maybe it’ll kick off.
It’s hard to know anything for sure without actually seeing the mechanics of it all. That said, the alpha of Showrunner is presently taking applications, so maybe a glimpse under the hood is more possible than it seems.
Based on this snippet from a Claude-generated sitcom script, however, even knowing how it works never guarantees quality.
Claude Burrows? I think not. Screenshot from Claude.Ai.
Post-script: How the above was made
With a nod to looking under the hood, and also documenting my genAI adventures as part of the initial research I mentioned, here’s how I reached the above script snippet from the never-to-be-produced Two Girls, A Guy, and a WeWork.
Initial prompt to Claude:
I have an idea for a sitcom starring three characters: two girls and a guy. One girl works a high-flying corporate job, the other girl has gone back to school to re-train for a new career after being fired. The guy runs a co-working space where the two girls often meet up: most of the sitcom's scenes take place here. What might some possible conflicts be for these characters? How might I develop these into episode plotlines?
Of the resulting extended output, I selected this option to develop further:
Conflict 6: An investor wants to partner with the guy and turn his co-working space into a chain, forcing him to choose between profits and the community vibe his friends love. The girls remind him what really matters.
I liked the idea of a WeWork-esque storyline, and seeing how that might play out in this format and setting. I asked Claude for a plot outline for an episode, which was fine? I guess? Then asked it to generate a draft script for the scene between the workspace owner (one of our main characters) and the potential investor.
To be fair to the machine, the quality isn’t awful, particularly by sitcom standards. And once I started thinking about sitcom regulars who might play certain characters, the dialogue seemed to make a little more sense, even if said actors would be near-impossible at best, and necromantic at worst.
“A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.”
Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire
I’m a little way in to A Desolation Called Peace, the second and final (I think!) part in Arkady Martine’s duology that began with A Memory Called Empire. Incidentally, I was reading the first book around the same time last year. It was the first fiction book I’d read in some time, and I was finding it difficult to get through.
There are all sorts of reasons this can be true of any reading experience, but after getting through three other books in record time at the beginning of the year, I’ve slowed down once again for Desolation. It’s an odd sensation, like the mental equivalent of slogging through wet sand.
This has nothing to do with the plot of the novel, which is multi-layered and surprising; nor the characters, most of whom are wonderfully idiosyncratic, deep and engaging; nor Martine’s writing, which is lyrical and free and so alive, a tiny diamond glittering in what is often a staid and immovable boulder of a genre.
I think it has more to do with where I am meeting this book, this series, this writing. Like near everyone on the planet, I’ve had a Big Few Years(tm). Throw multiple health issues into the mix, add a dose of grief, your basic burnout, and you’ve got a lovely thick batter to play with. I don’t think that’s necessarily it, though. It’s just where I am, what I’m doing, the byways and backstreets around which my thoughts often careen.
Martine’s writing feels like a foil for my current state of mind; a fitting opposite; yin to yang; boy I’m really stretching the old metaphors this time aren’t I.
Sometimes it’s not up to the reader as to how long something takes to read. Sometimes it just takes as long as it takes. It might be a page or two here and there; it might be a hundred pages in a sitting.
At a time when everything feels accelerated, truncated, made more homogenous and shallow, where the maxim is more, more, more, but never deeper, never stopping, never allowing thoughts to wander, connections to be made, boredom to set in… at a time like this, it’s nice to meet a thing, a story, that literally stops me in my tracks.
If you like what’s going on here at The Clockwork Penguin, if you appreciate the cut of my particular jib, as it were, buy me a coffee!
Godzilla with the spicy lightning as depicted in Godzilla vs. Kong (2021).
The 2014 reboot/continuation/expansion of the Godzilla franchise opens with the standard mystery box. A helicopter flies low over a jungle landscape, there are low minor chords from a rumbling orchestra: dissonance, uncertainty, menace. Helicopter Passenger #1 turns to Helicopter Passenger #2: “They found something.”
This is the germ of what is now a multi-film franchise, with a spin-off TV series that debuted in late 2023. A few weeks ago, I re-watched Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, as well as the sequel films I hadn’t seen, Godzilla II: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.
It was a bit of fun, obviously, a last hurrah before I went back to the very serious business of media academicking, but as is wont to happen, it’s been stewing ever since. So here: have some little thoughts on big monsters.
Last week I Masta’d1 up some speculations as to why Argylle has flopped. The first and most obvious reason that a film might tank is that it’s just not a very good film, as this may well be true of Argylle. But in a time where cinema is dead and buried and a media object is never discrete, we can’t look at the film in a vacuum.
I have thoughts on why #Argylle flopped. I haven’t seen it, so I won’t go into any great depth, but suffice to say there are two major components:
1) Marvel killed transmedia storytelling, jumped around on the corpse, drove a steamroller over it, then buried it in a nuclear waste facility.
2) Camp doesn’t hit like it used to. Big ensemble campy treats aren’t as sweet now; in an age of hyper-sensitivity, broad knowledge and information access, they taste a little sour. Ain’t no subtext anymore.2
The marketing machine behind Argylle decided they’d play a little game, by teasing a novel written by a mystery author (both in terms of them not being well-known, but also an author of actual mystery), with the film being quickly picked up for production. This was fairly clumsily-done, but leaving that to one side: okay, cool idea. The conceit is that the author runs into the real-life equivalent of one of their characters who whisks them away on an adventure. Cue ideas of unreliable narration, possible brainwashing, or whatever, and there’s the neat little package.
The concept overall is solid, but Universal and Apple made the mistake of thinking they could shoehorn this concept into a campaign that ‘tricked’ the audience into thinking some of it was factual, or at least had some tenuous crossover with reality.
Basically, they tried an old-school transmedia campaign.
Transmedia storytelling has always been around in some form or another. It dovetails quite nicely with epistolary and experimental narratives, like Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, and discussions of transmedia also work well when you’re thinking about serial stories or adaptations. The term is most often attributed to Henry Jenkins, a wonderful and kindly elder scholar who was thinking about the huge convergence of media technologies occasioned by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Jenkins’ ur-example of transmedia is The Matrix franchise, “a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.”3 The idea is that in order to truly appreciate the narrative as a whole, the audience has to follow up on all the elements, be they films, video games, comic books, or whatever.
“Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.”4
This model is now far from unique in terms of marketing or storytelling; with the MCU, DC Universe, the Disneyfied Star Wars universe and others, we have no dearth of complex narratives and storyworlds to choose from. This is maybe now partly why transmedia is seen as, at best, a little dated, old hat, and at worst, a bit of a dirty word, when it comes to narrative, media, or cinema studies. Those still chipping away at the transmedia stoneface are seen as living in the past or worse, wasting their time. I don’t think it’s a waste of time, nor do I necessarily see it as living in the past; it’s just that transmedia is media now.
Every new media commodity, be it a film, an app, a game, a platform, novel, has a web of attendant media commodities spring up around it. Mostly these are used for marketing, but occasionally these extraneous texts may relay some plot point or narrative element. The issue is that you need to conceit to be front and centre, you need some idea of the full narrative; you can’t expect the audience to want to do anything. The producers of Argylle made this mistake. They did transmedia the old-fashioned way, where narrative elements are spread across discrete media objects (e.g. book and film), and they expected the audience to want to fill in the gaps, and to share their excitement at having done so… on social media, I guess?
But like transmedia storytelling, social media ain’t what she used to be. Our present internet is fragmented, hyper-platformed, paywalled; city-states competing for dominance, for annexation (acquisition), for citizens or slaves (subscribers). Content is still king, but the patrician’s coffers care not as to whether that content is produced by the finest scribes of the age, or the merchant guild’s new automatons.
Viral is still viral, popular is still popular, but the propagation of content moves differently. Hashtags, likes, views don’t mean much anymore. You want people talking, but you only care as much as it gets new people to join your platform or your service. Get new citizens inside the gates, then lock and bar the gates behind them; go back to the drawing board for the next big campaign. The long tail is no more; what matters is flash in the pan attention attacks.
The producers behind the Godzilla reboot clearly envisioned a franchise. This is clear enough from how the film ends (or more accurately, where it stops talking, and the credits are permitted to roll). Godzilla apparently saves the world (or at least Honolulu and Las Vegas) from another giant monster, then disappears into the sea, leaving humanity to speculate as to its motivations.
It’s also apparent that the filmmakers didn’t want a clean break from the cultural history, themes or value of the broader Godzilla oeuvre; the title sequence suggests that the 1954 Castle Bravo tests were actually an operation to destroy Godzilla5. And in the film’s prologue, this wonderful shot is presented with virtually no context.
American triumphalism meets Japanese… er, monster promotions?
What struck me most, though, is the lack of overt story-bridges, particularly in the first film. Story-bridges are parts of the plot, e.g. characters, events, images, that allow the audience to jump off to another part of the narrative. These jumping-off points can be explicit, e.g. an end-credits sequence, or a line of dialogue referring to a past/future event, or they can be implied, e.g. the introduction of a character in a minor role that may participate more prominently in other media.
As media franchises become more complex, these points/bridges are not as often modelled as connecting branches to nodes around a centred point (a tentpole film, for instance), but as a mesh that connects multiple, interconnected tentpole media. In some of my academic work, with my colleagues Vashanth Selvadurai and Peter Vistisen, we’ve explored how Marvel attempts to balance this complexity:
“[Marvel] carefully balances production by generating self-contained stories for the mass audience, which include moments of interconnectivity in some scenes to fortify the MCU and thereby accommodate the fan base… [T]he gradual scaling up in bridge complexity from characters to storyworld to a cohesive storyline is integrated into a polycentric universe of individual transmedia products. These elements are not gathered around one tentpole event that the audience has to experience before being able to make sense of the rest.”4
In Godzilla, the story-bridges are more thematic, even tonal. The story remains consistently about humanity’s desire to control the natural world, and that world’s steadfast resistance to control; multiple times we hear the scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) speak about ‘balance’ in nature, the idea of a natural equilibrium that humanity has upset, and that Godzilla and his kin will restore. There is also a balance within and between humanity; corporate greed, political power struggles, individual freedoms and restrictions, all vie to find a similar kind of equilibrium, if such a thing is possible. The resulting tone is one that feels universal but prescient; topical and relevant to the contemporary moment, despite the presence of enormous monsters.
This tone is carried over into Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The monsters multiply in this instalment, and an extraterrestrial element is introduced, but in general Godzilla’s animal motivation is about preservation of self, but also of Earth and its biology. I should also note that there are more explicit bridges in this film, like the characters of Dr. Serizawa and his colleague Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins). But the true connecting thread, at least for me, is this repeated theme of humans and our puny power struggles playing out against the backdrop of a deep time, a history, forces and powers so ancient that we can never really understand them.
This macro-bridge, if you like, allows the filmmakers to then make tweaks to the micro-elements of the story. If they want or need to adjust the character focus, they can. If the plot of a single film seems a little rote, maybe, or they want to try something different, they’ve given themselves enough space in the story and the story-world to do that. This may not necessarily be intentional, but it certainly appears as an effective counter-model to the MCU/Disney mode, where everything seems over-complicated and planned out in multi-year phases, and everything is so locked in. The MonsterVerse approach is one of ad hoc franchise storytelling, and the result is a universe that feels more free, more open: full of possibilities and untold stories.
The point of all of this, I suppose, is to let us see what works and what doesn’t. As a storyteller or creative type, it helps me to model and test approaches to storytelling of all scales and budgets, as I think about what kinds of narratives I want to develop, and in which media form. Beyond that, though, I think that as we move into a contentscape that muddles the human-made with the computer-generated, this kind of analysis and discussion is more essential than ever.
Notes & References
Still working out the vernacular for the new social web. ↩︎
The first Godzilla film, directed by Ishirō Honda, was also released in 1954 ↩︎
Selvadurai, V., Vistisen, P., & Binns, D. (2022). Bridge Complexity as a Factor in Audience Interaction in Transmedia Storytelling. Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 7(1), 85–108 (quote from pages 96-7). https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.7.1.0085↩︎
