For this week’s assignment to create a character dialogue or chat bot I returned to a book I’ve been wanting to work with for some time. Last year over dinner one night, my aunt’s friend (Kim) told me about an experience she had on the WELL (the early BBS “chat room/social network” system) - she was too shy and new to computers to participate in the conversation, but observed as a topic called Local Bug Report unfolded. It started with a user with the name mandel (Tom Mandel) who posted about the flu he had that was “going around the office.” As time passed and the discussion continued, he visited the doctor and learned that he had lung cancer. The topic turned to a report on his health status and a sort of support group as he was going through treatment. I am especially interested by this in terms of internet history (and specifically the development of communities online) and as possibly the first death online. My aunt’s friend said that when she saw this happen and the community’s reaction, she understood what the internet was about - or would be about.
Kim published the transcript from the chat in a book called @Heaven (with permission from the users). I read it last year and it was unlike any other book I have read because it wasn’t really a book or novel with a traditional narrative. There was narrative present in it, but it was driven by a natural progression and dialogue facilitated through the medium of a chat room. Most of it was very mundane but it was punctured by unpredictable poignant, moving, and intense moments.
There is a moment before mandel dies that he speculates about someone making a chatbot version of him in the future so that he could “live on” virtually. Since reading that I was interested in trying to complete that kind of project and this assignment seemed like a good opportunity to explore this idea.
I tried to find a version online I could either download or copy and paste lines from, but could not find a format that would work. Since I didn’t have enough material, instead of making a chat bot, I decided to make an interactive recounting of this piece of history to think about what this book might look like as an interactive conversational narrative similar to Butterfly Soup.
To do this, I ended up typing out sections that I wanted to include in order to create a semi-branching narrative as a prototype for what this experience could be like. As I was doing this, it actually felt important to type out the text for this project and I was glad I was doing it rather than copying and pasting or using a text corpus version of the book - it made me feel more of a connection to the people who were participating in this chat and better able to empathize with their experience.
I included some options of responses to different parts of the chat based on real chat responses in the transcript (“beams” for example was a word used a lot in the chat to send good thoughts/vibes/prayers for example). These do lead to a few different branches of the narrative at first, but all come back to and in the end the options do not change the path of the narrative.
The only other character I included was a post from “nana” who was mandel’s wife (they married shortly before he died).
And I have a final room, which is the final discussion topic mandel started called “My Turn” to say goodbye to his community:
One challenge was that I hadn’t realized that may of the posts are quite long and Ren’py doesn’t seem to handle this well. I split up the text into smaller sentences, but it became odd when I started making the menu options large chunks of text. Perhaps a better solution would have been to have single word menu options and then show in the bottom what the full response was.
I also wasn’t what to do about visuals. I don’t think I’d want to include pictures of actual people - maybe if I were to continue this I’d add abstract visuals or just a picture of the computer the character is typing at.
You can play the Ren’Py version here: https://lydiajessup.github.io/mandelbot/index