Emotion Tracking in Causality (upcoming)

I guess it's a very subjective feeling : I tend to simplify the more I can and I need things to be almost compatible with a 5 year old kid (which is the kind of intelligence I have when it comes to analysis), and I always need to rely on physical oriented things, such as the fingers on my hand : beyond that I'm a little lost ;-) But I completely understand, and it's technically very easy : in a spreadsheet, everyone can select the values he wants for data validation. So it can be from 1 to anything we need. What do you think of the idea of customizable criteria (tension, romance, emotion, ECG, etc) ?

Hi,

Absolute values are bad, and we're avoiding them completely. You can simply work in 1-5 if that's good for you, but chances are that rewrites will keep adding events, and now you're going from 2 to 7. So it's designed from the ground up to simply not matter. You simply use it, and you can 100% think they way you already think. But having 30 events with values that need to be shifted because the scale change would be highly bureaucratic. We've played through these scenarios a hundred times, and absolute scales result in heavy administrative work that undermines the usefulness of the feature as a whole.

You can name all your criteria. But remember that tension is a derivative of all the others. Anger goes up and it goes down, and it has a side-effect of tension. An objective is close be achieved and it leaks tension. Or an objective has setbacks, and it leaks tension. We need to think bigger. This is not just a single story with a single throughline. This is a 20 episode television series with 30 characters and a dozen storylines and 80 metrics we're following. In order for this to provide any cognition at all, we need to let the computer paint the final picture of the story, and not simply have the final result as the only metric that one controls manually with all the detail removed. Working the way we suggest provides a visual where you can clearly see where the highs and lows and tension and release in the story is, both for the story as a whole and for everything that's happening inside of it.

I think that was implicit in the original description, other than perhaps Tension.

And absolutely a good idea. There are a number of things I might want to track from beat to beat, shot to shot, and it's impossible to know what I might want at a software level. Just give me the ability to throw a label on a data point and let it fly.

Hi,

We may be talking about two separate things, the auto-scaling of the values in the grander scheme of things, and then arrow buttons for how to increase individual events. I'm not in favor of more buttons, basically I'm biased to try every other option first. Alt-clicking could go in steps of 5 instead of 1. That works in countless apps, so we should try it first. This is just a crowded area, and heavy UI noise with small buttons close together like this must prove its need to exist. So I'd like to do Alt-clicking first and find out if the problem exists in actual use working with emotions. Most steps will be small, and you also have a slider.

Tags will not likely become attached to groups or blocks, because it's too indiscriminate. The inferred meaning would be that this tag is really attached to every beat in the container, except that the more data we carry on tags, the more the lack of individual control is a problem. And suddenly some tags are fake tags and can't be edited without editing all tags in the whole group. And suddenly dragging something into a block can mean that it silently adopts a tag. The can of worms is large, it's hard to explain and intuit, and I'm not in favor of this. The direction of the whole project is to move away from such solutions, because they actually break the app and break the comprehension, and bring with them a lot of special casing that leads directly to bugs. Getting rid of this kind of stuff is why Causality 3.0 is largely bug free.

But you're trying to achieve something that has/will have a far better solution. Emotional Tracking is half of the mission of helping you with long storylines. The other half is a dependency graph.

There, you'll be able to express the story as a set of rules, that e.g. going into this block requires anger to be at 80%, which both helps with story integrity, and gives you an actually writing target, where setting the rules is one of the first things you do, and then you start writing toward the rules to satisfy them, basically emanating the story backwards from important checkpoints. This is the place to do this.

Auto scaling is fine; that ends up handling itself.

Avoiding meta-keys for adjusting intervals is something I'm fairly big on for a number of reasons, but one of the pressing ones is that it's a pain in the ass for accessibility reasons. Any kind of multi-key or chorded interface requirement is a bugger for people who use alternate input devices or assistive technology. Sliders are, sadly, not that great either because they require pretty fine manipulation ability and are "sloppy" when it comes to communicating intent.

I've been at this a while, see. UI affordances are something I've fought with before.

Plus, you've already described a design which requires three small buttons to function, the -, INT, and + buttons. I'm really just suggesting changing the marker in the - and + and adding two more, << and >>, one to either side. If you make a long press on any of the buttons in that cluster pull up a pop-up modal that lets you set the integer directly, you end up with more space to read the button presses themselves because you aren't looking for direct taps in the middle area. And, as I said before, you can always rotate the whole thing 90o and put it on the side of the panel if you need more room for the text proper.

Sorry to keep going on about this but I've spent enough time wrestling with UI issues for folks that arbitrary fields that let you pop in numbers but provide no implicit guidance is a bugaboo.

There's no real compelling reason to force the tags attached to a container onto the beats or other containers within, mind you. They don't even need to inherit them by inheritance; you can just represent containers which have tags with values as another line to be represented.

The dependency graph definitely sounds like something which will be a necessary component of using these tools effectively. Is there already a plan of design for the user interface on communicating intention at time to the system? Building in necessary triggers definitely goes along with the Causality design of being able to track if something has been set up before it's mentioned, so that fits with the things on the table.

Because of my personal needs and those of people that I often work with, UI and affordance issues come up a lot. Though not even I am going to tackle the issue of getting Causality to work with screen reader software. There are levels of insanity I am not willing to dip into, no matter what.

But otherwise I try to keep an eye on things.

I'm still not in favor of multiple buttons. It's touch-hostile, and I think that the real-world changes you make are small, a couple of clicks up and down. I think that big changes are rare for these values.

The tag idea is unfortunately somewhat meaningless. Things can't have a value if they don't even exist in the story, which a tag on a pure container doesn't. The only thing that exists in the story is beats. And even if that bridge could be crossed, a container can represent 20 events, so it's entirely unclear when the value of such a tag would happen. This is unfortunately an impossible idea.

It's any emotion. But say it's a story about someone who doesn't believe in themselves. Then various events take their confidence up and down, until their confidence bottoms out, they take a risk and succeed, and their confidence level goes way up, because they learn they have it in them. Low confidence is the tension in the story, so the tension goes up as their confidence goes down, until they finally take a leap of faith and their confidence is restored along with harmony.

Could you also have high confidence be the source of high tension (the story could start with high tension because the main character has high confidence in themselves and needs to learn how to rely on others which becomes the character arc?) An example would be Tony Stark. High confidence in himself, high tension with surrounding cast of characters.

Yes, exactly. It's up to you to define what kind of emotion it is. That's a perfect example of someone with toxic self-confidence that might even be their downfall.