Epistemic status: Fake Framework

When you walk into an improv scene, you usually have no idea what role you’re playing. All you have is some initial prompt — something like:

“You three are in a garden. The scene has to involve a stuffed bear somehow. Go!”

So now you’re looking to the other people there. Then someone jumps forward and adds to the scene: “Oh, there it is! I’m glad we finally found it!” Now you know a little bit about your character, and about the character of the person who spoke, but not enough to fully define anyone’s role.

You can then expand the scene by adding something: “It’s about time! We’re almost late now.” Now you’ve specified more about what’s going on, who you are, and who the other players are. But it’s still the case that none of you knows what’s going on.

In fact, if you think you know, you’ll often quickly be proven wrong. Maybe you imagine in that scene you’re an uptight punctual person. And then the third person in the scene says to you, “What do you care, Alex? You’re always late to everything anyway!” Surprise! Now you need to flush who you thought you were from your mind, accept the new frame, and run with it as part of your newly evolving identity. Otherwise the scene sort of crashes.

It would go more smoothly if you didn’t hold any preconceptions about who you are or what’s going on. The scene tends to work better if you stay in the present moment and just jump in with the first thing that comes to mind (as long as it’s shaped by what has happened so far). Then the collection of interactions and emerging roles spontaneously guides your behavior, which in turn help guide others’ behavior, all of which recursively defines the “who” and “what” of the scene. Your job as a player isn’t to play a character; it’s to co-create a scene.

We can sort of pretend that there’s a “director”: it’s the intelligence that emerges between the players via their interactions. It’s a distributed system that computes relationships and context by guiding each node in its network to act freely within constraints. From this vantage point, the network guides players, and the job of each player is to ...

Gemist

Gemist

Gemist

Gemist

Gemist

Gemist