writing procedures

Check out Will Wright (creator of The Sims and SimCity) on a new game called Spore. Though I'm far from a game design expert, as I understand it, the potentially revolutionary component of this game is the way that it is able to adapt to user input and design and build a compelling world out of a series of relatively simple computations. Briefly put, you begin the game as a microscopic organism. As you evolve you get to select adaptations. You become a sea creature and then eventually, if you wish, a land creature. As you evolve you develop sentience. When you become fully sentient, you switch from biological evolution to social-technological development. Ultimately you develop the ability to span the galaxy.

Anyway, the interesting part of this is the way the game is "procedural," as Wright terms it, meaning that the shape and experience of the world are not predetermined but rather unfold from a series of relatively simple computations. In this way, Spore's functionality reflects the theory of multiplicity within a Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of materiality. But beyond that, I was thinking about insights it might provide into the composition/writing process.

We generally ask students to compose increasingly complex, textual products. We show them examples of published essays that demonstrate the complexity we'd like them to attempt. However, it is likely an error to imagine that texts are produced or conceived on that complex level. Nor do I imagine that many authors, including myself, manage or control the complexities of most texts they produce. To the contrary, often these complexities emerge on their own and then we have to deal with them. The procedures by which these complexities emerge are not nearly as complex as the products that result.

Now obviously the whole notion of "the" writing process reflects an attempt to recognize these procedures. However, in my opinion, this has never worked out as it might. I think the problem is that brainstorming is still fundamentally meant as a procedure where the idea for a text becomes largely realized. One then moves into constructing fairly large-scale conceptual elements as argumentation. More importantly, the subprocesses within "the" writing process bear a strongly determining relationship with their products.

The procedures I'm interested in are non-deterministic and would operate on a smaller scale. That is, they would operate within the compositional event as we see how emergent cognition, vocabulary, syntax, and so on intersect in the production of text. The complexity of the final product does not exist a priori in one of these elements (e.g., an idea). To use another analogy, this one from Rodney Brooks, an ant's gait is quite simple, but to watch it try to make its way across a sandy beach. Complexity emerges from interaction with a context.

While I'm not interested in a scientific naming of these processes, which I think cannot be divorced from cultural context, philosophic consideration of these notions may lead to some insight into how these procedures might inform pedagogy.