In-class exercise: Character relationships

Start by clicking on the following code to open it in Imaginarium:

# Try: imagine 10 characters
Characters have an age between 1 and 70.
A character is male, female or nonbinary.
A character is masculine-named or feminine-named.
A male character is masculine-named.
A female character is feminine-named
A character has a surname from English surnames.
A masculine-named character has a given name from male names.
A feminine-named character has a given name from female names.
A character is identified as "[given name] [surname]".
Do not mention being ma sculine-named.
Do not mention being feminine-named.

This version handles non-binary gender, but it does end up generating a disproportionately large number of non-binary characters.  If you prefer to use binary gender, use this:

# Try: imagine 10 characters
Characters have an age between 1 and 70.
A character is male or female.
A character has a surname from English surnames.
A male character has a given name from male names.
A female character has a given name from female names.
A character is identified as "[given name] [surname]".

Create a setting

• Think of a setting
  • Not high school or college
• Think of some kinds of characters
• Think of some other kinds of entities in the setting
• What are the story-relevant relationships that might hold between them?
• Take notes on them

Formalize the relationships

For each relationship ask:

• What kinds of things go on the left and right sides?
  • For example, owns is a relation between a person and a thing: in “\(X\) owns \(Y\)”, \(X\) is a person and \(Y\) is a thing
  • Note that often the same kind of thing goes on both sides
    • For example, coworker of is a relation between people: “\(X\) is a coworker of \(Y\)”, has person for both \(X\) and \(Y\)
• In English, \(X\) is called the subject and \(Y\) the object
• In math, \(X\) is called the domain of the relation and \(Y\) its codomain
  • An important special case is when the domain and codomain are the same; that’s called a homogeneous relation
• If you don’t have any homogeneous relations in your collection, add some

Think about formal properties

For each homogeneous relation, ask yourself whether there can be:

• Self-relationships
  • Can an object (character or something else) be related to itself?
    • Example: you can't be your own parent, but you can be in the same family as yourself
  • If so, must the objects always relate to themselves?
    • Example: you're always in the same family as yourself
  • In math, this property is called reflexivity
    • Reflexive relations: objects always relate to themselves
    • Anti-reflexive relations: objects never relate to themselves
• Symmetry
  • If \(X\) is related to \(Y\), can/must \(Y\) be related to \(X\)?
  • In math, this is called symmetry
    • Symmetric relations: if \(X\) relates to \(Y\), then \(Y\) always relates to \(X\), so the relationship is bidirectional
    • Antisymmetric relations: \(X\) relating to \(Y\) means \(Y\) can't relate to \(X\), unless they're the same.

Coding in Imaginarium

• Write your relations as verbs in Imaginarium
  • Write your one or more statements for each verb
• Test it with something like imagine 10 characters

Relationship taxonomies

• Organize your homogenous relations in a hierarchy
  • What is a way of what?
  • If you have homogeneous relations for a few different kinds of things, just chose the kind of thing with the most relations
• Make sure there is a “top-level” relation
  • That all your other homogenous relations are ways of
  • Add something like “be related to” if there isn’t one already
• Put a constraint up “up to 2” on the top-level relation.  This lets you generate relations without having a trillion lines in the relations window