Film Courage: Let's try to add some details and we'll add an aspect
card which is the last card [using The Story Engine story building card game].
Jeff Kitchen, Dramatist / Author / Founder / Consultant: We have glorious, treacherous,
wish granting and cloying. Cloying means clingy or it's like unpleasant (I don't remember
what, exactly what that word means). Easy to look it up.
I've heard it used perhaps in the sense of smell, where something smells dead or something,
but I don't think that's right. Let me just look it up. The definition of cloying is
disgusting or distasteful by reason of excess like cloying sweetness, excessively sweet or
sentimental: a cloying romantic comedy, her coyness grows cloying after a while.
Interesting okay, so it's just like too much,
interesting. Glorious, treacherous, wish granting, those are the two that, well
glorious and treacherous are interesting because as treacherous as we saw
Adolf Hitler he saw what he was doing as glorious, like he was saving the world. So
the context and the point of view with which you look at these things like this automaton
could be treacherous and yet feel like it's doing the world a huge service
and it might be monstrous but the robot may be programmed in such a way that it can't
see that what it's doing is evil or wrong or ethically questionable or that kind of
thing so those are both very interesting and then wish granting is fascinating
and it's interesting in part because of where quantum physics is going these days
and an automaton's ability to manufacture like Robbie The Robot
could like Morbius would give him a sample of lead and he'd say make us 600 pounds of lead
or 600 tons of lead and he just manufactures it inside his body one of the one of Commander Adams
is crewmen gives the robot a sample of whiskey and the robot says yeah yes I can manufacture
this for you with 60 gallons be sufficient and that the guy's like oh yeah that would be great
and that's a a bit of an old school example but if a if an automaton is tapped into some sort of
manufacturing capability 3D printers even the ability to Gene splice and manufacture highly
specific things to order it opens up a kind of a Hal in 2001 type thing and obviously a genie type
thing but the capacity to manifest something that was only an idea through like state-of-the-art
science and enhanced capacity and access to like if this robot was made by a massive like
manufacturing facility it might have access to all of that equipment even if it's stolen access
and like yes I could make that happen so it's very open-ended in that way and suggestive
but the one that jumps right out at me is treacherous that like grabs me by the throat
and wish granting is like there's a lot of fun possibilities in that it's very open-ended
and obviously in any story that has wish granting in it always has the caveat of
you know be careful what you wished for like you wanted it so badly and now you have to deal with
it but that's also I get tired of that form of wish fulfillment stories and it's also a kind of
don't you dare think big type of thing that society does to people you think big you're
going to get it which just is like crushing people down you're worthless you're no good
and I don't like that and so I like to go the opposite way of like you know dare to think big
explode the boundaries don't let them tell you you're not allowed to be great or be dynamic or
you know not just think outside the envelope but disintegrate the envelope
so it's interesting and it really could these all except for cloying which
feels outside the context in a certain way of these things but also well I'm not a
stranger to the word it's not part of my normal lexicon it's not a word that just comes to mind
and I think I've read it in novels where you know soldiers are Marching through a city and there's
dead bodies everywhere and they're saying the cloying smell foulness
filled their nostrils or something like that like overly sweet and weird and
so it the the few contexts that I have for cloying don't jump out at me at all like these other three
I would say treacherous treacherous and wish granting
are the ones that jump out at me the most okay do you feel we have enough of the cards pulled
to make a story or would you like to pull an extra card to build more of the story around do you feel
like you have enough here if you were to yeah I mean there's enough here to build a story we're
absolutely building from scratch because these are just raw elements
and you know you could build a a wacko comedy or you could build a brutal thriller or anything in
between so it's very open-ended you know there's a there's a direction because these things
infer certain possibilities and trigger possibilities in my brain
so part of me thinks well another card would be interesting but part
of me thinks there's so there's kind of an embarrassment of riches right here already
and throwing another thing into the mix might just be an unnecessary complication
so I'm really not sure either way okay well we can always pull a card later if.