I read that Scott's using the Machine for these improvs but I'm afraid I still don't get exactly how it actually works. The description in Inventions is sketchy, falling somewhere sort of actually being instructions for making or using one.
My rough guess is that he's got a sort of endless map and makes a move per panel, based on a die roll as he mentions, and the image he lands on--here's where we get to the guessing part--represents some sort of tone, or approximate plot development, or totally random twist, which he then tries to incorporate into whatever else he was already planning to do for the next panel? It's still vague but I can't really see how one icon could determine a panel more completely than that.
Anybody with a better understanding of it want to set me straight?
RS
Story Machine at work here?
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Story Machine
Scott writes that it's used to "stimulate unpredictable turns of thought". My understanding is that the series of images that he rules don't represent anything at all, but are just used to get the mind to think in a differnt way. One day an image of a spoon, for example, might get one to think about large blue cartoon arachnids. Another day it may lead to an idea about a parallelogram copulating with a circle.