Entertainment in the Age of Big Data

Everybody loves a good story. People all over the world seek out and crave entertainment. This will not change in the coming age of big data and cloud computing. But stories are more than just a distraction from the big problems of the world we are all supposed to be solving. Stories are (computationally) one of the most challenging problems facing our computers. Humans are hardcoded for story. Our computers are not. Or not yet. Through our research we examine a future of entertainment where increasing computational power allows us to be genuinely connected to a truly digital world. We argue that a genuinely digital and connected future opens the door for a new kind of storytelling, and ultimately, a new way of managing and interacting with the massive data sets collected and shared by humans.