Grand Text Auto

Andrew did a great job posting his talk notes for AIIDE. In this post I’ll describe some of my reactions and thoughts to the talks and conversations I had at AIIDE.

Chris Crawford

Andrew and I are certainly in agreement with Chris about the need to increase verb counts in order to achieve interactive story. But Chris strongly wants to avoid natural language, and instead move to a custom logographic language. Further, he wants to use parse technology to provide constraints as the player writes sentences in the custom language – I imagine something like pop-up menus. I understand the impulse to avoid natural language (seems like an impossible, AI complete problem) and to prevent the player from being able to form nonsensical sentences, but I worry that:
1) logographic languages will feel unnatural
2) a pre-parse interface that constrains what symbols you can use based on the symbols you’ve used so far will prevent players from being able to speak in their own style.

To our surprise, a New York Times reporter was at the AIIDE conference last week. The resulting article for tomorrow’s paper, “Redefining the Power of the Gamer”, posted online in both the Arts section and Technology section, consists of a series of interviews of several of the conference speakers — and leads off with a description of playing Façade, plus a screenshot and link to our website!

Although Façade is not quite released yet — we’re setting up our distribution channels as we speak — we’ve gone ahead and put up a “pre-order” e-mail address on the site (even though it will be freeware), to try to capture some of the traffic that may head our way from the article… :-)

At the ICT summer school in Stockholm, Espen Aarseth noted in his talk “How to Analyze Games: A Metamodel” (Sunday 5 June) that there are as many ways to study games as there are reasons to study them, and that, for example, game players would want very different things from game analysis than, for example, an academic studying games; thus, methods must take these vast differences into account.

Aarseth offered tentative, broad approaches to creating methods which could be used to study games, spending a good deal of time asking overarching questions about art (are games art?); he emphasized that art is modelled on a “king of the hill” style competition where an artist’s job is to claim the superior position. Several artists in the audience disagreed with Aarseth.

Aarseth also noted that communities (from academic fields to online groups) are formed by exclusion. Overall, the tone of competition proffered in games themselves seems to have infused the discussion. of the field.

Michael Joyce began his talk at the ICT summer school in Stockholm by distinguishing his talk “Red Shelves and texts held in confidence: Networked Collaboration as Medium and Artefact” from yesterday’s talk by Espen Aarseth.

Michael and I had great time last week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference (AIIDE) in Los Angeles. I’d guess there were around 80 participants, about two-thirds from academia and the rest from the game industry. There were many interesting presentations and a roomful of demos, including our now code-complete Façade, which got an enthusiastic reception. All considered the meeting a success, with plans to hold it again next year.

[Update: here’s a NYTimes article about the conference!]

What follows are raw notes from several of the talks and keynotes, in the order they were presented. Apologies if I missed a few, I occasionally had to take a break to avoid overload, and to tend the demo machine. Talk titles, and particularly prescient quotes, are highlighted in bold.

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Doug Church — AI Tools for Generating Player-Driven Emotional Experience in Videogames
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currently have a rise of entertainment content in games, beyond just play
not just the challenge of the game, now “entertainment”; big moments, emotional events, open ended worlds
how does AI fit in?

Today’s New York Times offers an article that investigates the origins of the joystick and credits it as one of the most overlooked acheivements of the last century.

Are they fun to send via SMS? I can’t say. But they do make for excellent short examples in a narratology lecture. the-phone-book.com offers six award-winning SMS stories.

I gave a lecture on Story and Games [slides in PDF] to the CIS 564 class on game design here at Penn. The first half was straight narratology; then we looked at the nature of games as simulations, game time as distinct from time in stories, etc., and I had the class play Varicella in two groups so that we could discuss it in some detail. Fun stuff.

I recently ran across this ambitious and obsessive illustration project: Zak Smith’s Illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow includes an image for every single page of Pynchon’s masterpiece. All the images are available on the site. The whole collection was exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial and is now in the permanent collection of the Walker Museum in Minneapolis.