Grand Text Auto

An article in today’s NYTimes about the success of the World of Warcraft MMPORPG ends on a curious note. After describing how the developers have endowed, and continue to endow, their virtual world with a rich history, culture and environmental design, we get this quote from Blizzard’s VP of creative development, Chris Metzen:

You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon? … It has to be the story. We want you to care about these places and things so that, in addition to the adrenaline and the rewards of addictive gameplay, you have an emotional investment in the world. And that’s what makes a great game.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands… is a dead shark.

— Woody Allen’s Annie Hall

The latest postmortem article online at Gamasutra (postmortem indeed) is an informative writeup of an ambitious student project at Full Sail game design school. A group of six took on the challenge of the Love Story panel from GDC 2004, to create some sort of love story game. Their concept was interesting, their art was good, team morale was high, women dug it — only they hadn’t figured out what players actually do in the game…

Rather than sit in front of the TV for four-plus hours tomorrow, I plan to tape the Superbowl and watch it later, allowing me to fast-forward through those annoying breaks in the action. Through the game, that is. Generally I’ve found Superbowl contests to be mediocre entertainment — it’s the ads that are more intriguing. I’ve gotten into the habit of taping the whole event each year, and usually find a handful of very, very expensive pieces of commercial video art worth watching. The whole viewing process takes about 45 minutes.

Our 60-minute fandango on interactive story at the Game Developers Conference this March suddenly promises to be double fine, now that we’ve wrangled Tim Schafer to join the fray. Tim will either speak full throttle about the past, present, and future of adventure games vis-à-vis interactive stories — or just sit back and laugh at us oh-so-serious pontificators and casually plug his new game, which by the way is now available for pre-ordering. Well, hopefully he’ll do a little bit of both.

For those unable to make it, I’ll take notes, and report back here.

“Wannabe game designer and failed programmer” Johnny Pi has a new blog, Design Synthesis. A few quotes from some of his initial posts:

[W]hat remains to be seen is how game developers are going to merge freeform and structure. How can we model a reactive gameworld without creating a picture of anarchy? … I’m interested in the confluence of order and chaos.

This was going to be a comment in today’s discussion on the IF 1893 in The Times, but this is lengthy enough that I’d rather score a new post out of it.

Nick and Scott commented that in today’s market, selling text-based IF has become rare, and that the viability of selling e-lit is questionable. My take is that the market for new forms of e-lit and the like, e.g. interactive drama, is underdeveloped enough that charging money for it may do more to hamper a work’s reach, than to give it away.

Michael and I are facing this issue right now: as we’re close to releasing Facade, now in its final stages of bug fixing and audio editing, we’ve been thinking about the best way(s) to release it. Anyone have any thoughts if it’s a good or bad idea for us to charge for Facade, based on what you know so far about it? What you would pay for it, if anything? Do you think charging for it would hamper its dissemination?

Ian Wilson has begun a new blog as a forum to discuss ways to advance the state of the art of emotional behavior in virtual characters and interactive experiences. Ian has contributed numerous comments to discussions on GTxA of late, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on this shared pursuit. And his domain name ends in “ai”, which is pretty cool. Added to our blogroll.

For the second year in a row, June appears to be an excellent month for conferences. In addition to AIIDE and DiGRA, add Chris Crawford‘s annual to your list. And this June they all share some common geography — the North American west coast, where I just moved to, coincidentally, so I hope make it to all three. :-)

Here is the CFP (Call For Phronts?), and registration information.

Craig Robinson wondered What If…, and then drew some charts.

The first chart represents the imagined potential of his life up to the present, and the second chart is the imagined potential of his life from the present forward.

I found these charts more satisfying than the similar but different chart exercise I conducted a while ago. Carl would surely agree.

A research fellow at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Ireland comments on the Lab’s permanent shutdown, which was announced last week. The MLE was originally launched in 2000, initially funded by the Irish Government, with a plan to transition over time to corporate funding.

However, dot.com times are gone, and companies are reluctant to invest into endeavors where the return on investment is not clear. … I believe that Negroponte’s vision of conducting research cannot work out in times of short-term renevue expectations.

The comments and trackbacks include additional links to others’ obituaries.

Whither research of cool stuff…

Justin Hall’s having a breakdown. I saw it on today’s installment of Justin’s Links.

opinion ahead — watch the video first before reading

I’m settling into Portland, Oregon now, after moving here a couple of weeks ago from Boston. Between the move and switching to working full-time on finishing Facade for the next two months, I haven’t had much time to blog, but I’ll toss out a quick post here, grinding that familiar axe… (and finally busting Nick’s 10-in-a-row postravagnza! ;)

For all the bemoaning that goes on about the lack of variety of interactive entertainment, and even more so about the slow progress in increasing the amount of agency in such games — criticisms I’ve made many times, and regularly hear others making — I want to suggest that the root cause of it all may be less blameworthy, and at the same time more troublesome, than some believe.

Our interactive drama Façade is almost done — except we don’t have a completed music/sound score. Michael and I are very interested to find one or more talented composers or sound designers, to collaborate with us on creating a soundtrack for this dynamic, one-act interactive drama.

If you’re interested, please send email to andrew@no-spam-interactivestory.net and michaelm@no-spam-cc.gatech.edu (removing no-spam-), including a link to some samples of your sound/music work.

If you’re not a music/sound person, please forward this announcement to any musician friends who may be interested in this opportunity to collaborate on Façade. If you’ve got a blog, feel free to re-post this open call.

A few notes on what we’re looking for:

It seems that blog readers and commenters can serve as focus testers for book authors — at least this happened in the case of Marrit Ingman, who convinced Seal Press to publish her memoir about depression, based on the feedback and encouragement from frequenters of her blog. In fact, as this NYTimes article describes, several books have been born from blogs.

But a word of caution is contributed by a certain assistant professor of new media studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey — that blogs aren’t quite the same as books. Where’d he get that idea? ;-)

A review of Half-Life 2 on the new Game Brains website praises the game’s design for making its linear plot feel intuitive and uncontrived. Meanwhile, the newly-formed under-the-radar studio Telltale Games is interested in creating “television adventure games”, according to a new Adventure Gamers article. For more, read an interview on Gamespot with Telltale CEO Dan Connors.

The gang’s all here. For the first time since our group blog began over a year and half ago, the five of us got together in the same physical place.

Noah, Scott, Andrew, Michael, and Nick

A Novel Approach to Games — an interview with D. B. Weiss, author of Lucky Wander Boy, a story of childhood, obsession and videogames — is the featured article this week at The Cultural Gutter.

Branching off our recent believable character discussion, I’d like to say something about writing, gameplay, and their interrelation. In that discussion, Ian W. suggested:

[Writers] are not likely to be engineers. Even if they are the roles are very different and their tools should reflect that.

I’d say, the roles aren’t very different actually. In fact, it will become necessary for writers to be engineers.

How are the roles not very different? Writers in any medium are creators of character behavior; they invent motivations for characters, and from that create what their characters do and say. In non-interactive media, such as books and plays, as a writer works, she plays these behaviors out in her mind and narrates them into pages of text. In interactive media, such as games, the behaviors themselves are written down, as procedures — pages of code annotated with surface text. The computer executes this program, animating the characters to speak and act. In each approach, the writer’s thought processes are very similar! Sure, it may be more work to write down the behaviors themselves, than to simulate them in your mind and narrate the results, but the creative thinking behind both is similar. It takes some training to learn how to write behaviors — that is, to program — but it’s do-able. If a writer for a game is only creating sentences of dialog, then she is only doing a subset of the actual task of writing; the engineer who coded the behaviors that play out the dialog has actually been a co-writer all along. And — all this answers why writers need to be engineers, or at least collaborate very closely together.

Ian W. also wrote,

would interactive writing really be procedural when the field is more mature?

I’ll flip this around — interactive writing will be more mature when it becomes procedural.

It’s very common these days for people to start their own bogs. Bogging is an interesting cultural phenomenon, and in fact, bogging has gone mainstream. Anyone can become a bogger, if they have something to bog, such as cranberries, pictured here. Bogging is inexpensive, and easy. Boggers often form communities, collectively referred to as the Bogosphere, and are known to regularly visit each other’s bogs. What boggers do is completely new — and cannot be replicated in any other medium.

Robin Hunicke attended last week’s Game Tech industry seminar, I assume circumventing the $2450 registration fee :-). The gathering was comprised of a Creating Believable Characters Seminar and a Game Tech Leadership Summit. She wrote up a great three part summary of the event. (Update: Make that five!)

Robin reports that the believable characters seminar was pretty much limited to (impressive) animation techniques; the presentations went little into AI and behavior, because there’s little tangible work to talk about there.

…about AI and believablity, it’s clear that they tried to find a good speaker or two – and just couldn�t. It�s not that people aren�t trying some simple things… or even that they aren�t attending the conference. For example – Checker (at Maxis) and Jay (at Valve) had a long debate during a break on Day Three about whether the industry is ‘doomed’ because for all our realism, characters are still empty husks. So clearly, it�s being discussed. But results are limited, work is slow, and not a lot of people are stepping up to say what they think will take us in the right direction. That worries me.

Um, hello… (pdf GDC04 powerpoint GDC04 video)

But, okay, generally speaking, Robin is right — no group has yet built a working demonstration, let alone entertainment experience, with a broadly capable, non-shallow believable interactive animated character.

A recent Gamasutra article reminds me that there’s actually quite a few small, under-the-radar startups or commercial groups out there that you may have never heard of, who are attempting to tackle interactive character and/or story in some form or fashion. Some groups are new, some have been around for a while; some are just one or two people, some have reasonably large teams of people (i.e, more than 2). Some have external funding, some are self-funded, some have no funding, or have already used it up; some are building polished products or freeware, some are building tools and technology. They’re all worth keeping tabs on.

The Sims 2 now has a patch that fixes a few bugs. If only real life was debuggable like this. Here’s a few highlights:

• Fixes a problem with Sims’ jobs not functioning properly when 3 or more Sims go to work in a helicopter.
• Visitors will no longer kidnap a baby or toddler by leaving the lot while carrying them.
• An adopted baby no longer snaps to the ground when the social worker that delivers it puts it in a crib.
• A Sim whose fianc� dies can now become engaged again.

A new issue of Game Studies is online, with articles such as “Social Realism in Gaming”, “Social Dynamics of Online Gaming” and “The Challenge of Serious Videogames”. Also, articles on game music, German gaming, and a review of Rules of Play.

Finally, a fresh take on the concept of direct interaction with virtual pets, something I’m pretty familiar with :-) . I’ve been waiting almost 10 years now for something new in this space, since a group of us at PF.Magic initially released Dogz and Catz in the mid-1990’s.

New for the Nintendo DS, a dual-touchscreen handheld game machine, comes Nintendogs. Check out this impressive flash movie demonstrating it. Here’s a little bit of discussion about it so far.

(via Intelligent Artifice)

• A recent AAAI symposium on “Style and Meaning in Language, Art, Music and Design“. The papers are available online. (Was organized by not one, but two Shlomo’s; what are the chances?)
• A new issue of Dichtung Digital, derived from papers presented at “Under construction: Digital literatures and theoretical approaches”, last April in Barcelona. The essays written in English include Laura Castanyer addressing “disenchantment” with hypertext, and in fact cries “murder”; Markku Eskelinen “shed[s] some ludological light into the recent trend of building textual instruments and instrumental texts”; and George Landow offers ways to judge “good or bad” hypertext.