Grand Text Auto

He’s kept a low profile for quite some time now, but the Micrys Pages, an ongoing series of critical essays on game design and game studies by a Red Storm developer who goes by Eyejinx, very much deserve your attention. I only just discovered them following a link to his site from one of his recent comments on a blog.

Eyejinx, who also has a background in literary theory, has written an extensive series called the “Pitfalls of the Working Game Designer”, which offer great insight on the true nature of the job, and attempt to debunk the romanticism often associated with it. I found the essay “Pissing in the Sandbox” particularly good, probably the best breakdown I’ve read yet of the sandbox analogy to contemporary game design.

Wow, this is great! Google has released a beta of Google Scholar, which offers search on topics, authors, etc. and returns links and beaucoup info on academic papers. Ooh, this is going to enable us to so easily dig up all kinds of papers that we didn’t know about yet. I feel like I just got a major scholarly power up.

Here’s their heuristic for ranking links:

UCSD’s Experimental Game Lab (I wasn’t aware they had one, until reading this Gamasutra blurb) has received some support from Sammy Studios, a subsidiary of Sega Japan. The support includes a $290K donation for research in MMOG technology, character animation and rendering, as well as free use by UCSD students of Sammy Studios’ proprietary game engine SCORE, for making student projects. Cool.

One of the UCSD EGL projects is a piece called What I Did Last Summer, generated by bl0gb0t with Alex Dragulescu. bl0gb0t “is a software agent in development that generates experimental graphic novels based on text harvested from web logs.”

Co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center Randy Pausch spent last spring in residence at the headquarters and major production branch of the world’s most successful game company, Electronic Arts Redwood Shores, and wrote up an informative document “useful to academics interested in how to prepare students for EA.” It’s also a good peek into the corporate culture of EA. The writeup paints EA as a pretty great place to work, which from my understanding of EA as a whole has a lot of truth to it, although this season’s heavy crunch time has been overly brutal in many’s opinion. (Pausch writes that 40% of CMU ETC grads get hired at EA, plus 10 summer interns per year.)

Whether you’re in academia or industry, I recommend reading the document, I think everyone can gain some additional insight from it. In case you’re pressed for time, here’s a few interesting quotes that stood out to me. (Any comments from me are in parentheses.) From Pausch’s document:

It immediately became clear to me that neither EA nor academia have any real understanding of how the other operates.

There have been AAAI workshops on interactive entertainment for years, but now we finally have AAAI’s First Conference on AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), to be held June 1-3, 2005 in Marina del Rey (Los Angeles), CA. Abstracts and papers are due January 23 and 25, respectively. There will also be a demonstration track and exhibit space.

The conference is targeted at both industry and academia, and encourages work that spans both research and commercialization. Invited speakers for this first AIIDE are Chris Crawford (recent post), EA co-founder and CCO Bing Gordon, Sony researcher Craig Reynolds, AI checkers guru Jonathan Schaeffer, and the perennial Will Wright of Maxis.

Recent activity that needs linking to:

• The fifth Game Design Workshop was held in Seattle a few weeks ago, a private gathering of 25 or so prominent game designers and writers, focused on story. Attendees that briefly described the workshop on their blogs include Ron Gilbert (which includes a comment by almost-attendee Scott Miller), Lee Sheldon, and Greg Costikyan, who was inspired to write a new essay on “games as the cultural complexification of play”.
• The November issue of Game Developer includes an article called “Writesizing” by Stephen Jacobs of RIT, which asks “what’s the difference between game writing and game designing?” and how do games “need to evolve to establish a professional standard of writing”?

An anonymous “EA Spouse” writes an impassionated plea for better quality of life for game developers, describing how his/her spouse has had to work such insane hours for months on end to finish a product, that it’s upended their lives. The 400+ comments include several other very unhappy spouses and developers speaking up, several of them bitter EA employees. A parallel discussion ensues at Slashdot Games. IGDA’s Jason Della Rocca (Reality Panic) has been addressing this Quality of Life issue lately.

Chris Crawford’s long awaited book on interactive story, in which he finally reveals his secrets and hard-won lessons learned from slaving for years to build the Erasmatron, is now out and available from New Riders. (For more on the Erasmatron, go here and scroll down for essays.)

Chris considers it “the most important book I have ever written”, and describes his goals for the book on the back-cover blurb:

A reminder that paper abstracts for DiGRA’s June conference in Vancouver are due November 30, as well as indie game entries to the first Slamdance Independent Game Competition, in January in Park City, Utah, due November 29.

The website is now live for the 2005 Game Developers Conference, to be held in early March in San Francisco. The variety and quality of presentations and panels are as superb as ever (see last year’s list, post-conference impressions).

Here are this year’s sessions that should be of particular interest to GTxA folk:

I’m suddenly inspired to make one of those new political video games. In it, you click on young apathetic voters lazing on their couches to get off their butts and vote. You click to dial phone numbers to call friends who normally wouldn’t vote in an election, and manage to get them to vote too. At a cafe and dinner table you are seated in front of family and friends who normally vote for their pocketbook, and you click as fast as you can to express your passion to vote for the larger issues.

The newest release from Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, available today for the PS2, has already garnered extremely positive critical reviews, and from what I can tell looks to be a masterpiece. Interactive narrative-wise, the reviews say that like previous GTA3 titles — which in 2001 broke new ground in combining detailed virtual world simulation with freeform gameplay and mission-oriented narrative — San Andreas also has a fairly linear story, but the sheer size and scope of this new action/adventure is larger than ever. Players have three complete cities to play in — takeoffs of LA, SF and Vegas, each their own mini-societies. Furthermore, ~50% of the content is found off of the 100+ quests main storyline, including playing classic arcade games and billiards, working out at the gym if you overeat at Burger Shot, dressing well, dating women, dancing, and joyrides and racing out of the city on winding country roads.

Again I am unable to find the time write a post this week, but I think I have an even better excuse this time. (Pardon me for a moment… YYYEEEAAAHHHH!!! *cough* ahem.) (Oh, and I also just finalized an offer yesterday on our first house, which took some extra time too — we’re moving from Boston to Portland, Oregon in January.)

Anyhow, I’ll contribute links to others’ interesting writings, in case you haven’t seen them yet:

Raph Koster, lead designer of the Star Wars Galaxies MMOG and Ultima Online and an implementor of LegendMUD, has written A Theory of Fun, to be available in a few weeks. A press quote says, “Raph’s intention here is to write an Understanding Comics for computer games: an accessible, lay-oriented text that explains, finally, what this medium means…”

The Public Beta folk will soon be publishing Difficult Questions About Videogames in which 71 contributions from CEOs, developers, journalists, academics and players were culled from 969 initial responses to an open call for opinions.

Coming up for air after several intense weeks of crunch time at work, west coast travel and Façade debugging, I will simply link to Rob Zubek’s recent post summarizing a recent series of articles, essays and discussions about Interactive Story, starting with comments from Spielberg and Zemeckis, then a reaction from Chris Remo (who last month ranted well with “I kill you”), and follow-up reactions from Walter Kim and the Slashdot Games community.

For the third time in the past five years, the chatterbot ALICE has scored highest and won the Bronze at the annual Loebner Prize competition, held this week in New York City. Jabberwacky came in second place.

We’ve discussed ALICE, Jabberwacky and the Loebner competition a couple of times on GTxA (1 2).

Representatives from Electronic Arts and the University Of South California’s School of Cinema-Television have unveiled the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, located in downtown Los Angeles. The lab has been created to act as a state-of-the-art research space and think tank for game design and creation.

(via Gamasutra)

Check out Toogle — it creates an image of text, from the very text used to search for that image.

Highlight the above — it’s text!

Speaking of NPR, I just learned from one of my favorite radio news sources about some UK research which found that those who keep personal diaries are ruining their health.

[R]egular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness. Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

“We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off,” says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all,” she adds.

PBS (public broadcasting in the U.S.) has created a television documentary called “The Video Game Revolution“, premiering tomorrow night at 8pm (check your local listings for dates and times in your area). The program description says the documentary will examine the history of games, interview famous game developers, profile game players, and conclude with the future of gaming.

Along with the documentary is an impressive companion website, with four sections: History of Gaming, Inside the Games, Impact of Gaming, and The Arcade. Each section has a variety of interviews, articles, graphics, videoclips, and downloads.

Idle Thumbs go to work and give us a great rant and follow-on discussion about the overabundance of violence in videogames — the problem not being that such games lead to violent behavior, but that they are inhibiting forward progress in game design.

Have you ever tried to convince your mom, spouse, etc. that video games aren’t violent? You might mention Tetris, or The Sims, but after that you’re left with nothing but a wishy-washy sentence or two about “potential” and “endless possibilities” without a shred of concrete evidence in the form of a real gamer’s game to back you up. Why is that?

About a month ago the Guardian online newspaper began its own blog on games. Today’s post asks, how important is story to games? (via Klastrup’s Cataclysms)

I’ve always loved non-fantasy comics; I never got into fantasy or superhero ones for some reason. I spent a lot of time reading MAD magazine as a kid, usually in my room while eating cookies pilfered from the kitchen pantry. My dad, who grew up in Coney Island’s housing projects, had collected MAD as a kid and later gave his tattered collection to me, where it promptly became even more tattered, along with any new issues he’d just finished reading. (The phrase “The Spy Who Glubbed Me” still sticks in my head.) But more than the movie parodies and the folding back cover, I was drawn to Dave Berg’s dysfunctional ‘The Lighter Side’, Al Jaffee’s inventive artwork, Don Martin’s onomatopoeic panels, the surreal ‘Spy vs Spy’ (and later the computer game), and of course those little cartoons in the margins by Sergio Aragones. Blecch!

Slamdance, an alternative film festival to Sundance held annually in late January in Park City, Utah, also now includes an Independent Games Competition. There are two $5000 prizes to be awarded, Jury and Audience. Early deadline is Oct 1, final deadline Nov 14.

Andre Lamothe, author of several game programming books that I’ve found handy, has launched XGameStation: as Slashdot describes, it’s “a retro level hardware platform, similar to the old Atari and NES systems, designed to teach enthusiasts and students the elements of console hardware design and effective low level programming skills.” Wow! Cool.

Two bloggers independently come up with a great idea at the same time — someone should make a game that explores the meaning of games themselves, a la McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Must be something in the water.

Gamespot’s got a new essay on games as worthy of academic study.

I meant to post this a few days ago when I initially read it — our antimodal friend Brandon Rickman, a frequent GTxA commenter, has written a couple of posts (1 2) about SIGGRAPH from two weeks ago. Sounds like as we feared, SIGGRAPH’s appeal has dwindled a bit when compared to previous recent years, particularly the art gallery and panel sessions.