Grand Text Auto

My s.o. Tania and I recently returned from a great 10 days of touring a series of northern Atlantic and Baltic cities — Reykjavik (capital of Iceland), Helsinki, Mariehamn (on the Finnish island Åland) and Stockholm. I’d never been north of Berlin, so it was educational for me as well as enjoyable. In the middle of the trip we spent two days on the ISEA ferry cruise on the Baltic Sea, hanging out with Noah, Jill, Scott, Michael, Ken Perlin and others. Traveling along the coast of Sweden through a channel of hundreds of little islands with teeny houses on them, some smaller than a typical American suburban lot size, was quite beautiful and memorable.

Michael and I exhibited Façade in a little room just off a smoky casino in the middle of the ship. It was played about 100 times, from which we have the traces to analyze, serving as another helpful user test. Feedback from players was generally positive, if a bit muted. Simon Penny had some good suggestions for us. One guy played it over and over for a couple of hours, perhaps trying to figure out how it worked, or trying to get it to behave the way he wanted it to.

I deliberately missed the rest of the conference; that’s alright, I’ve always found the appetizer to be the tastiest part of a meal anyhow.

The program for this year’s Software Art and Cultures Conference is now online. The meeting will be August 23-24 at Århus University in Denmark, and is free to the public. Talks include “Code as Performative Speech Act”, “An Exploration of the Visual Mind of the Software Artist”, “Software Art and Political Implications in Algorithms”, “Legos for a Meta-Theory of Meta-Artforms”, as well as an accompanying art exhibition, including “dot_matrix_synth” and “Hardware Orchestra”.

Just after the conference is the 3-day Runme Dorkbot City Camp, including the Read_Me Code Poetry Slam and an Outdoor computing session, and sessions such as “Algorithmic appreciation”, “Conceptual software” and “Appropriation and plagiarism”.

Via Slashdot Games, an article by Michael Labbe with advice for independent / hobbyist game developers on finishing the games they’ve started.

The majority of hobbyist developers imitate big budget development houses. This is an insane undertaking.

[G]ames do not have a successful and vibrant independent underground movement like movies and music. There are no largely successful independents left for beginners to look up to. As a result, the [hobbyist] developers bite off more than they can chew and the work is never completed. … Ultimately, pragmatism is the only thing that matters. If you follow another God, your path may never lead to a finished product.

ISEA has published a magazine about its upcoming festival and conference (pdf, 3.7MB). Here and there in magazine, in teeny text on skinny sidebars, are lists of people exhibiting art and speaking at the conference, which include several GTxA folk and friends.

Via our neighborhood ludology blogs, here are links to two articles with ideas on how to improve interactive narrative experiences. First, a new essay by Timothy Burke in which he strongly advocates agency in MMOG virtual worlds.

MMOGs can never be virtual worlds until they abandon the character as the primary unit of persistence. To be virtual worlds, they have to make the gameworld itself the major unit of persistence. … This is the dream of many MMOG players: they beg for gameworlds in which their actions matter, in which there are events of consequence. Developers promise to pursue this chimera, but rarely implement anything even approaching the most modest dreams of players.

Second, an older essay (1989) espousing the concept of game-stories, by Ron Gilbert, veteran developer of adventure games (Monkey Island) and its technology (SCUMM), posted on his new blog. In the essay, which holds up quite well 15 years later (perhaps suggesting how little progress has been made in interactive narrative since then), Gilbert discusses his “rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief” in game-stories. Particularly interesting to me, in light of our current experiment in real-time interactive drama, is Gilbert’s rule that “Real time is bad drama”:

Robin Hunicke has written a post mortem of the just-ended AAAI workshop she co-organized, Challenges in Game AI, which included a keynote from GTxA’s Michael, who promises a conference writeup as well.

Sounds like this successful workshop may take over for the “AI and Interactive Entertainment” workshops that had happened for several years at the spring symposia at Stanford.

Update: Rob Zubek has done a writeup, and Michael just posted a biggie.

Two new articles have recently come out interviewing advocates of independent game development — one on Armchair Empire with GarageGames co-founder Jeff Tunnell, and one with Jay Moore, “Evangelist” at GarageGames, on Gamasutra.

When asked how game development has changed in the last 15 years, Tunnell replies,

The standard answer here is that games are much harder to create, have larger budgets and larger teams.  I actually call bullshit on the conventional wisdom!  Games are easier to create than in any time in history and they will get easier.  … Making a game is a lot like being in a rock band.  Get together with a couple of like-minded people, learn your different crafts (programming, art, audio), and make a wildly innovative and fun game.  To quote a beaten phrase, “…the world will beat a path to your door.”

Gameblogs.org aggregates dozens of game blogs and their latest headlines into one master list, sortable by recent activity, category, and “popularity” (how often people have clicked on a link via Gameblogs.org, I suppose). Find your old favorites and perhaps some new ones, or add your own to the list.

I wasn’t looking for it, but today I tripped over an old e-mail and fell into MadInkBeard, a new blog to “discuss the idea of formal constraints (mostly in writing, but also in other media) as well as offer explanations and examples of various constraints”. From there I wrestled my way out and into constrained.org, “a community site for short stories that adhere to various literary constraint”, where I was trapped for a while, eventually escaping to endless limitations.

A gentle reminder — abstracts for presenting lectures, roundtables, panels and tutorials at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco instead of San Jose this time around, are due July 23, a week from Friday.

Here’s a writeup of the 2004 conference, from just a few months ago.

Steve Ince, a 2004 Game Developers Choice Award nominee for Excellence in Writing, shares his thoughts on writing for games in a GIGnews article, “My Fingers are Blistered and Bleeding“.

Always interested in what might be helpful for independent game developers (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9), I thought I’d pass along the following from Slashdot Games: the IGDA has started a special interest group for indie developers — those “interested in pursuing game development and distribution outside the standard channels as presented by the mainstream industry today.” So far, there’s a mailing list, a link to a FAQ about indie developers, a great page of links to engines, tools, etc., and the beginnings of a collection of helpful articles. I’ll add it to our list of resources links.

An initial summary of the goings-on at the fifth Phrontisterion conference on Interactive Storytelling is now online, written by its organizer. Chris reports that the attendees will soon write up their impressions as well, to be compiled into a new group blog.

A highlight of the conference was the discussion of several new books, notably Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, in which Chris offers many pages of wisdom gained from years of experience working towards building a grand vision of what interactive stories could be. Chris considers this the most important book he’s ever written; my initial quick-read of the manuscript can testify to this. More on this excellent new resource in a future post.

Glancing at the home page of the NYTimes, I spied a new article about election-year political videogames — featuring Ian Bogost and his till-now-under-wraps, about-to-be-released game, Opinions! The article reports that Ian, who as GTxA readers know was co-developer of the Howard Dean campaign game, was hired two months ago by the Democratic National Convention to create a game “for the Democratic convention committee. … In Opinions, the player performs an action in each of six minigames simultaneously, seeking to achieve a balance among them. Actions in the minigames, each corresponding to a domestic or international policy topic, affect the ease of playing in the other minigames.” Sounds cool!

“Ready or not games are in the gallery.” For a week starting today on the empyre listserv is ‘game to game’, a discussion of game art. Panelists include games and media theorist Melanie Swalwell; Rebecca Cannon, curator of selectparks.net; artists Anita Johnston and Troy Innocent; and moderated by Helen Stuckey.

The second DiGRA conference will be held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in one year’s time, from June 17 to 20, 2005. The conference is titled “Changing Views: Worlds in Play”. An excerpt from the press release:

The goal of this conference is to facilitate a richer and more comprehensive grasp of the present and future capabilities and applications of digital games by inviting and supporting work which demonstrates the values, means and ends of ‘changing views’ in and on digital games and games research. This work necessarily embraces interdisciplinarity and internationalism, and is, in sum, work which bridges between and across worlds in play.

A NYTimes article appears today about “small, simple, fast and fun” games, many of them from independent developers. The games described include Grow, recently mentioned on GTxA, and IGF prize winner Oasis. Plus, a link to Little Fluffy, which I’ve added to our resources links list. Check out their “Top 20” page.

I’ve added two relatively new blogs to our blogroll: particle stream, “a space for outlandish thoughts about fiction and games”, by Julian Kücklich of Germany, and particleblog by Tadhg Kelly of the UK (also a Ludonaut), who has coined the term insyn, “the idea that the things that you play with on your playstation or xbox can actually have substance and not be just about cheap thrills”.

Recently Tadhg had continued to expand on his conception of interactive reflective art, and Julian is currently reading and critiquing First Person. Both sites are worth your regular attention.

The next few months in NYC offer several events that GTxA readers might find worth the trip. Now that I live within driving distance I’m hoping to make it to some or all of these.

For Ars Electronica’s 25th anniversary, exhibited from May 21 through July 18 will be Digital Avant-Garde, featuring “outstanding media art projects from the past twenty-five years as well as inspiring new developments from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and artist-in-residence program”, plus additional symposia, artist talks, screenings, and workshops.

July June 15 papers are due for the workshop Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, previously posted about here. It will be held October 15 at Columbia University.

July 21-23 is the huge yearly international Autonomous Agents conference. This year it happens to be in NYC, also at Columbia. Looking through the list of hundreds of papers and posters, I’ve culled out ones with a believable agent / interactive story bent:

Continuing the theme of AI systems that use language: here’s a new paper by Rob Zubek at Northwestern, who has been thinking hard about how to make robust, richly interactive conversational characters. His PhD research is focused on building an architecture for structuring conversations as vast collections of reactions to player input, arranged in hierarchies, that compete to understand and respond to the player. Multiple possible threads of conversation all are listening simultaneously to what the player says at any time, and they each update their local probabilities of where they believe they are in the conversation. Assuming enough content is authored, this allows the conversation to have a variety of believable responses at any time, at varying levels of coherence. Thus the system can fail gracefully and perhaps move the conversation forward when the system has trouble understanding the player, or doesn’t have a good response.

I’ve been thinking about chatterbots, as well as the recent discussion about poetry generation using statistical methods. I’ve thought about what these systems do, and what they don’t do.

I recently played with and read up on ALICE, a state-of-the-art text-based chatterbot. Primarily authored by Richard Wallace, ALICE has twice won an annual Turing test-like competition called the Loebner Prize. To create ALICE, Wallace developed AIML, a publicly-available language for implementing text-based chatterbots.

Gnoetry has been discussed several times here on GTxA, most recently here. From its website, “Gnoetry synthesizes language randomly based on its analysis of existing texts. Any machine-readable text or texts, in any language, can serve as the basis of the Gnoetic process. Gnoetry generates sentences that mimic the local statistical properties of the source texts. This language is filtered subject to additional constraints (syllable counts, rhyming, etc.) to produce a poem.”

In my experience with them, ALICE and Gnoetry are entertaining at times, sometimes even surprising. They clearly have some intelligence.

But something feels unduly missing about these artificial minds. I decided to try to understand, why do I have trouble caring about what they have to say? What precisely would they need to do, beyond or instead of what they currently do, to make me care? (Is it just me? :-)

Seventeen experimental games from this year’s Indie Game Jam are now available for free download! Now you can see what all the fuss was about.

Constraints: they run on the PC, I’m guessing requiring a decent videocard, and unfortunately (but sensibly) they require a Playstation controller. And therefore also require an adapter to hook the PS controller to your PC’s USB port. I’m going to buy the adapter for $13 here; if you need a Playstation controller too, on the same site you can get a good one for $20. (Here’s a Google search for more options.)

We recently found out Facade will be exhibiting at ISEA2004, as part of the 2-day Baltic Sea Cruise art party. It’s August 15-17, on a ferry leaving from Helsinki, stopping in Stockholm and then continuing on to Tallinn, Estonia. By then Facade should be done, or in the final throes of beta testing, so we hope it will be a good celebration of the project finally wrapping up. Hope to see you there.

ISEA hasn’t yet published the listing of the all the projects in the exhibition, but they say they will soon.

June is shaping up to be a great month for discussing interactive story with like-minded folks. Chris Crawford still has room available at his intimate Phrontisterion conference (now in its 5th year), June 26-27 just outside gorgeous Jacksonville, Oregon. You can even camp on his property, I believe. Expected attendees this year include Gordon Walton, Justin Hall and Celia Pearce. Email Chris for more info.

Marek Bronstring, editor-in-chief of Adventure Gamers, writes about his experience playing Facade at the Independent Games Festival last month. (thanks to Walter for the link)

By the way, we added a few sample screenshots of Facade on interactivestory.net — scroll down past the project description to see them.