Grand Text Auto

Every year the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) holds a big yearly conference, this year in San Jose from July 25-29. One of the workshops this time around is “Challenges in Game AI“. Submissions are due March 12 for short papers in areas including AI methodologies, AI and game design, or case studies, including topics such as architectures, action planning, decision-making, multiple agent coordination, dynamic gameplay generation, learning, natural language interaction, characters, emotion, interface standards, and tools.

AAAI also holds symposia in the spring and sometimes in the fall; this spring, March 22-24 at Stanford, includes “Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text“.

This just in — Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca have just released a new political game commissioned by the Howard Dean for America presidential campaign!

In “The Howard Dean for Iowa Game“, you try your best to help Dean win the Iowa Caucus. You run around trying to get as many people as possible to notice your “Howard Dean” sign, and to knock as many doors as you can. I especially enjoyed trying to hand out as many leaflets as I could to harried passers-by. Made me feel for the people who try to do this out in the cold in real life.

Today has been some kind of day for new articles…

The future of adventure games is the topic of a series of smart essays by Marek Bronstring of Adventure Gamers (now added to our resources links list). Looks like a really interesting and informative read.

And Gamespot interviews Will Wright about The Sims 2. Advances from The Sims 1 include giving the player control over the camera, and greatly increasing the fidelity of the graphics, animation and probably behavior. I must say the screenshots look *amazing*. It looks scarily good to me. (Start here and keep clicking “previous”) For some perspective on gamers’ dissatisfaction with The Sims 1, read the comments on Slashdot Games.

Further reinforcing the point about the need for new kinds of content in interactive entertainment is a new Salon.com article by gamegirladvance‘s Jane Pinckard, “Video gaming and its discontents“. (Click on “free day pass” to read the article for free.)

… I just want what every gamer wants — smarter games. More meaningful games. Games that relate to other people. That relate to other things. Games that push me off the screen and off the couch. …

A NYTimes magazine cover story about the interactive entertainment industry, profiling the CEO of Atari, ends with the author’s account of reluctantly picking up the gamepad and giving Max Payne a try.

The whole scenario strikes me (especially after he dies a few more times) as silly and ponderous and overly bloodthirsty, and yet there’s something there — a curious tension between control and no-control — that seems worth feeling solely on the grounds that, over a lifetime of novels and plays and movies and songs and paintings, I’ve never felt it before. The form is miles ahead of the content, and as long as the gold rush is on, it’ll probably stay that way. But, as in the first days of television or radio or the movies, the form is the whole thrill, and it’s more than thrill enough.

Word Circuits (now added to our resource links list) has published a collection of seven short papers that “eschew general musings on the nature of electronic literature and instead dive right into a detailed close reading, filled with examples and quotations, perhaps even screen shots, of the text at hand.” The readings are polished versions of student papers from Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Digital Studies graduate course at the University of Maryland. The works dissected include ones by mez, geniwate, Diane Greco and GTxA’s own Scott Rettberg (who has his own blog by the way, with extra goodies he doesn’t post on this group blog).

I’ve always thought that good conversational virtual characters would require the skills of a politician, to respond to the player’s “off-topic” or “uncooperative” dialog by cleverly and believably turning the conversation back to topics that the virtual character knows or wants to talk about. We certainly do a lot of this in Facade, as needed.

Loebner contest (“The First Turing Test”) winners Kevin Copple and Robby Garner have teamed up with some Chinese researchers to create “AI Bush“:

Play the strategy game “Reelect Bush?” and see if GWB gets reelected, or not. You are a close advisor, whispering into George’s ear. He needs your help making decisions and answering pesky trivia questions that affect his chances of reelection, not to mention the effects various decisions can have on his conscience. GWB’s expressions, voice clips, and tracking polls tell you how things are going.

Yeah, darn those pesky trivia questions about weapons of mass destruction, global warming, etc.

The 20 finalists for the 2004 Independent Games Festival, held as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Jose in March, have just been announced. 111 entries were submitted, and a committee of judges from the game industry picked 10 in the “Open” (i.e., cd-rom-based) category and 10 in the “Web/Downloadable” category to compete. GDC attendees get to play the games on the expo floor at the conference.

We’re thrilled to see that our interactive drama project, Facade, has made the cut!

Surfing around, I came across freshmeat, which “maintains the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software… Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat database, and links to new applications are added daily… offers a variety of original content on technical, political, and social aspects of software and programming.” Among many other things, the database includes almost 100 pieces of independent, free, open-source “artistic” software ranging from textual to graphical to aural in nature, many added within the last year, such as:

The second Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment conference (TIDSE) will be held June 24-26 in Darmstadt, Germany, which is near Frankfurt, about a 5 hour train ride from Paris. Papers are due January 30 (ugh, that’s soon…)

I recommend this gathering, it’s a mixture of technical papers / system building and design-oriented approaches. We attended this last year, presenting Facade, and got good feedback and warm enthusiasm. Like the DiGRA LevelUp conference, the attendance was about mostly European, about a quarter North American. There’s a lot of interactive narrative activity going on in Europe, so it’s a great way to meet all those folks and hear about their work. And a big highlight was Chris Crawford’s rousing keynote presentation.

Last Saturday, from the bedroom window of our third story apartment, as we were admiring the results of the previous night’s snowstorm, the doorbell rang. Our new couch was due to be delivered that morning, but we thought, surely they would cancel. It seems we underestimated Boston furniture delivery truck drivers; minutes later I was relaxing in the living room on the new sofa with the December 1 issue of The New Yorker. After a brief nap to recover from my interrupted sleep earlier that morning — I always wake up before sunrise when I have lots of new events to process — I came across two articles, different but connected, that made me sit up and think.

Recently I made some free time to fully read Chaim Gingold’s Masters thesis on game design and interactive narrative, which we briefly posted about last May. I’m going to offer some informal feedback and comments in this post. Frankly I found this thesis as substantial and useful as most PhD dissertations in the field. It could also serve as a game design handbook! Chaim’s really trying to present theory and make it accessible and useable to practitioners, which I found impressive. (This should have been turned into a paper presentation at LevelUp, not just a poster…)

The title, “Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds,” is a bit misleading; at first I expected the thesis to focus exclusively on microworlds, and in a sense it does, but in fact it goes pretty broad with several universal design principles for enjoyable interactive experiences, about more than just “games”.

There’s a good discussion over at gamegirladvance about that jaded feeling that can set in with art/entertainment when you become a creator of it.

Update: More “behind the scenes” links just discovered, minus the jaded part.

A NYTimes article about game modding, amateur video game making, and the recent Unreal University symposium held at NC State. (I know Michael sent a few of his students there.)

Here’s a new, handy site, Virtual Worlds Review. (via Terra Nova)

I liked the Oz Project so much, I joined the company. Tomorrow’s my first day at Zoesis, a startup company in the Boston area developing AI-based interactive character and interactive drama technology. (This helps explain my recent move to Boston, in case you were wondering.)

We’d mentioned this before, but now there’s more details: the press release for the game-art show “Bang the Machine” at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, mid-January through early April.

Ray Kurzweil has been awarded a patent for his AI-based cybernetic poetry software. (via NYTimes)

Kurzweil, a successful developer of AI-based technologies and author of several books including The Age of Spiritual Machines, has an elaborate website promoting AI — that is, “accelerating intelligence.” (I just discovered his AI-oriented newsfeed; I’ll add it to our resource list…)

As you can see on his cyberart website — “we create software that creates art” — Kurzweil has collaborated with veteran AI-based artist Harold Cohen, with whom we had a discussion on this blog last June.

Found by way of the KurzweilAI.net newsfeed mentioned above, Wired has a new article about Rosalind Picard’s Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab, describing a virtual, conversational exercise coach character developed by Tim Bickmore (who had in years back helped develop the virtual real estate agent Rea in Justine Cassell’s Gesture and Narrative Language group). Michael and I have met Tim regularly at various AAAI symposia, he’s a good guy.

A lot of the research discussed in the article has overlap and potential for application in interactive art and entertainment. Towards the end of the article the hype dissipates a bit and more cautious, critical voices are heard — Shneiderman, Norman.

Nicolas Szilas contributed this summary of the recent Virtual Storytelling conference. Thanks, Nicolas!

Back from Toulouse

ICVS was in Toulouse this year, in the southwest of France. Once again (after TIDSE’03), this European conference managed to gather researchers on virtual storytelling from both Europe and US. Three other continents were even represented, by researchers from Japan, South Africa and Australia.

The term “virtual” in the name of the conference reveals an orientation of the conference towards Virtual Reality, hence some papers which to my point of view (and others’!) were not totally on the topic of interactive story… I will focus here on papers related to narrative, obviously.

Find them here. Good stuff. (via misc is the largest category)

Randy Littlejohn recently wrote a Gamasutra article (free registration required) in which he’s “agitating for the creation of a new kind of interactive experience that is comfortable and compelling for the masses,” namely interactive drama. This post is a reaction to the article, in the process sounding the same horn you’ve heard from me in previous posts, but with a few new comments inspired by the article. As usual I’ll use Façade in most of my talking points even though very few people have gotten the chance to play it, as it’s in its final months of development; again we apologize for that.

These reactions will make the most sense if you’ve already read the article — if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to do so!

More multiplayer madness coming at you… A new article about social gaming by Shannon Appelcline on Skotos.net. Lots (er, tons) of articles to be found there.

I’ve yet to play any Skotos games/stories (see the FAQ’s for what it is). Their flagship games, “multiplayer prose roleplaying games,” sound interesting. How much does this community overlap with the text-adventure IF community?

Particularly impressive-sounding are the authoring tools for non-programmers. “A cornerstone of the Skotos community is the ability to create your own games. Our goal is to make it easy and intuitive for game designers and story tellers to share the ideas that live in their heads.” Can anyone share for us their experience creating and playing these games / stories?

Gamespot gives “Real Life” a whopping 9.6 rating out of 10, and an Editor’s Choice Award!
;-) (via the PowerPill)

Today in Toulouse is day one of the two-day 2nd Int’l Conference on Virtual Storytelling (the 1st one having been held in Avignon, so it appears to be a French affair ;-) Michael and I would love to be there of course, but we’ve each travelled to Europe twice this year for conferences and have to draw the line somewhere… We did help review papers though. Nicolas Szilas, a regular commenter here on GTxA and presenter at ICVS, will hopefully be writing up a conference summary for us.

The above post on ICVS gives me the excuse to highlight three new academic researchers / projects that seem very interesting: procedural literacy, stealth learning, and computational (proto)ethics…