Grand Text Auto

About a year ago, Janet Murray and grad student Chaim Gingold initiated a “game morphology” project at Georgia Tech. They asked several game designers and researchers, What ten games have been most important to you as a designer/reseracher, and/or most important to the development of electronic gaming in general?

Some initial results of the project are now tabulated and made public on their website. It’s pretty interesting to see how each designer/researcher’s influences are similar and different to one another.

There.com has announced a special limited-time offer, where if you become a beta-tester in the very near future, for $30 you can become a lifetime member with no monthly fees.

I recently downloaded the installer for There, but it required me to upgrade my video drivers, which I was reluctant to do on my machine, on which I’m currently developing Facade. So I still haven’t tried There yet (or Second Life for that matter). But I will soon find some other machine to install There, and sign up for this $30 lifetime thing.

… cries the interviewer of Chris Crawford in a new joystick101.org article, in which Chris discusses his long-time-in-development Erasmatron interactive storytelling technology. (via Torill) Also, here’s another recent interview with Chris on Gamasutra.

When I last talked to Chris at TIDSE, he said he hopes to use the Erasmatron in the near future as the foundation for a new version of his classic Balance of Power. That would be great. I truly hope Chris gets a chance to reap the rewards of all the hard work he’s put into his system.

Reading Nick’s summary of the history of AI and narrative he’s writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, it stands out how few notable research milestones in AI and narrative have occurred over the last *40* years, since ELIZA first appeared…! We need to pick up the pace here, folks!

Is it because it’s difficult to get funding for this kind of research? Surely it can’t be for lack of interest on the part of researchers. Maybe narrative intelligence research has never quite recovered from the AI winter of the 1980’s? Or, probably more likely, “narrative” is such an huge, umbrella-like topic that actually all sorts of already-underway AI research projects, e.g., Cyc, the Shruti project (mentioned by William in an earlier comment), etc., are effectively laying the needed groundwork for more explicit narrative intelligence research in the future?

Ever wondered what the underlying plot structure of a “choose your own adventure” book actually looks like? I recently bought Night of a Thousand Boyfriends, a kind of dating adventure book, by Miranda Clarke. It had been a long time since I’d read a “choose-your-own”-type book, and was now curious to better understand the exact nature of its plot branching — would branches multiply systematically, leading to dozens of distinct paths and endings, or would the branches tend to fold back on themselves? Would there be any of clever re-use of pages in different contexts?

Check out these notes from a speech given by Matteo Bittanti last week at Europe’s Game Developers Conference, suggesting the future of game studies and game art “looks extremely promising”, but with a warning that they must avoid being perceived as “mental masturbation” by the game community at large. I agree. (via Ludology.org)

They’re almost 5 years old at this point, but a collection of interviews with digital storytelling practitioners, some touching upon issues of interactivity and agency, continue to satisfy. Brought to you by the Digital Diner in Berkeley. Brenda Laurel talks about being a bit disillusioned with AI, and the practical need for using a “low tech” approach in her Purple Moon projects. Mark Bernstein offers useful examples of when and why hypertext fiction “works”. Justin Hall on blogging, back when it was called “web diaries”. Abbe Don reflects on cracking (or not) the interactive narrative problem. Alex Mayhew on our “negative obsession” with non-linear paths. Jon Sanborn suggests people want interactive worlds, not stories. Mark Petrakis envisions conversational computer characters.

I came across an amusing new play called Games for Married Couples, by D. Bruno Starrs, published in last February’s issue of Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts. It was a very fun read for me, both for its witty dialog and for its structure, which bears a lot of resemblance to our interactive drama project, Facade. Both plays are short one-acts, have just three characters — a married couple and a friend, all action takes place in a single room, and shows variation when the scene is repeated over and over. It even has a reference to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a key inspiration for Facade.

sagasnet, a network of European professionals interested in creating interactive narrative content, is holding their yearly seminar next week in Leipzig, Germany. Between TIDSE, ICVS, sagasnet and all the other shindigs going on, Europe seems like a very busy place these days for interactive narrative. (More than the US, that’s for sure.)

Here’s a new interview with Mark Laidlaw, a head writer and designer at Valve of Half-Life (1999) and the much-anticipated Half-Life 2. These are among the best commercial projects out there that integrate game and story.

I just came across a nice article by David Kennerly, an MMOG producer and designer, called “Fun is Fine: Toward a Philosophy of Game Design”. It was published in June on Joystick101.org.

I think his suggestions are applicable to IF, interactive drama, etc., not just game-games.

Scott Rettberg, e-lit practitioner and theorist and co-founder of the ELO, now has his PhD dissertation online, “Destination Unknown: Experiments in The Network Novel.” It’s on my reading list; I’ve only had a chance to skim through it so far. It begins with a nice introduction to electronic literature and its history over the last two decades. The chapters delve into the nature of links and networks in the context of literature, e-books, and the pleasures, challenges and frustrations of reading and writing hypertext fiction. He does an interesting analysis of how people read The Unknown, a hypertext novel he co-wrote, based on the log files that record when and how often each page in the hypertext was accessed. He concludes with a chapter about possible future directions for e-lit, including a discussion of Facade.

The program for the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling is now online. It will be held in Toulouse, France from November 20-21.

Unfortunately we had to decide to not submit Facade for presentation at ICVS this time around, because we had just traveled to Europe only last March to present Facade at TIDSE in Darmstadt, Germany (why are there two conferences in Europe about interactive story within a few hundred miles of each other, within the same year? TIDSE and ICVS should merge, don’t you think?) Also, we hope to demo Facade at the LevelUp gamefair in Utrecht, Netherlands only a few weeks beforehand, so it just makes it logistically insane to also attend ICVS. Oh well.

Eric Dybsand, a long-time contributor to the AI scene at the Game Developers Conference, just published an informative series of Gamasutra articles about new AI middleware (i.e., code libraries and toolsets) for games. It seems that in the last year or two, several companies have released libraries/toolsets that put together common AI algorithms and techniques into a single package, intended to be easily integrated into a game. The articles take a detailed look at AI.implant, DirectIA, Renderware AI, and SimBionic. A conclusion article summarizes it all. (By the way, whatever happened to Motion Factory?)

Eric concludes with the following:

The first issue of GameGirlAdvance‘s new zine is out, called Play. Looks like fun!

A bit of exciting project news… We’ve just cast two writer / director / performers to be the voices for Grace and Trip, the two computer characters in our interactive drama Facade. We have been fortunate to find two talented members of the Chicago-based experimental / interactive theater group, The Neo-Futurists, Chloe Johnston and Andy Bayiates.

For the past few years Chloe and Andy have been members of the Neo-Futurists’ long-running signature show, Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. If you’re ever in Chicago, be sure to see it, it’s an ever-changing, inventive, searingly honest and, of course, funny, sixty minutes of experimental theater. Chloe and Andy have also written, produced and performed other plays with the Neo-Futurists.

Surfing around I came across a new book to be published this Fall, called “Tomorrow’s Stories: How Responsive Narratives Will Change Storytelling”. The author is Andrew Glassner, perhaps best known as the creator and editor of the Graphics Gems book series on computer graphics. According to his bio, he’s also written a novel, directed a short animated film, and designed some interactive fiction / game prototypes. I heard Glassner opine on the “Future of Fiction” panel Noah co-organized at SIGGRAPH 2000, and remember him as thoughtful and articulate.

His forthcoming book “addresses the fundamentals of how and why successful games and stories work. It is the first book to give a reader a practical understanding of both the structure of story and the structure of participatory gaming. This knowledge helps the reader see why and how today’s models of interactive fiction succeed and fail, and provides a foundation for developing new storytelling art forms that harmoniously integrate interaction and narrative.”

He sees limitations in branching narrative / hypertext approaches. “These ideas, and their cousins, have been tried time and again in the marketplace but have yet to achieve mainstream success. There are some very good, specific reasons for this lack of success, and those reasons can be found by going back to the basics of what stories and games are, and how they work.”

Lately I’ve been wondering how authors of non-linear interactive experiences develop their designs. Specifically, before coding, what are the ways people describe, represent, write down, their designs? Creating a written description of a system gets particularly tricky when the system’s behavior is more complex than what a state machine or graph can represent.

Second Life, “a rapidly growing and constantly changing 3D online society, shaped entirely by its residents”, officially started on Monday. Read the press release here. Free 5 day memberships are available; beyond that, it’s $15 / month.

I’ve yet to experience Second Life, but from what I’ve read, I’m pretty excited by this online world. For my taste, I’m much more interested in “real life” style online worlds, such as Second Life or There.com, versus fantasy online worlds such as Everquest. (Although, the screenshots of Second Life and There do seem a bit like “J.Crew” world to me. And, I have to admit, Star Wars Galaxies, which launches tomorrow, has some strong appeal. Hard to beat that brand I guess.)

The program for the 1st international digital games research conference, LEVEL UP, this November in the Netherlands, is now online. It’s quite a program.

As we have been discussing artist programmers and meaning machines on grandtextauto, I sent an email to Harold Cohen, creator of AARON, asking if he’d like to share his thoughts on the topic. To my delight, he wrote back with the following comments.

I wrote my first program early in 1969, at which point, I’m sure you must realize, the option of using an existing package as opposed to writing your own program didn’t exist — there weren’t any packages. If there had been I suspect I’d never have thought computing had anything to offer me.

That reflection leads me to one rather obvious comment; I don’t see anyone saying why they got involved in computing, what they wanted from it. And in the absence of any driving personal need, questions about whether one needs to program or not seem very arbitrary.

The Digital Storytelling Festival is underway in Arizona, blogged here and on Fray. Brenda Laurel presented a project called Backstory she and others are doing at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where she is chair of the media design program. Mark Bernstein calls Backstory “a really ambitious effort … to harness the storytelling power of teens for social change.”

More reading on the topic of artist programmers in an essay, Are the days of the lone programmer numbered?

Some new books: The nature of computer games: play as semiosis, by David Meyers. Ernest Adams, a longtime contributor to Gamasutra, has teamed up with Andrew Rollings to publish a book on game design.

We’ve had an array of wonderful comments in the two previous posts on artist programmers. (I just added a lengthy comment with a bunch of new links.)

Another facet of this debate: What happens when artists and programmers collaborate? The issues are more than just the potential cultural divide of freaks vs. geeks, but also the (perhaps unpleasant) issue of artistic credit. I’ve heard more than one story of a team of people working on a new media art piece “led” by a “primary” artist, who effectively takes all of the credit for the piece, when those who did the actual programming deserve at least as much credit for the success of the work. Sound familiar?

In the comment thread of Narrative as Virtual Reality, Lisa asks, “Why would an author *want* to yield the authorial control of a piece to some sort of AI engine?”

That’s a really good and interesting question. To me the issue of who has control (or, similarly, agency) of an interactive artwork is primary. There seem to be at least 3 parties who could be in (or share) control of an interactive artwork: the original author, the user, and the work itself (e.g., the AI).

An issue we want to address on grandtextauto, as we discuss the practice of making computer-based art, literature, poetry, drama, etc., is the question of artists as, or needing to be, programmers. How can artists to learn to be programmers? Why aren’t more artists programmers? Can tools simplify or take the place of programming? What kind of programming languages are amenable to artists? At what point do artists need to be programmers? Isn’t it enough for artists just to collaborate with programmers? Are programmers artists?

This topic is too big to address in just a post or two – so we’ll be addressing it in blog posts over time. Please join in with comments, ideas, and opinions.