November 26, 2007

Reminder: ELO 2008 Conference Submissions Due Friday

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 10:27 am

Submissions for the Visionary Landscapes ELO conference, at WSU near Portland, Oregon, are due Friday. You can submit presentations and/or creative work.

November 14, 2007

Intelligent Narrative Technologies 2007

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 12:38 pm

Last weekend, the AAAI Fall symposia were held in Arlington, just outside Washington, DC. Nick, Michael and I were there for the Intelligent Narrative Technologies symposium, among 60 people in attendance from the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia. Like the 1999 symposium on Narrative Intelligence, this was a gathering of both accomplished researchers and new faces to the field. (My first foray into academia was at one of these meetings, exactly 10 years ago, at a Socially Intelligent Agents AAAI symposium at MIT, where I co-presented Petz and first met Michael and several other Oz Project members.) Unlike the 1999 NI symposium, this time around it was almost completely academic computer scientists, with almost no industry folk in attendance and few who would identify themselves primarily as artists or writers.

An important general point brought out during the symposium was the need for a standard platform for interactive character and drama research, which if adopted by multiple groups, could greatly increase sharing of research results. I couldn’t agree more; we started talking about how to make that happen.

For me, the most exciting talks were on the final day, focusing on story generation and representation. But I’ll run through the program chronologically, quickly summarizing most of the talks, and going into detail on a few. I’ll link to those pdf’s that are currently available online.

November 6, 2007

Playing it Safe

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 10:19 am

This week’s The Escapist is about stories in games, including articles about the literary significance of the Half Life series, roleplaying in online Myst worlds, and advanced facial animation in David Cage’s new game.

And most interesting to me, an article by Mark Yohalem suggesting that game developers should back off on making character-driven games with interactive dialog, and instead make physical action-oriented games that reveal some sort of backstory as you play. For example, how the original Myst did it.

Why? Because making good interactive characters is somewhere between really hard to impossible. Yohalem says developers have a “misguided notion that it’s worth sacrificing a player-driven game to achieve a character-driven story”.

November 2, 2007

Zabaware Wins 2007 Loebner Competition

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 12:07 pm

Robert Medeksza of Zabaware, pictured left in the Zabaware t-shirt, creator of the Ultra Hal chatterbot assistant, has won the 2007 Loebner Prize Competition, the annual Turing Test competition now in its 17th year. Past multi-year winner Rollo Carpenter is pictured in orange.

The chat logs of this year’s top three placers can be downloaded on the competition’s information page. This year, Loebner has implemented an application that plays back the chat sessions as they happened in real-time, including logs of the human judges versus both the bots and the human confederates. Very cool.

Trip to the Stars

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 12:03 pm

In a small step towards ractors, Andy Bayiates, writer and performer known for his work with the Neo-Futurists, perhaps best known among GTxA readers as the voice actor for Trip of Façade, is now at your service, over the Internet, as your own personal astrologer. First person astrology indeed!

October 18, 2007

More on GTxA the Show

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 1:49 pm

I thought the opening of the Grand Text Auto group show at the Beall Art+Tech gallery went very well, especially when you consider how elaborate the three large installations were. All of the artworks worked, installations and otherwise! And they were physically arranged to fit nicely in a somewhat small space, without feeling overly cramped. Thanks again to all those who put so much time into organizing and setup. (I wasn’t one of them. ;-)

As I hoped would happen, I found it really interesting to experience our various literary and ludic works together in one place.

GTxA Symposium: Future Directions

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 1:45 pm

Each of us gave a “future directions” presentation at the GTxA symposium, held the day after the group show opened. Here is the text of mine, pre-written as a blog post, in the spirit of the show being borne from the blog.

Future directions… well, this show feels like some kind of funky vision of the future. Giant mutated joysticks… VR cave texts… a novel physically pasted around the world… a first real taste of the Holodeck… I’ve never seen such a cross-section of games/art/literature in one space. Many thanks to the Beall Center for hosting the show, and for Noah for organizing and curating it. It’s truly exciting, and I’m honored to be part of it.

October 17, 2007

SuperEgo Games

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 10:06 am

There’s a new character-driven episodic-content company on the block… SuperEgo Games, based in NYC, has announced Rat Race, “an action-comedy title set in a dysfunctional office, tasking players with just getting through the day amid a cast of difficult characters”. They’re using writing and voice talent from the TV industry in NYC, going for a sitcom-flavored game.

Our goal is to give you the feeling of ‘playing’ inside an episode of your favorite TV show. Sometimes we describe Rat Race as an interactive sitcom, but that doesn’t do it justice. There’s more to the experience than funny dialogue. Along the way you’ll sneak, sprint, solve puzzles, eavesdrop, steal, and even ‘neutralize’ that lab monkey.

October 4, 2007

Grand Opening

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 11:57 pm

September 29, 2007

Updates on the Pursuit of Interactive Story

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 3:03 am

It’s amazing how often I learn about a new group or individual with their own particular approach to building interactive stories. Here’s a couple dozen (!) descriptions and/or updates on the efforts that have caught or re-caught my eye recently.

September 28, 2007

Games, a Backward-Looking Medium

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 8:09 pm

If you’ve read this blog over the years, then you’ve heard it all before, but perhaps not quite so succinctly, eloquently, and certainly not as an op-ed piece in the New York Times! But here it is, by journalist Daniel Radosh.

If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways. … Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual life.

September 22, 2007

The Ass Wants to Be Free

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 1:03 pm

Sandbox games populated by NPCs invite players to screw around. One of our design goals when developing Façade was believability; we put significant effort into supporting and rewarding what we called “crazy guy” behavior from the player.

A few players over at Something Awful desire that kind of gameplay in mainstream games — charmingly describing it as “Asshole Physics”. A manifesto on the topic was recently updated from the original from 2003.

A link to Façade in the article created a big spike in downloads this week… Grace and Trip are surely being thoroughly abused as you read this.

September 13, 2007

GameWorld Expansion Pack

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 11:58 pm

Starting next week the GameWorld exhibition , ongoing at Laboral in Gijon, Spain (1 2), is expanding the show with Playware, adding more experimental commercial games, individual-produced games and installations. (via Rhizome News)

Check out this excellent YouTube video documenting a few of the works in the initial launch of GameWorld in April, including several of the installation pieces. The video also shows off the architecture of the museum space itself, designed for the show by Leeser Architecture.

September 11, 2007

Shadow Monsters and Revealing Light

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 1:48 pm

I’m not sure how we missed this at GDC last March… a brilliant interactive installation by Philip Worthington called Shadow Monsters. Taking a page from the works of Camille Utterback, Zack Simpson and the 2003 Indie Game Jam, Worthington’s Shadow Monsters has players collaborating with the system to create real-time animated, vocalizing monsters. Wow! Watch the video at Kotaku.


And if you’re into playing with shadows and light at home, Adam Frank has a new product for you, Reveal. (Adam made the installation Shadow with Zack Simpson, as well as Petz and Babyz with me.) Makes a great gift!

September 5, 2007

The Sequence of Intimate Exchanges

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 3:14 am

Or, Choose Your Own Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Choice #1, re-blogged here from Save the Robot: a play called Intimate Exchanges recently staged in NYC, as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway festival.

‘A 750-page epic by Alan Ayckbourn that asks 2 actors to play 10 characters in 8 interconnected plays.’ The two actors’ decisions at the beginning lead to different middles and ends. If the actress lights a cigarette in the first scene, it sets them down one path; if not, they go down another. Theatergoers have gone multiple times to catch the different permutations.

Also read about it in the NYTimes. Talk about let’s do it again, groundhog!

Choice #2

Save the Robot

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 2:44 am

Chris Dahlen is a profilic writer of many great reads on games, music, tech and beyond, for such outlets as The Onion A.V. Club, Pitchfork, Paste, The Escapist… at one point The Boston Phoenix (for which he reviewed Façade)… He has interviewed all kinds of folks including Paul McCartney, Daryl Hall, David Sylvian, Chris Ware, Ron Moore, Richard Garriott, the Penny Arcade guys… He’s also a software project manager and Java developer. If you like Clive Thompson, you’ll like Chris too.

August 29, 2007

Gimme Gamecock

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 8:49 pm

This kind of stuff is my music to my ears.

Also read about Gamecock Media in the NYTimes from last February, when they first launched, and this article in Variety last month.

May mega-angels and their minions save the game industry…

August 28, 2007

Billy vs. Steve

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 11:55 pm


I just saw this tonight, with my local gang of indie developers — fabulous. A must see!

The critics are unanimous as well: 98% on rotten tomatoes.

August 27, 2007

Big Day for Gonzo

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 11:41 pm

No, not thatthis!

Congrats Dr. Frasca!

High Art Play

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 7:06 pm

Not long ago the question you loved to hate was, are games stories? Lately your favorite quandry getting attention is, are games art? Poor games.

While for me the concern (if there ever was one) was sufficiently addressed recently by designer Clint Hocking, for mainstream games within popular culture, at a minimum — I’m interested to read the overviews, interviews and personal views, situated more in the realm of high art, from the new volume Videogames and Art, edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell.

August 24, 2007

Continuing Coverage

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 1:53 am

It’s been over two years since Façade‘s release, and bits of coverage continue to appear in a variety of formats. In the unlikely event you’re not sick to death of it, please read on.

August 23, 2007

Ian Horswill Blogging!

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 4:39 pm

Ian Horswill is a researcher and professor at Northwestern University well-known for, among other things, his excellent AI, robotics and vision work, leading a computer science meets arts-and-entertainment lab whose members included Robin Hunicke (now MySims design lead) and Rob Zubek (of Breakup Conversation fame), and administrator of a progressive Animate Arts curriculum at Northwestern.

Ian is now working on some AI-based interactive characters with procedural animation, and blogging about it.

This is very exciting. I’ve known Ian for over 10 years, he’s a regular at the AAAI meetings and GDC, a long-time supporter of our crazy ideas, an encouragement for me as an industry guy to wade into academic waters, a member of Michael’s thesis committee, the list goes on.

August 14, 2007

Virtual Friends, Lovers, and Prime Designers

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 2:10 am

Here are three excellent new articles, two in the Wall Street Journal and one from the New York Times.

Stuck Holding the Electronic Leash“. To young kids, virtual pets continue to be a successful game genre; in fact some companies are cashing in like never before. Impressive!

Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?

Nearly 40% of men and 53% of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers … More than a quarter of gamers said the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world …

August 3, 2007

This Truthiness Just In!!

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 11:21 pm

Ian Bogoston The Colbert Report…? this Tuesday? Is it truthy???!!!

[picks jaw off floor]

what’s cable TV coming to??!?!

Update: Video of Ian on the Colbert Report.

August 2, 2007

New and Beautiful Games with Pre-Digital Looks

from Grand Text Auto
by @ 7:26 pm

There are two new games coming out that look extraordinarily beautiful to me, based on their screenshots and video footage. Interestingly, in both cases, the developers have gone out of their way to make their visuals resemble pre-digital media forms: grainy, streaking, analog video art, and physical arts-and-crafts dioramas, respectively.

The standout item from the aforementioned IndieCade collection at E3 is (the premiere?) of The Night Journey, by celebrated video artist Bill Viola (I’m a big fan) and the USC EA Game Innovation Lab, in this effort led by Tracy Fullerton. Also see the description at USC’s site. Watch game footage at the IndieCade page. Haunting! (Viola has experimented with interactivity before, with Tree of Knowledge.)

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