Grand Text Auto

Lists are sometimes interesting and informative; sometimes exclusive and off-putting (often the case with ranked lists), and sometimes seemingly arbitrary — and sometimes all three simultaneously! Of course, they’re always debatable: for example, witness the ongoing good debate over a canonical list of games.

The blog Indygamer, similar to Jay is Games or GameTunnel, compiles a large collection of reviews of indie games; here’s the variety of games discussed there last month alone. Yesterday one of the Indygamer editors posted a list of his favorite 27 art games. Taken as one guy’s opinion, it’s an interesting list, with some cool stuff I’ve not heard of that I’d like to play.

There’s a nice feature-length article in the NYTimes Sunday mag today, called “The Real Transformers”, chronicling Rodney Brooks’ and Cynthia Breazeal’s work on social humanoid robots, including their plans for deploying a series of toddler-like robots in a museum in 2009. (There’s a successful precedent for this, you might recall.)

(btw, I’ve been away from blogging for a while, but I plan to get back into the game soon, perhaps write those follow-up NLU posts I had mentioned.)

Wow! Ian and crew at Persuasive Games (and sister blog Water Cooler Games) have landed the first of a new series of their games on the op-ed pages of the New York Times website!!

Read all about it at WCG, and check out today’s NYTimes opinion page. Their first new newsgame, Food Import Folly, apparently made within this last week, addresses the FDA’s limited ability to inspect imported food. (You need to be a registered TimesSelect reader to access the game, which I already happened to be; I think you just need to fill out a one-time registration form.)

This post, like the previous one asking “what do non-gamers want?”, is a spinoff from a recent discussion about natural language interfaces for games.

I find the topic of transparency in behavior and interface for NPCs particularly interesting, because it is actually a big problem for interactive drama.

With our efforts to build interactive drama and comedy, we want to reach a large audience — both as a business opportunity, so we can make our work self-sustaining, and as artists, hoping to reach out and communicate to many. We’re particularly excited about making entertainment that appeals to all those who don’t consider today’s videogames much fun. Let’s call them “non-gamers”. I think non-gamers outnumber gamers, perhaps greatly. For entertainment media, non-gamers enjoy TV, movies, books, even a bit of web, blog and YouTube surfing. We want to add interactive drama and comedy to their list. Reaching them would also have the nice side effect of expanding the expressiveness of videogames as an art/entertainment form.

What would non-gamers theoretically enjoy from videogames? I’ll speculate on this from my “it takes one to know one” perspective. Yes, I’m a non-gamer.

In this post I’ll make a case for natural language understanding interfaces in interactive drama and comedy. This is Part 3 of what’s becoming an intermittent developer-diary series about design and technology issues in play as we develop a new commercial interactive drama/comedy project.

The previous Part 2 post from last December asked and briefly answered several questions: how to achieve content richness for non-linear, real-time interactive stories; how to create satisfying agency; and briefly, how to find funding for this kind of work. Most of the discussion in the comments focused on business plans and funding, which impact the design and technology issues, because resources and time in the production schedule are needed to achieve the design and technology goals.

In this post the primary questions I’d like to address are:
What are the pros and cons of having an open-ended natural language interface for an interactive drama/comedy game?
Is natural language the right choice right now?

Related questions left over from the previous post include,
How well did the natural language interface work in Façade?
Can the failures of the natural language interface in Façade be overcome?

Today was the fourth birthday of Grand Text Auto! yay!

fyi, the submission deadline for the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies has been extended to May 15.

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, Dispositions and web version 1.1 of GAM3R 7H30RY (1 2) online at the Institute for the Future of the Book, has revised a version of the latter called Gamer Theory 2.0, published from Harvard University Press.

…McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field–where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

I mean that in the best way. Conrad Barski, M.D., has a site called Lisperati with all kinds of fun illustrated tutorials on topics such as Building, Programming and Hosting Your Own Debian Linux Server; Emacs Tagging; Lisp; and my favorite, How to Tell Stuff to a Computer: The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation.

Evan Shamoon, a writer at the recent successor to Computer Gaming World magazine, now called Games for Windows, solicited us with a nice set of questions, resulting in a substantial article published in this month’s issue. The article is called “Type What You Feel”.

I’ll continue my somewhat dubious practice of scanning in and posting such articles online (hopefully no one at GFW will complain, especially since we just plugged Microsoft’s hardware and conference cruises).

This blog gets a mention in the article too — perhaps the first time it’s made it into print? I can’t remember.

This just in: Microsoft is releasing a controller with a keyboard for the XBox 360. (Further, I didn’t know this — you can also just simply plug in a regular USB keyboard into the 360.)

Till now, we have been assuming that market for language-based interactive drama would necessarily be limited to PC and Mac users, because of the keyboard requirement.

So, we hadn’t seriously considered developing interactive drama for consoles, because of the keyboard issue. But now… hmm.

(~90% of all game purchases these days are for console, ~10% for PC, from my understanding.)

Speaking of developer blogs, the team at Tale-of-Tales has multiple blogs, not just the Drama Princess one we’ve linked to. Check out their main blog, which has lots of activity lately. (I replaced Drama Princess with it on our blogroll.)

On their main blog they have a nice series of screenshots of some of the works in exhibition at Laboral in Spain (1 2).

stretch your browser window wide… apologies in advance…

Borut Pfeifer, an experienced programmer-designer-writer-entrepreneur, friend of GTxA and currently working at EA’s Los Angeles studio on Neil Young and Doug Church’s dream team, has stuff to say on his new blog.

Check it out.

Game/Play in the UK may be winding down, but no fear: as I write, the new Gameworld show is opening today at Laboral in Gijon, Spain. The show is exhibiting many games discussed here on GTxA, including the recently debated canon. There’s a huge selection of interesting machinima and game-oriented films as well.

(Note the final list of pieces being exhibited have yet to be listed on the official site.)

AAAI symposia, held each Fall on the east coast (often in the Boston or DC area) and Spring (often at Stanford), are small, not-too-expensive conferences with just a few tracks, each focused on a specific AI topic. They’re a good place to meet like-minded folks and go deep on a topic over the course of 2-3 days.

10 years ago now, as a young developer-researcher from the game industry, these meetings were a great way for me to dip my feet into the academic waters and gently wade into the research scene. It was at one of these symposia in 1997 at MIT, on socially intelligent agents, that I first met then-grad-student Michael, which later led to our collaboration (borne in a hottub, to continue the water metaphor for a moment). Other past AAAI symposia I attended included meetings on narrative intelligence (resulting in this edited volume), and game AI. The game AI symposium track has since grown into the bigger AIIDE conference, so I haven’t been to symposia in several years.

Good news though: Brian Magerko and Mark Riedl are co-chairing a new symposium on AI-based narrative, for this November.

CFP for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies
http://gel.msu.edu/aaai-fs07-int/

Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, November 8-11, 2007
Submissions due: May 1, 2007

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. As the reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and education technology increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. The term “narrative intelligence” was coined to refer to the ability in both humans and computers to organize experience into narrative form. Previous and current work that in this field has produced results in narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling user interface modalities, narrative performance by autonomous embodied agents, cognitive models of narrative, and common-sense reasoning.

• Here are three links (1 2 3) covering a positively cyberpunk-looking Will Wright giving a keynote at this week’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival, a conference traditionally focused on music and film that in recent years has added an interactive media track. Wright wanted to talk about story, perhaps because he’s talking to so many linear media folk, but was billed to talk about Spore, so he tries to mash the two subjects together. Wright points out the problems with status quo approaches to interactive story, and implores game developers to make games that listen to the player more, suggesting Groundhog Day or Truman Show type structures. (btw, Wright’s comments about “story parsing” are identical to the points he made in a July 2002 SIGGRAPH panel on interactive story Noah and I organized.) The first two links here are live (attempted) transcripts, each of which differs a bit, each containing phrases I find it hard to believe Wright would utter, such as “Games inherently are this branching tree” and “movies are far more compelling than interactive drama, because interactive drama is quite flat”. (I think it depends what he means by interactive drama in the context of this speech; as a counterpoint, one transcript has Wright describing Façade as an interesting approach that moves towards generativity.)

For me this year’s GDC was different from previous years, because my attention these days is so oriented towards business and funding. As a result I made the tradeoff to skip many potentially interesting design talks, in order to make room for lots of hallway conversations, meetings, business-track lectures, cruising the expo booths for useful middleware, and catching up with friends and colleagues.

I’ll start with the (sadly) long list of talks I missed:

Speaking of prolific Northwestern grad students, recent industry-hire and friend of GTxA, Robin Hunicke, is already a game designer at EA/Maxis and leading the finally-announced MySims project for the Wii and DS. You’ll have to try to find additional adjectives for the term “super-cute” to describe its look and animation. Congrats Robin!

Robin’s been blogging over the past few months here and there about the process of being a game designer, gave a presentation last week at Microsoft’s Game Cruise, and will again next week at GDC.

FYI, there will be two back-to-back game festivals in Vancouver, BC, this May: first, the Vancouver International Game Summit, May 3-4, followed by the Northwest Games Festival on May 5, including a game contest with cash prizes!

Among mainstream game developers, Warren Spector is one of those putting significant effort into building more sophisticated interactive stories. To the list of exciting GDC talks next week, we need to add Spector’s newly announced talk “The Future of Storytelling In Next-Generation Game Development” (as well as Ernest Adams’ “Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories” for that matter). Recall Spector was a participant on a GDC panel on interactive story I moderated two years ago, although his attitude was somewhat dour at the time.

These days, after founding and reportly getting funding for his new studio Junction Point, Spector seems more optimistic. He was interviewed in this month’s print magazine Game Developer (owned by CMP, the same company that runs GDC and Gamasutra.com). Since few of you may get the magazine, I’ll type in a few highlights from the article:

There is a middle ground [between sandbox games like The Sims, and roller coaster rides like Half Life], and I don’t think it involves the choose-your-own-adventure approach. … The key for me is creating linked sandboxes and letting players explore those little narrative chunks on their own. [As the game developer] I’ll determine why it’s important that you get through a door, but how you get through it, what happens, and whether you kill, talk to, or ignore everyone on the other side belongs to you. That concept of sharing authorship is where the sweet spot of game narrative is… it’s a hybrid of a linear string of pearls game structure and a sandbox approach.

Arthouse Games has gotten a sneak peek at the close-to-final version of Jonathan Blow’s Braid, and an interview with Blow. You might remember Braid from last year’s Indie Game Festival at GDC, where an early version won for Innovation, or from last month, when Blow was first to withdraw from Slamdance 2007 over the Super Columbine controversy, or maybe you remember him from the Experimental Gameplay Workshop (EGW) at GDC, which he organizes each year.

I missed GDC last year (had a newborn at home), so haven’t gotten a chance to play Braid, but it looks very innovative indeed — not your grandmother’s platformer. Looking forward to the final release.

Jeff Orkin, experienced industry developer cum grad student — a transition I wish more developers would make! — is building an AI-based interactive narrative of some sort called The Restaurant Game, with a pretty cool implementation method:

The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. In a few months, we will apply machine learning algorithms to data collected through the multiplayer Restaurant Game, and produce a new single-player game that we will enter into the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer. It’s never been easier to earn Game Designer credentials!

The work of AI-oriented Northwestern University grad students has been interesting for quite some time (1 2 3) — and here’s a new project to add to the list. Nate Nichols and Sara Owsley, in Kristian Hammond’s InfoLab, have created a system called News at Seven, that intelligently and autonomously combines news text, images and video from the Web, related commentary from the blogosphere, avatars from Half Life 2, speech synthesis, and broadcasting via YouTube, to create a daily short newscast. It’s an AI-based mashup.