Grand Text Auto

Via Raph Koster’s blog (and Gameology before that), an artist named Rosemarie Fiore has created beautiful long-exposure photographs of old arcade games such as Tempest, Gyruss and Qix.

Gorgeous. (I feel bad for all the young’uns who never got a chance to play these games in the 80’s.)

For you, Nick!

Matthew Kennedy Gould is a lucky guy. Not just because he won $100,000, a trip to Tahiti, and got playfully handcuffed to a buxom blonde while they soaked in a hot tub after wrestling together in a pit of honey. No, Gould is lucky because he is the first person I’m aware of to have experienced true interactive drama.

The good news for us is, it was all videotaped, edited, broadcast on cable in 2003, and is rentable on Netflix.

The vision of interactive drama I’m referring to, first put forth by Brenda Laurel in her 1986 dissertation “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System” and 1991 book Computers as Theatre, and expanded upon in the mid 1990s by Joseph Bates’ Oz Project team at CMU, has a single naive player entering an artificial, dramatic story world, with all the other characters played by improvisational actors guided by a drama manager, who is monitoring the plot as a whole to fashion a coherent, Aristotelian tension-arc style story, centered around the player.

I just got the latest Atlantic Monthly in the mail, and in it there’s a letter to the editor commenting on November’s article about our efforts to build interactive drama. It contains an unusual critique, one that I’d never considered; I think it’s worth posting here for discussion.

Here’s a link that expires in 3 days, but I’ve taken the liberty to cut-and-paste the whole letter here:

Today being Groundhog Day, in the spirit of the most excellent movie, I will recycle two past Groundhog Day-related blog posts.

Groundhog Day and IF (again)
Let’s do it again

• Journalist extraordinaire Clive Thompson (1 2 3 4 5) has a new Wired article about Pleo, a next-gen robotic pet, created by Caleb Chung, the creator of Furby. The Pleo website is rife with cheesy pronouncements — “Can the seemingly impossible… be possible?”, “Can the subtleties of nature be… re-created?”, “Now is the time to bring magic to life”, and “Pleo is the first truly autonomous Life Form capable of emotions that allow personal engagement” — yet, Pleo does looks interesting. Although the YouTube video in the Wired article, to me, is a rather stiff, mild demo — in fact the Wikipedia page suggests that demo was rigged — I assume there will be more exciting behaviors in the final product. How big it will sell at $250 is a question; at that price, it probably can’t become the phenomenon Furby did.
• Brian Eno will be composing generative music for Spore!
• Don’t miss GameTunnel’s list of 2006’s top 10 indie games, including the oddly abstract-looking life simulator, Kudos.

(I’m overly late posting this call for papers, since they’re due tomorrow, but perhaps the organizers are open to time extensions if needed.)

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Supple Interfaces: Designing and evaluating for richer human connections and experiences

This workshop aims to create a common language for discussing research challenges and progress made in designing and evaluating “supple” interfaces. Supple interfaces aim to build richer connections between people as well as deeper emotional experiences through interface. Examples include affective interactive systems, games, and relationship-building systems. For these kinds of applications, the CHI community

An Open Letter to Organizers of the Slamdance Film and Game Festival, from Last Year’s Grand Jury Prize Winner for Games

January 7, 2007

We recently learned of the decision of the president and founder of the Slamdance Film and Guerrilla Game Festival, Peter Baxter, to pull one of the game festival finalists, “Super Columbine Massacre RPG!”, from this year’s competition. As reported in the Rocky Mountain News on January 5th, Baxter “made a ‘personal decision’ based on moral grounds and concern for the future of the organization.”

As recipients of last year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance game festival for “Façade”, we wish to express our strong disapproval of Baxter’s decision, and urge him to reconsider allowing “Super Columbine Massacre RPG!” to rejoin this year’s competition.

The casual game review site Jay Is Games is conducting a poll for best of 2006, including a category for IF or art — I think there’s one more day to vote, in case there’s a nominated art/game there you like…

[Update: Never mind, voting is over!]

As we’re talking about the challenges of getting a commercial indie production off the ground, I thought I’d link to these (1 2 3 4 5) posts from Eduardo Sanchez of Haxan, co-creator of the 1999 indie film mega-hit The Blair Witch Project, that cost $22,000 to produce and earned an estimated $250 million at the box office.

The 5 posts are about the nightmare they’re going through with their follow-up project, Altered:

I mean, how can you go from one of the biggest INDIE successes of all time to a straight-to-DVD release? How?

Now that’s scary.

We recently came across two quirky, independently-produced interactive dramas, each set at a fashion magazine, strangely enough.

The first is a visually minimal but relatively sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure -style story called Masq, written and programmed a few years ago by Javier Maldonado of Alteraction. The drama is presented in small comic-like panels, with a few dynamic menu choices below each. Playing through it a few times, I can sense the underlying structure is something akin to this, although probably a bit more complex. There’s also a bit autonomy in the presentation, where panels will occasionally advance on their own if you don’t take action.

Yikes, I’m over two months late with Part 2 of this post announcing production of The Party. My only excuse is that life is hectic for me these days. As Part 1 described, pre-production, authoring-tool building and prototyping of The Party has been underway for about a year now.

Building next-generation interactive characters and stories has many design, technology, production and fundraising issues. In this post I thought I’d lay out a series of issues we’re grappling with, and give my initial take on each. (I may have subtly different takes than my collaborator Michael.) We’d like to hear any thoughts, opinions and suggestions you have on these, and anything major you think I’ve left out. This helps us think through the issues and figure out solutions.

First, I have two assumptions that I hope won’t require debate in this thread,

Nicolas Szilas of IDTension, who just reported on TIDSE06 for us, announces a new collection of papers co-edited with Jean-Hughes Réty, “Création de récits pour les fictions interactives : simulation et réalisation” (as you can see, in French), at the intersection of games and stories.

Authors are a mix of academic and videogame designers coming from disciplines ranging from hypertext literature to computer science. They include independent scholar and frequent GTxA commentor Marie-Laure Ryan, Stéphane Natkin (researcher of video games and head of a new school of video games in France), Stéphane Donikian (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique), Sandy Louchart (working with Ruth Aylett on emergent narrative), Nicolas himself, and Jean-Noel Portugal, a game author whose views on Interactive Drama are quite relevant, says Nicolas.

This year’s TIDSE conference just ended, and the always outspoken Chris Crawford just wrote up his take on it; bring a few grains of salt with you as you read :-)

(Update: Nicolas Szilas added his description of TIDSE06 in the comments.)

One of the cool things they did this year was a workshop where attendees came with their own interactive version of Little Red Riding Hood (known in German as Little Red Cap), implemented in each participant’s particular architecture; here’s the original call for participants (pdf). That would have been instructive to see. (Although, even I had time to attend, sadly I wouldn’t have had time to implement my own version.)

A vibrant lineup for this March’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is now fully online, packed with interesting talks. Here’s a few that caught my eye, listed in alphabetical order. (My eye is more business-oriented these days than it used to be.)

After the Party: Introversion Software, One Year on from IGF 2006

Behavioral Theory in the Design of Serious Games

Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant

Can You Make Them Cry Without Tearing Your Hair Out? Emotional Characters

… says Will Wright of Spore, as heard on The Colbert Report last night. Watch it here via King Lud IC via YouTube via Comedy Central.

Raph Koster links to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” segment about widening the market for videogames. Much of the discussion focuses on moving beyond the buttons-and-thumbpad controller interface, e.g. to the gestural interface of the newly-released Wii. (No mention of natural language interfaces for games, though. :-)

Anyhow, it’s a good overview of the issues involved, discussed in layperson’s terms.

We’re actively fundraising and team-building for our interactive comedy-melodrama in development, The Party. Getting this project off the ground is a big and challenging task, and we’re looking for collaborators and partners.

We’ve posted a job ad on Gamasutra, seeking a Business Development Director for Procedural Arts. If you, or someone you know fits the job description, please have them apply! Serious applicants only, please.

We’ll be traveling to the SF, LA, NYC and Seattle areas over the next month or two, available to meet potential candidates.

Continuing the recent trend of feature articles about games and game designers in highbrow magazines (1 2 3), Will Wright is profiled in The New Yorker by one the magazine’s tech-friendly writers, John Seabrook, and accompanied by a sweet illustration by Istvan Banyai (one of my favorite contemporary illustrators).

While the material on Spore, E3, etc. will be very familiar to GTxA readers, the piece does delve into Will’s background and personal life more than anything else I’ve read on him.

(Also there’s a new short piece on serious games in The Utne Reader.)

Join me at this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Festival, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. I’ll probably have the only interactive exhibit there, besides the hundred or more comic artists themselves ;-)

I thought I’d bring Façade there, since its dramatic content and visual style were heavily inspired by Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball, and comics folks might dig it. Check out this Lichtenstein, anything look familiar?

Also I’m looking for an illustrator for a poster to visualize and promote The Party. Right now I’ve got my eye on the work of Portland’s Colleen Coover, which is fabulous, but who knows who else I’ll meet.

Call for Papers
The reign of Catz and Dogz?
The role of virtual creatures in a computerised society

A one day symposium at AISB’07 to be held at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2-5 April 2007

NYTimes

I’ve posted numerous times about virtual characters (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8), and in my posts I’ve always been critical of shallow, cardboard-cutout characters. I’ve always had trouble understanding how players can tolerate them.

However, sometimes a cardboard cutout is all you’ve got, and it’s better than nothing.

The Maine National Guard is giving life-size from-the-waist-up pictures of soldiers to the families of deployed guard members. Guard officials and families say the cutouts, known as Flat Daddies or Flat Soldiers, connect families with a relative who is thousands of miles away. The Flat Daddies are toted everywhere from soccer practice to coffee shops to weddings.

As I mentioned I’m currently developing authoring tools to be used for creating character behavior for interactive drama. Depending on how this is approached, this can overlap quite a bit with visual programming. I’m in the middle of researching people’s various approaches to visual programming, paying particular attention to user interfaces. (I’m still experimenting with what extent our authoring tools will expose the programming layer below, but I’d like to see how others have attempted to visually represent programs.)

In doing so I came across an very interesting ongoing project called Subtext by a research fellow at MIT named Jonathan Edwards, whose goal is nothing less than a complete revolution of how we program, to make a “fundamentally better programming language”. He’s created a pair of geekily entertaining demo movies that demonstrate a UI for programming in Subtext, definitely worth 30 minutes of your time.

Here’s a screen capture of Subtext from the movie, just to give you a flavor:

Since Façade was released over a year ago, we’ve yet to announce our plans for what’s next. Well, I’m happy to say Procedural Arts has a new interactive drama production underway, for over half a year now in fact. For those interested in the details, here’s Part 1 in a series of posts summarizing what’s been going on over the past year.

After releasing Façade in July 2005 and recuperating for several months, we were ready to begin a new interactive drama production, a commercial product this time, and seek funding for it. The goal is to take what works best from Façade, fix or improve upon what didn’t work, to make a new, more fun, more marketable interactive drama. That is, it won’t be “Façade II”.

The deadline for this year’s Slamdance indie games festival has been extended to October 6. Enter your game! The festival is January 19-27 in sunny, snowy Park City, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City.

The quirky weekly “Consumed” column in the NYTimes Sunday magazine this week focuses on Ian Bogost / Persuasive Games’ Disaffected!, as well as Molleindustria’s McDonald’s Videogame, both blogged previously on GTxA (1 2). From the article:

Skepticism about, and mockery of, the claims of commercial persuasion has a long history. And “Disaffected!” shows how the sophistication, goals and tactics of both admakers and anti-admakers have escalated in tandem. It can also be seen as an example of what Sonia Katyal, a Fordham University law professor, calls “semiotic disobedience” in an article to be published this fall in the Washington University Law Review.