Grand Text Auto

About me:
Through constraint and other formal methods, Oumypo (Ouvroir de MySpace Potentielle) seeks to uncover new MySpace structures, patterns and behaviors, which may then be used by MySpacers in any way they please. For example, we have contructed the “F+7” method: Replace every friend in your top 8 with the friend seven entries after that person in your “My Friends” list. Also, try the “Pimp My MySpace HTML Lipogram” in which you remove the letters H, T, M, L from all HTML codes used in your profile.

Who I’d like to meet:
Noël Arnaud, Valérie Beaudouin, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, André Blavier, Paul Braffort, Italo Calvino,

The second annual Game Writers Conference is happening September 6-7 in Austin, co-located with the online game focused Austin Game Conference, and a Casual Games Conference.

A bunch of writer/designers will be presenting there, from a variety of successful games. The schedule is comprised primarily of presentations on the current approaches of writing for games.

I wrote the organizers a while ago about potentially presenting Façade there, but I think the conference is focused more on proven, existing techniques than experimental, bleeding-edge ones.

Download Façade for Macintosh (131MB) via BitTorrent at interactivestory.net, and spread the word! First time players, please post your feedback here, thanks!

That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is we suspect some of you won’t be able to run it, as it requires at least a 2.0GHz G4 or G5. (Or 1.0GHz dual processors, or 1.8GHz Intel Core Solo.) Several beta-testers ran into this problem.

We’re also working to make it available via direct download at Download.com.

Anyone have any recommendations of what Mac sites we should contact, to get the word out?

Steve Meretzky may see The Escapist as one of the few brights spots in gaming / game criticism these days, but frankly it sometimes misses the mark (1 2). Witness this week’s impressively unnecessary anti-academic tirade. Either the editors are desperate for material, or have a worrisome misunderstanding of how academic study operates. So much for the idea of well-informed journalism.

(Note, my primary gig is not as an academic, so this shouldn’t be interpreted as a defensive statement.)

We received an interesting piece of feedback email the other day, and got permission from the sender to post it here:

I’d like to share a little bit about my experience playing Facade in a crowded, privacy-free, communal environment: the frat house. An avid reader of GTxA, I had been following the development and release of Facade closely, but that was most definitely not the case with my brothers. The week it was released, I downloaded it late on a wednesday night, installed it and played through it a couple of times while everyone was in bed. I was engrossed in the story and amazed at the emotional connection I actually felt to the virtual actors.

The next afternoon, I fired it up while my roommates were there and played through a little bit. They noticed and asked a lot of questions about the game. As I played, I noticed my interactions changing to demonstrate not how I would act or how I felt, but what I thought would elicit the most interest from my roommates. “Can I try it?” one asked. Of course.

Mac users that have been patiently waiting for Façade need only wait a few more days — Ryan C. Gordon, our gracious volunteer Mac porting expert (he does this for a living), that we met at IGC05, has just completed a beta build! It took a while, since he only had time to work on it in his spare time, but we hope you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait.

Or, wait even less if you’re willing to beta-test! If you have OS X 10.4.7 or higher, and can download and give prompt feedback on this beta-test version of Façade, please send email to info at interactivestory dot net by end of day Monday, August 7.

I suppose the big game industry news of the day is the cancellation of the yearly E3 tradeshow (who gives a crap, it was just a big marketing fest), but more interesting is the announcement of a new technology for digitally capturing super-high resolution models and motion of actors, called Contour. See articles in the NYTimes and Wall Street Journal. It’s developed by entrepeneur and inventor Steve Perlman (veteran Apple guy, General Magic, WebTV) and to be demoed at this week’s Siggraph in Boston. See and read more at his website, Mova.com.

The links have been piling up, time to unload… First, interactive narrative oriented links:

• Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, the first reader on the topic of game writing, written by the IGDA Game Writers SIG
• Generating Comics Narrative to Summarize Wearable Computer Data, GaTech Masters thesis, Jason Alderman
• Script of Ernest Adams’ GDC05 talk on interactive narrative
• The End of Things: endings in interactive narrative, Jason Rhody
• Ron Gilbert on his disappointment with lack of good story in games
• Chris Crawford reacts to being the anti-Christ
• A list of first-timer foibles when playing IF
• “Blade Engine”, a free game engine and construction kit aimed at making Visual Novel easy to construct, that strive for a higher level of plot and character depth than Choose Your Own Adventure books

More really great links:

• Will Wright and Brian Eno in conversation on the joys and techniques of “generative” creation (I’ve yet to read/watch this, but it looks great)
• Walking out of the uncanny valley alive?
• Bumptop: enriching the desktop metaphor (awesome!)

Tadhg Kelly over at particleblog (whom I recently linked to) has posted a good rant about the “interactive storytelling community’s” misguided notions of the nature and feasibility of interactive stories. In particular he points out that stories are delicate structures, so how can they be made interactive? The age-old question, but I like Tadhg’s take on it.

Please read his full post before reading my comments below, which I also posted on his blog.

I get most of my news either online, by radio or PBS TV, but I do indulge in physical delivery of a few magazines and the Sunday New York Times. It seems every third week or so over the past few months, the Sunday NYT Arts & Leisure section has headlined with an article on videogames, a notable new trend of coverage for the paper. Today I opened the paper to find a big spread on serious games by Clive Thompson (whose journalism I blogged recently), leading with a screenshot of Peacemaker developed by CMU grad students, followed on inner pages with several large screenshots of Gonzalo’s Madrid, Sept 12, three (!) screenshots of Ian’s Take Back Illinois, and ICNC’s A Force More Powerful. Plus lots of quotes by all. Very cool! Congrats to all for the great coverage.

It’s an early deadline this year for the Game Developers Conference, which will be in San Francisco again, March 5-9.

Speaking of new digital art shows, it seems GTxA’s Mary Flanagan has joyfully erected a sturdy piece of interactive art at a new UK game art show called Game/Play. Pictured to the right, it’s sort of an Iwo Jima meets Asteroids with Lilliputians, don’t you think? (To follow up Noah’s “Sticker St. Petersburg” post, maybe I should have called post this “Sticking London”)

With a dozen or so pieces in total, the show has four installations alongside Mary’s, including “Fluffy Tamagotchi (teddy bear material, Chicco toy TV set, 25 year old BBC microcomputer and some sensors), which can sing, wave its arms around and shit blue turds.” There are seven screen-based works — three online and four in the gallery, including recently blogged The Endless Forest from Tale of Tales, a funky second-person shooter by Julian Oliver, and your and my favorite digital marital arts game.

Accompanying the show is a catalog (pdf) of 20 specially commissioned texts on art / games / culture, including one by Mary. Mary is at the show, so expect a post with more details in the near future.

What a nice way to start my week — an article over at Water Cooler Games called “A paean to Dogz, at whose heels Nintendogs nips“.

A little history lesson is always a good thing, I have to say. Thanks, Ian!

Next month’s ISEA will be showcasing quite an array of electronic artwork. While San Jose ain’t quite the Baltic Sea (gang + 1 2 3 4 5 6 7), it’s much easier for North Americans like us to get to. Scanning the list, here’s a few previews that stood out to me, that may be of particular interest to GTxA readers. Text and images excerpted from the site.

Wildlife, Karolina Sobecka
At nighttime projections from moving cars are shone on the buildings in the industrial/abandoned part of town. Each car projects a video of a wild animal. The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it, as the car stops, the animal stops also. Aggressive driving is reflected in the aggressive behavior of the animal. The animals are avatars of the drivers, who, enclosed in their bubble of safety, are separated from the stark and dangerous world of urban reality, as being in a different universe. Several vehicles can be taking part in the performance, creating interactions between the various animals, as the vehicles pass or get closer and further away from each other.

Amy and Klara (also see full project page), Marc Böhlen
Amy and Klara are robot characters capable of synthetic text to speech generation and automated speech recognition, for which the charged world of foul language is under investigation. Swearing offers several interesting conduits into a critique of the under-exposed normative tendencies in automated language representation and social robotics. Why are most smart gadgets and toys friendly and playful, why are they usually modelled as pets or servants? Machines that curse and pick a fight might offer a more realistic preparation for a shared future between machines and humans.

Feral Robotic Dogs (alse see full project page), Natalie Jeremijenko
OUT THERE, in happy family homes, in the offices of corporate executives, in toy stores throughout the globe, is an army of robotic dogs. These semi-autonomous robotic creatures, though currently programmed to perform inane or entertaining tasks: begging for plastic bones; barking to the tune of national anthems; walking in circles; are actually fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

For quite some time now I’ve been waiting for some astute game scholar somewhere to analyze Piers Anthony’s most excellent Apprentice Adept sci-fi/fantasy series from the early 1980’s, the first book being Split Infinity. From what I can tell via Google, in the context of game studies and game design, no one has yet written about The Game from the Apprentice Adept novels. Maybe I’m the first; perhaps there are few game scholars old enough to have read Anthony? :-0

I read these books as a 10 or 11-year old kid (as well as Xanth, etc.), and I still think about them once in a while, particularly The Game. Anthony offers what I think is a fascinating vision of the future of game competition, and game generation; I could imagine attempting to create a video game version of this.

First, some backstory: the Apprentice Adept series takes place in two worlds, the technology-based planet of Proton, and the parallel universe of Phaze, a land based on magic and fantasy. The series focuses on the character Stile, a Citizen of Proton who discovers Phaze and travels back and forth between the two worlds / realities, has adventures, etc.

Anyhow, on Proton, societal status is based on your ranking in The Game, sort of a cross between the Holodeck and a Gameboy.

We’ve neglected to point out that the second Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) conference is about to happen, this week in LA. I don’t think any of us from GTxA will be there this year unfortunately, although I believe one or two of Michael’s grad students will have posters there. Here’s the list of presentations, which includes a talk by a Sims 2 developer, “The Power of Projection and Mass Hallucination: Practical AI in The Sims 2 and Beyond”, as well as “Emotions in Human-Agent Interactions” by Jonathan Gratch, a leading researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies, USC.

Last week, also in LA, was Advances in Computing Entertainment (ACE), an pretty pricey conference with an interesting line-up of presentations, including Michael presenting an experimental Alternative Reality version of Façade, work with his colleague Blair MacIntyre and others. Maybe Michael can add a comment describing ACE a bit for us?

Also, a reminder that Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) will be taking place August 21-23 in LA. This one both Michael and I plan to attend, to give a talk on developing Façade, and demo at the Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents (GALA). Hope to see you there.

Chris Crawford’s at it again, stirring up trouble with more over-the-top invective for the game industry — and, of course, an offer of salvation, Storytronics. Actually, I saw him speak at the Northwest Games Festival a couple of weeks ago, and he did a good job proselytizing his mission, attempting to make converts among us in the audience. (This is getting a little too L. Ron Hubbard…) More on that when the festival gets written up by organizer Beth A. Dillon. Till then, read reactions from Design Synthesis, The Ludologist, Joystiq, Gamer Junk. And as a general palliative, check out this essay on fanaticism among game opinionators at Only a Game.

Just when you thought it was safe to turn to page 49, Choose Your Own Adventure books are back! (From our archive, here’s an analysis of how one of these are structured.)

The topic this month on the excellent empyre listserv is “liquid narrative“, although the discussion so far seems a bit parched. Maybe you can juice it up!

Recently there’s been some high-profile, mainstream business press on games: a few weeks ago, Will Wright and Spore were featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and a Second Life avatar made it to the cover of the May issue of Business Week.

The trend continues in the June 10 issue of The Economist, with a one-pager on game AI, repeatedly quoting Dr. Mateas of GTxA, and including two screenshots of our project Façade! Here’s a link to the article on their subscription-only site; here’s a scan I made of the article. [Update: the article is now properly online here.]

• Microsoft is holding a chatterbot contest with $40K in prizes. Bots due Oct 15.
• E3 panel of game designers on interactive narrative
• Brandon Rickman critiques Glassner’s Interactive Storytelling
• Ernest Adams on “Perlin’s Law” (oh please)
• An ongoing series of game structure analyses at Only A Game (1 2 3 4) — identifying key player moves (aka verbs, or discourse acts) in several games
• Excerpts from Katherine Isbister’s Better Game Characters By Design
• Second a-Life
• Very cool recursive interactive images
• DARPA life recorders (previously blogged 3 years ago as “LifeLog“)

Belgian game design duo Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, aka “Entropy8Zuper!”, creators of 8, have more than one ambitious new projects in the works.

The first is The Endless Forest, a dreamy, non-goal-oriented online world where players embody human-faced deer, beginning alone in the forest but before long encountering other deer avatars, and soaking up the peaceful environment together. They’ve just released Phase Two of the forest, which now allows players to collect “the hidden magic of the forest to cast spells on each other”, altering each other’s appearance. Their artistic goals include exploring new forms of narrative in an online world, presumably emergent narrative.

Especially relevant to GTxA readers is their newest project, Drama Princess, currently in an initial design phase

Yesterday in Los Angeles, Grand Text Auto, among others, celebrated the wedding of Jennifer and Noah!

Pictured, from left to right: Andrew, Scott (played by Eva Vu Stern; we realize this is confusing, as Eva has more hair than Scott), Nick, Noah the dashing groom, Mary and Michael.

On that note, Scott is rumored to be occupied with nuptial ideas of his own recently…

The schedule is posted for the upcoming Northwest Games Festival, Saturday June 3rd in Portland, and it appears to have a sizable dose of interactive narrative content. Southern Oregon-based Chris Crawford will be keynoting, presumably discussing and pimping his and his team’s latest Storytron efforts. Portland-based Alexandre Owen Muniz will be giving a presentation on IF; his piece A New Life tied for 2nd place at IF Comp 2005.

Since I assume there’ll be plenty of newbies there, rather than present Façade I volunteered to give an intro to game programming lecture, where I plan to proselytize Inform 7 (and 6), Processing, Torque (also Oregon-based!) and any other accessible systems and high level languages I can think to suggest.

Been too busy to post, but would like to share a few links:

• Devil’s advocates: Clive Thompson calls interactive narrative “dry water” and a “nonstarter”, noting (via GTxA) that interactive poetry is more prone to success; and Greg Costikyan opines,

  To me, the search for the interactive narrative game is one of those things that people have bashed their head against the wall about since the beginning of computer games – and if you want to bash your head against that wall, that’s great. Sooner or later someone will break through the wall, but me, I’ll go do something else.

  Bam… bam… bam…
   

• Clive again, on next-gen characters’ ever deeper descent into the Uncanny Valley. Reacting to a preview of Indigo Prophecy sequel Heavy Rain,
  

  This wouldn’t be so bad if the designers were actively trying to create some eldritch, sephulchral nightmarescape straight out of Goya’s Black Paintings. But no … they’re trying to create a spunky, cute, realistic girl. God almighty, these people must be stopped. This stuff is hideous beyond description…

(Interestingly, Clive seemed to like our foray into interactive narrative, but didn’t seem to like our attempts at avoiding the Uncanny Valley…!)

Three years old, that is. Yup, it’s Grand Text Auto’s third birthday. Besides some great discussions with you all this past year here on the blog, and some all-time-high traffic numbers for the site (mostly spam bots, but still), lots has happened this year for us “drivers”: completions of PhD’s, releases of digital fiction, poetry and art, new jobs, and not to mention a kid or two. Probably a book announcement or two in there somewhere as well.

We’re looking forward to more as we begin year four!

Some enterprising folks in my hometown of Portland, Oregon are organizing a free, one-day games festival on Saturday June 3rd, called the Northwest Games Festival. Register on-line to come show off your game, attend sessions, awards, etc. Everyone is invited, including all you up in Seattle and Vancouver, you out there in Boise, come on Eureka, hey you up in Anchorage…

I hope to do a session on getting into game programming, participate on a panel with local indie studio folks, and make Façade available to play.

Procedural Arts is proud to be a sponsor of the festival.