Grand Text Auto

Check out a new interview I discovered at furtherfield.org with GTxA’s Mary Flanagan on net art, cyberfeminism and authorship.

While I appreciate the “rah-rah, boo-hoo, emotion in games!” cheerleading in this week’s The Escapist — I too am all for creating more affective interactive experiences — let’s get real about the status quo of gaming’s expressiveness, please?

• I thought Tadhg Kelly’s particleblog ended in July 2004, shortly after his interesting insyn proposal. I didn’t realize he was back to blogging, as of last summer; he’s been working at Lionhead as a scene designer on The Movies (although apparently is leaving Lionhead along with many others in the recent re-shuffle). Anyhow, he’s got two new essays I enjoyed, one on moving beyond fun in videogames, and a response to Warren Spector’s Escapist article series. Also check out this Next Gen article he wrote on using human-captured motion/imagery in games, although I found it problematic.

As easily predicted Darwinia swept the GDC’s Independent Games Festival, and also predictably there is a bit of controversy over whether Darwinia deserved to compete, since it’s now distributed by Steam and has had some moderate commercial success. I think the answer is an obvious “yes” — Darwinia was created in true indie style, and just because the game is now moderately successful, by no means disqualifies it as indie.

• A Bob Ross “Joy of Painting” videogame. Oh dear, I hope we don’t have to shoot at happy little clouds and bushes…
• Awesome — Game Music Radio. (Ah, we’ve got to submit our Façade soundtrack files to the station, especially the rare bizarre Noh-drama tracks that only occur 10% of the time you play Façade…)



• Irascible blog commenters out there, you should like this new freeware game… Flamewar!
• Intel Game Demo Contest — win $30K or more!



• Opening April 13 at IIT in Chicago, ben f. laposky: the 1953 electronic abstractions exhibition: restaged and remixed

[Note: I timestamped this post 11:59pm March 31, so you’d know I wasn’t joking.]

There was sometimes fascinating, sometimes frightening testimony at a U.S. Senate hearing last Wednesday on the effects of violence in games. One of the only voices suggesting that the social science data is perhaps not yet conclusive was UIUC prof Dmitri Williams, who blogs at GTxA compatriot site Terra Nova. (Interestingly Williams’ was the only testimony not available to the press as of yesterday; luckily Williams has posted his statement on his site, along with everyone else’s.)

Violence in games is not something we usually talk about on this blog; we’re more interested in the aspects of human behavior typically not represented or simulated to date in interactive entertainment (1 2 3 4 5 6 7, for example). When we do occasionally talk about violence, it might be about how it seems to seep its way into character-centric interactive entertainment experiences, how violence is such a one-note tune in contemporary game design or in media coverage of games, maybe how life can eerily imitate game violence, or meta-commentaries on violence in life vs. games, or the military’s involvement in gaming (1 2 3), or perhaps to expose the occasional violent debate between game scholars.

An axe I often grind is the need for what I’ve called “authentically interactive” characters and stories — how we need them for the medium to progress and mature, for creative, artistic and aesthetic reasons.

But couldn’t authentic characters also be the salvation for the violence in games crisis?

More GDC writeups: 21st Century Game Design co-author Chris Bateman, at his blog Only a Game, has posted a nice summary of fellow ihobo developer Ernest Adams’ GDC talk, “A New Vision for Interactive Stories“.

Ernest surveys some of the techniques and issues in developing interactive stories, including observing and reacting to Façade (as we know, he’s a fan). Based on the summary of the talk, it’s more of a broad talk than deep one, touching on the idea of limits in interactive stories (reminding me of Nick’s first GTxA post), suggesting an implicit “credibility budget”. The talk concluded by pointing towards procedurality as a road to progress.

• Still waitin’ for that Citizen Kane moment
• From the maker of Disney spin-off games, Desperate Housewives: the videogame. Here’s early screenshots.
• Is Controller Design Killing Creativity in Video Games? (Answer: Yes! We need interfaces that are more than a few buttons and a joystick, i.e., language!)
• Hal’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, from MIT Press. 50% off right now.
• An old link, but worth noting: Warren Spector is developing a Source/Steam title.

Articles covering the still-ongoing Game Developers Conference are flowing in: The Birth And Growth Of Independent Game Studios, Zimmerman on Self-Published Games, What’s Next? panel, reactions to Will Wright’s astro-flying lecture (1 2) (who’s on the cover of Wired this month), You Can (Not) Be Serious, What’s Wrong With Serious Games? (written by a fellow PAGDIG member), Peace-oriented Game Design Challenge, GDC: Write Club — as well familiar material from presentations by Juul, Isbister. Update: Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker talking about prototyping Spore.

Like last year, perhaps the most interesting GDC reportage to comment on is the now-annual IGDA rant session (proficiently transcribed again by Alice at Wonderland), organized by Gamelab’s Eric Zimmerman and this year starring ex-Gamelab now area/code developer Frank Lantz, experimental gameplay workshop organizer Jon Blow, ex-XBox evangelist now CAA Seamus Blackley, resident curmudgeon Chris Crawford, and special appearances by Robin Hunicke, Jane Pinckard, Chris Hecker and Jason della Rocca. Reactions below:

• The NYTimes on the latest robotic toys and dolls
• Via collision detection, Margaret Atwood’s telepresence book-signing robot!
• Cfp for the the 15th annual symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, “Getting to Know Socially Intelligent Robots”, this September in the UK
• Writeup on the very cool stylized rendering techniques in Shadow of the Colossus
• A new online journal, Animation, the first cohesive international refereed publishing platform for animation across all forms of media
• Janet Murray spoke at USC recently, “Making Steven Cry: on knowing what to ask of game experience and game design“

The Escapist has a new article by journalist and editor Mark Wallace, “The Play’s the Thing“, informing readers about the existence of the academic ludology/narratology debate — that it appears most game scholars are ready to move on from. Members of the IT-Copenhagen gang (Aarseth, Juul, Frasca) are quoted (Espen in fact referring to himself as a narratologist ;-) plus ex-developer Mark Barrett. Wallace (who has commented here at GTxA, skeptical of interactive stories) concludes that it’s “the wrong debate”; regarding game and narrative in interactive entertainment, “one doesn’t exist without the other”.

Join us this Thursday March 9 at 7:30pm for a presentation about the development of Façade at my local indie dev hangout, the Portland Area Game Developer Interest Group (PAGDIG).

I’d make a joke about the rain in Portland, but that’s just a myth Portlanders perpetuate to keep too many Californians from moving here. ;-)

I wanted to re-read Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit before commenting on Patrick Dugan’s article from a few weeks ago in The Escapist, “An Exit“. I’m glad I did, it’s a fascinating play that I hadn’t read in a long while.

More big name film directors are getting into games — James Cameron of Titanic Terminator fame will be creating an MMOG for his “completely crazy, balls-out sci-fi” film in development, Project 880. “We’ll create a world for people [the game] and then later present a narrative [the film] in that world”. The game will developed with Multiverse, newly formed by two Netscape veterans to create a MMOG platform for indie game development.

The ELO is hosting a Windows, Mac and Unix re-implementation of James Meehan’s pioneering 1981 story generation system, Tale-spin. Warren Sack re-implemented it in 1992 as Micro-Talespin. Installation instructions are included there.

At this August’s Intelligent Virtual Agents conference in Marina del Rey (submissions due April 7) there will be a GALA — a Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents. Neat. GALA submissions due June 15, with an award for best student entry.

Mark Bernstein points us to a clever new fiction, Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde. “In this world, it is sometimes possible for people to jump into books and interact with their characters… The books, it turns out, have their own police force which protects the integrity of literature from outside agents…”

Lastly, there’s an interactive story / adventure game in this March’s IGF —

[Update, Feb 16: Beta-testing is complete, and Façade v1.1 is now available for download. The original post requesting beta-testers is below.]

Seeking volunteers to do a quick beta-test of Façade v1.1, sporting the following new features:

• Trip and Grace have been working out and have slimmed down the installer to 164MB — quite a weight loss from the original 800MB fattie! (Thanks to speex.org for the regimen, and Jason Rohrer for some slimming tips.)
• Now with subtitles! When combined with audio muting it makes Façade almost work-safe.
• A relaxed CPU check policy — gone are those cumbersome and secretive shift-F12 hand maneuvers.

Remember this mobile game?

It works on most platforms, particularly cushiony ones. It’s designed to be single player, although it can be quite entertaining to watch others play! Tends to take weeks or months to level up though.

I suppose you can play it anywhere, although it’s most fun to just hang in your crib with your homies, er, parents.

A sporty outfit is a plus, but not required.

In a cost-cutting move, Sony is discontinuing its revolutionary line of robotic puppies, the Aibo.

Has Sony screwed the pooch with this move? Aibo generated so much good PR for them over the years. Interestingly, only 150,000 were purchased since its release in 1999, I would have thought more. Then again, it cost $2000.

Clearly, expressive virtual pets continue to have the power to fascinate and generate serious revenue. Maybe Sony has a new robotic creature of some sort in the works to succeed Aibo. If so, W00f.

(via Ludology.org)

Raigan Burns, one half of the N team whom we briefly met at Slamdance, sends us this list of freeware games he recommends, culled from looking at hundreds of freeware titles. Several of the stickman titles in the list were inspiration for N, which won the Audience award at both IGF05 and Slamdance06. Enjoy, in no particular order:

Seiklus: abstract stickman adventure game
http://autofish.net/clysm/games/seiklus/index.html
http://autofish.net/clysm/art/video_games/seiklus/seiklus12.zip

Puchi: another tiny stickman game, this was a huge inspiration for N, super-fun puzzle/platforming
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4849

Frontline: yet more unclassifiable and addictive stickman action
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4378

The IGDA’s AI Interface Standards Committee is recruiting new members, from both industry and academia. See the call for applications below, open until February 20:

After a flurry of activity last year, Game-Brains.com took a brief hiatus over the past few months, but is now back with an improvised review of Façade that, among other things, channels the perspective of the right-wing news media:

My friend eugene sent me a link to an artificial.dk interview with Marc Downie — whom you interactive character enthusiasts may know as the person responsible, among other things, for the excellent realtime charcoal rendering of the MIT Media Lab’s virtual wolves. A little research reveals that Marc recently defended his PhD dissertation, “Choreographing the Extended Agent: Performance Graphics for Dance Theater”, and is now part of a collaborative group of artists called OpenEnded Group. The interview describes How long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume…, a dance piece with live interactive imagery, pictured here. Cool stuff.

As you know, GTxA isn’t exactly a personal blog, but there are times to make an exception. :-)

My daughter Eva Vu Stern was born January 4, 2006, at 8:07 p.m., 6 lbs 11 oz. Mom, Baby and Dad are at home now, happy and healthy.

If you see any blog posts from me timestamped at 4 a.m., you’ll know why!

Wait, before we say goodbye to 2005, let me quickly throw out a few extra links that shouldn’t be forgotten:

We’re working on an improved version of the Façade parser, and could use more raw data of what players tend to type to Grace and Trip.

If you’ve played Façade, please do us a big favor and email us the stageplays you generated. Each time you’ve played, a trace of your dialog was automatically saved in c:\Facade\stageplays. (Even if you’ve uninstalled Façade already for some reason ;-) it will leave behind the stageplays folder.)

You can email your stageplay files to us as individual attachments, or ideally your entire stageplays folder as a single zipped-up file, to info -at- interactivestory -dot- net.

Nicolas Szilas, friend of GTxA and fellow interactive drama researcher, has written up a summary of last month’s Int’l Conference on Virtual Storytelling in Strasbourg, France. (Also see his summary from 2003.) Thanks again, Nicolas!

In Nicolas’ summary I’ve inserted a link to Ernest Adams’ ICVS keynote presentation, “Letting the Audience onto the Stage”. Ernest tells us he’s lately been questioning some of his long-held assumptions about agency and interactive story, which is evident in his slides.

Nicolas writes:

This was third edition of ICVS, after Avignon in 2001 and Toulouse in 2003, a conference focused on digital/virtual storytelling. ICVS is a computer oriented conference with a flavour of Humanities and Art.

Regarding the core issue of Interactive Drama — no dramatic change! The topic was discussed, but I was expecting more concrete solutions. Ernest Adams reminded us that Narrative and Interactivity are hard to combine (pdf), and did not omit discussion of Façade as one of the most advanced approaches. Ken Perlin advocated for a procedural approach to Interactive Narative, but did not go beyond the stage of general advice and intuitive narratology. Sandy Louchart and Ruth Aylett presented an interesting comparison between Reality TV and emergent narrative, but how this will be effectively exploited in a computer system is yet to come.

The graph-based model is still largely in use, often (but not always) inspired by the Propp Model: