Grand Text Auto

It’s getting weird when quotes from Will Wright are showing up in the NYTimes Book Review. Terra Nova’s Ed Castranova’s new mmorpg book Synthetic Worlds and Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby’s Smartbomb are reviewed. On NPR.org, this excerpt (chapter 1) from Smartbomb paints quite the enthralling picture of videogame designers.

Also, everybody’s favorite sexy zine Nerve has a new, extensive series of articles on sex, relationships and games, being doled out over time, including an amusing review of Façade and a series of questions posed to familiar game designer/researcher types. I like the visual juxtaposition of Grace’s and Aeon Flux’s faces in the column listing.

Matt Madden, an experimental comic artist/writer (mentioned in our generative/interactive comic discussion a while back) has released an excellent experiment in narrative form called 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Read this review by Stephen Frug for a good overview of this work.

Also see American outpost of the Oubapo, the comics equivalent of the Oulipo.

Speaking of which, Frug also mentions that a new edition of the out-of-print Oulipo Compendium is now available, published by Make Now Press in the US and Atlas Press in the UK.

I’m going to order both and have my own little oulipolooza.

The ALICE bot developers (Richard Wallace and co.) are making an interesting resource available for purchase: based on 10 years of conversation logs between their award-winning chatterbot and thousands of users, they have compiled a list of ALICE’s most common 10,000 user inputs. (Their bot is in fact comprised of short responses to 4x that number of inputs.) Further, they’ve abstracted this raw data into the top 10,000 patterns of input, which I’d guess is drawn from the top 30,000 inputs or more. This “Superbot” data, in the form of Excel spreadsheets, can be yours for $999.

I actually think that’s a decent value for such data, even if it’s somewhat tied to the general design and interface of ALICE. That is, there’d be all kinds of new inputs users would say that are not on the list, once you make a conversational agent that can have deeper conversations than the very broad but shallow ALICE, or if you made agents with a more focused, less generic domain, such as Grace and Trip in Façade. Still, I’m sure many items on this list would be said to most any bot, at least in this early era of overall bot intelligence.

Speaking of bots and what people say to them, I came across the webpage for an intriguing symposium held at Interact 2005 as well as a sequel to be held at CHI 2006: Agent Abuse, the dark side of human computer interaction. Here’s the symposia’s abstract:

A voice-recognition-enhanced version of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s DiNA, a head-and-shoulders chatterbot focused on discussing current affairs, will soon be debuted as part of her show “Selected Works: 1976 – 2005” at the Bitforms gallery in New York. Here’s a NYTimes article from last Sunday briefly reviewing the history of Hershman’s pioneering work over the decades.

(Unusually, the bot’s programmer, Colin Klingman, actually gets a mention in the article. But why not get double-billing with Hershman, something I’ve argued is necessary for programmers of non-trivially interactive art?)

Some excellent conferences are upcoming in Australia — Interactive Entertainment 2005, Nov 23-25 in Sydney, including invited speakers Tracy Fullerton of USC Interactive Media, Mark Meadows who wrote Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, VRML creator Mark Pesce, and interactive narrative researcher R. Michael Young from NC State.

A few days later proceed to the procedural Third Iteration, the third international conference on generative systems in the electronic arts, Nov 30-Dec 2 in Melbourne. “It investigates three major themes – human-computer creativity, generative meaning systems, and the computational sublime.” (These dates directly conflict with DAC in Copenhagen. Not that it matters to me, I have no money or time to make it to any of them, sadly :-) Third Iteration includes invited speaker Casey Reas, co-creator of Processing. And a few days after that, also in Sydney, is a Creativity and Cognition Symposium on Generative Arts Practice.

This has been a unusually prolific year for computer-based drama; in addition to Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy and Façade we have last week’s release of Lionhead’s much-anticipated The Movies. I haven’t played it yet (nor Indigo Prophecy), but the reviews are pretty positive (1 2), and users are already madly uploading thousands of their user-created movies to Lionhead’s community server.

From what I’ve read so far about The Movies, it’s primary gameplay is as a tycoon sim, about running a movie studio. While that gameplay is reportedly decent, the more interesting activity is the game-within-a-game of shooting your own movies — ostensibly as a task for succeeding in the larger tycoon sim game, but more enjoyably just for fun, as a tool of self-expression, the product of which (2-3 minute video files) you can share with your friends on the online community. (In fact you can go to “sandbox” mode and skip the tycoon sim game altogether, to just author little movies.)

How self-expressive can you be? Well, looks like you pick from an extensive pre-built library of cinematic shots and character types, that cover about five cinematic genres — horror, action, love story, sci-fi, etc. From what I can tell from the reviews, you may not have much control over behavior of the characters within a shot, but you can dub whatever dialog you like into these shots (by recording your voice), change lighting, wardrobe and makeup (huge variety), actors’ facial features (and plastic surgery), backdrops (huge variety), camera angles and perhaps focus / depth of field, add titles, subtitles and credits, and edit the timing of the shots in a simplified video editor. And, the system renders the “film” in a variety of styles, from more old-time cinema with lots of scratches and grain to modern.

Very impressive. Looks like they pulled off something great here. Here’s some screenshots, and an excerpt from the Gamespot review:

We’ll be giving a talk tomorrow at 6pm at USC’s Interactive Media program about the creation of Facade. If you’re in the LA area tomorrow and have some free time, perhaps we’ll see you there!

Interestingly, there seems to be an ever-growing number of games or game announcements, or at least talk of games, that have sexual content or sex as a theme — enough to warrant a post. Here’s a few of the links that I’ve been gathering:

• Mojo Master, a free advergame (sponsored by a deodorant company) is a pretty good flirtation game, with high production values. It applies Magic-the-Gathering-style card gameplay to the idea of competitive flirting; it’s an interesting take on the concept of social/head games. It’s more successful than, say, Sprung for the DS looks to be. Then again, check out Project Rub…

An annual AI and a-life conference in the UK, AISB, often in Edinburgh but this coming April in Bristol, has a call for papers for a symposium on Narrative AI and Games. Submissions due December 21.

Game designer, writer and book author Chris Bateman has a blog just a few months old called Only a Game. Lots of great lenghty posts to be found, including Between Stories and Games, Fractal Stories, A Template for the Future of the Game Industry, Grass Roots Gamers, Racheted Progress, and an extensive post-mortem (1 2) of a game he worked on.

Chris co-wrote the newly released 21st Century Game Design, was designer and scripter of Discworld Noir (UK, 1999), and is now the managing director of the game design studio International Hobo and a member of the IGDA Game Writers SIG.

The interesting links keep piling up:

The ongoing Helsinki lecture series “Games and Storytelling” has Gonzalo Frasca as a speaker on November 8, with an interesting talk title: “Mini-games, maxi-storytelling: looking at minigames as a narrative genre”. The previous speaker was Greg Costikyan, talking about “Constraining Interaction to Create Emergent Narrative”. (Reading Greg’s powerpoint slides, this appears to be a design-centric attempt to squeeze another drop of water from the rocks that are today’s AI-light game engines.)

Another European interactive narrative lecture series, sagasnet, is releasing a collection of papers called Developing Interactive Narrative Content, including a (new?) Michael Joyce essay, “Interactive Planes: Toward Post-Hypertextual New Media”.

The blog Gamecraft has a multi-part writeup (1 2 3 4) of last week’s FuturePlay conference at Michigan State. Also, Reality Panic has a bit of commentary and pictures.

Update: DAC 2005 is over – it was great! GTxA’s non-exclusive coverage of the conference is available:

Session 1, Session 2, Session 3b, Session 4b, Session 5, Session 6, Session 9, Session 10, Session 11, ELINOR reading, Mateas & Montfort talk

Digital Arts and Culture 2005, to be held this December in Copenhagen, looks to be a very stimulating event as usual. The list of papers is now online, including several scholars and artists you may be familiar with from discussions here at GTxA:

Ian Bogost: The Rhetoric of Exergaming
Espen Aarseth: Fiction vs Simulation in Games
Jill Walker: The Digital Aesthetisation of Oneself
Douglass, Marino, Dena: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies
Scott Rettberg: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation
Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern: Procedural Authorship
Fox Harrell: The GRIOT Improvisational Poetry System
Stuart Moulthrop: Rethinking Scholarship in the Days of Serious Play
Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort: A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics
Boehner, Sengers, Medynskiy, Gay: Technology between Art and Tool
Panel: Gameplay: The Great Debate (Juul, Bjørk, Aarseth, Iversen)
And many more beyond just this corner of the blogosphere (do spheres have corners?):

On the heels of delaying The Godfather videogame until 2006 (a project Coppola is unhappy with and supposedly never approved), it was just announced that EA will be giving Steven Spielberg an office their Los Angeles studio, to work side-by-side with game developers to develop three yet-to-be-determined games.

Spielberg has been an avid follower of games for years. In a speech last year, he told film students they could change the face of filmmaking if only they played more video games.

Here is the full press release; read more about Spielberg’s take on the state of ludology vs. narratology from last year.

Adding to yesterday’s coverage, I’m continuing to blog live today at the IndieGamesCon in Eugene, Oregon.

(Some fun news — they just announced Façade has won Most Innovative Game at the IndieGamesCon’s Player’s Choice Awards. It’s gotten good play and buzz at the show-off center here this weekend. :-) Almost no one had heard of it till seeing it here.)

back to the talks…

—-

The Billion Dollar Indie Opportunity
Benjamin Bradley of GarageGames

only indies have the risk-taking ability to go after these 12 steps of indie success, that I’ll talk about here

We’ll also talk about China — every major game studio wants to go after China
But isn’t there no such thing as “indie” in China?

I’m blogging live today and tomorrow from the Independent Games Conference, aka IndieGamesCon, in Eugene, Oregon, organized by GarageGames.

GarageGames’ introduction:
“It is now possible to quit your dayjob and support yourself making indie games”

——

Casual games panel

Casual games are currently a $0.5B business, may grow to 3x that in 2 years

Popcap — James Gwertzman, previously of Escape Factory and Sprout Games, now the new director of business development for PopCap
Mobile casual games are becoming big
I’m concerned about venture capital money coming in and not keeping eye on short-term profits — there’s a danger there

If you haven’t yet, be sure to participate in this chatbot research survey that ends in one week! The research is being conducted by Mark Marino, who blogs by night at WRT. Also, check out his latest post on i.plot, an interesting program he and I saw demoed at last July’s Siggraph.

1up has posted an extensive post-mortem about the recently-released, cinematic Indigo Prophecy, aka Fahrenheit. The post-mortem is written by the game’s writer/director David Cage. I haven’t played Indigo Prophecy yet, but definitely plan to.

Clearly Cage and his Quantic Dream team have design goals in line with what some of us at GTxA proselytize and develop, as several people at various conferences who were following Quantic Dream had hinted to us over the past couple of years. Cage writes:

I like to call this game an “Interactive Drama”, which in my mind suggests the fact that the player acts and interacts in a narrative and emotional experience.

Cool, good to see that descriptor being used more, and it seems appropriate for this piece. That said, while they had the people-power of a team of 80 in production for 2 years on it, I see the project’s biggest obstacle as interface: their design was constrained by needing to run on console machines, where the controller is only a few buttons and two analog sticks. I.e., interactive drama with an action title’s interface mechanics. The post-mortem vaguely describes how Cage came to some sort of Dance-Dance-Revolution-like interface design, which to me seems like an odd match for interactive drama, but was perhaps the best one could come up with under those constraints. (Never mind the CPU constraints of console machines, for AI purposes.) I’ll have to play it to understand the interface better; I assume for dialog they necessarily went for menu-based dialogs, which while almost universal in games is also quite limited, of course.

About narrative structure, Cage describes his concept of “rubber band stories”:

This morning I was just hopping over to Greg Costikyan’s site to grab a link from a recent post of his about game industry revenues, to bolster a comment I was making here about Chris Crawford, and to my surprise found that Greg’s friendly blue palette was replaced by a revolutionary red! (Well, hot pink.) The reason?

Game industry veterans Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson announced today that they are joining forces to launch Manifesto Games, a new venture to build a strong and viable independent game industry. Its site will offer independently-developed games for sale via direct download–a single place where fans of offbeat and niche games can find “the best of the rest,” the games that the retail channel doesn’t think worth carrying. Three types of games will be offered: truly independent, original content from creators without publisher funding; the best PC games from smaller PC game publishers, including games in existing genres like wargames, flight sims, and graphic adventures; and niche MMOs. … Manifesto expects to begin carrying original content by early 2006.

The above is from Manifesto’s press release. And, Greg is sort of “open sourcing” the process of running the startup.

As reported and described by The Ludologist, Aki Järvinen’s card game about making games, called GameGame, is now available! He had hinted about this at last June’s DiGRA, and now it’s ready to play.

You’ll need to print out and cut up the cards, and read the rules, before you can game your own game. The website describes it as “Ludology meets Understanding Comics”.

Good deal! I haven’t meta game this cool in a while. ha ha. what a card.

Neuvo-games journalism siteThe Escapist (now with beer ads!) has posted a fresh interview with Chris Crawford.

The man known as the Dean of American Game Design toils alone, unfunded and underappreciated, in a forest in Oregon. He has renounced games; or perhaps, one might say, games have renounced him.

Who is Chris Crawford, and why does he toil alone?

(Readers of GTxA will recall that Chris has told us why, which spawned further discussion (1 2). Also read about our visit last June to Chris’ annual gathering.)

Relax, open a cold one (or a carton of milk), and enjoy the article.

On artificial.dk you’ll find an excellent interview with artist and curator Marius Watz about the current state of generative art, and an upcoming show Watz is organizing called Generator.x.

Generator.x is a framework for thinking about generative practices and creative uses of code, whether applied to art or design. We have identified some key subjects: Generative aesthetics, process-based design, performative software and tools by artists for artists. By inviting leading practitioners in the field I hope to introduce the field to newcomers, as well as provide a platform for new discourse. … The Generator.x exhibition is divided into two sections: ‘Code as Material’ and ‘Code as Method’. …

The interview talks at length about a tension between the software art and generative art scenes, and a bit of musing about future possibilities for the field — “Generative art describes a strategy for artistic practice, not a style or genre of work”.

About his own work, an example pictured at left, Watz says,

Some game / literature links I’ve been collecting over the past few weeks have reached enough critical mass to warrant a post.

Aleks Krotoski, contributer to the Guardian games blog, imagines games that “take their inspiration from novels, pulp fiction, high-brow literature and other variations of the written word”. She muses about several books she’d love to see turned into games, ranging from Jane Austen to Philip K. Dick.

Speaking of which, what would your grandmother like to play? Robin Hunicke moderated a panel on this topic at the recent GDC Europe, in the same format as Eric Zimmerman’s Game Design Challenge at GDC North America, including (who else?) the game designer of Katamari Damacy. Not your grandmother’s game, indeed.

Speaking of women and games — we can’t get a hold of it here in the US, but Newsweek International (Europe, Asia, the Middle East) has a new issue on the Future of Entertainment. The issue includes an article called “Videogames for Girls” that may discuss Façade, we’re not sure.

If any non-Americans out there have a copy, please let us know what the article says, thanks! We’ll try to get a hold of a couple of copies this week somehow.

Hopefully this means they’re going crazy over Façade is Riyadh right now.

Time to award another Loebner prize — an annual formal instantiation of the Turing Test, now in its 15th year. This year’s final four contestants are:
ALICE Silver Edition, botmaster Richard Wallace et al (previous winner in 2004, 2001, 2000)
Eugene Goostman, botmaster Vladimir Veselov
Jabberwacky, botmaster Rollo Carpenter
Toni, botmaster Steven Watkins

The contest will be held this Sunday from 10am to 4pm, at 220 W. 98th St #2B, New York, NY (is that someone’s apartment?). Assuming no contestant makes it beyond the Bronze medal stage (none have in the past, I believe), $3000 will be awarded; however the $25,000 Silver Medal “will be at risk” this year, according to the rules explaining the scoring system.