Grand Text Auto

Telltale Games‘ first installment of their 3D adventure game adaptation of the comic Bone is now available for Windows, as a free demo and $20 full game. I just played the free demo — it’s pretty cool, and well produced. The menu-based conversational interface (one of several modes of interface in the game) was well done, considering the constraints of that format. Worth checking out, even if you’re not an adventure game aficionado.

The Chicago-based experimental theater group The Neo-Futurists just opened a new show called Daredevils! The company’s “first-ever live stunt show” explores “the seemingly ever-present male desire to engage in feats of physical risk” using “a combination of task-based performance and individual narratives on the themes of personal decision-making, the nature of risk, and what it means to be a daredevil.”

Andy Bayiates, the voice of Trip in Façade, is one of the Daredevil team, sporting a black jumpsuit adorned with patches from his stuntman sponsors, NASCAR-style, including a big blue one with white lettering from InteractiveStory.net. Andy’s physical stunts in the show include eating the hottest curry in Chicago every performance.

See below for a close-up of the patch.

The trAce Online Writing Centre has announced a call for papers for a new issue of Convergence called “An End to the New? Re-assessing the claims for New Media Writing(s)“.

This special edition will seek to re-assess the claims made for these forms over the last decade, to challenge the dominant ideologies and terminologies of this maturing field, and to provide a critical re-evaluation of new media writing(s) in all its forms. [This includes] re-assessments of the claims made for hypertext, new media or digital writing(s) over the past decade.

Sounds interesting! Submissions are due January 30.

Via an IGDA newsletter I just discovered the website and schedule for the first annual Game Writers Conference — a two-day event dedicated to the art and craft of game writing, October 26-27, co-located with the annual Austin Games Conference focused on MMOGs and mobile games, and the Women’s Game Conference on women in the computer and video game industry.

Confirmed presentations for the Game Writers Conference include Mark Laidlaw of Valve presenting “Gaming the Narrative”, Clint Hocking giving a case study for writers about the production of Splinter Cell, and a talk called “The Writer/Designer Tag Team” from the developers of Gears of War.

The somewhat surly NYTimes new media critic Sarah Boxer (if you recall, she wrote a pretty harsh review of the last Boston Cyberarts Festival) has been browsing web comics lately, and she’s concerned.

The comics that use digital technology to break out of their frozen boxes are really more like animated cartoons. And those that don’t are just like the old, pre-digital ones, without the allure of the printed page and with a few added headaches for reader and creator alike.

Calling all indie gamemakers: entries for the 2nd Annual Independent Games Competition at Slamdance are due October 24 for a modest $40 fee, or submit by Sept 30 to save $10. The competition, held in January in Park City, Utah alongside the Slamdance and Sundance film festivals, includes a category for student work. Check out last year’s finalists and winners.

In the past at other festivals there’s been some contention over what “indie” means; here are Slamdance’s rules this year:

Developer(s) cannot have sponsorship money exceeding $25,000.

Games published or distributed for profit before the final deadline of October 24, 2005 are ineligible.

Innovative and unusual formats, such as interactive fiction and drama, are encouraged to apply. Games must display interactivity, and be in an electronic format to be considered for the competition.

That last paragraph… hmm…

Here’s the full press release.

Clive Thompson, that squid-loving journalist who often writes about games, collision detection blogger and sometimes GTxA commenter, has a well-written new piece in last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine called “The XBox Auteurs“. Be sure to read it before it expires to the archive. The article spends most of its time profiling Rooster Teeth, a group of machinima-makers in Austin who have been producing the ongoing Halo-shot series, Red vs. Blue; read the FAQ here. Clive really likes…

…the idea that faceless, anonymous soldiers in a video game have interior lives. It’s a ”Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” conceit; ”Red vs. Blue” is what the game characters talk about when we’re not around to play with them. As it turns out, they’re a bunch of neurotics straight out of ”Seinfeld.” One recruit reveals that he chain-smokes inside his airtight armor; a sergeant tells a soldier his battle instructions are to ”scream like a woman.” And, in a sardonic gloss on the game’s endless carnage, none of the soldiers have the vaguest clue why they’re fighting.

It’s been five weeks since we released Façade, and we are hard at work at recuperating. :-) Those last few months of development work were brutal, and we’re still feeling fried, like when you cross the finish line after running a marathon and you’re bent over trying to catch your breath (not that either of us have actually run a real marathon to know what that truly feels like). That it’s summer right now is good timing, it makes our recharging more sun-filled. It’s nice to get our lives back after so long.

Here’s a “thank you” again to those who helped out during the project, from beta testers and demo assistants, to blog commenters and well-wishers offering moral support, to those proselytizing interactive drama to the non-believers, and for everyone patient enough to keep their vaporware-radar and hype-o-meters at bay during the past few years.

Thank you to those who have already donated a few bucks or euros to the project. If you enjoyed Façade (or hated it) and haven’t tossed an electronic tip our way, it’s never too late! We’re continuing to add juicy secrets to the invaluable “Behind the Façade” guide /cook’s tour — this all can be yours for a mere $5 donation. “A must-have for the interactive drama enthusiast.”

The release has been pretty smooth — we’ve just passed the 100,000 downloads mark!

There’s a new research study beginning today about chatbots, surveying people who have played with them or other conversational agents (Façade counts!), as well as those who build them.

Subject: Seeking chatbot study participants
Calling all: Chatbot Users and Chatbot Makers
If you have used or have built chatbots, or conversational agents, please participate in my online study of these research communities and their priorities. I am looking to get a sense of who make bots, who use them, and in what ways. The questions will only take a few minutes to answer, but participants can return to participate in ongoing discussions.
To participate, go to: http://wrt.ucr.edu/wordpress/chatbot-survey/
The study will begin August 8 and continue until October 15.
This is a confidential study. Please see the site for information about privacy and participation.
Mark Marino, Ph.D. Candidate, UCR., mmarino @ WriterResponseTheory.org

Over at Game/AI there’s a discussion among game AI developers about strategies for innovation, and the need for AI implementers and game designers to work much more closely together. Good stuff!

On game development: Adventure Developers has an extensive four part series on the state and future of adventure games. Via Game Brains, a fascinating and torturous series of diary entries from an indie game studio with a truly awesome game prototype that everyone agrees is amazing, yet they can’t get a publishing deal. At the Cultural Gutter, an interview with some of the folks at 42 Entertainment who say, “[Alternative Reality Games] are the sound of the 21st century. They sound like what today feels like.” Finally, recent GTxA commenter Borut Pfeifer writes an inspiring Gamasutra article The Rise of the Auteur & the Return of Indie Development (“there are a number of factors coming together over the next five to ten years that will change the nature of indie game development”).

The Gamasutra column “The Designer’s Notebook” by Ernest Adams just came out with a knock-down fabulous review of Façade. Wow!

It’s particularly nice how Ernest discusses the distinction between drama and game, and how he breaks out the various design and technology fronts that the project pushes on.

And he didn’t even tease us again for requiring installation to the c: drive! :-)

Tonight at 10pm EST on the videogame channel G4 is the premiere of a Cinematech episode called “Who’s Afraid of Interactive Drama?“, featuring Façade.

Are there any tech-savvy volunteers out there able to record and make a Quicktime movie of the show? (I don’t pay enough money per month to Comcast to get access to G4; plus, it’d be nice to have a digitized version of the episode for the archives.) Any help would be much appreciated!

I thought I’d link to a few dissertations that have been published recently that may be of interest to GTxA readers. Perfect for a summer read on the beach with your laptop, right? Here are excerpts from their abstracts.

Autonomous Expressionism and Network Arts: New Paradigms in Art, Emotional Interaction, and Information Retrieval, by David Ayman Shamma, Northwestern University
In this dissertation, I depart from traditional computer science metrics and methodologies and introduce a new framework for building computer systems with an emphasis on the creation of new artistic installations and interactions. Specifically, I introduce Autonomous Expressionism, an extension of Abstract Expressionism, whose goal optimizes the emotional experience in human computer interaction.

Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character (pdf), by Mark Riedl, North Carolina State University
In this dissertation, I explore the use of search-based planning as a technique for generating stories that demonstrate both strong plot coherence and strong character believability. First, I describe an extension to search-based planning that reasons about character intentions by identifying possible character goals that explain their actions in a plan and creates plan structure that explains why those characters commit to their goals. Second, I describe how a character personality model can be incorporated into planning in a way that guides the planner to choose consistent character behavior without strictly preventing characters from acting “out of character” when necessary. Finally, I present an open-world planning algorithm that extends the capabilities of conventional planning algorithms in order to support a process of story creation modeled after the process of dramatic authoring used by human authors.

More frolicking with robots — here’s an amusing NYTimes article on living with a 15-inch-tall walking, seeing, listening robot named Nuvo. It’s a new $6000 product recently released from a Japanese company named ZMP. From the article, “I came to understand that for all their purported helpfulness, home robots are largely about companionship.”

Submission abstracts to speak at the 2006 Game Developers Conference are due August 1st.

On GTxA we’ve already seen IKEA as adventure game — you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike — but once you make it out of the maze and you’re packing the trunk of your car with your acquired inventory to head home, how about a mini-game of IKEA Tetris?

We’re having an interesting debate over at Game Matters on the role, or desirability, of agency in games and stories. Frankly I’m surprised by what I’m reading. Please contribute if you have some thoughts on this.

Slamdance now has a student game competition, due Sept 19. ICVS poster/demo/art submissions are due July 22. And a new site Games and Storytelling out of Finland offers several videos of lectures by various folks knowledgable about the subject.

The Cultural Gutter has a new article discussing a lavish coffee-table book about Half Life 2, “featuring examples of the visually stunning work of the game accompanied by 100-word descriptions. What comes across in the book, which quotes dozens of people, is how much collaboration shaped the process.” And the LA Weekly suggests there’s a “moralgorithm” in operation when playing NBA Live 2005 for Xbox.

AI engineer extraordinaire Damian Isla has started a new group blog called Game/AI, and invited fellow AIIDE attendees Rob Zubek and Paul Tozour onboard. Damian did great work at MIT Media Lab’s now winding-down Synthetic Characters group, and since became the AI lead at Bungie for Halo2. Rob you may know from his occasional comments here on GTxA — he recently finished an excellent dissertation at Northwestern (more on that in a future post; see an older post here) and has just joined Maxis. Paul was an AI developer for Metroid Prime, Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2. One of their first discussions: ending the tyranny of hierarchical finite state machines.

The CFP is due July 8 [update: July 31] for Future Play, billed as the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology. It will be held at Michigan State University, October 13-15. Already on the lineup: John Buchanan (academic liason for EA), Chris Hecker, Ernest Adams, Brenda Harger, James Gee, Henry Jenkins, Greg Costikyan, and GTxA’s Michael Mateas giving the closing keynote.

Also there is a juried call for games — academic, experimental, independent and/or student games, due September 9.

What follows is a visually-guided tour of one particular path through last weekend’s Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in Vancouver, BC. There we so many parallel tracks of talks (8+ at times) that I’ll only be offering a sliver of what went on, but the other GTxA’ers in attendance, Mary and Michael, as well as several other bloggers out there, will surely fill in more detail and show you more images.

Before we begin, I should say there was a game studies person sorely missed at the conference (note I’m avoiding the L-word), who tells us he was off cavorting in Paris at the time and couldn’t attend. However his spirit was in Vancouver with us nonetheless, and in fact as you browse this series of pictures, I invite you to play a little game I’d like to call, “Where’s Gonzalo?”

The proceedings of the upcoming DiGRA conference are now online, giving folks a chance to read up before the ludopolooza officially begins Thursday evening in Vancouver. Looks like quite a diverse collection of ideas and arguments! Among them you can find the full text of a new paper by Michael and me, Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space. Preluded in part of last December’s Head Games discussion and sort of a companion paper to our AIIDE paper, in this new paper we talk about our take on resolving the tension between game and story: to recast interactions within a story world in terms of abstract social games, where players fire off discourse acts instead of guns, in which the player’s “score” is not communicated to the player via numbers or sliders but rather via enriched, theatrically dramatic performance.

Echoing the debates we had two years ago in both blog and book, Mark Bernstein has recently restated his argument, with the coda, “As far as I’m aware, this argument has been essentially ignored.” Actually, I responded to this argument in my First Person book essay response to his and Diane Greco’s essay (see below).

Before you stop reading, thinking this is just pointless academic jousting, let me say I think Bernstein and Greco’s argument is a good and very useful one, pushing important design issues to the fore, that I rarely see done. And although I’m not wanting to rehash the debate, it would be interesting to hear others’ take on the issue, if anyone has any new thoughts to contribute. (Mark includes a link to a good new essay from WRT on frustration with IF and HTF.)

Here’s an excerpt from my response, written four years ago, taken from the book (that you won’t find in the abbreviated version at EBR):

“Even if we could experience Hamlet on the holodeck, it wouldn’t work. Tragedy requires that the characters be blind…” I agree, it seems likely that certain types of stories such as traditional tragedy may not work as an interactive story, for the reasons Bernstein and Greco describe. Instead authors will need to tell the kinds of stories that do work interactively. Façade is a more open-ended, explorative, psychological situation. Is this drama anymore? We hope to understand this better once we get a chance to play with the finished work.

To our surprise, a New York Times reporter was at the AIIDE conference last week. The resulting article for tomorrow’s paper, “Redefining the Power of the Gamer”, posted online in both the Arts section and Technology section, consists of a series of interviews of several of the conference speakers — and leads off with a description of playing Façade, plus a screenshot and link to our website!

Although Façade is not quite released yet — we’re setting up our distribution channels as we speak — we’ve gone ahead and put up a “pre-order” e-mail address on the site (even though it will be freeware), to try to capture some of the traffic that may head our way from the article… :-)