Grand Text Auto

Michael and I had great time last week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference (AIIDE) in Los Angeles. I’d guess there were around 80 participants, about two-thirds from academia and the rest from the game industry. There were many interesting presentations and a roomful of demos, including our now code-complete Façade, which got an enthusiastic reception. All considered the meeting a success, with plans to hold it again next year.

[Update: here’s a NYTimes article about the conference!]

What follows are raw notes from several of the talks and keynotes, in the order they were presented. Apologies if I missed a few, I occasionally had to take a break to avoid overload, and to tend the demo machine. Talk titles, and particularly prescient quotes, are highlighted in bold.

***
Doug Church — AI Tools for Generating Player-Driven Emotional Experience in Videogames
***

currently have a rise of entertainment content in games, beyond just play
not just the challenge of the game, now “entertainment”; big moments, emotional events, open ended worlds
how does AI fit in?

If you’re on the North American west coast this summer, consider attending one of these shindigs, where we’ll be giving Façade talks and demos. We’ll be posting these papers online, as well as publicly releasing Façade itself, soon.

* Artificial Intelligence and Digital Entertainment, June 1-3, Marina del Rey, Los Angeles. Our talk and demo: “Structuring Content in the Façade Interactive Drama Architecture”.

* Digital Games Research Conference — Changing Views: Worlds in Play, June 16-19, Vancouver, BC. Our talk: “Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space”.

* Chris Crawford’s Phrontisterion, June 25-26, Jacksonville, Oregon. We’ll be demoing, discussing, debating and camping.

* SIGGRAPH, July 31 – August 4, Los Angeles. I’ll be on an EA heavy panel, Believable Characters: Are AI-Driven Characters Possible, and Where Will They Take Us?

The abstracts follow:

Janet Murray asked for the answers I would have given to the questions I posed to Warren Spector, Neil Young and Tim Schafer at the recent GDC panel, Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories? I found it useful for myself to write these out, to clarify my own thinking, and to hopefully get feedback from anyone interested.

I’ll try to be succinct and specific. These answers are informed by my experience over the past 13 years developing interactive characters and stories and closely following the industry and academic R&D in the field, helping me identify what I believe is important and what’s not. (Also I’m guessing these would be answers similar to what Michael would have said had he been given more time to participate in the actual panel discussion.) For some background on the panel, you may first want to read what the panelists said: 1 2 3.

Question 1: What do you consider the most important qualities and pleasures we *don’t* yet find in today’s interactive entertainment? And why are they needed?

Boiling it down, I see three major areas sorely deficient in today’s games, that if given substantial attention from game developers, e.g. 3+ focused years of R&D, I believe would lead to some true progress toward creating authentically interactive, much more satisfying characters and stories.

While we sometimes like to abuse robots, sometimes we like to frolic with them — see this Chris Anderson blog post.

It’s reminiscent to me of Simon Penny’s charming and nimble Petit Mal.

(Okay maybe this illustration to the left is a bit of a dramatization, but I was inspired by the story.)

(via collision detection)

Game development execs are smarter than you might think — they understand what’s important. From a new NYTimes article on the upcoming generation of game consoles:

Relying solely on wide-screen, high-definition images to sell a title creates “empty visual calories,” said Glenn Entis, a vice president and the chief visual officer for Electronic Arts. “We’re looking for an emotional impact.” The company wants to create characters “that feel like there’s a mind” inside, he said.

You might ask, what’s their plan to accomplish this?

Better late than never, I hope — here’s a writeup of my experience of last March’s Game Developers Conference. Perhaps the nine weeks that have passed since GDC has given me some additional long-term perspective on it all.

Personally I had less fun at this year’s conference compared to last year, because I was more stressed out this time. I was to moderate a high-profile panel on interactive story, give a programming talk and live demo with Michael on natural language in games (which we were still preparing for until minutes before the talk), and try to network with game developers that we may try to work with in the future — all self-imposed tasks of course. But all that was enough of a load to put me into a sleep-disturbed funk for the entire GDC week and beyond.

(But now I’m feeling better, especially because our interactive drama project is now so close to completion — it has taken forever to finish up all the niggling details, but we’re really, really close.)

Okay. Informed by this year’s GDC, in this post I’d like to summarize my impressions of the overall state of commercial interactive entertainment development, as well as my take on the state of interactive story development.

…according to the the New York Times. Specifically, two articles you’ll probably either love or hate: from last weekend’s magazine, a preview / excerpt of Steven Johnson’s upcoming book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, on how the complex narratives and game-like structures of today’s best television shows give your mind a cognitive workout; and, separately, a harsh review of certain pieces at this year’s Boston Cyberarts Festival (a few being the type of work I’d probably call push-button art, if I were in a crotchety mood).

It is reported that in the next few months a browser-friendly version of what is arguably the biggest, longest-running AI project in history, Cyc, will be made available, allowing laypeople (and bots?) to access its massive common-sense knowledge base and continue tutoring it, a process ongoing for 22 years now.

There is already a limited form of Cyc available, with a recent major update.

It will be very interesting to begin playing with this knowledge base and reasoning engine, and imagining artistic applications of it. There’s already a precedent for this — six years ago Michael applied some of Cyc’s knowledge base in his ideologically-biased documentary history project Terminal Time, a collaboration with Paul Vanouse and Steffi Domike.

We knew it would happen… what took so long, really? Virtually Jenna is, I believe, the first fully explicit, hard-core 3-D animated virtual sex game. Billed as “gamerotica”, it’s more like lewdology. Ostensibly the goal is to get Jenna’s Excite-O-Meter to the max, but based on the graphic sample videos on the website, I suspect players may be content to just, well, screw around. According to a review in Wired you can control male or female sex partners for Jenna, sex toys and a disembodied hand, as well as a camera for pornographic photo shoots, in all their high polygon-count, texture-mapped glory.

The sixth annual Ludum Dare 48-hour Game Programming Competition, aka LD48, starts tomorrow at 10pm US EDT. As of this moment, 21 hours and 36 minutes before competition begins, there are currently 123 entrants, ready to go with their compilers and libraries of choice, and presumably large caches of caffeinated beverages, frozen burritos and power bars.

Latin for “to give free play to“, Ludum Dare (pronounced ‘Lude-um Dar-ay’) “is a ‘mostly from scratch’, timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme”. Voting is almost over for choosing that common theme, which includes ideas such as “repetition”, “kitchen combat”, “goop”, and “that tickly feeling in your stomach (not quite love)”.

Idle Thumbs — a scrappy, well-written games journalism site that I think is getting ever more impressive — has a new piece called Games Beyond ‘Games’, reporting on last February’s Innovation in Games Symposium in the Netherlands. A quote from a struggling indie game developer who presented at the symposium:

[T]here is a market for innovative games, there is a desire to make them, there is a need to do research into them, but the games industry is not the place where this will happen.

And speaking of the Orisinal games, you’ll find a creative review of several of them Idle Thumbs as well.

This week in Lausanne, Switzerland is EvoMUSART, a workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art. Papers include “Genetic Paint: A Search for Salient Paintings”, “Artificial Life, Death and Epidemics in Evolutionary, Generative Electronic Art”, and “Extra-Music(ologic)al Models for Algorithmic Composition”. Here is the abstract of Jon McCormack’s “Open Problems in Evolutionary Music and Art”, that looks particularly interesting to me:

Posts from me will be few and far between for the next month or so, as they have been since GDC — we’re in the final stretch of debugging, audio editing and polishing Façade, and unfortunately I’ll have little mental space or energy left over for blogging until it’s done. (done… what a concept… unimaginable, really…)

I do promise to find the time to finish writing up my impressions of GDC, I just can’t predict when. I’ve made some notes, so I won’t forget it all.

For now, please direct your attention to a new well-written piece by Adam Cadre, who is enjoying the company of another conversational virtual character.

From the call for proposals for one of 4 themes of the next ISEA, in San Jose:

The Interactive City seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone else’s shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games with a global audience, projects for the Interactive City should transform the “new” technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and locative media into experiences that matter. … Interactive City proposals should embrace aspects of the city of San José and/or the surrounding metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area specifically. We are seeking projects that are large in scale, require advanced or special planning and/or permissions.

I’ll try to fit this
in a small space —
folks in Japan are
reading novels on
cellphones, one
little chunk of text
at a time.
(via if:book)

A new group blog called Game Eaters kicks off by serving up writeups of day 1 and 2 of the Living Game Worlds symposium at Georgia Tech, including Ian Bogost comparing videogame communities to soup. Mmm.
(via Ludonauts)

p.s. those writeups of GDC will continue next week… still digesting it all… my plate is overflowing this week…

I’d like to write up my impressions of GDC this year in a series of smaller posts instead of a single huge one.

One of the comments that came out during the panel discussion Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories is that the game industry has yet to reach its “Citizen Kane moment”. This is the idea or hope that at some point someone will finally create a game that uses the medium in such radically new ways that it uncovers a new grammar of expression, and in the process reaches new artistic heights.

Maybe it’s the lingering effects of GDC on my perception, and I’m really really not intending to make light of a tragedy, but aren’t parts of this horrific news report from Duluth, Georgia of a prisoner who overpowered a guard and killed several people perversely resonant with the simulated and networked age we live in?

In the course of Mr. Nichols’s escape, he hijacked at least three cars and a tow truck in quick succession, boarded the Atlanta commuter train and stole the agent’s truck, officials said. … Mr. Nichols, 33, surrendered after … apparently learned he was surrounded by watching television coverage of the operation.

I’m not suggesting any causal relationship between simulations of violence and real life violence, I’m just noticing how, for me, it’s becoming somehow easier and easier to compare features of the two, or at least to the media representations of the real life violence. It really bothers me that I’m compelled to make this (admittedly simplistic) observation at all.

Wonderland has blogged two talks from yesterday’s day 1 of the Serious Games Summit at GDC: Raph Koster on fun and Cory Ondrejka on Second Life. Good stuff.

It’s perhaps not the most high-tech painter AI out there, nor is it quite an AI-assisted content creator as I would envision one, and its “I am an artist” claim is a stretch, but Daria has created a few canvases I found interesting. Reminiscent of Gnoetry, but probably technically simpler, the “distributed system of server components that collectively combine to become an autonomous creative unit” Daria takes your keyword or words, searches the Web or some custom database of related text and imagery (I’m not sure which), parses its found text and selects some of it, selects and filters some part or parts of images, and then composites the text and image fragments into a final picture.

Designer extraordinaire and long-time blogger Jason Kottke has taken the plunge and quit his day job, to blog full-time. Referring to that excellent comics issue of McSweeney’s, that I too greatly enjoyed, Kottke writes,

Chris Ware notes that “in the past decade or so, comics appear to have gained some greater measure of respect, due in no small part to the number of cartoonists who have begun to take the medium seriously”. This is me taking online personal publishing seriously because I feel it deserves as much.

Alright! … but, um… how’s he going to pay his rent?

A quick link to throw out there: working off of an essay written about a year by Kieron Gillen ago calling for a New Games Journalism, described by the Guardian as “a highly subjective approach to videogame writing in which the player’s own experiences within the game environment are brought to the fore”, the Guardian has compiled a top ten list of noteworthy examples. (via gamegirladvance)

Before Will Wright regales us with The Future of Content, I’d like to get in a few words, to “put down on blog” a few concerns I’ve been mulling over.

There is a serious problem, I believe, that doesn’t get enough attention: by and large, people are not enabled to create dynamic content for interactive experiences. Many people want to do it, I’ve noticed, but most are unable to. And, the path to allowing this to happen is not an easy one.

What does dynamic content mean? In an interactive medium, this means content that is alive, not dead; that reacts to and acts upon other content; content that is not immobile or frozen. Not mere skins, static models, layouts of walls and hallways, or chunks of linear text — but moving, behaving, reactive content: machines, automata, manipulators, generators, even intelligent characters and lifeforms.

First a few words on why users creating dynamic content matters, then some thoughts on solutions.

The next International Conference on Virtual Storytelling will be held November 30 to December 2, 2005 in Strasbourg, France. Submissions are due May 27. See our trip report from 2003’s ICVS.

Janet Murray is already lined up to be one of the keynote speakers; two more are to be announced.

(Uh oh, speaking of scheduling conflicts — ICVS overlaps with Digital Arts and Culture, a few hundred miles to the north in Copenhagen! Hmm, maybe a flight to Paris, a train to Strasbourg, a commuter jet to Copenhagen…)

By the way, if I butchered that French, please blame it on Lycos.

Head over to Central Park West this Thursday to check out some innovative art — yes, that, but also a presentation at the American Musuem of Natural History comprised of folks from Amorphic Robot Works and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. “Three artist-programmers, each of whom specializes in building robots, show and tell how they make machines that mimic humans and create art.” (via NYTimes)