Grand Text Auto

If there’s an essay on machinima you’ve been burning to write, now’s your opportunity. Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche are editing The Machinima Reader, the first collection of essays to critically review the phenomenon of machinima from a variety of prespectives. 500 word abstracts should be sent as RTF files to Michael Nitsche (michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu) and Henry Lowood (lowood@stanford.edu) by April 3, 2006. If your abstract is accepted, final essays should be 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006. Here’s the full CFP:

Scott Fisher gave a talk at Tech today on ubiquitous storytelling. Scott’s been visiting Tech for the last couple of days – Ian and I enjoyed a nice dinner out with him last night.

More DAC…

OK, I guess it’s my turn to blog now. So it continues…

We have a couple of tenure-track faculty openings in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech.

Positions in Digital Media

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture is seeking to fill two (2) positions at the rank of assistant or associate professor in the emerging discipline of Digital Media. Applicants should have expertise in one or more of the fields listed below and be prepared to teach at the undergraduate and graduate level in LCC’s suite of programs in computational and digital media. A Ph.D. in an appropriate field is required, as is computational proficiency and a demonstrated capacity for significant original research/creative work. Expertise in educational technology is desirable, as is a proven record or significant potential in generating external funding.

The recently released Curator Defense (also an IGF submission this year) puts the player in the role of a museum curator defending against rampaging hoards of modern art (it’s unclear whether this means modern art or contemporary art). Using a light, RTS-like tech tree, the player can set up various defenses, such as banisters, defense turrets, and the Venus de Willendorf, to prevent modern art from reaching the store room. Once a piece reaches the store room, it becomes part of the permanent collection, displacing one of your Old Masterpieces. You loose when your entire collection has been replaced with modern art. Thanks to Zach Pousman for this one.

I’m continuing my live blogging of Games For Health.

Chris Foster
Baltimore Business and Economic Development

Invests in life science industry. Spends most of the talk on the wellness crises facing the nation and the world.
Mentions that there would be a $165 billion a year savings from moving to an electronic, unified health care record; “how can we not afford to do that, given that we have a crisis of cost in health care?”

Thought I’d do some live blogging from Games for Health in Baltimore.

Steven Downs
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Talked about why the foundation is interested in funding games for Health. They fund it under their “emerging health care applications” umbrella – he noted that the irony is that games are not “emerging”, they’re already here.

CGAMES, the 7th international conference on computer games, will be held November 28-30 in Angoulême, France. CGAMES follows on CGAIDE 2004, a conference focusing on game AI, design, and education. See below for the full description of the call for papers. Submission deadline is September 30th. The timing is perfect for combining this with a trip to DAC.

Lisbeth Klastrup is a visiting scholar here this semester. It’s great to have her be a member of the game research community at Tech for awhile (she’s actually been her for three weeks already, but better late than never in welcoming her…). As an ethnographic self-study project, she’s moblogging her life while she’s here, to get a sense of what moblogging feels like. So far her moblog posts have a melancholy feel, focusing on breakdowns in the physical and social infrastructure in Atlanta. Of course, adjusting to living in a new country is bound to make one feel a bit melancholy. I look forward to seeing Atlanta through her eyes via her moblog. I’ll have to have her visit my neighborhood so she can record impressions. Welcome Lisbeth!

The call for papers is up for ACE 2006 – Agent Construction and Emotions:
Modeling the Cognitive Antecedents and Consequences of Emotion. This is the latest in a series of workshops on modeling emotions in autonomous agents.

While this topic is obviously relevant to anyone building autonomous characters, there’s an interesting tension between functionalist models of emotion that are concerned with how emotion serves as an internal resource for guiding decision making (emotions make us more rational), and computational models of emotion for believable characters that must respond to and convey emotion.

Atlanta-based Kaneva has a beta release of their Kaneva Game Platform. What makes this different from the myriad other modding frameworks and game engines out there, is that this engine supports the creation of MMO games, hosted on the Kaneva website. Currently the engine seems targeted at supporting FPS and RPG style games. According to their licensing faq, you can use the engine for free to create your game, and host the game for development purposes (up to five simultaneous players) on Kaneva’s servers. You can self-host games for free, with up to 30 simultaneous players, but can’t charge for your game. Or you can get a commercial license to host your MMO on Kaneva’s servers; you decide how much to charge for your game, Kaneva runs the infrastructure and billing. The royalties the developer gets on the net revenues slide from 50% – 70%, depending on the monthly net (this handy table lets you fantasize about how much money you’d receive in royalties a month on a $10.00 monthly subscription). It’s an interesting model, requiring no upfront cost to license the engine, reasonable royalties on the subscription income, and no investment in billing or server infrastructure. This should allow indy developers to get into the MMO market relatively risk free…

A recent New York Times article describes a new Pentagon research project in which 15 researchers are being trained at the American Film Institute on how to write sellable Hollywood screenplays. The reason?

Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?

Alison Mealey is creating procedural visual art using Unreal. She sets up custom maps, has AI bots play against each other on the map, logging each bot’s (x,y) location once a second, and then uses Processing to render the log file as an image. Thanks to Jose for the pointer.

Andrew and I were at Phrontisterion VI this last weekend. The timing was perfect – we’d just finished our final build of Façade (!!) a day or two before the Phront.

A regular thread of discussion on GTxA is the artist/programmer debate and related issues of procedural literacy for digital media artists and theorists. In this light, it was nice to see this 23 year old magazine cover depicting Chris as an artist/programmer hanging on the wall.

[Update July 6: Chris’ conference report is online.]

On October 14, 2005, MetaScholar Initiative at Emory University is hosting Free Culture & the Digital Library. “This interdisciplinary symposium, featuring Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan, will explore the relationship between digital access to public cultural information and intellectual property constraints. In recent years, new legal limitations in the United States have affected public access to the materials held in a variety of different open digital library infrastructures, ranging from those of the Library of Congress to Kazaa. As new technological possibilities and laws governing their many uses emerge, it becomes critical to examine the relationship between digital innovation and legal regulation. This symposium seeks to promote a better understanding of the associated impacts of these changes on the local, national and international levels, both now and in the future.” So come down to Atlanta and get your dose of Free Culture.

I spent Thursday at the ACH/ALLC conference in Victoria. I was invited to participate in the panel Story Generation: Models and Approaches for the Generation of Literary Artifacts, organized by Jan Christoph Meister and Birte Loenneker. The panel consisted of three presentations: Chris and Birte with “Dream On: Designing the Ideal Story Generator Algorithm”, Federico Peinado (whom I met at TIDSE last summer) with “A Generative and Case-Based Implementation of Proppian Morphology”, and myself with “Beyond Story Graphs: Story Management in Game Worlds”. Chris and Birte define paper-and-pencil story generation architectures with the aim of pushing on structuralist narratology. The goal of the work is to integrate various narratological theories, reveal where these theories are underspecified (their architectures are much more detailed than narratological theories expressed in natural language), and push narratology in new directions. Reminds me of some of Marie Laure-Ryan’s work, particularly in Possible Words, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Birte coined the term “computational narratology” (has a nice ring to it) to describe this work. Fernando, a Ph.D. student working with Pablos Gervas (who has himself done work in poetry generation), described a case-based story generator based on Propp’s story functions. Given an initial user query specifying the story functions that should appear in the story, the system recalls the most similar story from its case base and performs generate-and-test on the retrieved case. This consists of randomly tweaking the story (performing story function substitutions) many times, stopping when a story is found that both includes the functions requested by the user and satisfies constraints captured by the ontology. He is starting a project with Birte to implement within his system the architectural theory she and Chris have developed for discourse-level manipulation (e.g. flashbacks, flash forward). Finally, I talked about what happens when generation is combined with real-time interactivity, presented story management as a far more scaleable and robust alternative to story graphs, described the author-centric viewpoint that infuses my approach to Expressive AI (I don’t care about automation for automation’s sake, but about building architectures with powerful authorial affordances), and gave an overview and comparison of both the beat-based drama manager used in Facade and the search-based drama manager proposed and Bates and Weyhrauch and recently revived in my own work (more on this in a later post).

Andrew did a great job posting his talk notes for AIIDE. In this post I’ll describe some of my reactions and thoughts to the talks and conversations I had at AIIDE.

Chris Crawford

Andrew and I are certainly in agreement with Chris about the need to increase verb counts in order to achieve interactive story. But Chris strongly wants to avoid natural language, and instead move to a custom logographic language. Further, he wants to use parse technology to provide constraints as the player writes sentences in the custom language – I imagine something like pop-up menus. I understand the impulse to avoid natural language (seems like an impossible, AI complete problem) and to prevent the player from being able to form nonsensical sentences, but I worry that:
1) logographic languages will feel unnatural
2) a pre-parse interface that constrains what symbols you can use based on the symbols you’ve used so far will prevent players from being able to speak in their own style.

Two more game conferences are happening soon. First, for those who don’t have the time to travel, there’s On Demand Games: The First Webcast Conference, with notable game industry folk including Raph Koster discussing online gaming. The conference is is on June 1st, 2005, from 9:30 am – 12:30 pm EST. Registration is free, but there’s limited space, so sign up today.

Second, there’s the Games, Learning and Society Inaugural Conference to be held June 23 and 24 in Madison, Wisconsin. “The GLS Conference will foster substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education.”

Well, it’s been forever since I’ve blogged; the last couple of months have been truly brutal. With Spring “break” upon me (my break involves catching up on all the things I’m ludicrously far behind on), I thought I’d try to sneak in a blog post or two. The big recent events to report on are my trip to GDC and the Living Gameworlds Symposium we hosted at Tech last week.

I didn’t have nearly as good a time at GDC this year as last, mostly due to the horrible cold I came down with the day I flew out. I spent the majority of the conference in an addled daze, finally feeling human the day I flew back. So here follow my fever-crazed impressions of GDC. To cut to the chase:

1. The industry is beginning a phase transition into procedurality (code as content). The transition will take a long time to complete, requiring, as it does, fundamental new skills (procedural literacy, anyone?).
2. Next-gen consoles are going to be even more ludicrously expensive to develop games for (at least the old-fashioned content-shoveling way). AAA games will require teams of 300+ and commensurately large budgets. Therefore console games will be dominated by giant studios making risk-free titles. Maybe procedurality will save us (see point 1).
3. Still lots of grumbling in the trenches about lack of innovation in the game industry and perma-crunch development schedules (see points 1 and 2).
4. The “story” hype-wave is no longer peaking as it was a couple of years ago. Though there were a couple of events about the future of interactive story (including Andrew’s panel), they mostly had the flavor of “we’ll, we haven’t made much progress” or “we don’t know how to make progress”. Much of the “story” stuff at GDC has now been pushed into routine game design forums (writing dialog for characters, creating linear storylines for games, cut-scene design, etc.). The hunger for real interactive story seems to be on the wane.
5. “Everybody’s upgrading, nobody’s downgrading”

The schedule and registration information for the Living Game Worlds Symposium at Georgia Tech is now available. This is the symposium in honor of Will Wright that I mentioned earlier.

Ian has started blogging his experience at the Slamdance Game Competition. Sounds like he’s having a great time. His first post is a reflection on the question “What is an indie game?”, fueled by his conversation with The Behemoth, the studio that created Alien Hominid.

I recently wrote a paper (draft) that builds on previous posts on GTxA on procedural literacy (1 2). It argues that New Media scholars and practitioners must be procedurally literate (which includes knowing how to program), and that games (and game-like artifacts), because of their fundamentally procedural nature, can serve as ideal objects around which to organize a New Media-centric introduction to Computer Science. I welcome any comments on the draft.

Intellectual property in the context of games and new media is one of our regular themes here at GTxA (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9). So I was particularly struck by the IP concerns raised in More than Human, an article appearing in CIO Magazine (“The Resource for Information Executives”). The article matter-of-factly explores the corporate implications of transhumanism, particularly for Chief Information Officers. As corporate employees enhance their bodies and minds, there will be the need to adjust digital rights management policies.

When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing a contractually limited form of amnesia.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute is joining the ranks of schools offering game-related degree programs with its new four-year undergraduate program in computer game design. Like Georgia Tech’s undergraduate program in Computational Media, Worcester’s program combines training in computer science and the humanities (though the article incorrectly says that Worcester program is “the first field of study of its kind” to do this – Tech’s program has already launched). Interestingly, the article quotes CMU ETC’s Jesse Shell as having reservations about such programs. The ETC’s approach is to bring in students with traditional undergraduate training in the arts, humanities or engineering/computing and train them to be interdisciplinary at the masters level (similar to the approach in Tech’s IDT masters program). Schell is concerned that students in an interdisciplinary undergraduate program will have breadth without depth. My response is that at the masters level it may be too late to create designer/programmers who truly have interdisciplinary skills, people who won’t just be prepared to work as anonymous specialists on large game design teams, butwill rather be the leaders who invent new genres of interactive entertainment.