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Greg Cato, a friend of mine from my Carnegie Mellon days (we met in Simon Penny’s Agents and Embodiment seminar), has a new game blog up: overanalyzed.com. His most recent post describes his experience trading MMO currency in real-world markets from his perspective as a former day-trader. His frank discussion of the intersection of virtual and real marketplaces spawned a recent terra nova thread.
The SIGGRAPH Panels program is up. They’re accepting panels in a two-phase process this year. First, panel proposals were submitted Nov. 3 and a selection of panel topics was accepted. Now everyone can submit position papers to the accepted panels; panels will be dynamically composed out of the best submissions. Most of the panel topics are of interest to GTxA readers including:
Here at the real Experimental Game Lab :), we’re pleased to announce the symposium Living Game Worlds: Community, Simulation and the Future of Entertainment, to be held in honor of Will Wright March 15-16, 2005. Wright will be at Georgia Tech to accept the prestigious Ivan Allen award in recognition of his ground-breaking work in game design (the previous two Ivan Allen award winners are Jimmy Carter and Sam Nunn). Based on conversations with Will, we’re putting together a custom symposium organized around topics that Will wants to engage. We’ll have panels on Procedural Narrative, Procedural Content, and New Entertainment Genres, as well as demos/performances by leading machinima and demoscene practitioners. I’ll post a link to the final schedule when it becomes available.
The New York Times today has an article on story generation: Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite! The article mentions several well known systems, including Selmer Bringsjord’s Brutus and Callaway’s and Lester’s Storybook. The most amusing single line: “Still, what has been accomplished so far is scary enough, and surely there is more to come, thanks to rapid advances in computing power and the rise of “narratology” (how stories are told) as an academic field of study, among other unwholesome trends that are making the novelist’s life ever more perilous.” I particularly like the scare quotes around “narratology”, especially given the infamous debate that never happened.
UC Riverside isn’t the only place discussing GTA: San Andreas. This last Monday, in the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech, we held a group play-session and discussion of the game (part of the Game Night series we’ve started in the lab). At our next Game Night we’re discussing Fable: we want to compare two recent, large open-world games back-to-back.
The discussion left me feeling disappointed with San Andreas. With all the positive reviews, I had expectations for an even higher-agency GTA III experience. While there are some hilights (the rhetoric of poverty implied in only being able to eat crappy fast food, the character-appropriate accessorizing, the gang reputation system), I actually felt like I had less agency in this game than in previous installments. The fundamental gameplay is almost identical to GTA III: now the game is just really really big, with a simple RPG stats system attached.
The Subtle Technologies Festival will take place May 26-May 29, 2005, in Toronto Canada. Symposium submissions are due January 15th, 2005. This year, in addition to the usual diverse program, there is a special session celebrating the “World Year in Physics”; artists and scientists who investigate physics in their work (for scientists, presumably something different than standard disciplinary physics?), are encouraged to apply.
Recognized internationally as a unique forum that encourages new insights and collaborations between artists and scientists, Subtle Technologies challenges physicists, geneticists, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, architects, dancers, media artists and musicians to contemplate how art and science act upon one another and reshape perspectives.
Well, it’s been forever since I’ve had a chance to post. Lame… I’ll try to write a real post soon, but in the mean time, please enjoy this lovely job ad for two positions at Georgia Tech. If you do new media work at the intersection of theory and practice, please consider applying; we’d love to have you on the LCC team.
Budget permitting, the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology will make two tenure-track assistant professor appointments.
1) Film and Media Studies with an emphasis on the intersection of traditional and digital media. Preference for an established research trajectory and teaching experience that could include film history, film theory, media studies, and digital technology with possible additional interests in television and cross-cultural issues.
2) Digital Media Theory and Practice. Requires evidence of sophisticated digital practice and theoretical insight in one or more of the following areas: interactive cinema or documentary, enhanced television, immersive environments, multi-user environments, games as social networks, procedural art, electronic literature, or information architecture. Both positions offer the opportunity for graduate and undergraduate teaching. Normal teaching load is 2/2. Ph.D. or appropriate terminal degree required for both positions.
After being tarred with the Republican brush for mentioning Take Back Illinois, an email came across my inbox that fortuitously allows me to reestablish my liberal credentials. Steffi Domike, one of my collaborators on Terminal Time, sent me a link to a book excerpt appearing on the (far) right-wing site FrontPage Magazine. In an excerpt from the “expose” 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Charitable Giving, the authors chastise her for (via the Heinz foundation) supporting, among other things, Terminal Time. While I certainly got a good chuckle out of this, I was disappointed to see them refer to Terminal Time as a video. Given my work in AI-based generative art, I would never create a mere video, but only machines that can generate countless videos. Also, the writer misses the point that Terminal Time operationalizes radical, monomaniacal ideologically biased reasoning; indeed, the excerpt looks like it could have been generated by Terminal Time.
Over at watercoolergames, Ian Bogost has announced Persuasive Games’ latest political game Take Back Illinois, a four part game commisioned by the Illinois House Republican Organization. The game explores four Illinois state political issues, medical malpractice reform, education, participation, and economic development. Currently, only the medical malpractice reform game is active – the other games will be released during the coming weeks.
The deadline for entries in the Life 7.0 art and artificial life competition is Wednesday, November 3, 2004.
Announcing the sixth edition of the competition on “art and artificial life” sponsored by the Telefonica Foundation in Madrid. We are looking for outstanding electronic art projects employing techniques such as digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, computer viruses, wetware, embodied artificial intelligence, avatars, evolving behaviours and virtual ecosystems.
An international jury — Chris Csikszentmihalyi (US), Daniel Garcia Andujar (Spain), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico/Canada), Jose-Carlos Mariategui (Peru), Fiona Raby (UK) and Nell Tenhaaf (Canada)– will grant four cash awards totaling 20,000 Euros.
The call for papers for the next DIGRA conference is available. Abstracts are due November 30th, 2004.
In contemporary commercial game design, natural language interaction is avoided like the plague. If the player needs to “talk” to characters in the world, designers typically employ menus (either dialog trees containing explicit dialog, or flat dialog action menus containing actions such as flirt, insult, etc.) or simply can the entire conversation by providing a talk command. Barring occasional experiments with limited speech recognition (e.g. Lifeline, Seaman, Babyz), developers are skeptical of natural language understanding (NLU), remembering the frustrations of the well-known parser failures of text-based interactive fiction, and noting that NLU requires human-level AI to solve in the general case.
Ultimately, however, in order to create adult experiences containing rich characters addressing complex themes, games will have to use language, and thus will have to tackle NLU. Players will want and need to communicate a large set of possible meanings to the characters (and of course the characters, as well as the large scale structure of the game, should be responsive to those meanings). Any explicit choice approach to conveying this large range of meanings (e.g. dialog menus, discourse act menus, constructive interfaces that let you put together sentences out of parts) introduces a number of problems, including foregrounding the boundaries of the experience (the player immediately sees the full range of possibilities), making all choices appear equally salient, and making action selection unwieldy (and potentially unmanageable).
Alex McLean recently published Hacking Perl in Nightclubs at perl.com. Alex is a musician who performs electronic music by hacking music generation perl code live in a front of the audience. He’s also one of the founders, along with Nick Collins, of the Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming.
Why does Alex do perl programming performances? He says:
However, when running my Perl scripts during a performance I grew to feel as if I wasn’t really performing — I was running software I’d written earlier, so to some extent the performance was pre-prepared. I could tweak parameters and so on, but the underlying structure was dictated by my software. So what’s the alternative?
Over the last couple of months, I’ve moved toward writing software live, in front of an audience. If a programmer is onstage, then they should program!
FILE, an electronic art and game festival in Brazil has now made their online digital magazine FILE SCRIPT available. Relevant to our recent discussion of Simon Penny’s ISEA talk on behavioral or generative art, FILE SCRIPT has an interesting article on meta-art, first describing telecommunication and telewriting experiments as a kind of meta-art (the artist is constructing, not a work, but a context in which art “happens”), and then moving on to extend the term meta-artist to include “…computational systems or softwares that attain quasi-autonomy in making their design decisions or that may even be designed to evolve in complexity as they learn through experience in their sign-processing endeavors.” The article looks at several image generation (including Aaron) and poetry generation systems.
I was pleased by the reception of Façade at ISEA. There was pretty much someone playing it all the time, and often a line waiting to play.
This post was jointly written by Michael and Noah.
ISEA was a remarkable concentration of people bringing together technology and the arts. But there was an odd fixation, in many of the discussions, on the notion of “art/sci collaborations.” It seems that many who spoke at ISEA think of “artist” and “scientist” as exclusive categories — inhabitants of each unable to even glimpse far within the culture of the other, much less participate in both cultures. Significant work is needed, we were told, to find better ways for these vastly different beings to communicate and collaborate, so that the work of art/sci can move forward.
What makes this puzzling is that much of the foundational work for the ISEA community was created by people like Myron Krueger — people who worked on both the scientific and artistic aspects of their projects. People who saw these aspects as inextricably entwined (or “deeply intertwingled”) rather than as the separate territory of deeply different types of people.
On August 2nd The Third Place Gallery launched its new Game Art gallery. From August 2nd to September 30th the gallery is open to submission of any piece of art which is inspired by the world of electronic games
The judges will pick out art pieces for exhibitions in their personal galleries; one work in each category will receive a grand prize of €2000.
In Dance Voldo Dance, my favorite Soul Caliber character, Voldo, dances to Nelly’s Hot in Heer. Since word of this video has already been circulating around the blogosphere for a couple of weeks, I’ve been resisting posting about it here. But I enjoyed the video so much that I decided a “me too” post was fine. All moves in this video are in-game; no programming or game hacking is involved. While there’s alot of Machinima being produced these days, most of it is narrative; I enjoyed the pure dance performance of this piece of Machinima, a performance enabled by Voldo’s freaky double-jointed moves and enhanced by his S&M attire. While Dance Voldo Dance was carefully choreographed, I can imagine a new fighting game performance form in which two or more players improvise to music in real-time, perhaps done as a competition with the audience serving as judges.
As promised, here’s (finally) my trip report for the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI. The report is really a bunch of notes I took about the various talks, lightly edited to make them more readable. I didn’t quite manage to take notes for everyone’s talk, but did for most of them. After the workshop, I spent a week on the West Coast visiting a number of game companies (Will Wright’s group at Walnut Creek, the Sims 2 Maxis folk at EA headquarters, and Sony Electronic Entertainment US R&D where Craig Reynolds works) and going to my 20 year high school reunion (“Go Senators“).
I’m blogging from the AAAI workshop on challenges in Game AI. I’ve seen many interesting presentations, and will post a trip report later. But for now, I wanted to post a link to Craig Reynolds’ new Game Research and Technology page. It’s a great resource. He’s just made the page public, and is looking for feedback and suggestions for additional pointers, so don’t be shy about mailing him suggestions for the page.
As promised, here is the long-delayed second half of my TIDSE 2004 trip report.
The second day opened with an invited talk from Ron Baeker, a computer graphics pioneer. He described a new initiative at the University of Toronto: Knowledge Media Design (KMD). KMD are computational media that systematically embody knowledge in a way that encompasses data and process, as well as task space and interpersonal space (social component of tasks and media). The focus is on systems that support human creativity and control, rather than on systems that autonomously generate media artifacts. The best part of the talk was some of the videos he showed of his early work. The first video showed the Genesys animation system that he built in 1966 at the Lincoln Labs at MIT. Genesys allowed users to construct animations by tracing animation paths on a screen. Interestingly, given the discussions on virtual humans at the conference, he did some work in the mid-60s on a system that supported the animation of stick figures. It turned out to be difficult to maintain the constraints between the various parts of the stick figure, so he “moved on to easier problems.” Some of his early projects involved looking at program code as a form of human communication, something which, given all the writing I’ve done on GrandTextAuto about programming as an expressive media, why artists should program, and so forth, I heartily agree with. One of these projects explored the idea of a program book. If software is to truly have a long life, the code should be published as a designed book, with the full source code printed in the book in such a way as to facilitate reading the principles, design decisions, issues, and so forth that are expressed in the code itself. He showed some pictures of The Eliza Book, one of the program books that they made. I’d love to leaf through this book!
Three upcoming conferences explore interactive narrative and characters from an AI perspective.
Update 7/7/04 (Andrew): A fourth has been added at the end of this message.
A special track on artificial intelligence in music and art will be part of the 18th international FLAIRS conference in Clearwater Beach, Florida, May 16-18, 2005. They invite original and unpublished contributions on AI applications in the analysis, composition, generation, interpretation, performance, evaluation, classification, and data mining of artifacts from various creative endeavors and fields, such as visual art, graphics, video, music, sounds, architecture, design of physical artifacts, sculpture, literature, poetry, etc. Besides being published in the FLAIRS proceedings, a selection of papers from this track will appear in a special issue on “AI Tools in Music and Art” to appear in the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT). The submission deadline is October 15th, 2004.
A EUSAI2004 Workshop on Life-Like Robots in Ambient Intelligent Environments will be held November 8th, 2004, in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Whereas previous work focussed on the social aspect of robots and life-like virtual characters, this workshop wants to explore the field of interactive life-like robots that are situated in an ambient intelligent environment. Questions to be investigated includ:
Marc Boehlen and I explored some of these issues with Office Plant #1. It’s nice to see a whole workshop organized around this theme. Submissions are due September 10th, 2004.
I recently returned from TIDSE 2004 (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment). Here’s the first part of my trip report from this conference.
Norman Badler (keynote)
Norman Badler opened the conference with a keynote titled Embodied Agents and Meaningful Motion. He began by describing the gulf between the world of computer graphics and the world of artificial intelligence, noting that virtual humans must integrate techniques from both fields in order to support compelling interactions between real and virtual people. He described his own work on the EMOTE motion quality model, based on Laban motion analysis, that provides a parameterized model that procedurally modifies the affective quality of humanoid motion, given 8 high-level parameters. The best part of the talk was his list of the myths that many virtual humans researchers are guilty of believing (he noted that he didn’t mean to single out any one researcher, and that he himself has been guilty of believing many of these).
The 3rd European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art, EvoMUSART 2005, will be held March 30 – April 1 2005, in Lausanne, Switzerland. EvoMUSART focuses on the use of evolutionary techniques (genetic algorithms, genetic programming) for generative music and art. Submissions are due November 5, 2004. Topics of interest include:
FILE, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica (Electronic Language International Festival), will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from November 22nd to December 12th, 2004. Submissions are due June 15. FILE will consist of four simultaneous events:
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