Grand Text Auto

When asking how the humanities, the arts, and computer science can come together to create new possibilities for media making and understanding, we might choose to be purely theoretical. But why would we do this, when we have decades of experience to draw upon?

The Media Systems gathering last summer brought together a remarkable group of participants from digital arts, digital humanities, and media-focused computer science. It was convened by a historic group of partners — the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts (in their first-ever collaboration) together with both Microsoft Studios and Microsoft Research. I was amazed and pleased to spend three days with the group we assembled, discussing important topics for the future of computational media.

At UC Santa Cruz we’re launching a new professional MS in Games and Playable Media, which will be offered through our Silicon Valley campus and will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program. We are currently in the selection process for the first position to be hired, the Creative Director. Simultaneously, the job ad is now live for the Program Director. For this newly-opened position we’re seeking someone with demonstrated leadership in the games and playable media field. Application review begins May 29, 2013. The job includes program and curriculum vision, planning, management, and evaluation; teaching and advising students in the program; and ongoing professional work and/or research in the games field. Those who have already applied to the Creative Director position are encouraged to also apply for the Program Director position, if appropriate.

On May 10th, at the Computer History Museum, UC Santa Cruz will host some of the world’s most exciting thinkers on interactive storytelling for Inventing the Future of Games 2013. Rather than focus on yesterday’s tips and tricks, our focus is on how the future of interactive storytelling is being invented now. There will be talks, panels, discussion, and live demonstrations — including, I am excited to share, the first-ever public demonstration of a major, not-yet-announced interactive storytelling technology being developed by UC Santa Cruz and multiple partner organizations.

The University of California, Santa Cruz is hiring a new Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. This is someone who works full time helping students and faculty do interesting projects, thinks about the future technical direction of the program (and has a budget to purchase technical items worth investigating), helps people figure out how to exhibit and distribute their work, and manages the DANM spaces in the Digital Arts Research Center (including a black box theater, a white box gallery, a rapid prototyping lab, etc). The starting salary range is $57,500-$80,500 and review of applications begins March 20th. Please help spread the word, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

At UC Santa Cruz we are about to launch (pending final approvals) a new year-long (12 month) MS degree focused on combining technical and design innovation — to create novel possibilities for the games of today, to enable new types of games, and to explore a wide variety of next-generation playable experiences. The degree will admit students who have a background in computer science and knowledge of games. Target students include industry professionals seeking new knowledge (e.g., advanced AI techniques) and/or wanting to experience new roles (e.g., engineers seeking a move into design) as well as talented recent undergraduates who have completed technically-focused game degrees. The application deadline for this year is March 15th. The degree will be offered through our Silicon Valley campus and will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program.

Next week, among the redwoods of the UC Santa Cruz campus, we will host the Media Systems gathering. It will be the first joint activity of the NSF, NEH, and NEA — and we are also sponsored by both Microsoft Studios and Microsoft Research.

Some might wonder what such disparate funders, not to mention the people they are bringing together from different fields, could possibly have to say to each other. In ten years I predict we’ll ask, instead, “What took so long?”

Today Inside Higher Education is running an editorial of mine.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts convened a historic workshop — it was their first jointly funded project. This meeting marked the beginning of a new level of national conversation about how computer science and other STEM disciplines can work productively with arts and design in research, creation, education, and economic development. A number of projects and follow-up workshops resulted in 2011. I was lucky enough to attend three of these events and, in the midst of all the exciting follow-up conversations, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about the digital humanities?

Yesterday I held a paperback of Expressive Processing in my hand for the first time.
(This takes its price down to around $13 at places like Amazon.) I’ve also learned a number of interesting things about the book since it was published — learning more about what others think of it, of course, and also more about how the research and thinking behind the book is influencing my own work as a digital media creator. I wrote about the creation-focused set of lessons last month, in a post called Humanities-Based Game Design.

I gave a lecture yesterday with Jesper Juul and Clara Fernandez-Vara called “Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History.” It was part of the Game Education Summit at GDC and Frank Cifaldi wrote a nice discussion of a couple of the key themes for Gamasutra.

We put our slides together on Jesper’s computer, so I don’t have them all, but here are mine with my presenter’s notes (what I actually said varied, of course).

The nice thing about teaching game history now is that we’re very close to agreeing on the list of essential games, from around the world, that students need to master in an introductory game class

A number of people asked me to post my introductory slides from the “What is a Research Game” session at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Here they are with my presenter notes.

Well, what is the current role of games in universities? Here’s the stereotype: Social scientists still talk with people, but now those people are WoW players, Humanists still think deep thoughts, but now they’re about Passage, Computer Scientists still build systems, and still only far enough to publish papers, Educators still do the same type of instruction, but now they add points and badges, Artists still make and exhibit pieces, but now they reference game culture

Prom Week is about to be released and Expressive Processing is about to come out in paperback — a confluence that has me thinking about humanities-based game design, something I’ve been more actively mulling since an NSF workshop on the Future of Research in Computer Games and Virtual Worlds that UCI hosted in 2010.

Obviously I’m not the first person on this scent — on some level people have been discussing humanities-based game design at least since Brenda Laurel’s dissertation. But working on Prom Week helped me realize that I think we need to go beyond “operationalizing” models from the humanities or applying humanities ideas gleaned from studying other media as design heuristics (though these are also important approaches).

Two new pieces of writing this morning have me thinking about the future of game dialogue.

Clint Hocking suggests that our cultural expectations of dialogue need to change — dialogue isn’t bad because it’s written as a way of players coming to understand their impact on the game world. He talks about an “evolution of our cultural sensibilities” that “causes film dialogue to feel strange and old-fashioned” because it isn’t written toward this goal.

That makes sense, but the problem is that canned dialogue, even moreso than canned animation, is going to hit a wall quickly if you actually let players have an impact on the game world.

What was the first work of digital literature, or digital art? What was the first video game — the first computer game played with graphical display? These are the sorts of questions that come up when we start rummaging around in the pasts of fields, thinking about the boundaries, and thinking about trajectories that might have been.

I offer my thoughts on these questions — one answer considered, one initial and speculative — in the new book Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka.

It’s winter in Rio, but I still spent a serene morning watching the waves, while mist clung to the green hills behind.

So why the picture of a sign? It’s something even more unusual, for a visitor from the US, than a beautiful beach: a mall billboard advertising an event full of professors!

In this case it’s the Regions of Narrative / Regioes Narrativas event that brings me to Rio, running the 24th and 25th at the House of Science / Casa da Ciência. It looks like a great event — with some familiar faces and some people I’m looking forward to meeting. I’ll be talking about the present and future of game narrative, including Prom Week.

Pat Harrigan and I have just published an essay on the remarkable game Twilight Struggle in a new book that Greg Costikyan and Drew Davidson edited for ETC Press: Tabletop: Analog Game Design. We find Twilight Struggle fascinating — it is not just a game about the Cold War, in which one recapitulates many key events of that period through play, but a game that requires thinking like a cold warrior.

We have three great talks on games this week at UC Santa Cruz. All are free and open to the public. Please help spread the word!

Monday
Title: Mama Ludens vs Fanboi – What is wrong with the Gaming Revolution?
Speaker: Jessica Enevold, Assistant Professor at Lund University, Sweden and Managing Editor for the journal Game Studies
Time and Place: 2pm Monday May 16th, Engineering 2 room 599

Tuesday
Title: What will the games business look like in 5 years?
Speaker: John Davison, VP of programming at CBS Interactive for GameSpot and Metacritic
Time and Place: noon Tuesday May 17th, Media Theater (M110)

Inventing the Future of Games is a one-day symposium happening today in Silicon Valley. It gathers some of the brightest minds from universities and industry to discuss potential futures of game design and technology. To follow/discuss on Twitter the tag is #IFOG2011, and for updates afterward you can connect with the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media via Facebook or Twitter, or keep an eye on our Vimeo channel.

This morning I gave a talk in the GDC Education Summit — Interactive Storytelling: Preparing Students to Innovate — and I’m posting my slides below. As for the topic, my talk description ended up being pretty accurate:

We want students to create innovative games, but innovation in interactive storytelling can be hard to imagine for students, both undergraduate and graduate. Designing an interactive story isn’t a secret art or a matter of magical technology. It’s the design of a system, of elements and operations, just like other parts of games. We can prepare students for this work by helping them understand the history of mainstream and trailblazing projects, get experience with the tools and models available, and learn the strengths and limitations of different approaches. This lecture introduces ideas and systems your students can work with now.

At UC Santa Cruz we’re looking for someone to help us conceptualize, launch, and run a new “Center for Games and Playable Media.” We’re seeking someone who would be interested in representing Santa Cruz at events, working with the new center’s affiliates (in industry, government, etc), imagining how new game research technologies could be made into experimental games, and working with students and faculty to bring the game-related activities at Santa Cruz to the next level.

Excerpts from the official information are below. People can apply by going to http://jobs.ucsc.edu and searching for job number 1002822. Also, feel free to leave comments with questions.

NextSpace in Santa Cruz is ending its 2010 What’s Next lectures with a talk titled “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Future of Gaming and Social Media” — 7 p.m. Thursday, December 2, on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Our own Michael Mateas will be one of the panelists, along with CBS Interactive’s Simon Whitcombe and Sol Lipman of AOL / Rally Up.

The first reviews of Expressive Processing have begun to appear, and the three I’ve seen come from three distinct perspectives: a game development veteran who has become a professor, an industry computer scientist with an AI background, and a public relations intern with a games-focused website. I think the collection of perspectives is interesting, but it’s hard for others to take a look because two of the three reviews are behind paywalls. This post provides a quick peek at all three, which may be particularly interesting for those curious as to what’s being said in places where their browsers can’t tread, and identifies an area of disagreement that I hope will be addressed further in future reviews.

I have lots of book news to share. The quick news is that Kotaku’s running an excerpt from Expressive Processing and MIT Press has now published a paperback of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media — taking the price down to around $15 at online booksellers.

“Façade tried to solve this problem by replacing the parrot with something more like a brain-damaged human; Heavy Rain, by comparison, is probably the best-trained parrot in history.” From Archie Bland’s Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons?

Heather Logas only has through tomorrow to make the crowdsourced funding goal for her indie storygame — or all the funding pledged so far is lost. Heather describes the game by saying:

Remember those Choose your own Adventure books you used to love as a kid? The game is a bit like that, if it was the fevered brain child of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and H.P Lovecraft.