Grand Text Auto

The Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine is a dedicated exhibition space — as well as a producing institution — for art and technology projects. They’ve had exciting game-focused exhibitions, interactive narrative installations, and much more. They’re currently calling for exhibition proposals for 2007-08. The deadline is October 20, and more details follow.

The job ads are coming thick this time of year. Particularly promising ones have just been posted by Georgia Tech (review begins October 15) and UC Davis (review begins November 15).

Most discussions of story generation begin by considering James Meehan’s Tale-Spin (1976) — and deservedly so. Meehan’s project made the leap from assembling stories out of pre-defined bits (like the pages of a Choose Your Own Adventure book) to generating stories via carefully-crafted processes that operate at a fine level on story data. In Tale-Spin‘s case, the processes simulate character reasoning and behavior, while the data defines a virtual world inhabited by the characters. As a result, while altering one page of a Choose Your Own Adventure leaves most of its story material unchanged, altering one behavior rule or fact about the world can lead to wildly different Tale-Spin fictions.

There are two publications that already do a good job of telling us about Tale-Spin: Meehan’s dissertation (The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer, 1976) and a chapter in Inside Computer Understanding: Five Programs Plus Miniatures, 1981 (edited by Roger Schank and Christopher Riesbeck). But these sources don’t tell us much about Tale-Spin‘s story. Reading these publications we don’t learn many behind-the-scenes details about Tale-Spin‘s development, or get much sense of the process of Meehan’s work on it.

So, with help from his former student Walt Scacchi, I recently got in touch with Meehan. Now at Google, he was willing to take the time to write up a short narrative of Tale-Spin‘s development. The result was so good that I asked him if I could post it here for the wider GTxA readership, and he kindly agreed. He wrote:

Roger Schank arrived at Yale in the fall of 1974 as a charismatic hot-shot in natural language processing, pushing the idea that everything you know about language is wrong (more or less). Language was not essentially about grammar and other formalisms; language was intertwined with cognition. If I don’t understand what you’re talking about, it doesn’t matter whether I recognize the structure of your sentences. Moreover, if I do understand what you’re talking about, it doesn’t matter whether your sentences are well-formed.

We can look at games as fantasies. When I play a game I operate in a world in which I have abilities far removed from those in my daily life — whether I’m making gravity-defying maneuvers to slice through sand monsters in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time or making executive urban planning decisions in SimCity, the game lets me act like someone I’m not.

So one question for the game industry is: “Who do gamers want to be?” Tim Schafer points to this as part of the problem that Psychonauts had in the marketplace. Did gamers want the fantasy of being 10-year-old boys?

Most games don’t take such risks, and offer variations on the fantasy of being a gun/sword/spell-toting tough guy. So the question becomes how to present that fantasy. What’s the most effective way of getting gamers to imagine the experience of playing the game will be a good fantasy of this sort? Obviously, it’s not the only question — Psychonauts had good word of mouth both about its fantasy and about its gameplay — but it’s a key question.

This year, at E3, I got to see two organizations with access to exceptional resources offer spectacular answers to this question.

As Ian notes at Water Cooler Games, on Sunday September 3 and Sunday September 10 there’s a need for playtesters in the San Francisco area. The game to be tested is one of “benevolent assassination,” which Ian designed with Jane McGonigal. It’s called Cruel 2 B Kind.

I’m the only GTxA representative at ISEA this year, and I’m sorry to report that my compatriots are missing a great event. At the Tuesday night kick-off I caught the PigeonBlog release and then saw a really solid show at the San Jose Museum of Art curated by Steve Dietz (Edge Conditions, running through November 26th). Since then I’ve started to see some of the massive collection of art in South Hall (a parking lot covered with a giant tent and filled with digital art), enjoyed a number of live/performative cinema events organized by Ana Serrano of the Canadian Film Centre, seen the “2.0” version of Adriene Jenik’s fascinating SPECFLIC project, and attended the very impressive (if slightly problematic) “3 Data Bodies” by Super Vision. Tonight I’m seeing Mike Figgis do a “live mix” of Time Code and then watching Survival Research Labs bust out their amazing combination of robots, flame throwers, and sound. I really couldn’t be happier with the amount of stimulation I’m getting from the art and events.

Unfortunately,

I’ve recently joined the faculty of the Communication department at the University of California, San Diego. Having joined, one of my first acts as a member of the faculty was to become part of a search committee — so now I can help bring other interesting people aboard.

Luckily for me, UC San Diego’s not a hard sell. There is much support for digitally-flavored research, including the recently-constructed Cal-IT2 (including a wing devoted to the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts). There are many digital media people on the faculty already, from Lev Manovich to Miller Puckette, from Natalie Jeremijenko to Brian Goldfarb. The grad students are doing great work, including Fox Harrell (whose presentations at DAC and Computational Aesthetics we’ve noted in recent months), Eduardo Navas (of newmediaFIX and other prominent online projects), and the student in my department, Ge Jin, who this spring made a splash with his interviews with Chinese MMO gold farmers. And, of course, there’s the fact that the department is highly interdisciplinary, has a great history of innovative work, and is placed where the weather is supposedly the best in North America.

All that said, the job ad is below. Both areas of focus are of potential interest to GTxA readers, of course, but the “play and communication” area seems particularly fitting.

GTxA’s neighbors to the north at Simon Fraser University are making a move that will shake the academic digital media landscape. This coming season they are hiring six assistant (or possibly associate) professors and four lecturers in Interactive Arts and Technology — which is a very fast scaling up in the academic world, especially for a young field like ours. After this, students and faculty will be ranking digital media programs differently.

The deadline for applications is early: 15 September 2006. The ten positions are:

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss) looks like an exciting new collection. I haven’t seen a copy in person, but the contributor list is great. Here’s some of the jacket text:

New media poetry–poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers–exists in various configurations, from electronic documents that can be navigated and/or rearranged by their “users” to kinetic, visual, and sound materials through online journals and archives like UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements in this volume explore this synergy’s continuities and breaks with past poetic practices, and its profound implications for the future.

In a recent blog post, the wraps were taken off the initial plans for MediaCommons, an exciting forthcoming project of The Institute for the Future of the Book. They plan

a wide-ranging scholarly network — an ecosystem, if you can bear that metaphor — in which folks working in media studies can write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween.

With my early-summer plans completed, I’ve just posted a copy of my dissertation — Expressive Processing: On Process-Intensive Literature and Digital Media — at my revamped personal website. As I write on that page:

This work represents my initial take on a set of topics that I currently wrap up under the heading “expressive processing.” There are two things I particularly mean to get at with this phrase:

The Digital Arts and Culture conferences are, for me, the best in the field. Now the deadline for the next DAC is nearing… As mentioned previously, the deadline for 500-word abstracts for DAC 2007 is August 14, 2006. Full papers will be due December 4, 2006. The conference will be September 15-18th 2007 in Perth, Australia. Don’t miss it.

The DVD magazine Aspect is a great source for high quality documentation of, and commentary on, new media art. They’ve recently released a diverse and intriguing issue on the theme “Personas & Personalities” and here’s their new call, with the theme “Performance”:

Aspect is currently welcoming submissions for our
ninth volume, Performance. This issue will focus on
the broad spectrum of performance art — from the most
traditional interpretations to those integrating
advanced technologies, inanimate objects, passersby,
sites, and beyond.

All submissions must include the following, and must
be postmarked before September 30, 2006.

Saint Petersburg is a beautiful city, and so when the Summer Literary Seminars invited me to teach a workshop for students interested in hypertext (considered broadly) I wanted to propose projects that would get us out into the streets. Our first project — Sticker Saint Petersburg — was inspired by work like Implementation, Logozoa, and The Bubble Project. Though no one tried to use the opportunity to establish the truth of Nick’s earlier comments on Russian stickers, four of the students (Mike Alber, Ben Stark, Bill Stobb, and Guy Tiphane) have given me permission to put their work online.

Yesterday, as Scott predicted, I successfully defended an interdisciplinary PhD at Brown. I’ll be posting more information about it before long, and hopefully updating my moribund personal website at the same time, but first I have some plans. The biggest is for this May 28th, when I’ll be getting married to Jennifer. We’ve been friends for 19 years now, and I’m looking forward to being family with her.

Check out the World of Awe Enhanced CD and Aspect 7: Personas and Personalities.

I don’t know how many Brazilian GTxA readers we have, but I’ll be giving a few lectures in Brazil during the third week of May (the 17th, 18th, and 20th). It’d be great to meet folks down there.

I’m at UCI’s Massive gathering today, although I had to arrive a little late.

One of the more intriguing things I’ve heard so far is about some developments in Second Life. They’re building an API into the system. It sounds like it might just be for pulling live data out of Second Life for use elsewhere, but my hope is that it will be possible to structure and control elements of Second Life via external processes (e.g., characters controlled by AI running outside Second Life‘s scripting system). Similarly, they’re working toward an open source viewer that they imagine being customized by different communities. These might both open up interesting possibilities for researchers and artists.

I haven’t had a chance to read Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (I need to get past a couple looming deadlines first). But I was just looking at the website, which is definitely one of the more interesting book-related sites I’ve ever seen. For starters, there’s an End-User License Agreement, a simulated packet sniffer and webcams, and some rather suggestive imagery. In terms of the book itself, if her ISEA keynote (pdf) is any indicator, it’s going to be a very thought provoking read.

On April 20th UC Irvine will host “Massive” — a one-day event about the present and future of MMO games. There’s an early registration discount, but the deadline is tomorrow (April 6th). From the site: MASSIVE will engage 25 speakers and approximately 80 registrants from industry and academia in a dialog about the future design, technical and cultural challenges presented by massively multiplayer games, current and future research agendas from both industry and academia, and case studies and future models for industry academia collaboration.

April 15th is the deadline (don’t believe the March 31st listed on the website) for proposals to UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. If you’re an artist or an independent curator, this is your chance for a show at the Beall in 2007-08. The Beall was the site of the groovy ALT+CTRL show, for which there’s now a nice website (and some hip panoramas are also online). Of course, timing is tight, but wouldn’t you have started on the proposal around now even if you’d been planning for months?

To celebrate the availability of the First Person paperback, I’m happy to share the table of contents for the sequel that Pat Harrigan and I have edited. The new book, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, is currently in the MIT Press production process (and will hopefully appear on shelves this fall). We’re very pleased with how the new book has come together. It includes leading game designers, innovative computer scientists, writers and artists engaging the playful potential of digital media, and scholars who take games and other “playable” media seriously along computational, representational, performance, and ludic dimensions. Plus three appendixes include alternative RPGs from John Tynes, Greg Costikyan, and James Wallis!

This is the last in my series (1 2 3 4) of posts about two story generation systems that were first published about in the mid-1980s: Minstrel and Universe. I think they’re not just interesting in themselves, but also in the lessons they give us for how we might approach story generation today (including interactive story generation). In fact, I think they’re interesting in helping us think about how we might design any system meant to exhibit behaviors we consider “intelligent” — behaviors meant to be interpretable to a human audience as similar to things we do ourselves.

As mentioned in the first post of this series (1 2 3), the primary designer of Universe is Michael Lebowitz (also, according to the acknowledgments in Lebowitz’s 1984 and 1987 papers, work by Paula Langer and Doron Shalmon made significant contributions to the project and Susan Rachel Burstein helped develop many of the ideas). The Universe system shares a certain intellectual heritage with Minstrel and Tale-Spin, and it also has another unusual shared feature in common with Tale-Spin. As we see with Tale-Spin‘s “mis-spun tales,” the most famous story attributed to Universe has a somewhat more tenuous connection to the project’s output than one might assume. Here is the story:

In my previous two posts (1 2) I gave some background about two story generation systems, Minstrel and Universe, and outlined the basic set of plans and goals used by Minstrel. In this post I’ll discuss the main engine Minstrel uses for creating new stories: transformation and adaptation. As we’ll see, it’s both intriguing and problematic.