March 20, 2012

The Prison-House of Data

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?

March 15, 2012

Expressive Processing, Now Much Softer!

A curved paperback of Expressive Processing 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.

March 7, 2012

Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History

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

March 6, 2012

What is a Research Game?

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

February 24, 2012

Getting Started with ABL

While I have been advocating the use of reactive planning for over a year now, there is often a large amount of middleware between a game environment and the reactive planning agent that needs to be defined in order to make use of ABL in games. The goal of this article is to provide a tutorial for interfacing a game environment with a simple ABL agent.

February 21, 2012

Prom Week’s “Social Exchanges”

To celebrate Prom Week’s release on on Facebook and Kongegrate, we thought we’d share some of the details about what’s going on inside of the heads of Prom Week characters.

As we’ve posted before, Prom Week is a game where the player gets to shape the social lives of 18 highschoolers by controlling what social actions they take with one another. What each character wants to do, and how each character chooses to respond, is determined by over 5,000 social considerations.

Graeme Devine Talk Tomorrow at UCSC

Local Santa Cruz game developer and perennial guest speaker Graeme Devine is visiting UCSC tomorrow (Wednesday the 22nd) to give a talk titled “Social Games are DEAD!” In his own words:

Everyone on the planet is rushing to add a social element to their game, picture app, music app, whatever app. Our widely held view of acceptable application development has narrowed to freemium social games that have to monetize. Somewhere along the way we forgot that games should be fun experiences and we became analysts. Let’s talk about that.

February 17, 2012

Emily Short on Playable Narrative Systems

Interactive story author Emily Short spoke at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, as part of the ongoing Inventing the Future of Games speaker series. Emily, best known for her work on groundbreaking interactive fictions such as Galatea and Savoir-Faire, spoke about her recent work with Richard Evans (AI Lead on The Sims 3) developing an interactive story system centered around character and conversation in Jane Austen’s universe. (Emily and Richard’s company, Little Text People, has recently been acquired by Linden Lab; Emily stressed that the ideas presented in the talk represent work done before the acquisition.)

February 14, 2012

Prom Week Released on Facebook!

Delve into all the adolescent angst, drama, and scheming of the week before a high school prom in this online game, which uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence system to enable players to shape the social lives of 18 hapless high school students. Find dates for them, break up and make up, forge new friendships, make enemies — it’s up to you to determine whether the Prom will be a magical wonderland of disco ball lights or a nightmare of existential crises!

Play it now!!!

February 13, 2012

Humanities-Based Game Design

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).

February 9, 2012

It’s Time: Overthrow Elsevier.

from Post Position
by @ 5:31 pm

The Boston Globe calls it the scientific community’s Arab Spring. Perhaps the comparison is bombastic, but this issue actually goes beyond science. It’s a question of whether the results of our research, scholarship, and critical writing as academics will be held hostage from our own universities and completely locked away from the public view, or whether we can put aside the artificial scarcity of information that commercial publishers have created and foster better, open communications.

Our colleagues in the sciences are the main ones who are taking a stand in this particular case – a boycott of commercial, closed-access publisher Elsevier – but others can stand with them.

If you haven’t, please read about the issue with Elsevier specifically, for instance in the Chronicle and the Guardian. These are good old news stories in which one side says it’s right and then the other side says it’s right, and so on.

The future of game dialogue

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.

Prom Week Authoring: Crafting Procedurally-Driven Narratives

Cassandra uses a mismatch between her and Gunter’s feelings about cultural knowledge base items to shoot down his attempt to ask her out.

Hello! I’m Aaron A. Reed, lead writer on Prom Week, and I wanted to talk a bit about the challenges the writing team faced bringing eighteen characters to life during the most exciting week of their lives. (So far, at least… I’m pretty sure Lil is going to go on to do great things.) I’ve previously worked on large-scale interactive stories before, like my 2009 project Blue Lacuna, but Prom Week presented authoring challenges on a whole different level.

February 6, 2012

Vote Prom Week for the IGF Audience Choice Award!

It is our pleasure to present Prom Week’s Audience Choice Special Release!

Please enjoy playing this version of Prom Week — we would very much appreciate your vote in the 2012 Independent Games Festival Games: Main Competition Audience Award.

Cecil Brown on Games Blacks Love to Play

Dr. Cecil Brown began his lecture Games Blacks Love to Play by citing Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 observation that the games people play mirror the surrounding culture. Brown uses this stance—that games teach us about the culture they come from—to explore the history of African Americans, the interplay between black and white play cultures, and the effect these diverse forms of play had on American culture at large.

Brown divided American history into three stages. First, slave culture, in which outdoor physical play predominates. Under slavery, blacks rarely learned to read and write, as punishment was having your hands cut off. Black culture, thus, was primarily oral and kinetic out of necessity. Second, segregated culture, characterized by dance. Thirdly, integrated culture, which our digital culture is a part.

January 13, 2012

Prom Week a finalist in Technical Excellence at IGF 2012

We are very excited to announce that Prom Week has been nominated as a finalist in Technical Excellence for the 2012 Independent Games Festival!

We’ll be posting more info about Prom Week, how it works, and information about our release date soon.

Whooo hooooo!!!


January 6, 2012

Computer: Plaything or Tool?

Header

I recently gave a talk at the ASAP/3 conference that sketched the history of computers as tools & playthings. I’ve learned my lesson on giving dominantly visual talks: if you don’t have good notes then they are a major bummer to give in the future, plus nobody else can read them. What was I thinking when I made a slide with two blue arrows on it? You’ll find that you can basically read my notes off each page of the pdf: it’s almost exactly what I say during the talk. You’ll have to imagine my voice though. Two video segments (one of John Cimino showing off the Spore Creature Creator, another of Steve Jobs discussing computers as bicycles for our minds) are missing, but otherwise it’s complete. From the talk:

December 20, 2011

Your Conference Can Have Women!

from Post Position
by @ 6:03 pm

I recently had the chance to revisit the Gendered Conference Campaign, which is not new (it’s more than two years old) but is (unfortunately) still relevant. Without fixing blame on conference organizers, this page lists several “all-male” academic conferences (those where all the invited speakers are men) and offers useful, concrete suggestions for including women in your own conference.

November 21, 2011

Positive Publication

from Post Position
by @ 8:08 pm

An interview that James J. Brown, Jr. did with me is now up as part of the latest issue of JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

It’s entitled “The Literary and the Computational: A Conversation with Nick Montfort.”

I’ve banged up against some fairly conservative, and indeed rather backwards, ideas about what publishing is recently; it was great to talk with Brown and see him and JEP representing a much more positive idea.

Workshop on Design Patterns in Games – May 29th 2012

We’re planning a workshop on Design Patterns in Games in conjunction
with next year’s Foundations of Digital Games conference. There is
more info on our website (http://dpg.fdg2012.org/) or you can contact
me directly.

CFP follows:

Chicago Colloquium Notes

from Post Position
by @ 12:02 pm

I went to the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science this weekend (Sunday and today), and gave the keynote that opened this event. I spoke about Platform Studies, describing how the difference between Pong and Hunt the Wumpus could be better understood by considering that these games were made of different stuff — different material computing systems. Then, I brought in the five-level model of digital media studies that I introduced in Game Studies in my article “Combat in Context” back in 2006. I spoke about the existing and forthcoming titles in the Platform Studies book series by MIT Press: Racing the Beam (Montfort & Bogost, 2009); the book on the Wii, Codename: Revolution by Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal; and The Future was Here by Jimmy Maher, covering the Amiga. I also spoke about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); GOTO 10, a book engaging with platforms that I, and nine co-authors, are completing. Finally, I concluded by offering 16 questions about the digital humanities, in a lecture moment that was inspired by a particular 20th century American composer.

November 15, 2011

Report on the AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems

This year the AAAI Fall Symposium Series included a track organized by Pat Langley on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Pat identified the following objective for the symposium:

Pursue the initial goals of artificial intelligence and cognitive science: To explain intelligence in computational terms and reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts.

Pat’s motivation for re-evaluating the goals of artificial intelligence is presented in a recent editorial in Machine Learning, while my motivation for attending the symposium was to discuss how to build integrated, heterogeneous agents. The introduction to the symposium was a discussion of why AI research has gone astray. Pat identified the following issues in his talk:

November 11, 2011

Prom Week: Gameplay and Social Physics

When we started making Prom Week, our mission was to make social interactions truly playable. While games have increasingly gotten better at physical simulation, social interactions in games still tend to be scripted, with most games using dialogue trees of some form. A result of this is that many games end up being about physical conflict, as the physical simulation is the only part of the system dynamic enough to enable interesting gameplay.

Just like physics simulations in puzzle games such as Angry Birds support many emergent solutions to game challenges, we want to support emergent gameplay for social interaction.

October 7, 2011

“Games” for Grief, Mourning, and Anger

Screenshot of "maybe make some change"
maybe make some change, my new interactive story , does not have achievements, leaderboards, or co-op play. Many definitions of “game” might exclude it. Underneath the multimedia components it’s a parser-based interactive fiction, but there’s no space to explore, no objects to take. It’s inspired by a true story about war crimes in Afghanistan. It’s not exactly what most people would call “fun.”

September 28, 2011

Foundations of Digital Games arrives in Raleigh in 2012

The Foundations of Digital Games conference, which covers research on a broad range of computer game topics, will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA from May 29-June 1, 2012. Magy Seif El-Nasr (Northeastern Univ.) is the conference General Chair, while Mia Consalvo (Concordia Univ.) and Steve Feiner (Columbia Univ.) are the Program Co-Chairs.

The conference will feature workshops immediately before the main conference, along with paper and poster presentations. As in past years, a doctoral consortium will provide a venue for new researchers to highlight their work. The call for papers is out, with full papers due December 19, 2011. Workshop proposals are due October 17, 2011.

<- Previous Page -- Next Page ->

Powered by WordPress