Grand Text Auto

Illustration: Alexis Demetriades

Chris Lewis, a member of the Software Introspection Lab at UC Santa Cruz has his game testing work profiled in Science Notes 2011, in the article “Fixing Glitchy Games” by Donna Hesterman.

Games increasingly have emergent properties brought about by the complex interactions between the player, AI-driven non-player characters, level geometry and items in the game world. Except for the player, all of these have become more complex in the latest generation of AAA titles, leading to an exponential increase in potential interactions. Lewis states it well:

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.

First, as of this writing: I’m at the GAMBIT Summer Summit here at MIT, which runs today and is being streamed live. Do check it out if video game research interests you.

A few days ago, I was at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Bordeaux. On July 1 I presented the first conference paper on Curveship since the system has been released as free software. The paper is “Curveship’s Automatic Narrative Style,” which sums up or at least mentions many of the research results while documenting the practicalities of the system and using the current terminology of the release version.

Adam Smith (also of EIS) and I are organizing a new workshop to be co-located with AIIDE 2011 on the intersection of AI and game design. Game AI usually refers to controlling interesting agents in a game world, but this workshop is focused on how AI can assist during the game design process itself. Our belief is that bringing concerns from design studies, computational creativity, and game production into contact with AI can result in a radically new and productive view of AI in games.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote presentation at the 2011 Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011) conference (part of the pleasure being the location, Waikiki beach in Hawaii). My slides are available in pdf (1.3M) and ppt (13.5M).

The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in of the natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit sequel by valve, you are changing the space without necessarily adding or subtracting from it. You’re using what’s already there, but rearranging it; repurposing it. Relying on a complex process of disambiguation to carry through your novel contribution to the whole of spoken or written utterances (as you learn in English grammar classes).

The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit sequel by Valve, you are changing the space without necessarily adding or subtracting from it. You’re using what’s already there, but rearranging it; repurposing it. Relying on a complex process of disambiguation to carry through your novel contribution to the whole of spoken or written utterances (as you learn in English grammar classes).

The Second International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC-11) in Mexico City was a great success, thanks in large part to local organizer Rafael Pérez y Pérez and to the support of UAM and UNAM Posgrado.

If you’re interested in computational models of creativity, please take a look at the proceedings. It was announced in Mexico City that the next ICCC will take place in 2012 at University College Dublin. We hope you’ll look forward to joining us there. And from year to year, computationalcreativity.net will keep you informed about conferences in the series.

Dennis "Thresh" Fong

Dennis “Thresh” Fong, a retired pro gamer and founder of Raptr and XFire, participated in an exhibition match against EISBot during a visit to UC Santa Cruz today. While Dennis had not played StarCraft: Brood War for several years, he provided EISBot with an excellent challenge. Dennis played as Zerg (orange) and the outcome of the match is shown in the video below:

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.

Dr. Magy Seif El-Nasr will be giving a talk at UCSC this Friday. All interested are welcome!

Title:

Effective 3D Visual Design for Games: Integrating Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Results from Experimental Studies, and Artistic Tacit Knowledge

Time & Location:

March 18, 11:00 am, E2-599

Abstract:

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.

The StarCraft AI competition introduced at AIIDE 2010 will be part of the AIIDE 2011 program. Last year the main event was won by UC Berkeley’s team, which showed how a computer opponent could be used to destroy enemies. This year, we expect to see even more sophisticated agents. Competition details are available here.

In August 2010, the first ever Mario level generation competition was held at the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) conference. The contest involved generating a personalized level for a particular player, using metrics from a player’s  prior playthrough of a different level. There were three entries from the Expressive Intelligence Studio, including the winner, Ben Weber!

However, this competition had only the CIG audience as participants and judges. Julian Togelius and Noor Shaker at ITU Copenhagen have now opened up the competition for the general public to participate. The goal is to gather more (and more detailed) data on the differences between the generated levels and players’ preferences between them. We invite everyone to participate in these experiments!

Building on the great success from last year, we are pleased to announce that there will be a second workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, to be held this coming June 28 in Bordeaux, France, co-located with FDG 2011. The workshop focuses on advancing the state of the art in computational techniques for creating content for computer games by bringing together researchers to discuss novel research and important issues in procedural content generation. The deadline for long and short papers is March 11, 2011.

Overview

It’s the beginning of another year, which means it’s time for another Global Game Jam. Santa Cruz is proud to host a site for the third year in a row, and we continue to grow. In fact, we’re currently tied for the 2nd largest site in the US and the 10th largest site in the world! But even if you’re not ready to dedicate a full 48 hours to the festivities, you should still come check out our keynote speakers this year, who will be talking from 4:30 on Friday, January 28th. We continue our tradition of world class talks to kick off our game jam, and this year we have three veterans of the industry that offer unique and fascinating perspectives on game design.

It has to have been 4 or 5 years since I’ve seen a recent Simpsons episode.  After catching up on the last few episodes, I can really appreciate how “with it” the Simpsons have been.  After all, it’s gotta be relevant if being parodied by the Simpsons.    Particularly relevant is episode 21, where Bart’s teacher is replaced with a younger, hipper instructor.

Bart: “Then Zack skyped us, live blogged our spelling bee, and friended us on facebook!”

FDG 2010 has put out their Call for Papers, the important date being 5th February as the paper and poster submission deadline.

FDG 2009 was a fantastic conference, filled to the brim with various gaming academic luminaries, fascinating papers and a wide variety of interests. I’m looking forward to 2010, as it’s just down the road in Monterey!

Yo Frankie! An open source platformer created using Blender.

I recently gave a presentation on the landscape of open source software in computer games at the Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, where I am currently visiting the Libresoft research group. My slides are available here.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender.

Tale of Tales just released a new game or rather “experimental play experience” (a phrase surely concocted to appease those who don’t accept their repurposing of the word game).  Anyhow, it’s called Fatale and it is awesome.

Starting with The Endless Forest, Tale of Tale’s have consistently created environments that exist for the purpose of being looked at and explored.  This may not sound all that unique as most 3D games have environments that are explored, but the difference is that these games exist solely for this purpose.  To them, game environments are not containers for gameplay, but rather are the reason for gameplay.  By only affording the player navigation controls, the player’s mind is free to embark on a journey of induction and introspection.  In their own words, Fatale “offers an experimental play experience that stimulates the imagination and encourages multiple interpretations and personal associations.”