Grand Text Auto

On Monday, October 12th, UCSC’s Expressive Intelligence Studio will be hosting a symposium on Procedural Content Generation. Please join us to see interesting talks by speakers Julian Togelius (ITU Copenhagen), Mark Riedl (Georgia Tech), and Kate Compton (EA/Maxis). There will also be a panel on “The Future of Procedural Content Generation”, moderated by Michael Mateas (UCSC), and a number of demos by students in EIS. All events will occur on the UC Santa Cruz campus. We hope you will be able to come!

Further information on talks and scheduling information is after the cut.

StarCraft

I’ve been interested in developing AI for StarCraft for several years now. I recently came across the Broodwar API project, which provides hooks into StarCraft. It enables developers to query game state as well as issue orders to units. The Broodwar API makes it possible to write custom AI bots for StarCraft.

There are several benefits to using StarCraft as an environment for evaluating game AI. StarCraft is a robust, commercial RTS game that has been around for over 10 years. The game is more complex than current research systems due to its distinct races, deep tech trees and large map pool. Also, StarCraft has developed a large following of players, resulting in a huge number of game traces available for analysis.

“Hello, my name is Ian Bogost” (press Click to Play in the top right).

I’m glad there’s no English translation of the web site, I like not knowing why he’s there. It’s like when you see Matt Damon on Japanese commercials, and you have no idea what he’s selling.

Ian Bogost = Matt Damon. You heard it here first.

Rationalization was covered on the Indie Games blog and reviewed on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.  It was great to see that people were interested in checking out the game.

Though, on Rock, Paper, Shotgun people did far more than just check it out.  There were over 50 comments and many of these were very thoughtful interpretations of the game.  It excites and surprises me that the audience of this primarily mainstream game industry focused blog would be interested in dissecting this admittedly strange “proceduralist” game.

Xorex is a haphazard pastiche of various games I’ve played over the years.  It has several elements you’ll feel right at home with: gems to be arranged into color-matching linear groups, a forward-firing ship with flexible inventory and ammo storage, a grid-based board to which you can add and remove tokens, an unstoppable source of new clutter to be blown away, and a timer and leader-board for use in posturing with friends.  While making this game was a fantastic first-experience with open-source Flash development tools like HaXe and FlashDevelop, I must admit to a hidden agenda.

if (sandWeight != idolWeight) { throw new BoulderException(); }

Geek disclosure: I’ve become fascinated by the different facets of Software Engineering. Not just as a means to an end, but as a practice, as an art and as a historical artifact. I feel like I’m in Indiana Jones and the Java Temple, full of Pythons, with the riches of Perls and Rubies.

My desire for faster, better, stronger code has been spurred on by being bitten one too many times by unchecked exceptions in Python, leading me back to the comfortable blanket of Java, unit testing and a framed photo of Kent Beck on my bedside table.

I created a short game called Rationalization to help me think through some ideas.

The game is very abstract and its message is primarily procedural.  I look forward to hearing any reactions you may have.

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In my last post, I discussed how games are being used to communicate, not just to entertain.  Today, I want to discuss The Great Flu, a game recently released by Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  The game attempts to educate the public about the dangers of and difficulty in containing flu pandemics.

Riddick and his Ulaks (read: sharp knives)

Between being laid out with a kickboxing injury on my foot (not as manly as it sounds, I’m afraid) and food poisoning (which really is as non-manly as it sounds), I’ve had plenty of time to play some more games, without having to write it off to any significant others or advisers as “research”. Gamefly delivered “The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena”, which has touched a nerve that has been twinging a long time (not in my foot): while technology is a great gameplay enabler, it’s also no panacea when the game design is flawed.

I’m happy to announce the publication of my first monograph, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. As the subtitle suggests, this book is a software studies take on the past and future of digital fictions and games. As of today it’s available in bookstores as well as online — and a PDF of the introduction can be downloaded from the MIT Press site.

I don’t need to tell this audience about the momentum building behind educational games.  Even when I was an elementary student, going to the computer lab to play Math Blaster, Odell Down Under, or Oregon Trail was a special treat.  These days, kids grow up on video games: game consoles are nearly as common as TVs in households; cell phones are standard issue for kids of all walks of life; the internet is available to everyone, with its countless easily accessible, free games.

The Super Mario Bros. AI Competition is a fantastic competition being run by Sergey Karakovskiy and Julian Togelius in conjunction with the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2009). Were it not for the fact that all members of the EIS lab are terribly busy working on our research (our advisers read this too, you know!), I’m sure we’d be all over this.

The video above is our favorite entry so far, which wins three million EIS bonus points for escaping from a fall.  Amazing!

How do we understand moments of “agency” with games and other forms of digital media — what Janet Murray characterizes as players’ “satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”? Last month our DiGRA 2009 abstract on this topic sparked a thoughtful discussion. It pushed the co-authors (Michael Mateas, Steven Dow, Serdar Sali, and yours truly) to take a closer look at what our definition of agency might be — not just what might encourage or diminish it — and how our thinking breaks from the past. As we worked to complete the full version of the paper we decided that our paper would focus on agency as a “phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computational model.” Anyone interested in reading the version we submitted to DiGRA can do so after the break.

Poetry and Slashdot collide via XKCD

Slashdot is “News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters”, and one of the most influential news sites in computing circles. Yesterday, appearing in an article titled “Games That Design Themselves” a certain “University of California” professor is named.

Who could this shadowy persona be? With so many campuses to choose from, who could possibly be elevated to such an illustrious status? Why, it’s none other than EIS’s very own Michael Mateas! h+ magazine takes a look at Mateas and Stern’s Façade, and have a look over friend-of-Grand Text Auto’s Jeff Orkin and his Restaurant Game.

In my recent PhD thesis proposal I described how I am going to tackle game design as a new domain for automated discovery.  A key piece of this is figuring out game design might be explained as the kind of knowledge-seeking effort you might expect from science or mathematics.  With successful systems performing discovery (such as Simon Colton’s HR system which contributed some new and interesting knowledge in pure mathematics) and new projects beginning to automate the process of exploring a space of games (such as Julian Togelius’ Automatic Game Design experiment), the idea of mashing these together into a “game design discovery system” seems quite attractive to me.

“Jazz Band Revolution” …. Trust me, this is a great idea. A fellow EIS labmate recently gave a class presentation about the “Edutainment Fail.”  To its credit, edutainment is responsible for my first interactions with desktop computers.  Games such as Oregon Train, Logo Writer, some lemonade stand game, and that typing game were widely used in my early primary school years.  I suppose as games became more commercially available, the novelty of games in education were upstaged.  Still, it’s apparent that there is a great deal of learning that goes into playing some of the most popular games today, so it begs the question… Why aren’t games used for educational purposes more? Many bridges are in process being built to overcome the gap between the motivation to be entertained and the motivation to learn.  Similarly, there are many educational avenues from the experiencing to building of interactive experiences– whether it is to learn about the technology itself or to be engaged by the technology to learn.  Let’s be honest, everyone knows that games are more than just entertainment, yet why are they mostly seen as entertainment– If I am willing to learn for the sake of being entertained, surely, I am willing to learn USEFUL things for the sake of being entertained (if nothing else).  Being entertained should be assumed for all games; asking for a game that can entertain is like asking for a drink that will quench thirst.  Albeit, not all drinks will quench thirst, but we have more options than just water to quench our thirsts.  So listen up Activision, Harmonix, and Konami: Games are for more than just quenching my thirst for entertainment.

Molleindustria recently created a new game prototype called Kosmosis: “A COMMUNIST SPACE SHOOTER AS AN ARCADE GAME FROM AN ALTERNATE PRESENT WHERE NON-DEGENERATED SOCIALIST VALUES ARE HEGEMONIC.”  The game was created as an entry for the Experimental Gameplay Project competition titled “Unexperimental Shooter.”  Molleindustria are known for tackling controversial subjects including free culture and religious hatred and are some of the few people who create games from the “message up” (i.e. design with procedural rhetoric in mind).

Foundations of Digital Games is a fantastic “big tent” games conference that focuses on both technical and humanistic games research. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop for submitting your games research to a high-quality, peer-reviewed venue, look no further. Hope to see you at Asilomar next June!

FDG 2010: The 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 19-21 June 2010, at Asilomar Conference Grounds, Monterey, California.
http://fdg2010.org/

Important Dates
Workshop Proposals: 18 Sep 2009
Paper and Poster Submission: 5 Feb 2010
Doctoral Consortium Submission: 12 Feb 2010
Author Notification: 29 Mar 2010
Demo Submission: 2 Apr 2010
Registration for Authors: 9 Apr 2010
Camera Ready Papers: 23 Apr 2010
Conference: 19-21 Jun 2010

This summer, I’m working with Matt MacLaurin at Microsoft Research on Kodu Game Lab.  For those of you who aren’t familiar, Kodu is an environment for people with no programming experience to quickly create games.  Its visual programming language is designed to be intuitively understandable and its library of characters and objects facilitate rapid game development.  If you’re interested in checking it out yourself, it’s currently available for the very reasonable price of $5 through X-Box Live Arcade.

 One of my goals for the summer is to introduce some interesting AI features to the characters of Kodu.  Among those features is learning.  We want Kodu characters to be able to adapt their behavior based on their experiences.

Following Noah’s lead, I thought I’d post the extended abstract and ask for comments on my upcoming DiGRA paper.  This is joint work with Noah as well as Sri Kurniwan at UCSC.

ABSTRACT

As game education programs grow, educators face challenges bringing formal study of games to students with varied backgrounds.  In particular, educators must find ways to transition students from viewing games as entertainment to exhibiting deeper insights.  One approach is to expose students to a wider variety of games, particularly German-style board games.  We hypothesize that greater familiarity may lead to improved understanding of game mechanics and test this hypothesis with a study involving students in an introductory game design class.  Initial analysis of the results shows increased understanding and changes in the student’s view of games.  From this we may suggest directions for future research and game education pedagogy.

Trying to find traction in my pursuit of academic scholarship is quite daunting at times.  There are just so many people in the world doing so many interesting things, and it often feels like an endless catching up with the many experts of today.  What I do know is my childhood aspiration to tell stories through video games drives me on this adventure of discovery.  What I didn’t know was how many communities of thought there would be along the way: communities that care about stories, communities that care about games, communities that care about stories in games.  (It keeps me constantly feeling like the “the new kid” in school.)  And what I take away from this last conference is a new collaboration of interesting research questions that I could’ve very well been working on.  Not that I’m second guessing the path I’m currently on, but rather, I look forward to bringing my own discoveries to the intersection of all these communities.  So, let me share a little bit of what I learned about the Digital Humanities community.

Steven Dow, Michael Mateas, Serdar Sali, and I have an abstracted accepted for DiGRA titled “Agency Reconsidered.” We’re working on the full paper this month, and will certainly share it when available, but one of the things I value about blogs is that they provide a place to do academic work in public. So I’m posting the abstract here, along with some thoughts on where we’re going for the final paper, and I’d appreciate any ideas/pointers that people have. Suggestions and criticisms that arrive now (rather than after it’s completed) are much more likely to shape the final paper.

Johanna Drucker has a thoughtful review of Matt Kirschenbaum’s Digital Humanities Quarterly. I think most of what she says is spot-on. But she has to be kidding with this, right?

Have any works appeared in digital media whose interest goes beyond novelty value? Not yet.

Michael Mateas has been selected as the inaugural MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair for the UC Santa Cruz campus. The MacArthur Chair was established in 2009 for the purpose of supporting research, public service, and teaching that promotes the objectives of the MacArthur Foundation, which include working to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. Michael was selected for the chair based on his proposal, “Radically Expanding the Expressive Power of Serious Games.” Michael, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will hold the chair for five years.

This past January, Craig Reynolds from Sony’s research group in Foster City gave a presentation at UC Santa Cruz on current challenges in creating computational crowds, especially those where the members of the crowd are cooperating to perform some task. A video of the talk can be viewed here:

https://slugtube.soe.ucsc.edu/play-video.php?ID=1072

As a contrast to the recent talk by Mark Henne from Pixar, this talk focused on the underlying algorithmic difficulty of creating the desired algorithmic behavior. Mark’s talk focused more on how to integrate behavior into an existing pipeline, and challenges with ensuring the filmmakers retained artistic control over the procedurally generated scene.