Grand Text Auto

The creators of the free documentarty Gamer Br (GTxA post, English home page) are gearing up for another project: a three-episode video on the way digital technology is influencing cultrual production, and the distribution and reception of media, in Brazil. The first, “Skip the Intermediary,” will cover the struggles of musicians and record labels. The second will cover the IP revolution that Creative Commons licenses and other challenges to traditional copyright are bringing in Brazil. The final video will cover the free software movement and its cultural effect.

greetings from London in the middle of all this. London is completely locked down!
I have been here completing my PhD thesis work entitled ‘Playculture’. The work is the first attempt to create a feminist game design methodology through the triad of art practice, critical theory, and activism/intervention.
My viva voce at the SMARTlab on Tuesday 5th July was successful, with esteemed examiners from the US, UK, and Germany! (This is the ‘dissertation defence’ in the British system.) While here have also participated in a Furtherfield / ID Runners workshop on areas of work where art, cultural production, technology, personal development and social action all overlap, and a panel at the ICA (separate post forthcoming). . . lots of excitement!

I am extremely pleased to announce the release of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Façade!

This long-awaited one-act interactive drama, featuring a 3D environment and voice-acted, AI-driven characters, has been a testbed for research in and development of new discourse-based NLP techniques, a new drama management framework, and new ways of allowing behavior hierarchies to interact. It has been the source of more than a dozen academic publications co-authored by Michael and Andrew, as well as Michael’s Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. dissertation. A pre-release version of Façade was a finalist in the 2004 Independent Games Festival. Façade is also delightfully entertaining and abundant in its dramatic and artistic merits. It offers a fairly short dramatic experience that is intensive and compelling, and unlike anything else I have seen in video games or other interactive systems. The New York Times called Façade “the future of video games” and one person who has devoted his life to interactive storytelling, Chris Crawford, said the system was “the best actual working interactive storyworld yet created.” You can read the official press release on Façade, read on for more about the release, or skip directly to the the download page on InteractiveStory.net.

We’re having an interesting debate over at Game Matters on the role, or desirability, of agency in games and stories. Frankly I’m surprised by what I’m reading. Please contribute if you have some thoughts on this.

Slamdance now has a student game competition, due Sept 19. ICVS poster/demo/art submissions are due July 22. And a new site Games and Storytelling out of Finland offers several videos of lectures by various folks knowledgable about the subject.

The Cultural Gutter has a new article discussing a lavish coffee-table book about Half Life 2, “featuring examples of the visually stunning work of the game accompanied by 100-word descriptions. What comes across in the book, which quotes dozens of people, is how much collaboration shaped the process.” And the LA Weekly suggests there’s a “moralgorithm” in operation when playing NBA Live 2005 for Xbox.

Apropos of this, some a cappella Nintendo theme songs. If you ask me, even the appearance of the ninja doesn’t really redeem it, but hey, it’s topical.

Andrew and I were at Phrontisterion VI this last weekend. The timing was perfect – we’d just finished our final build of Façade (!!) a day or two before the Phront.

A regular thread of discussion on GTxA is the artist/programmer debate and related issues of procedural literacy for digital media artists and theorists. In this light, it was nice to see this 23 year old magazine cover depicting Chris as an artist/programmer hanging on the wall.

[Update July 6: Chris’ conference report is online.]

AI engineer extraordinaire Damian Isla has started a new group blog called Game/AI, and invited fellow AIIDE attendees Rob Zubek and Paul Tozour onboard. Damian did great work at MIT Media Lab’s now winding-down Synthetic Characters group, and since became the AI lead at Bungie for Halo2. Rob you may know from his occasional comments here on GTxA — he recently finished an excellent dissertation at Northwestern (more on that in a future post; see an older post here) and has just joined Maxis. Paul was an AI developer for Metroid Prime, Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2. One of their first discussions: ending the tyranny of hierarchical finite state machines.

In my research on a new collaborative project meme.garden (with d. howe) I happened to re-explore some ‘commonsense’ databases including the commonsense project at MIT, “open mind.” After various approaches to making effective search engines, this one–with its reliance on real people’s knowledge aggregated over time–seems promising.

Yet such a system is rife with problems, as one can imagine. It is criticised by some net researchers and bloggers for containing too many ‘garbage’ entries to be efffective, and just plain factual errors by those who might even mean well.

Proof that young researchers can bolster their publication records when they write about video games: The BBC reports that South Africa’s main medical journal has accepted an article on “PlayStation Thumb” for publication – one written by a 13-year-old girl.

Her study found that 28 of the 60 boys and 17 of the 60 girls she spoke to played regularly.

Of these, eight boys and seven girls complained of symptoms such as redness, tingling and blisters.

The unfortunate thing is that Safura Abdool Karim, the author, does not herself own a PlayStation and finds them “a waste of time.” So here we have another case of game research being done by a non-gamer…

On October 14, 2005, MetaScholar Initiative at Emory University is hosting Free Culture & the Digital Library. “This interdisciplinary symposium, featuring Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan, will explore the relationship between digital access to public cultural information and intellectual property constraints. In recent years, new legal limitations in the United States have affected public access to the materials held in a variety of different open digital library infrastructures, ranging from those of the Library of Congress to Kazaa. As new technological possibilities and laws governing their many uses emerge, it becomes critical to examine the relationship between digital innovation and legal regulation. This symposium seeks to promote a better understanding of the associated impacts of these changes on the local, national and international levels, both now and in the future.” So come down to Atlanta and get your dose of Free Culture.

When I saw the headline “Fake spy guilty of kidnapping con” on BBC news today, I was worried that Harry Mathews might have gotten himself in trouble. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case.

Mathews, a novelist, poet of the New York School, fashioner of literary forms and sole American member of the Oulipo, is most recently the author of My Life in CIA. This delightful book was reviewed a while ago by local Oulipophile MadInkBeard. Mathews calls it an autobiographical novel; in it, he describes his dangerous escapades of 1973. That tumultuous year, he purportedly answered the suspicions of his friends abroad (who thought, or in some cases were certain, that he was a CIA man) by beginning to play spy.

The CFP is due July 8 [update: July 31] for Future Play, billed as the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology. It will be held at Michigan State University, October 13-15. Already on the lineup: John Buchanan (academic liason for EA), Chris Hecker, Ernest Adams, Brenda Harger, James Gee, Henry Jenkins, Greg Costikyan, and GTxA’s Michael Mateas giving the closing keynote.

Also there is a juried call for games — academic, experimental, independent and/or student games, due September 9.

Janet Murray has a great article just out in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Humanistic Approaches for Digital-Media Studies.” It discusses the Georgia Tech masters of science in information design program and technology and the new digital studies Ph.D. program (the first class just started last Fall) and also mentions the new undergraduate computational media program. Janet gives a great view from her own perspective of how these programs have some together, and she describes the faculty’s diversity (with a nod to Michael, of course) and the strength that the programs gain from this diversity. She makes a good case for studying outside of one’s core strengths and for taking the risks necessary to found new programs like these. She writes,

What follows is a visually-guided tour of one particular path through last weekend’s Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in Vancouver, BC. There we so many parallel tracks of talks (8+ at times) that I’ll only be offering a sliver of what went on, but the other GTxA’ers in attendance, Mary and Michael, as well as several other bloggers out there, will surely fill in more detail and show you more images.

Before we begin, I should say there was a game studies person sorely missed at the conference (note I’m avoiding the L-word), who tells us he was off cavorting in Paris at the time and couldn’t attend. However his spirit was in Vancouver with us nonetheless, and in fact as you browse this series of pictures, I invite you to play a little game I’d like to call, “Where’s Gonzalo?”

What interesting literary presentations I’ve been to recently. Yesterday Hanna and I took the train out to meet up with Scott in South Jersey. We went to a small, carceral structure in Ocean City where lawn furniture was set up in an arts and crafts studio. There we heard John Ashbery read to a crowd that was still ambulatory but of a noticeably different demographic than is the grad student/junior faculty crowd. The motto of the Ocean City Arts Center seems to be “Life is short … the arts extend it!”

Today, Hanna and I went to a “A Potable Joyce,” a show at the Rosenbach Library and Museum performed by actors and employing some shadow puppets. The performance tells (some of) the story of the Odyssey, Ulysses, and Joyce’s writing and publishing Ulysses. The Nausicaa episode was elided – probably a good move, as there were several audience members around age three.

At Brown we’ve renamed the Creative Writing program “Literary Arts.” This encompasses regularly-offered workshops in fiction, poetry, playwriting, electronic writing (combining writing with designing computational contexts for the writing), and the recent additions of screenwriting (now that we have someone to teach it) and cross-disciplinary workshops (which encompass hybrid forms of text as well as things that are closely related to performance, installation, and video art). So, now that it’s in the name of the department, I find myself using the word “literary” a lot more than I used to — and using it to mean, roughly, “a common element in all the types of art we make in our department.”

Obviously, that’s not a very rigorous way of using the term. And a couple times recently, when I’ve used “literary” to refer to that common element in the digital media work we do, I’ve gotten pressed to unpack what I mean. At which point, of course, I can’t help but flash all the way back to college —

I spent Thursday at the ACH/ALLC conference in Victoria. I was invited to participate in the panel Story Generation: Models and Approaches for the Generation of Literary Artifacts, organized by Jan Christoph Meister and Birte Loenneker. The panel consisted of three presentations: Chris and Birte with “Dream On: Designing the Ideal Story Generator Algorithm”, Federico Peinado (whom I met at TIDSE last summer) with “A Generative and Case-Based Implementation of Proppian Morphology”, and myself with “Beyond Story Graphs: Story Management in Game Worlds”. Chris and Birte define paper-and-pencil story generation architectures with the aim of pushing on structuralist narratology. The goal of the work is to integrate various narratological theories, reveal where these theories are underspecified (their architectures are much more detailed than narratological theories expressed in natural language), and push narratology in new directions. Reminds me of some of Marie Laure-Ryan’s work, particularly in Possible Words, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Birte coined the term “computational narratology” (has a nice ring to it) to describe this work. Fernando, a Ph.D. student working with Pablos Gervas (who has himself done work in poetry generation), described a case-based story generator based on Propp’s story functions. Given an initial user query specifying the story functions that should appear in the story, the system recalls the most similar story from its case base and performs generate-and-test on the retrieved case. This consists of randomly tweaking the story (performing story function substitutions) many times, stopping when a story is found that both includes the functions requested by the user and satisfies constraints captured by the ontology. He is starting a project with Birte to implement within his system the architectural theory she and Chris have developed for discourse-level manipulation (e.g. flashbacks, flash forward). Finally, I talked about what happens when generation is combined with real-time interactivity, presented story management as a far more scaleable and robust alternative to story graphs, described the author-centric viewpoint that infuses my approach to Expressive AI (I don’t care about automation for automation’s sake, but about building architectures with powerful authorial affordances), and gave an overview and comparison of both the beat-based drama manager used in Facade and the search-based drama manager proposed and Bates and Weyhrauch and recently revived in my own work (more on this in a later post).

My sources at ACH tell me that Mark Wolff just delivered a great paper called “Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms.” Here’s an excerpt:

The Flux Gallery in Queens is presenting Comix Ex Machina, an exhibition of “devices that present a series of narrative images to the viewer by means of a mechanical process, either interactively or automatically.” It looks pretty nifty.

Where is the hard data about women in the games industry? In a 2004 New York Times article, the approximate number of women in the US games industry is estimated to be 10%. But where is the hard data? Send on if anyone has it. Also, while I’m sure everyone heard of Lowenstein’s call for new kinds of games at E3, I wish to repost it as a reminder that the issue of gender and gaming runs deep and is multifaceted: a more

I’m at DIGRA 2005, and listening to HoLin Lin, a Taiwanese sociologist at National Taiwan University.

Lin and her team interviewed almost 60 players in internet cafes. She notes how much parents have control over children’s and teen’s gaming. In fact, she notes that the most common complaint of children living at home was surveillance. In addition, boys generally enjoy priority of computer access.

Intelligent Agent continues to be one of the most provocative and wide-ranging publications on the digital media scene. Now published in an online, modular format, IA‘s recent releases include David J. Leonard arguing that sports video games replicate “the ideologies and nature of nineteenth century minstrelsy” and Donato Mancini (in a review of Writing Machines by N. Katherine Hayles) asserting that the “emergence of electronic literatures in the 20th century and the ever-increasing use of new media in literature means that the acceptance of media and materiality as dimensions of literary meaning is inevitable.”

Today in Trópico — the Brazilian online magazine of Art, New Technologies, Cinema, and Culture — there’s an interview with yours truly by Cícero Inácio da Silva. We cover many topics familiar to GTxA readers, from critical readings of simulations to the pleasures of the forthcoming Façade.

Elin Sjursen, the blogger behind Bloggerdy Doc, is doing an interesting variation on the blog tip jar with Help Send Mr. Teen to Summer Camp. In an effort to send her teenage son to camp this summer, she’s making photoshop art in exchange for donations to the summer camp fund. If you send her a high resolution image along with your donation to the summer camp fund, she’ll send back a piece of photoshopped artwork, such as Rex, this photoshopped bat-dog.