Grand Text Auto

The proceedings of the upcoming DiGRA conference are now online, giving folks a chance to read up before the ludopolooza officially begins Thursday evening in Vancouver. Looks like quite a diverse collection of ideas and arguments! Among them you can find the full text of a new paper by Michael and me, Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space. Preluded in part of last December’s Head Games discussion and sort of a companion paper to our AIIDE paper, in this new paper we talk about our take on resolving the tension between game and story: to recast interactions within a story world in terms of abstract social games, where players fire off discourse acts instead of guns, in which the player’s “score” is not communicated to the player via numbers or sliders but rather via enriched, theatrically dramatic performance.

I am pleased to announce the winner of the 60 Second Story Competition.

After much deliberation, The judges selected “Charles” by Steve Himmer as the winner of the first 60 Second Story Competition, citing its humor, clarity, and completeness as a story. Steve will be receiving a one-minute supply of chocolate, and a one inch by one inch edition of his story will be printed by Spineless Books. Steve Himmer teaches writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of an unpublished novel about a bear, and also writes at onepotmeal.com.

The runners-up included “Faith” by Ed Falco in second place, a tie between “The Golden Age” by Roderick Coover and “Pillow, Pillow” by Jason Nelson for third, and “Florence” by Christine Wilks in fourth.

for the next two weeks, i’ll be reblogging at the eyebeam reblog site.

Last week I finished watching Jason Scott’s BBS: The Documentary (which I mentioned earlier on here) and also saw Gamer Br [torrent], [main site] a freely available 45-minute documentary about video gaming in Brazil that’s available via Legaltorrents.

They’re both well worth watching if you like the kind of stuff we like here on Grand Text Auto. It was interesting to see, though, how the two films look very different approaches to talking with people about their computing experiences, the digital communities that they’ve been part of, and the things that make them passionate about computing.

Echoing the debates we had two years ago in both blog and book, Mark Bernstein has recently restated his argument, with the coda, “As far as I’m aware, this argument has been essentially ignored.” Actually, I responded to this argument in my First Person book essay response to his and Diane Greco’s essay (see below).

Before you stop reading, thinking this is just pointless academic jousting, let me say I think Bernstein and Greco’s argument is a good and very useful one, pushing important design issues to the fore, that I rarely see done. And although I’m not wanting to rehash the debate, it would be interesting to hear others’ take on the issue, if anyone has any new thoughts to contribute. (Mark includes a link to a good new essay from WRT on frustration with IF and HTF.)

Here’s an excerpt from my response, written four years ago, taken from the book (that you won’t find in the abbreviated version at EBR):

“Even if we could experience Hamlet on the holodeck, it wouldn’t work. Tragedy requires that the characters be blind…” I agree, it seems likely that certain types of stories such as traditional tragedy may not work as an interactive story, for the reasons Bernstein and Greco describe. Instead authors will need to tell the kinds of stories that do work interactively. Façade is a more open-ended, explorative, psychological situation. Is this drama anymore? We hope to understand this better once we get a chance to play with the finished work.

Eliza Redux, by Adrianne Wortzel and Studio Blue at the Cooper Union, has just launched and is featured in the Turbulence Spotlight. The Eliza Redux site offers online access to a “a physical robot which, having passed the Turing test with flying colors, thinks it is a human psychoanalyst and persists in offering online pseudo- psychoanalytic sessions. … Peer consultation is available in the Reception Area as well as archived sessions and other reference materials.” Of course, the reference is to Eliza/Doctor, the 1964-1966 system Joseph Weizenbaum created at MIT. (Dennis has Charles Hayden’s implementation online – the same one we included in The New Media Reader and which is widely available for download.) Wortzel’s announcement reads, “In spite of the transparency of the program’s lack of intelligence, lab personnel were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish the machine from a human psychotherapist and became so dependent upon ELIZA for ‘therapeutic sessions’ that eventually Weizenbaum had to withdraw its use.”

Andrew did a great job posting his talk notes for AIIDE. In this post I’ll describe some of my reactions and thoughts to the talks and conversations I had at AIIDE.

Chris Crawford

Andrew and I are certainly in agreement with Chris about the need to increase verb counts in order to achieve interactive story. But Chris strongly wants to avoid natural language, and instead move to a custom logographic language. Further, he wants to use parse technology to provide constraints as the player writes sentences in the custom language – I imagine something like pop-up menus. I understand the impulse to avoid natural language (seems like an impossible, AI complete problem) and to prevent the player from being able to form nonsensical sentences, but I worry that:
1) logographic languages will feel unnatural
2) a pre-parse interface that constrains what symbols you can use based on the symbols you’ve used so far will prevent players from being able to speak in their own style.

To our surprise, a New York Times reporter was at the AIIDE conference last week. The resulting article for tomorrow’s paper, “Redefining the Power of the Gamer”, posted online in both the Arts section and Technology section, consists of a series of interviews of several of the conference speakers — and leads off with a description of playing Façade, plus a screenshot and link to our website!

Although Façade is not quite released yet — we’re setting up our distribution channels as we speak — we’ve gone ahead and put up a “pre-order” e-mail address on the site (even though it will be freeware), to try to capture some of the traffic that may head our way from the article… :-)

At the ICT summer school in Stockholm, Espen Aarseth noted in his talk “How to Analyze Games: A Metamodel” (Sunday 5 June) that there are as many ways to study games as there are reasons to study them, and that, for example, game players would want very different things from game analysis than, for example, an academic studying games; thus, methods must take these vast differences into account.

Aarseth offered tentative, broad approaches to creating methods which could be used to study games, spending a good deal of time asking overarching questions about art (are games art?); he emphasized that art is modelled on a “king of the hill” style competition where an artist’s job is to claim the superior position. Several artists in the audience disagreed with Aarseth.

Aarseth also noted that communities (from academic fields to online groups) are formed by exclusion. Overall, the tone of competition proffered in games themselves seems to have infused the discussion. of the field.

Michael Joyce began his talk at the ICT summer school in Stockholm by distinguishing his talk “Red Shelves and texts held in confidence: Networked Collaboration as Medium and Artefact” from yesterday’s talk by Espen Aarseth.

Michael and I had great time last week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference (AIIDE) in Los Angeles. I’d guess there were around 80 participants, about two-thirds from academia and the rest from the game industry. There were many interesting presentations and a roomful of demos, including our now code-complete Façade, which got an enthusiastic reception. All considered the meeting a success, with plans to hold it again next year.

[Update: here’s a NYTimes article about the conference!]

What follows are raw notes from several of the talks and keynotes, in the order they were presented. Apologies if I missed a few, I occasionally had to take a break to avoid overload, and to tend the demo machine. Talk titles, and particularly prescient quotes, are highlighted in bold.

***
Doug Church — AI Tools for Generating Player-Driven Emotional Experience in Videogames
***

currently have a rise of entertainment content in games, beyond just play
not just the challenge of the game, now “entertainment”; big moments, emotional events, open ended worlds
how does AI fit in?

Today’s New York Times offers an article that investigates the origins of the joystick and credits it as one of the most overlooked acheivements of the last century.

Are they fun to send via SMS? I can’t say. But they do make for excellent short examples in a narratology lecture. the-phone-book.com offers six award-winning SMS stories.

I gave a lecture on Story and Games [slides in PDF] to the CIS 564 class on game design here at Penn. The first half was straight narratology; then we looked at the nature of games as simulations, game time as distinct from time in stories, etc., and I had the class play Varicella in two groups so that we could discuss it in some detail. Fun stuff.

I recently ran across this ambitious and obsessive illustration project: Zak Smith’s Illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow includes an image for every single page of Pynchon’s masterpiece. All the images are available on the site. The whole collection was exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial and is now in the permanent collection of the Walker Museum in Minneapolis.

What happens when your journalism classes do a four year investigation into who Deep Throat was, publish their results on the Web, garner huge amounts of press coverage, and then turn out to be wrong?

Two more game conferences are happening soon. First, for those who don’t have the time to travel, there’s On Demand Games: The First Webcast Conference, with notable game industry folk including Raph Koster discussing online gaming. The conference is is on June 1st, 2005, from 9:30 am – 12:30 pm EST. Registration is free, but there’s limited space, so sign up today.

Second, there’s the Games, Learning and Society Inaugural Conference to be held June 23 and 24 in Madison, Wisconsin. “The GLS Conference will foster substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education.”

We’re back from Provflux, the Providence arts festival where Scott and I read Implementation at The Steel Yard, posted the novel throughout the city, and offered stickers at the CUBE2 Gallery, where photos of sticker placements were on display.

Thanks to Hanna for taking this photo of the reading. Scott has posted some photos from the exhibit and more photos from the reading on Flickr, available via his blog.

If you’re on the North American west coast this summer, consider attending one of these shindigs, where we’ll be giving Façade talks and demos. We’ll be posting these papers online, as well as publicly releasing Façade itself, soon.

* Artificial Intelligence and Digital Entertainment, June 1-3, Marina del Rey, Los Angeles. Our talk and demo: “Structuring Content in the Façade Interactive Drama Architecture”.

* Digital Games Research Conference — Changing Views: Worlds in Play, June 16-19, Vancouver, BC. Our talk: “Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space”.

* Chris Crawford’s Phrontisterion, June 25-26, Jacksonville, Oregon. We’ll be demoing, discussing, debating and camping.

* SIGGRAPH, July 31 – August 4, Los Angeles. I’ll be on an EA heavy panel, Believable Characters: Are AI-Driven Characters Possible, and Where Will They Take Us?

The abstracts follow:

Scott, Hanna, and I are at Provflux. More later, but for now, a quick report: At the RISD Museum, in the Annual Graduate Student Exhibition, we found an electronic literature piece right there in the wild. Joseph Hecking’s Mimetics Simulation No. 1, done in the medium of “interactive computer graphics,” according to the placard, presented on overhead, game-like view of small figures running about bearing symbols – crosses, staffs, dollar signs, and so on. When one of them is touched via the touch-screen interface, texts appear, for instance:

drink a uniter to have cause on walt disney
at all medical institutions with a divider

Several new offerings in New York City for those interested in studying and making games.

In conjunction with the Tiltfactor Research lab at Hunter College,

I’m going to be offering two courses: one is game studies foundations, and one is focused on making social impact games for the web.

Parsons also has a new game track in their Design and Technology MFA program!

Even after much prompting, Scott won’t announce it, but his new personal site has been online for a while now at retts.net. His site is a good place to track Scott’s new media teaching, see what his classes are up to, and learn about other things that Scott deems too embarrassing to publish on Grand Text Auto.

The Hypertext ’05 full paper deadline has passed, but you can still submit short papers and demo proposals (due June 9) and poster proposals (due June 19). The conference will be September 6-9 in Salzburg.

Jason Scott has just shipped his epic BBS (Bulletin Board System) documentary, a set of three DVDs which has video from more than 200 interviews with BBS pioneers, “new school” latecomers to the scene, sysops, users, and others involved in the huge, headless social computing project of the BBS during the 1970s and 1980s.

On Tuesday, I saw on Slashdot that the documentary was shipping. And I got my copy today. Hanna and I just watched the first episode. Without having seeing the whole production, it’s still clear to me that anyone interested in the material and social history of computing should watch this documentary, and it would be useful to show parts of it to classes that deal with the topic.

A quick surprise: the number one downloaded audio book on a favorite p2p. network right now is The Bible- Old Testament- Complete. Just thought I’d share. It appears to be hedging out Tom Clancy, Anne Rice, Tolkien, and Harry Potter.

Janet Murray asked for the answers I would have given to the questions I posed to Warren Spector, Neil Young and Tim Schafer at the recent GDC panel, Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories? I found it useful for myself to write these out, to clarify my own thinking, and to hopefully get feedback from anyone interested.

I’ll try to be succinct and specific. These answers are informed by my experience over the past 13 years developing interactive characters and stories and closely following the industry and academic R&D in the field, helping me identify what I believe is important and what’s not. (Also I’m guessing these would be answers similar to what Michael would have said had he been given more time to participate in the actual panel discussion.) For some background on the panel, you may first want to read what the panelists said: 1 2 3.

Question 1: What do you consider the most important qualities and pleasures we *don’t* yet find in today’s interactive entertainment? And why are they needed?

Boiling it down, I see three major areas sorely deficient in today’s games, that if given substantial attention from game developers, e.g. 3+ focused years of R&D, I believe would lead to some true progress toward creating authentically interactive, much more satisfying characters and stories.