Grand Text Auto

I’ve just been shown two new approaches to collaborative networked writing. TurtlePox (on which Jill scooped me) makes a collaborative writing game out of social engineering email viruses, and pushes the virus metaphor. So, for example, last week I got an email with a story about a turtle that needed my help, with a link at the bottom to “participate.” I changed my strain to infect more people each round, and then passed it on to a few people, including “someone” @gmail.com. She changed the order of the initial email’s paragraphs, and then passed it on to folks, including someone @danah.org. That someone passed it on to people, including someone @mail.rit.edu, and lowered the number of infections per round. The someone @rit then rewrote the first paragraph to make it a proclamation of the iconic nature of the story in the following two paragraphs, then passed it on, including to someone @usc.edu. Each of us was making only the types of changes the system allowed us. On the site you can see the strand transformations (which are being reset, except for the strand sent to me) and also a map of its spread across the U.S.

The Quillion is a quite different type of collaborative networked writing. As the author puts it, “I took my favorite things about LiveJournal, Wikipedia, SorryEverybody.com, and Lowbrow.com, and smashed them together into a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, except without the tragedy and death. Yet.”

Branching off our recent believable character discussion, I’d like to say something about writing, gameplay, and their interrelation. In that discussion, Ian W. suggested:

[Writers] are not likely to be engineers. Even if they are the roles are very different and their tools should reflect that.

I’d say, the roles aren’t very different actually. In fact, it will become necessary for writers to be engineers.

How are the roles not very different? Writers in any medium are creators of character behavior; they invent motivations for characters, and from that create what their characters do and say. In non-interactive media, such as books and plays, as a writer works, she plays these behaviors out in her mind and narrates them into pages of text. In interactive media, such as games, the behaviors themselves are written down, as procedures — pages of code annotated with surface text. The computer executes this program, animating the characters to speak and act. In each approach, the writer’s thought processes are very similar! Sure, it may be more work to write down the behaviors themselves, than to simulate them in your mind and narrate the results, but the creative thinking behind both is similar. It takes some training to learn how to write behaviors — that is, to program — but it’s do-able. If a writer for a game is only creating sentences of dialog, then she is only doing a subset of the actual task of writing; the engineer who coded the behaviors that play out the dialog has actually been a co-writer all along. And — all this answers why writers need to be engineers, or at least collaborate very closely together.

Ian W. also wrote,

would interactive writing really be procedural when the field is more mature?

I’ll flip this around — interactive writing will be more mature when it becomes procedural.

It’s very common these days for people to start their own bogs. Bogging is an interesting cultural phenomenon, and in fact, bogging has gone mainstream. Anyone can become a bogger, if they have something to bog, such as cranberries, pictured here. Bogging is inexpensive, and easy. Boggers often form communities, collectively referred to as the Bogosphere, and are known to regularly visit each other’s bogs. What boggers do is completely new — and cannot be replicated in any other medium.

The calamities (and triumphs) that can be reached from the beginning of Edward Packard’s 1979 Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book The Third Planet from Altair are fully mapped by Greg Lord, as his justifiably proud professor Matt Kirschenbaum points out. Just as Andrew found four main paths in Night of a Thousand Boyfriends, Lord tracked down the four principal paths of Altair. He also provided a short essay relating his CYOA analysis to the theories of Espen Aarseth and Marie-Laure Ryan, and considering aspects of the material nature of the book (e.g., the effect of different “decisions” leadings to texts on facing pages, so that one can’t help but glimpse the other result). There’s a glossary explaining the terminology Lord developed and used, too.

Millions of folded paper cranes fluttered down from warplanes in the skies over southern Thailand Sunday … Encouraged by the government, Thais across the country — Cabinet ministers, office workers, schoolchildren and even convicts — have been busily folding the Japanese-style origami birds for the past two weeks.

As the birds fell to their targets in the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, school children rushed out to collect them and seek the notes inside.

Did they get the idea from William Gillespie’s electronic writing?

Although for the last month or so, I’ve been buried in a variety of teaching and administrative duties, I have found the odd moment here and there to get completely addicted to Flickr, the most compelling web-based application I’ve run across in a long time. Flickr is a photo sharing service. While the services it provides subscribers (unlimited storage, generous uploading allowance, the ability to easily integrate with blogs and RSS) are not in themselves revolutionary, two of the other features of Flickr are particularly intriguing in terms of artistic practice. The first is that Flickr has built their system with the Creative Commons in mind. As you upload your photos, it is simple to select and tick off a CC: license, making photos available in what is already for other use to use in what is already the most extensive Creative Commons photosharing database. The second is that the system allows for easy metatagging, and most flickr users take advantage of it. So you can imagesurf Flickr by keywords, and not only by more obvious criteria, such as color (red), style (blackandwhite) place (Chicago), or date (1969), but also by more conceptual tags (unhappy). Any picture can be tagged with multiple phrases. The result is both an exceptionally useful public resource for anyone interested in sharing and remixing image content, and a fascinating portrait of the zeitgeist. Although the full service costs about $5 a month, the free version is also fairly generous, allowing users to upload 100 photos.

Robin Hunicke attended last week’s Game Tech industry seminar, I assume circumventing the $2450 registration fee :-). The gathering was comprised of a Creating Believable Characters Seminar and a Game Tech Leadership Summit. She wrote up a great three part summary of the event. (Update: Make that five!)

Robin reports that the believable characters seminar was pretty much limited to (impressive) animation techniques; the presentations went little into AI and behavior, because there’s little tangible work to talk about there.

…about AI and believablity, it’s clear that they tried to find a good speaker or two – and just couldn�t. It�s not that people aren�t trying some simple things… or even that they aren�t attending the conference. For example – Checker (at Maxis) and Jay (at Valve) had a long debate during a break on Day Three about whether the industry is ‘doomed’ because for all our realism, characters are still empty husks. So clearly, it�s being discussed. But results are limited, work is slow, and not a lot of people are stepping up to say what they think will take us in the right direction. That worries me.

Um, hello… (pdf GDC04 powerpoint GDC04 video)

But, okay, generally speaking, Robin is right — no group has yet built a working demonstration, let alone entertainment experience, with a broadly capable, non-shallow believable interactive animated character.

A recent Gamasutra article reminds me that there’s actually quite a few small, under-the-radar startups or commercial groups out there that you may have never heard of, who are attempting to tackle interactive character and/or story in some form or fashion. Some groups are new, some have been around for a while; some are just one or two people, some have reasonably large teams of people (i.e, more than 2). Some have external funding, some are self-funded, some have no funding, or have already used it up; some are building polished products or freeware, some are building tools and technology. They’re all worth keeping tabs on.

Please visit the exhibition “Thank You”—an activist art project conceived by Danish/Australian/U.S. group Wooloo Productions (I’m in it!). It launched yesterday on World AIDS day, December 1st, 2004.

Thank You “confronts its audience with the relationship of exchange between Africa and the West. Dealing specifically with issues of exploitation and disease, the project utilizes possibilities afforded by online technology to illustrate the absurdity of today’s co-existing economic reality.”

mary has been so quiet…. because . . .

The Sims 2 now has a patch that fixes a few bugs. If only real life was debuggable like this. Here’s a few highlights:

• Fixes a problem with Sims’ jobs not functioning properly when 3 or more Sims go to work in a helicopter.
• Visitors will no longer kidnap a baby or toddler by leaving the lot while carrying them.
• An adopted baby no longer snaps to the ground when the social worker that delivers it puts it in a crib.
• A Sim whose fiancé dies can now become engaged again.

A new issue of Game Studies is online, with articles such as “Social Realism in Gaming”, “Social Dynamics of Online Gaming” and “The Challenge of Serious Videogames”. Also, articles on game music, German gaming, and a review of Rules of Play.

I just got back from Europe (my most recent post was from an AI lab in Zurich) where I attended a great gathering at the University of Siegen organized by Peter Gendolla und Jörgen Schäfer. Titled “Netzliteratur — Umbrüche in der literarischen Kommunikation,” it featured Marie-Laure Ryan, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Roberto Simanowski, and yours truly as the U.S. participants. Others came from Germany, France, Spain, Finland, and Switzerland. (Program PDF.) One of the highlights for me was finally meeting people who I’d corresponded with (like Marie-Laure) or who I’d long heard of (like French participants Philippe Bootz and Jean-Pierre Balpe). Everyone’s papers will be online at Dichtung Digital before long, so I won’t say too much about the presentations here — except to note that Markku Eskelinen’s was based on his excellent Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The challenge of cybertext theory and ludology to literary theory, already online at DD.

The deadline is December 15th for applying to Brown University’s graduate program in Literary Arts, the only organization I know of that offers a two-year fellowship for electronic writers. It’s a great opportunity to work in the company of writers who care intensely about language and innovative forms, support and appreciate deep engagement with computational media, and don’t have to deal with the weird politics of differing funding levels (Brown’s program only accepts as many people as it can support). Fall 2005 will mark the fifteenth year of writing workshops for electronic media at Brown.

I didn’t mention it in my review of the just-released Gamers, but the concluding piece in there, by Nic Kelman (a novelist and graduate of the Brown MFA program) contains a “Video Game Arts Manifesto.” The to-do list begins by declaring that video games must “become more than simply entertainment” and ends with a challenge to game developers: “Make someone cry.”

Funny thing is, squeezing out the tears has been an explicit goal for game designers for more than 20 years.

Mark Marino and his collaborators have rolled out Grand Thieves Audio, a set of MP3 “modologues” that are ready to be played within Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, as you play it. With these, you can supplant the uncannily accurate radio fare that is included in the game with the appeal of an army recruiter, the caring voice of Mama Vercetti, and helpful hints from a driving instructor who provides some history and tells of his past as a shop teacher. These first three monologues, written by Mark, are voiced by various talent. The speeches have their amusing period touches: The recruiter refers to recent victories in Granada rather than Iraq, and he and mom make mention of then-current video games rather than more recent developments, such as America’s Army. The fourth recording offers a (slightly anachronistic) reading and commentary from now-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Mark Unpingco). This “book on 8-track” is excused by the fact that time travel does, after all occur, in Terminator. I’m not sure if these pieces will become a habit and replace my usual soundtrack for GTA: Vice City, but they are worth listening to in-game, and provide an interesting twist – one that is a bit more subtle and nuanced than converting the Barons of Hell into Barney.

A Review of Gamers: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
Edited by Shanna Compton
Soft Skull Press
2004
260 pp.
$14.95

Like a piece of summarization software run with extreme parameters, I have located the single sentence that I believe best characterizes Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. It is found in Aaron McCollough’s essay, about two-thirds of the way through the book:

“When I attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, playing Madden was one of the few things that helped me briefly forget about being a fraud.”

According to the Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data, which is often indispensable when attempting to understand unusual volumes such as this one, this is a book about Video Games – Social aspects and Video games – Psychological aspects. According to the press release, it’s “The first book to ever seriously explore the culture of video and online games.” Actually, Gamers is probably best characterized as collection of personal essays, with a handful of rather impersonal ones thrown in to keep them company. The personal essay genre is not my favorite, and a video gaming theme doesn’t necessarily make the genre more palatable. I approached Gamers with some of the trepidation I might have felt starting in on Drivers: Writers and Visual Artists Discuss Their Fond Memories of Cars. Still, when I received Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (the bibliophilic, single-author equivalent of such a volume) as a gift not long ago I did go ahead and read it, and I even found things to like. Never one to be a snob for books about books, I was willing to read the confessions of common gamers, too.

Finally, a fresh take on the concept of direct interaction with virtual pets, something I’m pretty familiar with :-) . I’ve been waiting almost 10 years now for something new in this space, since a group of us at PF.Magic initially released Dogz and Catz in the mid-1990’s.

New for the Nintendo DS, a dual-touchscreen handheld game machine, comes Nintendogs. Check out this impressive flash movie demonstrating it. Here’s a little bit of discussion about it so far.

(via Intelligent Artifice)

• A recent AAAI symposium on “Style and Meaning in Language, Art, Music and Design“. The papers are available online. (Was organized by not one, but two Shlomo’s; what are the chances?)
• A new issue of Dichtung Digital, derived from papers presented at “Under construction: Digital literatures and theoretical approaches”, last April in Barcelona. The essays written in English include Laura Castanyer addressing “disenchantment” with hypertext, and in fact cries “murder”; Markku Eskelinen “shed[s] some ludological light into the recent trend of building textual instruments and instrumental texts”; and George Landow offers ways to judge “good or bad” hypertext.

Here at the real Experimental Game Lab :), we’re pleased to announce the symposium Living Game Worlds: Community, Simulation and the Future of Entertainment, to be held in honor of Will Wright March 15-16, 2005. Wright will be at Georgia Tech to accept the prestigious Ivan Allen award in recognition of his ground-breaking work in game design (the previous two Ivan Allen award winners are Jimmy Carter and Sam Nunn). Based on conversations with Will, we’re putting together a custom symposium organized around topics that Will wants to engage. We’ll have panels on Procedural Narrative, Procedural Content, and New Entertainment Genres, as well as demos/performances by leading machinima and demoscene practitioners. I’ll post a link to the final schedule when it becomes available.

The New York Times today has an article on story generation: Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite! The article mentions several well known systems, including Selmer Bringsjord’s Brutus and Callaway’s and Lester’s Storybook. The most amusing single line: “Still, what has been accomplished so far is scary enough, and surely there is more to come, thanks to rapid advances in computing power and the rise of “narratology” (how stories are told) as an academic field of study, among other unwholesome trends that are making the novelist’s life ever more perilous.” I particularly like the scare quotes around “narratology”, especially given the infamous debate that never happened.

He’s kept a low profile for quite some time now, but the Micrys Pages, an ongoing series of critical essays on game design and game studies by a Red Storm developer who goes by Eyejinx, very much deserve your attention. I only just discovered them following a link to his site from one of his recent comments on a blog.

Eyejinx, who also has a background in literary theory, has written an extensive series called the “Pitfalls of the Working Game Designer”, which offer great insight on the true nature of the job, and attempt to debunk the romanticism often associated with it. I found the essay “Pissing in the Sandbox” particularly good, probably the best breakdown I’ve read yet of the sandbox analogy to contemporary game design.

Wow, this is great! Google has released a beta of Google Scholar, which offers search on topics, authors, etc. and returns links and beaucoup info on academic papers. Ooh, this is going to enable us to so easily dig up all kinds of papers that we didn’t know about yet. I feel like I just got a major scholarly power up.

Here’s their heuristic for ranking links:

UCSD’s Experimental Game Lab (I wasn’t aware they had one, until reading this Gamasutra blurb) has received some support from Sammy Studios, a subsidiary of Sega Japan. The support includes a $290K donation for research in MMOG technology, character animation and rendering, as well as free use by UCSD students of Sammy Studios’ proprietary game engine SCORE, for making student projects. Cool.

One of the UCSD EGL projects is a piece called What I Did Last Summer, generated by bl0gb0t with Alex Dragulescu. bl0gb0t “is a software agent in development that generates experimental graphic novels based on text harvested from web logs.”

Today in the department here at Penn, I heard David S. H. Rosenthal, of Stanford and Sun, speak on “Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe: Peer-to-Peer Digital Preservation” – the Stanford-based LOCKSS program for providing academic journals in a distributed, reliable way, through libraries.