Grand Text Auto

The call for papers for the next DIGRA conference is available. Abstracts are due November 30th, 2004.

In contemporary commercial game design, natural language interaction is avoided like the plague. If the player needs to “talk” to characters in the world, designers typically employ menus (either dialog trees containing explicit dialog, or flat dialog action menus containing actions such as flirt, insult, etc.) or simply can the entire conversation by providing a talk command. Barring occasional experiments with limited speech recognition (e.g. Lifeline, Seaman, Babyz), developers are skeptical of natural language understanding (NLU), remembering the frustrations of the well-known parser failures of text-based interactive fiction, and noting that NLU requires human-level AI to solve in the general case.

Ultimately, however, in order to create adult experiences containing rich characters addressing complex themes, games will have to use language, and thus will have to tackle NLU. Players will want and need to communicate a large set of possible meanings to the characters (and of course the characters, as well as the large scale structure of the game, should be responsive to those meanings). Any explicit choice approach to conveying this large range of meanings (e.g. dialog menus, discourse act menus, constructive interfaces that let you put together sentences out of parts) introduces a number of problems, including foregrounding the boundaries of the experience (the player immediately sees the full range of possibilities), making all choices appear equally salient, and making action selection unwieldy (and potentially unmanageable).

Perfectly apropos of Andrew’s recent post about, and the ensuing discussion of, interactivity and comics, is the release of a demo of Future Boy!, [36.3MB].

A special panel discussion, “Interdisciplinarity and the Humanities,” kicked off this year’s Graduate Humanities Forum meetings at Penn. Sheldon Hackney — history professor, former president of Penn, former chair of the NEH, and hero of the culture wars — described how, early in his academic career, he programmed a mainframe computer to manipulate data about votes in the Alabama legislature, only to find that political scientists had been done similar work, and discovered similar formulas, already. (A danger of interdisciplinary work, indeed.) Liliane Weissberg, professor of German and comparative literature, discussed how institutions related to fields of inquiry, describing how many current academic departmental boundaries arose in a 19th-century European political context. Gary Tomlinson, professor of music, talked about how ethnomusicology and the study of popular music arose to challenge traditional European musicology. He also talked about how his own work, which he was free to do as a tenured professor, might not be a good model for students who needed to seek entry-level academic jobs. Moderator Wendy Steiner, professor of English, discussed her work and its relation to visual art studies and English, mentioning several methodologies or approaches that enabled interdisciplinary practice: semiotics and narratology, for instance. (Ethnography, mentioned in Tomlinson’s discussion of ethnomusicology, seems to also be in this category.) Further comments from panelists were also insightful — I enjoyed hearing from Prof. Hackney about what might seem like a tedious administrative topic, for instance: how Penn’s institutional structure, with graduate groups separate from departments and the possibility of instituting programs and seminars, allowed for more flexible, if less well-funded, interdisciplinary discussion and inquiry. The discussion in Q&A was lively and interesting, too.

Representatives from Electronic Arts and the University Of South California’s School of Cinema-Television have unveiled the EA Game Innovation Lab at USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, located in downtown Los Angeles. The lab has been created to act as a state-of-the-art research space and think tank for game design and creation.

(via Gamasutra)

Bridgeport and Westbound claim to own the musical composition and sound recording copyrights in “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” by George Clinton, Jr. and the Funkadelics. We assume, as did the district court, that plaintiffs would be able to establish ownership in the copyrights they claim. There seems to be no dispute either that “Get Off” was digitally sampled or that the recording “100 Miles” was included on the sound track of I Got the Hook Up. Defendant No Limit Films, in conjunction with Priority Records, released the movie to theaters on May 27, 1998. The movie was apparently also released on VHS, DVD, and cable television. Fatal to Bridgeport’s claims of infringement was the Release and Agreement it entered into with two of the original owners of the composition “100 Miles,” Ruthless Attack Muzick (RAM) and Dollarz N Sense Music (DNSM), in December 1998, granting a sample use license to RAM, DNSM, and their licensees. Finding that No Limit Films had previously been granted an oral synchronization license to use the composition “100 Miles” in the sound track of Hook Up, the district court concluded Bridgeport’s claims against No Limit Films were barred by the unambiguous terms of the Release and Agreement. Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films LLC, 230 F. Supp.2d 830, 833-38 (M.D. Tenn. 2002). Although Bridgeport does not appeal from this determination, it is relevant to the district court’s later decision to award attorney fees to No Limit Films.

Atsuko Tanaka and Akira Kanayama, two members of the Gutai movement in Japan, spoke tonight at the Japan Society in nyc. Amazing talk. For those of you who may not know, Gutai was an art movement, based in Japan, that asked many of the same questions that fluxus, conceptual artists, and I daresay new media artists ask(ed), but very early in the scheme of things… Begun in 1955 (!) with a big two week event in the suburbs outside of Osaka, Gutai was proclaimed as an experiment : to take art outside the closed inside and expose the works to the outside, to sun wind and rain. A bunch of teens and young artists took over a pine grove park and staged a 13 day exhibition of paintings, gigantic sculptures created from abandoned machinery, and other unusual objects and performances. Atsuko Tanaka, one of the first women conceptual artists (ok, yes I know putting myself on the chopper here) put out a large pink bubble gum vinyl sheet to ripple in the wind. With the zero artists, Gutai members demonstrate a very early strain of conceptualism. Another member, Saburo Murakami, would take a ball, dip it in ink, and toss it against a wall… trying to invent a “new painting” using the “feel” of velocity. According to Alexandra Munroe, host of the talk and interviewee, GUTAI means “tool and body” – the element of performance is a strong strategy in many of the works.

Tonight’s the opening of “The Passage of Mirage — Illusory Virtual Objects.” It’s curated by Christiane Paul and Zhang Ga, and features works by Jim Campbell, Vuk Cosic, John Gerrard, W. Bradford Paley, Eric Paulos, Wolfgang Staehle, Thomson & Craighaid, and Carlo Zanni. There are artist talks coming up on the 30th, and then a symposium titled “Negotiating Realities: New Media Art and the Post-Object” on October 10.

But that’s hardly all Christiane’s been up to. For example, two cool projects have recently gone up at the Whitney Artport (a space she curates). One is {Software} Structures by Casey Reas (with Robert Hodgin, William Ngan, Jared Tarbell). The other is Demonstrate by Ken Goldberg and Alpha Lab (click “view again” if your browser blocks popups).

More details on all of these below.

Check out Toogle — it creates an image of text, from the very text used to search for that image.

Highlight the above — it’s text!

The first meeting this year of the History of Material Texts Workshop at Penn featured the presentation “The Materiality of the Digital Text” by Rebecca Bushnell, English professor and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. (The textual status of digital documents is one of three themes for the workshop this year.) Bushnell quoted Alberto Manguel, Roger Chartier, Robert Coover, and Sven Birkerts in investigating how to approach the material nature of digital facsimiles, and showed the on-line Furness Shakespeare Library from Penn’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. The digital text is clearly different than an original edition or printed facsimile, but neither Bushnell nor others in the seminar were stuck on thinking of it as immaterial, or as some simple confounding of the order of the codex. We even discussed a bit how the nature “born-digital” works differs from that of digital facsimiles of print texts. Classicist Shane Butler made clear how the methods of the seminar could be brought to bear on digital or other sorts of non-printed texts, stating that “the material text” can be thought of as any practice — oral, written, printed, or digital — that separates the author from expression of an idea and allows that expression to exist independently.

After Twisty Little Passages and First Person, the academic book I’ve been most looking forward to reading is Alan Liu’s Laws of Cool, years in the making and just released by University of Chicago Press.

The Laws of Cool is a study of the relation of the contemporary humanities and arts to information culture, and of information culture itself to the now dominant business paradigm of “knowledge work.” What crucial perspective on knowledge do the humanities and arts still contribute when the primary mission of knowledge is business? Reciprocally, how do “knowledge work,” “lifelong learning,” “learning organizations,” and so on offer critical insight into the contemporary humanities? And finally, what is the mediating role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of the new humanism and aesthetics of technological “cool” (as it is so often called on the Web)?

Fable is one of this year’s most anticipated games — and with good reason. The creative team behind it has been responsible for a string of innovative games (e.g., Black and White, Dungeon Keeper) and this time they’ve set themselves a massive challenge. Fable, which will be released shortly, aims to re-imagine the adventure game so that it doesn’t center on hoop-jumping — it aims to situate a traditional hero’s journey within a simulated world. While some early reviews bemoan the fact that elements of Fable had to be scaled back, it’s clear that the game is still remarkably ambitious. As the player’s character ages, and as the world changes around him (“him” because plans for female heros were among those cut), he can choose at almost any time to explore and adventure in the world, pick up the plot of the hero’s journey, or try to use the actions available in the simulated world to route around what would be the next necessary step in a hoop-jumping adventure game. And, what’s more, this world isn’t just a graphical world. It’s also a linguistic one. It’s one in which the work of writers — James Leach chief among them — is central.

You can read quite a bit online about the work of Peter Molyneux and Fable‘s game design (e.g., in The New York Times). You can read quite a bit about the work of the AI team and the simulated world and characters (e.g., early reviews from places like IGN). I will concentrate, in these posts, on the writing of Fable.

Here’s an article with a few factoids re: women gamers from cnn.

Also folks, I want to remind you that if you are near NYC this weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun), the fabulous ARTBOTS show is coming! The Third Annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show will take place on September 17, 18, & 19 from noon to 6:00pm @126th Street & Amsterdam Avenue. I was a curator of the show along with Mark Tribe and Douglas Irving Repetto of Columbia U, and I can promise that there are some amazing pieces in the show!!

Speaking of NPR, I just learned from one of my favorite radio news sources about some UK research which found that those who keep personal diaries are ruining their health.

[R]egular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness. Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

“We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off,” says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all,” she adds.

Today’s edition of The World (a BBC, PRI, and WGBH co-production) includes a story on newsgaming (wma), especially September 12th. There’s a nice bit of interview with Gonzalo, and also a couple comments from yours truly.

Alex McLean recently published Hacking Perl in Nightclubs at perl.com. Alex is a musician who performs electronic music by hacking music generation perl code live in a front of the audience. He’s also one of the founders, along with Nick Collins, of the Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming.

Why does Alex do perl programming performances? He says:

However, when running my Perl scripts during a performance I grew to feel as if I wasn’t really performing — I was running software I’d written earlier, so to some extent the performance was pre-prepared. I could tweak parameters and so on, but the underlying structure was dictated by my software. So what’s the alternative?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve moved toward writing software live, in front of an audience. If a programmer is onstage, then they should program!

Ecotonoa, a NEC project, allows Web visitors to build onto a virtual tree by adding their own short messages, the most popular of which seems to be “smoke bowls.” Thanks to Ryan on ifMUD for the tip.

Via Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s coin-op (just added to the GTxA blogroll), Yellow Arrow is a sticker art/collaboratively authored viral narrative project. Project participants post a yellow sticker pointing to something they think is important in the urban landscape, and then send a short email description to the yellowarrow.org server via their phone. Each sticker has an individual ID. When other users encounter the sticker in the public space, they then can send an email to yellowarrow.org to retrieve the description the tagger left behind.

Sure, we don’t have a fancy logo, but the nickm.com Video Game Research Facility does its part to advance the field of game studies. Thanks to the Dreamcast, there’s access to the original versions of Jet Grind Radio, Rez, Shenmue, and other fine blockbuster commercial games, not to mention the latest and most advanced wave of homebrew console games. The Atari Jaguar (upper right) turns out to not be good for much except Tempest 2000, although there are several other cartridges available, should any scholars at nickm.com want to investigate how console game development can go horribly awry. The VGRF also features a Sony Playstation (bottom middle) for some 32-bit tomb raiding and for light-gun-enabled alien-killing. The Apple //c, seen directly beneath the authentic mid-1980s video output device, offers access to some 1980s home computer video gaming. Finally, the Atari 2600 Jr. (bottom left, atop the most frequently-accessed cartridges) provides a essential platform for historical research, particularly given the ready supply of controllers (trackball for Centipede and Missile Command, two pairs of paddles for four-player Warlords) and the library of more than 100 carts. It also offers a good way to negotiate power relationships with visiting scholars.

Via Brandon, a wicked cool word tool: WORDCOUNT

is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Grand (1804) Text (1339) Auto (17171), fer instance.

The Atari Flashback is slated to be released in November for $45, IGN reports. The story, and discussion, is on Slashdot, too. The Flashback seems hardware-compatible with the Atari 7800, a system that ran most Atari 2600/VCS cartridges, too. I’m excited because it’s a low-cost, plug-into-the-TV system that allows two people to play at once. (This experience was precluded by the all-in-a-joystick Atari VCS systems that have been released so far.) The 20 games for 2600 and 7800 that are installed in the Flashback include many standouts, and one game that was never released, Saboteur. However, it doesn’t look like it will accept cartridges, a disappointment for those who have cartridges sitting around or are planning to acquire them. And of course that would dash the hopes of those of us who want new cartridges to be made — but it turns out, those new Atari VCS games are in development, and don’t depend on the launch of the Flashback.

I’ve been talking quite a bit recently (e.g., in the Dichtung Digital interview) about the idea of playing (with) text — specifically, about textual play that operates via logics that are more linguistic than they are graphical. Not detecting collisions with graphical words, but, for example, interactively moving along chains of words that exist in bodies of text.

My first experiment in this direction — conceived and created with collaborators Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich — has just been released. Regime Change is the first of two “textual instruments” that were commissioned by Turbulence. We’ll be releasing the second, News Reader, later this month.

PBS (public broadcasting in the U.S.) has created a television documentary called “The Video Game Revolution“, premiering tomorrow night at 8pm (check your local listings for dates and times in your area). The program description says the documentary will examine the history of games, interview famous game developers, profile game players, and conclude with the future of gaming.

Along with the documentary is an impressive companion website, with four sections: History of Gaming, Inside the Games, Impact of Gaming, and The Arcade. Each section has a variety of interviews, articles, graphics, videoclips, and downloads.

Andrew pointed to a followup conversation about academia vs. industry on GameGirlAdvance, following up on the GameSpot article on the topic. In GGA comments, gman wrote: “I don’t agree that academics can teach us ‘how we can make them [games] better’. I don’t think they’ve done it in any other entertainment.” Mark replied, “Without being too agressive, I’d say that your opinion IS uninformed.”

I have to side with Mark on this one. Looking at interactive fiction and the novel particularly, I’ve tried to explore the relationship of academia to “industry” (or, “the creative process”) below…

Robert Pinsky’s recent poem “Pixel,” celebrating the 50th anniversary of the picture element, is really worth a read, despite the inability of Wired to properly typeset poems online. (You can read this edition decently if your monitor has about 1600 pixels of horizontal resolution; otherwise, the “printer-friendly” page — you need to scroll down 1/3 of the way — is better.) After you get past the initial shock of the beginning of the poem (“Porn on the web: …”) you may be able to appreciate the project of it: to set up the digital arts as an inevitable extension of the past, to explain the different, complementary drives of artist and engineer to allow new and powerful sorts of expression; to connect even pornography with classical, traditional art.