Grand Text Auto

Via Slashdot Games, a new Gamespy article reporting on a recent talk given by Peter Molyneux, whose company’s upcoming release Fable looks to be very interesting. Some snippets from the article on the topics of AI, and interactive story:

… “we [the games industry] have to take on challenges that the academic world has been trying to tackle for years.”

… The central problem that developers have been wrestling with for years is “how do you tell a linear story in a simulated world?” He didn’t propose a solution other than to say that you need to have the world — and the story — react to the character as a gamer plays. Simulation and AI and the other technologies he described would have to be developed to that level.

Robin Hunicke and Rob Zubek, friends of ours and both currently PhD candidates in Northwestern’s Interactive Entertainment Group, recently got a sneak peek at the current build of Facade (which is still a few months away from completion). On her blog, Robin wrote up her reaction and discussions she had with Rob, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the project as they perceived them.

Since virtually no one has gotten a chance to play Facade yet, I’m not sure how much the specific points about the project will make sense to readers; but certainly valuable to readers, Robin poses several good and interesting general questions about IF, player feedback, natural language processing, etc.

The new version of criticalartware brings something like the “history-enriched digital objects” approach to the pathways connecting the site’s contents. Then the contents and relationships are made available for others to visualize in new ways. It’s like a wiki about interesting tech/art stuff with connections that strengthen and fade through reading (and the possibility for terms to link in more than one direction). Unfortunately, it appears one has to go through a registration process just to start reading. I did, and it’s an interesting site, but the high barrier to initial perusal seems misguided.

From a message about criticalartware:

In the ever present techno-social fabric of operating systems, desktops and software, criticalartware seeks to examine the pre-internet era of early phase “Video Art” and the growth of software art in the channels of contemporary “New Media” theorypractices. We are interested in “software” as a construct and context during these two art historical moments and the ways in which software functions as art and art functions as software. These two moments function as brackets in frames of reference that will form the basis of our activities.

Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism

Princeton University
6 March 2004

“We are not here to condemn games or to defend them, but to interpret them,” Roger Bellin, of Princeton’s PhD program in English, said in introducing the conference, as he cautioned against seeking a single, hegemonic approach to games and pointed out the diversity of approaches that are represented here. This excellent conference was co-organized by Dexter Palmer; it ran quite smoothly after the one audiovisual hitch (which involved my Atari 2600 Jr.).

About 45 people were there at the very beginning of the day; the number quickly swelled to about 75. I was slated to speak first, but was shuffled into the last spot of the panel as Roger went to chase down a coaxial cable. What follows are just my notes on the conference, posted after my late-night train trip back, pretty lacking in analysis, but perhaps of some use to those who want to know what the conference was like:

The Boston Globe ran an article last Sunday about Sherry Turkle, who is hosting an “Evocative Objects” symposium held tomorrow, Friday March 5, at MIT.

The article touches on emotional robotic and virtual characters, including robots in nursing homes.

What has become increasingly clear to her is that, counterintuitively, we become attached to sophisticated machines not for their smarts but their emotional reach. “They seduce us by asking for human nurturance, not intelligence,” she says. “We’re suckers not for realism but for relationships.” … “We need a national conversation on this whole area of machines like the one we’re having on cloning,” Turkle says. “It shouldn’t be just at AI conventions and among AI developers selling to nursing homes.”

GameSpot has an article previewing the upcoming Independent Games Festival at GDC, including a blurb about Michael’s and my project, Facade. Judging by the accurate details in our blurb, they’ve actually played the projects they’re writing about.

Update: GameTunnel has started a series of articles on the IGF.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Barry Silverman has contributed a note on a very important topic for those doing engineering or science work on Grand Text Auto-style systems: how can you evaluate your development effort so that a granting agency (or thesis committee, or journal) can see if you made some measurable improvements?

Not too long ago, I became interested in the topic of how to evaluate an interactive fiction or drama-based game that might also have training value. This came about because I was applying to NIH for a grant to create a game and they wanted any game to prove it had value. My own thesis was that the training value would be enhanced to the extent that it was stealth learning, that the users were engaged/transported, and to the extent they were entertained. We compromised and the sponsors had me place a psychometrician and a narratologist on the team. It is now three years later, we completed the game (see here or here on this site), a clinical trial with 200 subjects is currently underway, and to conduct the trial the team had to produce a number of instruments by which to evaluate the game.

In particular, we developed various new survey instruments to capture user reactions to the game and shifts in their knowhow and behavioral intent. By comparing across various experimental arms (ie, game, movie version, pamphlet, etc.) we hope to capture the impact of the game relative to other mediums. Overall, in addition to a demographics instrument we have developed instruments for metrics in both training dimensions (Knowledge, Stated Intent, Willingness to Pay) as well as in aesthetic dimensions (Narrative Engagement, Game Entertainment, Usefulness, and Usability). We also make use of two previously developed instruments on decisional conflict and need for cognition. The nine draft instruments are provided in a recent report I have posted to my website – select “Evaluation” tab under http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~barryg/heart/index.html …

Used to be, one good way to artistic notoriety was to be put on trial for obscenity. Sure, it wasn’t an easy experience, but it catapulted debate about the quality of your work into the top ranks of artistic discussion. And, as an added bonus, it created a certain illicit thrill around the consumption of your product. Obscenity trials did wonders for the careers of James Joyce, Henry Miller, and of course “Madame Bovary c’est moi.”

Now, of course, you’d have to get as desperate a publicity hound as the pre-September 11th Rudy Giuliani on your side to get anyone worked up about the offensiveness of your art. And even then your chances of getting into any real legal trouble would be just about nil. But a new path has opened — copyright violation.

That’s right, copyright violation is the new obscenity. Create a piece of illegal art and the chances aren’t bad that a giant apparatus of authority will come crashing down on you and drag you on a long, painful tour through the legal system. And drag your work into the public spotlight at the same time.

Following on our discussion of code as art (Fear of Code), I came across an annoucment for the show Hackers: The Art of Abstraction currently on display at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. The show emphasizes the connection between hacking and creative activity in any medium. The Wired News article links to an interesting Marxist description of hacking, A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark.

When I was up at Brown I ran into Michelle Higa, one of the four editors of Chaise Magazine. She gave me a copy of the first issue of this free DVD magazine (which has some associated Web selections.) Having now watched the videos (one of them is documentation Michelle did of the project Screen, a project of GTxA’s Noah Wardrip-Fruin and others), seen the stills, and listened to the audio, and poked at the interactive goodies, I am quite impressed and amused. This isn’t an upgrade of your cheesy mid-1990s CD magazine, but a collection of several great projects from digital media workers at Brown and RISD.

Adventure Gamers is a site that reviews and discusses commercial adventure games, as well as independent / amateur productions:

Although the days of classic adventures may have passed, the heart of adventure gaming lives on through the work of amateur designers who create adventure games in the true spirit of the classics, and make them free for all to play. This site is dedicated to throwing a spotlight on those independent, free adventures.

They report that “the amateur adventure community spirit is alive and well”, and that “2003 saw some of the greatest Underground releases that we’ve ever seen.” To honor them, the site has just held its first annual Underground Awards; the winners were announced last week. (via Slashdot Games)

It’s been a week and a half since the fine E-Fest at Brown already — no time for me to write anything like a trip report — but I wanted to bring one incisive comment from there into this forum.

Brian Kim Stefans was one of many who provided great readings/performances and participated in interesting discussions. Speficially, he compared humanistic writing about internet and computing culture to the Orientalism that Edward Said discusses: people from a different culture, with no direct knowledge of the country or culture, learn about it second- or third-hand and construct their own fantasy of what it is like.

I’m happy to announce that two new games studies faculty, Ian Bogost and Michael Nitsche will be joing us at Georgia Tech this Fall.

Some of you already know Ian from watercoolergames and as a frequent commentor here. Ian is interested in the rhetorical function of games, how they can be used to convey a position and change opinions. Ian also develops games, most recently the Howard Dean campaign game (which we discussed here).

The current lead article on gaming site 1up is about interactive fiction, and it includes an excellent set of interiews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, and 2003 IF Comp winners Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. (Although there are many good bits apart from the interviews, the IF history part of the article, at the beginning, is cribbed from Graham Nelson’s brief history in the Inform Designer’s Manual — as stated in the article — and it’s better to just read Nelson’s history if you’re looking for brief background. The names of both Thomas M. Disch and Robert Pinsky are wrong in the article, too.) The article is by Andrew Vestal and Nich Maragos; 1up is a ZiffDavis joint.

Woohoo! Twisty Little Passages was reviewed in The Onion: “… too dense and dry for casual readers … mechanical contraptions … eschewing substantive literary analysis … deception or even murder … juicy …”

Following on the heels of last week’s AP news article about game studies is a new NYTimes article that interviews several researchers, including grandtextauto’s own Nick Montfort.

New to grandtextauto? Our URL managed to make it into the article too, so as is custom when this happens, for any new readers visiting for the first time, we like to offer a list of links to noteworthy discussions we’ve had over the past year about games, interactive narrative, art, and so on. These are in reverse chronological order. Add new comments to any of them, to continue the discussions!

A few hours ago I gave a talk entitled “Continuous Paper.” It was at the History of Material Texts Seminar here at Penn, and dealt with the print-based heritage of computer interfaces. The full text is online.

Speaking of chatterbots… A BBC technology correspondent is eager to report that text-porn bots have passed the Turing test. The article begins by lumping apples and oranges together:

At first glance spam, pornographic text messages and video games are not contributing much to human development.

Great, thanks. But he goes on to describe how AI’s have been known to fool users, and is particularly taken with Natachata, a chatbot that operates in adult SMS text chatrooms.

On the heels of Noah and Michael’s posts from yesterday… At first it seemed like yet another sexed-up article headline: two upcoming AI-heavy interactive entertainment products described in a Popular Science blurb titled “Terror Games”.

Peek behind the graphics of two new games [The Sims 2 and Peter Molyneux’s Fable] and you’ll find the same artificial intelligence that’s at work in Pentagon-sponsored war simulations.

But the blurb offered no further explanation. Huh?

The BBC reports that the gaming company There (1 2 3 4) is creating a detailed model of the entire earth for the US Army. The Army will use the simulated earth to plan future battles.

“The Enemy Within” is a basically informative — if unexciting — overview article about viruses and worms in the Sunday Observer. But someone appears to have decided that stating the article’s topic honestly wasn’t going to cut it. Hence the headline, and these two sentences that ended up just under it:

He’s 21, he’s got dreadlocks, likes punk bands… and his hobby could wreck your computer in seconds. Clive Thompson infiltrates the secret world of the virus writers who see their work as art – while others fear that it is cyber-terrorism

There is something oddly compelling about Crimson Room (also available on a US server) by Toshimitsu Takagi. Not that it’s the best graphical adventure game that is available for free, but the conflation of camera movement from The 7th Guest with amusingly awkward English and puzzles worse than the ones in the most painful Penguinsoft title…

And it’s all online, in Flash. Yes, I finished it and have the right to be on the escape person list. (I did peek at the solution; the interface isn’t always pleasant.) Shout out to my poetry homie JK for passing along the link.

On Memory Card, her new blog, Mia Consalvo, game researcher and assistant professor at Ohio U, wonders if it’s okay to cheat at a game while researching it.

We’re reading Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen in my Internet Writing & Society class, and discussing AI. While googling around trying to see if there was a working version of Depression 2.0 out there, I ran across Jabberwacky, a Web chatterbot that took 3rd place in the 2003 Loebner Prize.

Beard of Bees Press has just made available The Dublin of Dr. Moreau, another collection of machine-generated poetry produced by Gnoetry, a poetry composition system that sythesizes new language based on probability distributions learned from existing texts. In the case of The Dublin of Dr. Moreau, the poems are based on the statistical properties of James Joyce’s Dubliners and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau.

We’ve previously mentioned Gnoetry (1 2 3 4).