Grand Text Auto

Although I should have been studying for my preliminary exam on Wednesday, today in the department I heard an unusual WPE-II presentation: “Interactive Storytelling: Coupling the Emotional Range of Drama with the Engagement of Interactivity.” (The WPE-II is the paper-and-talk that is the last of the preliminary exams here in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Penn, and will hopefully be my next stop after Wednesday.) The topic of Michael Johns’s talk (which was possibly closer to interactive drama than interactive storytelling) was hardly alien to me, but it was a bit different from the graph-theoretic or expectation-maximizing algorithmic goodness that we usually get around here.

I’ve always thought that good conversational virtual characters would require the skills of a politician, to respond to the player’s “off-topic” or “uncooperative” dialog by cleverly and believably turning the conversation back to topics that the virtual character knows or wants to talk about. We certainly do a lot of this in Facade, as needed.

Loebner contest (“The First Turing Test”) winners Kevin Copple and Robby Garner have teamed up with some Chinese researchers to create “AI Bush“:

Play the strategy game “Reelect Bush?” and see if GWB gets reelected, or not. You are a close advisor, whispering into George’s ear. He needs your help making decisions and answering pesky trivia questions that affect his chances of reelection, not to mention the effects various decisions can have on his conscience. GWB’s expressions, voice clips, and tracking polls tell you how things are going.

Yeah, darn those pesky trivia questions about weapons of mass destruction, global warming, etc.

The students in my New Media Studies course this term produced Blog on Blogs, a review of several different types of weblogs. This semester was the first time we dedicated significant class time to weblogs, along with electronic lit genres including hypertext, new media poetry, and interactive fiction. I think it worked out pretty well as a class assignment, in that it both required the students to put some critical thought into weblogs as a genre, and to regard their own web writing as public discourse.

The 20 finalists for the 2004 Independent Games Festival, held as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Jose in March, have just been announced. 111 entries were submitted, and a committee of judges from the game industry picked 10 in the “Open” (i.e., cd-rom-based) category and 10 in the “Web/Downloadable” category to compete. GDC attendees get to play the games on the expo floor at the conference.

We’re thrilled to see that our interactive drama project, Facade, has made the cut!

Surfing around, I came across freshmeat, which “maintains the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software… Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat database, and links to new applications are added daily… offers a variety of original content on technical, political, and social aspects of software and programming.” Among many other things, the database includes almost 100 pieces of independent, free, open-source “artistic” software ranging from textual to graphical to aural in nature, many added within the last year, such as:

A workshop at CHI2004, Reflective HCI: Towards Critical Technical Practice, promises to be an interesting venue. The phrase “Critical Technical Practice” (CTP) was coined by Phil Agre in Computation and Human Experience as a description for a technical practice that simultaneously questions its own philosophical and cultural foundations while using this questioning to open up new technical possibilities.

The new issue of The Iowa Review Web is out, and it includes a couple of nice things. First, there’s a new piece from hyperfiction pioneer Judy Malloy. Malloy’s “narrabase” work “Uncle Roger” was one of the first hyperfictions I heard about (in an old issue of Leonardo) and it’s now available on the web in an annotated 2003 edition. The TIR Web piece is a new one, titled “Afterwards.”

Also worth checking out is an Interview with Tal Halpern by Patrick F. Walter. In addition there’s a link provided to Halpern’s “Digital Nature: the Case Collection. version 2.0” — an artifactual hypertext commissioned by Turbulence that I’m just beginning to explore.

The second Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment conference (TIDSE) will be held June 24-26 in Darmstadt, Germany, which is near Frankfurt, about a 5 hour train ride from Paris. Papers are due January 30 (ugh, that’s soon…)

I recommend this gathering, it’s a mixture of technical papers / system building and design-oriented approaches. We attended this last year, presenting Facade, and got good feedback and warm enthusiasm. Like the DiGRA LevelUp conference, the attendance was about mostly European, about a quarter North American. There’s a lot of interactive narrative activity going on in Europe, so it’s a great way to meet all those folks and hear about their work. And a big highlight was Chris Crawford’s rousing keynote presentation.

Last Saturday, from the bedroom window of our third story apartment, as we were admiring the results of the previous night’s snowstorm, the doorbell rang. Our new couch was due to be delivered that morning, but we thought, surely they would cancel. It seems we underestimated Boston furniture delivery truck drivers; minutes later I was relaxing in the living room on the new sofa with the December 1 issue of The New Yorker. After a brief nap to recover from my interrupted sleep earlier that morning — I always wake up before sunrise when I have lots of new events to process — I came across two articles, different but connected, that made me sit up and think.

A link off of Grimmelman’s article led me to the curious AgoraXchange project, which will launch in January. A team including net artist Natalie Bookchin and political theorist Jacqueline Stevens is behind the project, the goal of which is to create an MMG that poses an “alternative to the present world order” guided by four decrees that include the abolition of inherited property rights. The ambition of the project appears to be to create a game that will be instructive in reshaping global society. While such a simulation is unlikely to overthrow capitalism, the idea is a refreshing turn from many MMGs that seem hell-bent on promoting the acquisition of virtual wealth as the highest virtue to which gamers can aspire.

At Law Meme, James Grimmelman has written an excellent article in the wake of the State of Play conference: “Free as in Gaming?.” Grimmelman’s article follows up (extensively) on a question posed by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler at the conclusion of the conference, after Second Life had announced its decision to allow players to retain copyright to in-game intellectual properties:

“You’re creating this world in which people come to play and be creative, and yet you’ve given this world a system that has been extensively criticized as limiting creativity. Haven’t you just given them a new set of hurdles to creativity?”

Recently I made some free time to fully read Chaim Gingold’s Masters thesis on game design and interactive narrative, which we briefly posted about last May. I’m going to offer some informal feedback and comments in this post. Frankly I found this thesis as substantial and useful as most PhD dissertations in the field. It could also serve as a game design handbook! Chaim’s really trying to present theory and make it accessible and useable to practitioners, which I found impressive. (This should have been turned into a paper presentation at LevelUp, not just a poster…)

The title, “Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds,” is a bit misleading; at first I expected the thesis to focus exclusively on microworlds, and in a sense it does, but in fact it goes pretty broad with several universal design principles for enjoyable interactive experiences, about more than just “games”.

There’s a good discussion over at gamegirladvance about that jaded feeling that can set in with art/entertainment when you become a creator of it.

Update: More “behind the scenes” links just discovered, minus the jaded part.

A NYTimes article about game modding, amateur video game making, and the recent Unreal University symposium held at NC State. (I know Michael sent a few of his students there.)

Here’s a new, handy site, Virtual Worlds Review. (via Terra Nova)

The Politics of Information is an essay collection in five parts edited by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills. This fall it’s been appearing at electronic book review, and garnering some interesting responses. I’ve been happy to see a few contributions from folks I’ve met at DAC and ELO gatherings: Matt Kirschenbaum’s essay compels us to go further with the notion of “software studies” (see also Matt’s blog); Laura Sullivan’s essay reports on teaching a course that brings together radical politics and hypertext production; and an email roundtable proposed by Geert Lovink discusses net.activism with Chris Carter, Ricardo Dominguez, and Bruce Simon.

Recently I’ve been reading Nick’s new book, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Of course, I liked it right off (how can you not like a scholarly book with the spoilers marked?). But today, reading further, I realized that I’ve been waiting for a book like this.

I liked the Oz Project so much, I joined the company. Tomorrow’s my first day at Zoesis, a startup company in the Boston area developing AI-based interactive character and interactive drama technology. (This helps explain my recent move to Boston, in case you were wondering.)

We’d mentioned this before, but now there’s more details: the press release for the game-art show “Bang the Machine” at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, mid-January through early April.

In the latest installment of the ludology vs. narratology debate, Gonzalo Frasca says “that’s not an argument! there never was such a debate!” and I say “yes there was!”

Happy Thanksgiving; I’d like to give thanks to the military-academic-industrial complex for general-purpose computing and the Internet.

Ray Kurzweil has been awarded a patent for his AI-based cybernetic poetry software. (via NYTimes)

Kurzweil, a successful developer of AI-based technologies and author of several books including The Age of Spiritual Machines, has an elaborate website promoting AI — that is, “accelerating intelligence.” (I just discovered his AI-oriented newsfeed; I’ll add it to our resource list…)

As you can see on his cyberart website — “we create software that creates art” — Kurzweil has collaborated with veteran AI-based artist Harold Cohen, with whom we had a discussion on this blog last June.

Found by way of the KurzweilAI.net newsfeed mentioned above, Wired has a new article about Rosalind Picard’s Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab, describing a virtual, conversational exercise coach character developed by Tim Bickmore (who had in years back helped develop the virtual real estate agent Rea in Justine Cassell’s Gesture and Narrative Language group). Michael and I have met Tim regularly at various AAAI symposia, he’s a good guy.

A lot of the research discussed in the article has overlap and potential for application in interactive art and entertainment. Towards the end of the article the hype dissipates a bit and more cautious, critical voices are heard — Shneiderman, Norman.

Nicolas Szilas contributed this summary of the recent Virtual Storytelling conference. Thanks, Nicolas!

Back from Toulouse

ICVS was in Toulouse this year, in the southwest of France. Once again (after TIDSE’03), this European conference managed to gather researchers on virtual storytelling from both Europe and US. Three other continents were even represented, by researchers from Japan, South Africa and Australia.

The term “virtual” in the name of the conference reveals an orientation of the conference towards Virtual Reality, hence some papers which to my point of view (and others’!) were not totally on the topic of interactive story… I will focus here on papers related to narrative, obviously.

Find them here. Good stuff. (via misc is the largest category)

I haven’t been blogging much the last couple of months; this semester has been overwhelming. As the semester winds down and I begin blogging again, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on my experiences teaching Computation as an Expressive Medium.

As I described before, this class is a graduate introduction to programming for students coming from arts and humanities backgrounds. It contains a mixture of students in LCC’s Information Design and Technology program, as well as students in the HCI master’s program (many of the HCI students come from non-programming backgrounds). For the theoretical component of the class, I’m using Nick and Noah’s New Media Reader.

The initial syllabus was far too ambitious, both in terms of programming projects and readings. We ended up doing only the first four projects, not six, and reading about half the readings. Class presentation of the programming material took longer than I had initially planned.

It was challenging coordinating the readings with the projects. I tried to coordinate the readings with the conceptual backgrounds of the assignments. For example, while working on Project 3, the “build your own image manipulation tool” project, we read:

• Man-Computer Symbiosis (Licklider)
• Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication Systems (Sutherland)
• A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)
• The GNU Manifesto (Stallman).

Randy Littlejohn recently wrote a Gamasutra article (free registration required) in which he’s “agitating for the creation of a new kind of interactive experience that is comfortable and compelling for the masses,” namely interactive drama. This post is a reaction to the article, in the process sounding the same horn you’ve heard from me in previous posts, but with a few new comments inspired by the article. As usual I’ll use Façade in most of my talking points even though very few people have gotten the chance to play it, as it’s in its final months of development; again we apologize for that.

These reactions will make the most sense if you’ve already read the article — if you haven’t yet, I encourage you to do so!