Grand Text Auto

As we have been discussing artist programmers and meaning machines on grandtextauto, I sent an email to Harold Cohen, creator of AARON, asking if he’d like to share his thoughts on the topic. To my delight, he wrote back with the following comments.

I wrote my first program early in 1969, at which point, I’m sure you must realize, the option of using an existing package as opposed to writing your own program didn’t exist — there weren’t any packages. If there had been I suspect I’d never have thought computing had anything to offer me.

That reflection leads me to one rather obvious comment; I don’t see anyone saying why they got involved in computing, what they wanted from it. And in the absence of any driving personal need, questions about whether one needs to program or not seem very arbitrary.

The Digital Storytelling Festival is underway in Arizona, blogged here and on Fray. Brenda Laurel presented a project called Backstory she and others are doing at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where she is chair of the media design program. Mark Bernstein calls Backstory “a really ambitious effort … to harness the storytelling power of teens for social change.”

More reading on the topic of artist programmers in an essay, Are the days of the lone programmer numbered?

Some new books: The nature of computer games: play as semiosis, by David Meyers. Ernest Adams, a longtime contributor to Gamasutra, has teamed up with Andrew Rollings to publish a book on game design.

I just spent the last week in Stockholm as an invited opponent on a licentiate thesis in interactive drama. While there I was able to visit with a number of folks in the Swedish Institute for Computer Science, the IT University of Kista, and the mobility studio of the Interactive Institute.

As we get serious about studying new forms of art and new sorts of games, the question of how to draw categories for consideration arises. Defining categories isn’t just some tedious Scandanavian pastime; it’s also a way of figuring out why exactly we are more interested in some stuff than in some other stuff. Do we like certain types of literary works because they are presented on a computer, for instance, or because they require effort from the reader, who participates in determining what is read? (This is the implicit question asked in Cybertext and in some of Espen Aarseth’s earlier writing.)

Espen, Stephen Granade, and some others have been discussing the virtues of the category “Games in Virtual Environments,” as an alternative to “computer games,” here on Grand Text Auto. The “virtual environment” is a feature of interest to me (it’s part of my definition of interactive fiction, while “game” is not) and also, I think, of interest to Stuart. In fact, I do think there is something more interesting about richly world-simulating computer games than one sees in computerized versions of card and board games. But this idea for a category also raises some questions.

The Iowa Review Web this month features Stuart Moulthrop. In addition to the official publication of Pax (mentioned in this space earlier) the feature includes an interview with Stuart conducted by yours truly. It was this conversation with Stuart that really got me thinking about the notion of “instrumental texts” and I suspect it’ll prove similarly thought-provoking for many. Here’s an excerpt to get you started…

Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Talk with me about the idea of an “instrumental text”…

We’ve had an array of wonderful comments in the two previous posts on artist programmers. (I just added a lengthy comment with a bunch of new links.)

Another facet of this debate: What happens when artists and programmers collaborate? The issues are more than just the potential cultural divide of freaks vs. geeks, but also the (perhaps unpleasant) issue of artistic credit. I’ve heard more than one story of a team of people working on a new media art piece “led” by a “primary” artist, who effectively takes all of the credit for the piece, when those who did the actual programming deserve at least as much credit for the success of the work. Sound familiar?

Andrew raises the question of whether artists should program. The answer is yes. Here’s why.

Computers are not fundamentally about producing 2D visual imagery, video, or 3D models (everything taught in the typical into to electronic media classes).

Computers are not fundamentally about responding to the input of a user/player/interactor (computer-based interactive everything).

Computers are not fundamentally about controlling motors, lights, projectors, or other electro-mechanical systems (installation art, robotic sculpture).

Computers are not fundamentally about mediating signals from distant locations (telepresence).

I caught up with Michael in Atlanta on my way back from ACH/ALLC. Michael and I got to talking about (among other things) programs to generate stories, poems, and other creative texts. He mentioned that he benefits from looking at thoughtful symbolic architectures for this sort of thing, such as Minstrel, but really finds nothing of interest in the statistical approaches taken by systems like Gnoetry and Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet.(Correct me if I’m misrepresenting you, Michael!) On the other hand, I do think there’s something to the way that these statistical systems manage to knit together a new sort of voice – something that makes the process of the generator interesting to consider – and I’ve written about this a bit in an article that is forthcoming in The Cybertext Yearbook 2003. Interestingly, a paper by Greg Lessard at ACH/ALLC described a limerick generator he had developed, called VINCI, so this topic is still a current one.

Our discussion led to questions about how, in this specific case of creative text generation, symbolic/rule-based AI can be integrated with statistical AI to achieve some of the advantages of each. …

In the Narrative as Virtual Reality comments thread, I’ve suggested rather strongly that those who plan to discuss hypertext should read the work of Ted Nelson — as both the term “hypertext” and the ideas it describes come from his writings.

Of course, such suggestions often lead to the question, “Where can I read Nelson’s writings?” Unfortunately, they aren’t found in the local chain bookstore, and perhaps not even in the local research library. So I’ve put together a few pointers.

In the comment thread of Narrative as Virtual Reality, Lisa asks, “Why would an author *want* to yield the authorial control of a piece to some sort of AI engine?”

That’s a really good and interesting question. To me the issue of who has control (or, similarly, agency) of an interactive artwork is primary. There seem to be at least 3 parties who could be in (or share) control of an interactive artwork: the original author, the user, and the work itself (e.g., the AI).

An issue we want to address on grandtextauto, as we discuss the practice of making computer-based art, literature, poetry, drama, etc., is the question of artists as, or needing to be, programmers. How can artists to learn to be programmers? Why aren’t more artists programmers? Can tools simplify or take the place of programming? What kind of programming languages are amenable to artists? At what point do artists need to be programmers? Isn’t it enough for artists just to collaborate with programmers? Are programmers artists?

This topic is too big to address in just a post or two – so we’ll be addressing it in blog posts over time. Please join in with comments, ideas, and opinions.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. May 19 – May 23.

DAC is my “home conference” and the only place I know of where art, literature, music, performance, and games for the computer come together with serious scholarly discussion of new media. I’ve presented work there since the second time they put it on, in Atlanta in 1999, and the conference has been host to an array of great discussions and ideas, as well as leading me rather immediately to collaborate with Noah and with William Gillespie. Thus, I was determined not to miss DAC this year, even if it meant traveling halfway around the world in a pet carrier. Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad.

Speaking of books, today in the mail I just received my copy of Narrative Intelligence, from John Benjamins Publishing. If you’re interested in “the confluence of narrative, artificial intelligence, and media studies,” this book is for you. It’s an edited volume that collects together some of the papers from the Fall 1999 AAAI symposium on Narrative Intelligence organized by Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, with additional new papers by Brenda Laurel and Phil Agre. And, it’s got a cool lime green cover.

I’ve been working on a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality for Computers and the Humanities, the journal of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. It needs to be short, explain why the journal’s audience might be interested in Ryan’s topic, and also give my personal take on the book. I’d be very interested to hear comments on the draft below.

Last year Andrew Stern sent out an enthusiastic email message about Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality. He called it one of the best books to address interactive drama.

Interactive drama is an area of investigation that attracts scholarly and popular audiences. At its broadest, it covers the wide range of computer experiences that have story content, some form of performative enactment, and a means for the audience (whether a full theatre or a single person in front of their PC) to alter some aspect of this story or enactment. The group interested in interactive drama includes English professors who see it as a future form of literature, media scholars who see it as an approach for understanding computer games, computer scientists who see it as the next major application for artificial intelligence, and entertainment executives who see it as the next stage of cinema. Interest in interactive drama has contributed to the success of past books such as Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, and Mark Stephen Meadows’s Pause and Effect.

Stern is one of the leading practitioners in the area of interactive character and drama. After getting his email I decided to do a web search and see what else I could learn about Narrative as Virtual Reality. To my surprise, I found almost nothing. There were some weblog comments, but few did more than mention the book’s existence. I didn’t find a single online review, and I found few references to offline ones. At the end of this process, my interest was piqued. A book came out from a major academic publisher on a topic of current interest — and to someone as well informed as Stern it was an exciting addition to the literature, but the field as a whole had largely ignored it. It was a bit of a mystery. And so, in order to have a reason to delve into this mystery myself, I set out to review this volume.

Chaim Gingold, a recent graduate of the IDT masters program at Georgia Tech, has put his excellent written thesis (pdf) and thesis project (mac pc) online at www.slackworks.com/~cog/. His thesis provides a description of a miniature worlds aesthetic derived from the work and thoughts of Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Seymour Papert, introduces the idea of “magic crayons” as lightweight computational languages that integrate conventions of artistic practice, and describes his thesis project, Comic Book Dollhouse.

His treatment of miniature worlds unpacks the design aesthetic of Shigeru Miyamoto. As Chaim states:

I thought this sounded promising… If you’re looking for a way to get into developing your own small graphical virtual worlds for your own interactive stories or games, but aren’t sure how to get started, this might be of help. Flipcode, a great site for independent game developers, recently posted a link to the Reaction Engine, described as “a hobbyist game engine designed specifically for beginner programmers, making small fun games, or prototyping game ideas quickly.” It’s $60.

Thanks to the link from Greg Costikyan’s latest post, I just discovered the intense debates underway on the Games Research Network listserv, recently established by DiGRA. Lately the discussions there have revived classic debates such as “what is interactivity” and “ludology vs. narratology”, as well as debating lots of other really interesting new topics and ideas contributed by some very bright people. Requires registration.

Meanwhile, a parallel debate apparently continues to rage down-under at DAC over the identity of ludologists.

Damn there’s a lot to read on the web these days.

Here at DAC I’ve seen many great presentations and had several discussions that were provocative. I won’t try to repeat what’s been blogged about this already on the conference site; I do hope to post more on the conference later. Among many digital artist and researcher friends here, several are part of the new Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. (Of these folks at the Center, Espen, Lisbeth, and Susana are here at DAC.) I haven’t actually talked to Espen much about this, however; he and Noah and I instead have been spending time (and lots of money) trying to defeat House of the Dead 3.

Last semester I taught a course on interactive narrative. One of the challenges in teaching such a course is presenting a unifying framework within which the many computer-based “story-like things” that people have made can be understood as a unity, as all being instances of interactive narrative. (The alternative is to present a hodge-podge of approaches to interactive narrative, but this isn’t nearly as much fun.) My approach was to present a design space organized around four degrees of freedom:

• Interaction – the interactor’s relationship to the narrative. Is she interacting as a first-person character within the story, sitting above the story-world manipulating it from afar, constructing stories out of pieces provided by a story construction kit, etc.?
• Narrativity – in what sense is the interactive experience a story? Is the experience a heroic journey in which the interactor must complete a quest, an ironic commentary on a specific story genre in which interaction is used to expose the limits of the genre, a single situation designed to be experienced multiple times with variation, etc.?
• Segmentation – what are the pieces of the story? Are the fundamental pieces snippets of dialog, dramatic situations, story events constrained by a grammar, pages of text, etc.?
• Representation – the sensory display, what the player actually sees, hears, etc.

[several of the other bloggers are traveling at the moment, not easily able to post for the next day or more, so I will continue to hog the blog]

No one has complained (yet), but in my blog posts so far I wonder if it appears like I’m bashing some of the approaches to digital fiction-making, e.g., hypertext, or IF.

We didn’t start this blog to bash, or be negative. If my posts have appeared that way, let me say that’s not how I intend it. And if possible, I preemptively apologize for bashing I may appear to be doing in the future. :-)

While I’m definitely critical (no apologizes there), my intention is to offer what could be fruitful directions towards making deeply interactive digital fiction.

See, there I go again, implying that what has been built to date has not been deeply interactive. Well, sadly, from my perspective, that’s true.

An interesting debate about the current new crop of online worlds can be found here on Slate.com.

I’m posting from the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Melbourne, Australia. I’m presenting Tuesday, and while I might find myself prattling, it’s actually prate that I’m excited about. prate is Brion Moss’s new project — an n-gram text generator in the tradition of the DOS program Babble! My DAC presentation, along with this post, is the first announcement of its availability. It’s written in Java and works well cross-platform (I used it for a performance at Brown last month, running on a Mac). This is an initial ‘geek release’ (light on documentation) of a project that’s going to evolve, and that will also provide the basis for some future collaborative work that Brion and I have up our sleeves (our past projects together include The Impermanence Agent).

In the comments of last week’s Expressive AI thread, Noah and Nicolas both make great points.

I think Noah is right that, for the foreseeable future anyway, lots and lots of human authoring will be required to make rich, quality digital fiction. Story generation AI is still in diapers.

But Nicolas is quick to point out that watching / reading chunks of human-author-created content – i.e., non-computer-generated, “canned” content – whether that be a paragraph of text, a snippet of video, a cutscene, what have you – makes the player / reader feel like the fiction is limited, too inflexible, too rigid, too prescripted. Doesn’t it? Fixed chunks of content make me feel like too much of the possibility and potential of the scenario have been sucked out of the experience, too often leaving me only a few table-scraps of variation, of agency. (If anyone feels differently about this, please disagree!)

My guess is that a way to progress towards richer, more deeply interactive fiction, will be, as usual, somewhere in between the ends of the spectrum – somewhere between large-ish chunks of hand-authored content and pure procedural generativity.

Long ago, after the version of myself on whom I blame rash promises got me into this blogging thing, I figured I would somehow find the time to say something remotely interesting every week or so. That version of myself, since discontinued, did not reckon up all the hours needed to do my day job, design a new undergraduate degree in games and simulation (http://iat.ubalt.edu/sde), and finish what had become a year-long multimedia project. So for this week at least, please accept as booby prize my latest cybertext, “Pax” (http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/pax). Soon to appear in Iowa Review Web and (minus alas its author) at DAC.

Take Route 66 to Arizona next month for the Digital Storytelling Festival, “a three-day showcase (June 12-14) that features ground breaking projects created and implemented in a variety of areas of Digital Storytelling. Digital Storytelling is recognized as a creative movement that uses digital technology to create media rich stories to impart meaning. It is successfully being used in areas of education and training, entertainment and creative design, personal and legacy storytelling, community building and corporate identity through branding and marketing. … The Festival program appeals to: practitioners, visionaries and enthusiasts of new media, educators, historians, genealogists, storytellers, community builders, activists, artists, journalists, corporate creatives and technologists.”