Grand Text Auto

I just finished reading a fantasy novella titled The Archer’s Flight. As the book’s introduction notes, it was the result of an unusual process:

It was serialized, appearing in seventeen chapters over a year’s time, but that’s not what’s unusual about it. It was published on the Web, but that’s not the unusual part either. What is unusual (and as far as I know, unique) is that this story’s readers chose the actions of its main character. Each published chapter ended in some dilemma for the protagonist, Deica; the audience collectively decided what she would do (via posting and voting on a web site), and their decision led to the next chapter. This was not a group of writers offering advice on what would make the best story; rather, the readers took on Deica’s role, as they would in improvisational theater or a roleplaying-type game. They decided what they would do if they were her.

Mark Keavney is both the author of The Archer’s Flight and the originator of the method used for its creation. He calls this method “storygaming” and describes it in detail in his essay “The City of IF Story.”

“Absolutely not,” say Grand Text Auto executives. Bloggers at the popular site have categorically denied that, with the aid of a program freely available on the Internet, “secret content” can be unlocked and the blog can be revealed as being laced with sex and obscenity. The sharp reply came after the Entertainment Blog Rating Board, at the behest of Senator Hillary Clinton, issued a ruling revoking Grand Text Auto’s previously awarded rating of “serious hypertext.”

Last week I wrote about my interest in reading processes (and discussed Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice). Today, in the same vein, I’d like to discuss a rather different book: Charles O. Hartman’s Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996).

Hartman’s book is presented as a memoir — in which the author reflects on his experiments, as a poet and teacher, with computers. These include assembling his own Sinclair ZX81, designing new computer programs used in the process of composing poetry, employing a famous text generation program created by others, and implementing a program for performing (and student learning of) scansion for poems in iambic and anapestic feet. Hartman continues this work, a decade later, and in fact his scansion program is now available in a new version (Scandroid 1.1) which is GPLed, written in Python, and certified by the Open Source Initiative.

Early in Virtual Muse Hartman tells us of his poetic experiment for the ZX81, a BASIC program called RanLines that stored 20 lines in an internal array and then retrieved one randomly each time the user pressed a key. This sort of random arrangement of fixed possibilities is a common first experiment for those considering combinatory poetry. What Hartman offers in Virtual Muse, however, is an unusual attempt to think through this sort of randomness (chapter 3).

I thought I’d link to a few dissertations that have been published recently that may be of interest to GTxA readers. Perfect for a summer read on the beach with your laptop, right? Here are excerpts from their abstracts.

Autonomous Expressionism and Network Arts: New Paradigms in Art, Emotional Interaction, and Information Retrieval, by David Ayman Shamma, Northwestern University
In this dissertation, I depart from traditional computer science metrics and methodologies and introduce a new framework for building computer systems with an emphasis on the creation of new artistic installations and interactions. Specifically, I introduce Autonomous Expressionism, an extension of Abstract Expressionism, whose goal optimizes the emotional experience in human computer interaction.

Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character (pdf), by Mark Riedl, North Carolina State University
In this dissertation, I explore the use of search-based planning as a technique for generating stories that demonstrate both strong plot coherence and strong character believability. First, I describe an extension to search-based planning that reasons about character intentions by identifying possible character goals that explain their actions in a plan and creates plan structure that explains why those characters commit to their goals. Second, I describe how a character personality model can be incorporated into planning in a way that guides the planner to choose consistent character behavior without strictly preventing characters from acting “out of character” when necessary. Finally, I present an open-world planning algorithm that extends the capabilities of conventional planning algorithms in order to support a process of story creation modeled after the process of dramatic authoring used by human authors.

Yesterday I wrote about my interest in reading processes.

Today, in that vein, I’m sharing some thoughts from reading Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991). Given its subtitle, you’d think I would have read Perloff’s book a decade ago. But I just picked it up for the first time this summer. In part this is because Perloff’s focus is primarily on writing in a media-saturated culture, rather than writing which employs media other than traditional print (though a number of such examples are considered). As it turns out, I found that Perloff’s book has much to offer someone coming from a perspective such as mine. In particular, her focus on the procedural work of John Cage is of interest. In fact, while Cage is more often mentioned in connection with music than poetry, as Perloff notes in her preface (p. xiii) Radical Artifice is a book about poetry “written, so to speak, under his sign.”

Part of the argument for procedural literacy (Michael’s article, my reply) is that we must learn to “read processes.” That is, we must learn to interpret the operations of systems… not just the outputs. There are a number of reasons for this, a few of which I’ll briefly sketch here.

First, as Ted Nelson began arguing in the 1970s, we’re living in a world increasingly defined by processes — processes designed and implemented by humans. These processes can be designed poorly, or implemented poorly, or designed and implemented to help some people and make life difficult for others… but this is the fault of humans, and it can be corrected (and sooner rather than later, if we can learn to spot bad designs before they’re widely adopted). To put it another way, “the computer just works that way” is a non-argument. The importance of this knowledge lay behind Nelson’s now-famous cry from the front of Computer Lib / Dream Machines: “You can and must understand computers NOW.”

Second, more specifically, we’re entering a period in which the results of computational processes are increasingly used to form assumptions or offered as evidence. This is one thing if we’re forming our assumptions about whether the weekend will be sunny while we’re trying to decide whether to have a picnic — but the results of computer simulations are also increasingly used when we’re in the process of trying to make more weighty decisions about matters such as city planning and greenhouse gas emissions. To take one of my favorite examples, Jay Forrester’s urban dynamics simulations (which inspired SimCity) can be used to try to figure out how to build a healthy city, but we need to view any results from his work through an interpretation of the structures and processes of the simulations — which Garn and others have argued are deeply flawed (for example, by their cities’ lack of dynamic interaction with suburbs).

More frolicking with robots — here’s an amusing NYTimes article on living with a 15-inch-tall walking, seeing, listening robot named Nuvo. It’s a new $6000 product recently released from a Japanese company named ZMP. From the article, “I came to understand that for all their purported helpfulness, home robots are largely about companionship.”

Submission abstracts to speak at the 2006 Game Developers Conference are due August 1st.

A certain documentary filmmaker who reads GTxA pointed out to me that the first issue of The Escapist is out. I don’t tend to be a big reader of PDF-based zines, but the “cover” of this one lured me in, and hey, there’s some interesting writing in here.

The magazine “covers gaming and gamer culture with a progressive editorial style.” An article by Jennifer Buckendorf takes on the stereotypical construction of the gamer as someone who plays FPSs (rather than Everquest or classic games) and who doesn’t pursue other hobbies, such as reading. Kieron Gillen investigates the nature of video game forms, answering those (such as a lawmaker bent on restricting video games) who see the simulation aspect of games as at odds with games being able to express anything. John Tynes argues that controller and display innovations (a la the Nintendo DS) are dead ends in a market where people want to push out the same standard game across as many platforms as possible.

I recently had an interesting email from Jim Whitehead, a CS faculty member at UC Santa Cruz (who did a great job chairing the 2004 ACM Hypertext conference).

I’ve developed an undergraduate course teaching the fundamentals of game design for non-programmers, pitched at a general undergraduate audience. It’ll be offered next Winter for the first time…

I’m thinking that in this course it makes sense to have students experience and perform critical analysis on some classic video games, to really take apart what makes them fun, see how they create dramatic tension, and determine how the rule system contributes to the game play. I think it would be best to have students study older games, since they’re generally simpler, and don’t take quite as much game play to experience a larger part of the game. Since the graphics are simpler as well, the games have to focus on game play fundamentals to create a fun experience.

So, here are the questions for you, and for Grand Text Auto (assuming this blog has a “Ask GTA” feature, akin to “Ask Slashdot”).

* Is there any consensus on the canon of best games for, say, the Nintendo Entertainment System (or any other older platform for that matter)? Mario Bros. and Zelda seem like shoo-ins, but are there others? Castlevania? Ys?

Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel of the excellent networked_performance blog are this month’s guests on the empyre mailing list. To get a feeling for the conversation you can check out the two initial posts and a recent contribution from Chris Salter.

This past week, an incredible group of women met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London as part of the workshop/talks in the Cybersalon series put on by London’s SMARTlab and the ICA. The participant’s backgrounds spanned disciplines from game design to mobile technology design to arts activism to organizational collaboration. To fuel the discussion, speakers (including yours truely) were asked to choose their favourite misused word in technology-culture and speak about it.

On GTxA we’ve already seen IKEA as adventure game — you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike — but once you make it out of the maze and you’re packing the trunk of your car with your acquired inventory to head home, how about a mini-game of IKEA Tetris?

The creators of the free documentarty Gamer Br (GTxA post, English home page) are gearing up for another project: a three-episode video on the way digital technology is influencing cultrual production, and the distribution and reception of media, in Brazil. The first, “Skip the Intermediary,” will cover the struggles of musicians and record labels. The second will cover the IP revolution that Creative Commons licenses and other challenges to traditional copyright are bringing in Brazil. The final video will cover the free software movement and its cultural effect.

greetings from London in the middle of all this. London is completely locked down!
I have been here completing my PhD thesis work entitled ‘Playculture’. The work is the first attempt to create a feminist game design methodology through the triad of art practice, critical theory, and activism/intervention.
My viva voce at the SMARTlab on Tuesday 5th July was successful, with esteemed examiners from the US, UK, and Germany! (This is the ‘dissertation defence’ in the British system.) While here have also participated in a Furtherfield / ID Runners workshop on areas of work where art, cultural production, technology, personal development and social action all overlap, and a panel at the ICA (separate post forthcoming). . . lots of excitement!

I am extremely pleased to announce the release of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Façade!

This long-awaited one-act interactive drama, featuring a 3D environment and voice-acted, AI-driven characters, has been a testbed for research in and development of new discourse-based NLP techniques, a new drama management framework, and new ways of allowing behavior hierarchies to interact. It has been the source of more than a dozen academic publications co-authored by Michael and Andrew, as well as Michael’s Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. dissertation. A pre-release version of Façade was a finalist in the 2004 Independent Games Festival. Façade is also delightfully entertaining and abundant in its dramatic and artistic merits. It offers a fairly short dramatic experience that is intensive and compelling, and unlike anything else I have seen in video games or other interactive systems. The New York Times called Façade “the future of video games” and one person who has devoted his life to interactive storytelling, Chris Crawford, said the system was “the best actual working interactive storyworld yet created.” You can read the official press release on Façade, read on for more about the release, or skip directly to the the download page on InteractiveStory.net.

We’re having an interesting debate over at Game Matters on the role, or desirability, of agency in games and stories. Frankly I’m surprised by what I’m reading. Please contribute if you have some thoughts on this.

Slamdance now has a student game competition, due Sept 19. ICVS poster/demo/art submissions are due July 22. And a new site Games and Storytelling out of Finland offers several videos of lectures by various folks knowledgable about the subject.

The Cultural Gutter has a new article discussing a lavish coffee-table book about Half Life 2, “featuring examples of the visually stunning work of the game accompanied by 100-word descriptions. What comes across in the book, which quotes dozens of people, is how much collaboration shaped the process.” And the LA Weekly suggests there’s a “moralgorithm” in operation when playing NBA Live 2005 for Xbox.

Apropos of this, some a cappella Nintendo theme songs. If you ask me, even the appearance of the ninja doesn’t really redeem it, but hey, it’s topical.

Andrew and I were at Phrontisterion VI this last weekend. The timing was perfect – we’d just finished our final build of Façade (!!) a day or two before the Phront.

A regular thread of discussion on GTxA is the artist/programmer debate and related issues of procedural literacy for digital media artists and theorists. In this light, it was nice to see this 23 year old magazine cover depicting Chris as an artist/programmer hanging on the wall.

[Update July 6: Chris’ conference report is online.]

AI engineer extraordinaire Damian Isla has started a new group blog called Game/AI, and invited fellow AIIDE attendees Rob Zubek and Paul Tozour onboard. Damian did great work at MIT Media Lab’s now winding-down Synthetic Characters group, and since became the AI lead at Bungie for Halo2. Rob you may know from his occasional comments here on GTxA — he recently finished an excellent dissertation at Northwestern (more on that in a future post; see an older post here) and has just joined Maxis. Paul was an AI developer for Metroid Prime, Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2. One of their first discussions: ending the tyranny of hierarchical finite state machines.

In my research on a new collaborative project meme.garden (with d. howe) I happened to re-explore some ‘commonsense’ databases including the commonsense project at MIT, “open mind.” After various approaches to making effective search engines, this one–with its reliance on real people’s knowledge aggregated over time–seems promising.

Yet such a system is rife with problems, as one can imagine. It is criticised by some net researchers and bloggers for containing too many ‘garbage’ entries to be efffective, and just plain factual errors by those who might even mean well.

Proof that young researchers can bolster their publication records when they write about video games: The BBC reports that South Africa’s main medical journal has accepted an article on “PlayStation Thumb” for publication – one written by a 13-year-old girl.

Her study found that 28 of the 60 boys and 17 of the 60 girls she spoke to played regularly.

Of these, eight boys and seven girls complained of symptoms such as redness, tingling and blisters.

The unfortunate thing is that Safura Abdool Karim, the author, does not herself own a PlayStation and finds them “a waste of time.” So here we have another case of game research being done by a non-gamer…

On October 14, 2005, MetaScholar Initiative at Emory University is hosting Free Culture & the Digital Library. “This interdisciplinary symposium, featuring Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan, will explore the relationship between digital access to public cultural information and intellectual property constraints. In recent years, new legal limitations in the United States have affected public access to the materials held in a variety of different open digital library infrastructures, ranging from those of the Library of Congress to Kazaa. As new technological possibilities and laws governing their many uses emerge, it becomes critical to examine the relationship between digital innovation and legal regulation. This symposium seeks to promote a better understanding of the associated impacts of these changes on the local, national and international levels, both now and in the future.” So come down to Atlanta and get your dose of Free Culture.

When I saw the headline “Fake spy guilty of kidnapping con” on BBC news today, I was worried that Harry Mathews might have gotten himself in trouble. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case.

Mathews, a novelist, poet of the New York School, fashioner of literary forms and sole American member of the Oulipo, is most recently the author of My Life in CIA. This delightful book was reviewed a while ago by local Oulipophile MadInkBeard. Mathews calls it an autobiographical novel; in it, he describes his dangerous escapades of 1973. That tumultuous year, he purportedly answered the suspicions of his friends abroad (who thought, or in some cases were certain, that he was a CIA man) by beginning to play spy.