Grand Text Auto

There’s a new article at MSNBC.com on the future of emotion in games, a topic we like to talk about here on GTxA. A variety of game developers and researchers are quoted, including Andrew and me. It describes our work on Facade as an example of the advances in AI required to support emotion-rich game experiences.

The exhibition Machinista 2004 is currently accepting entries until February 28th 2004.

Machinista is a yearly unmediated open-submission online exhibition. Creative and technological practices including visual and software art, science and design projects, moving image, experimental music and performance are featured in various scales and stages of development ranging from documentation of prototypes and exploratory installations to fully operational systems.

Submissions for the following three themes are welcomed in all media.

trAce‘s Digital Writer-in-Residence and recent commenter on grandtextauto, Tim Wright, has a new article of interest called Blog Fiction.

… it would seem natural for the world of the blog to become a fertile ground for new forms of digital storytelling and the development of new independent authentic fictional voices. Strange then that there are only a handful of writers out there currently experimenting with the idea of the fictional blog. …

If you’re an aspiring game designer, this looks to be a good opportunity for getting your hands dirty with creating your own game. Actually I’d imagine this would appeal both to people trying to break into the game industry, as well as experienced designers. Even if you don’t win, it’s a platform to get real experience designing and building a game — which looks good on the resume. (via GameDev.net)

Peter Norvig, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach fame (the most commonly used intro to AI textbook), has created a Powerpoint presentation for Lincoln’s Gettysburgh Address. This work is in the tradition of Powerpoint art, generally critiquing the Powerpoint communication style, pursued by artists such as Michael Lewy and David Byrne.

Upon entering the warehouse, you need to go:

N, N, E, N, S, SW, U, N, W, U, W, W, W, U, NW, N, NW, S, E, W, W, W, N, W.

Now you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. A skeleton, probably the remains of a luckless consumer, lies here. Beside the skeleton is a rusty SKARPT high-quality steel knife with hard plastic handle and a shopping cart. Search the body. Take the IKEA GIFT CARD (still has $43 on it).

I know there are plenty of you who need the rest of the walkthrough. (Thanks to ifMUD’s ctate.)

The Yak has fed us some additional screenshots of the in-development Unity, screenshots I mentioned in a comment ealier, but since I couldn’t include an image in the comment … here:

A nice, short, and to-the-point interview with the Yak (a.k.a. Jeff Minter) is on GameSpy. Elsewhere someone noted that “Jeff hates people saying its like REZ.” Just to clarify my earlier post: I didn’t say it was like Rez! I said it was (going to be) better!

A month ago I finally had a chance to go to Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. While wandering through this mechanical arcade, I found myself comparing these turn-of-the-century machines with contemporary game genres, looking for commonalities in design approaches and player/viewer experiences. A number of distinct machine types were immediately apparent.

Fortune Telling Machines
The classic in this genre is the gypsy or old crone who waves her hands over a crystal ball before dispensing a fortune, though many other forms, such as the Love Meter and Career Meter are on exhibit. Fortune telling programs have certainly been popular in computing; I remember many horoscope programs being sold for the TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari 800 (the first few computers I used). And there are more contemporary efforts, such as classic Mac program Synchronicity, by Paul O’Brien, the “father of interactive divination”. Interestingly, a number of the responses to project 1 in my class last fall involved horoscope or fortune telling programs. All such systems, whether implemented in gears or code, harness brute randomness to create a (more or less) engaging experience. Even when the systems involve some amount of interaction, such as grasping the levers at a specific time on the Love Meter, or sensing the exact timing of keystrokes in Synchronicity, these interactions are mediated by highly random processes, inducing almost no agency. So how do such systems elicit any sort of engagement at all? They work by giving ambiguous responses that can be interpreted by individuals in the contexts of their own lives; by having the responses relate to important life themes, such as love or career, these systems effectively push most of the sense-making onto the human participant instead of into the system. The participant does all the work of reading meaning into a random process.

Tim Wright, one of the developers of Online Caroline, poses a question that I think deserves a new discussion thread. With his permission, here’s his post:

Being partially responsible for this thread I thought I’d better chip in. When I talked about people stepping over the line I was thinking of behaviour such as:

a/A soldier in the British Army sending pictures of himself in full uniform, and then offering to kill Caroline’s boyfriend for her. Seriously.

Four bloggers interested in academic discussion of video games have launched Ludonauts: Exploring the Videogame, which is to be updated thrice weekly. It looks promising!

They’ve taken on some interesting topics, like genre in video games. This post begins with a casual discussion of how it is hard to classify certain films into genres; I wish there had been some discussion of what exactly genre means (some literary and film theorists have certainly thought about this a lot), and what genres of non-computer games there are (this would be a good hint as to how the term can be meaningful for video games).

Our making, not telling terminology debate is a reflection of a larger issue, often framed as game vs. story or ludology vs. narratology, but I’d rather frame it as high-agency vs. low-or-no-agency. Let me quickly state, I’m not saying I don’t like stories or experiences without agency — I love them! I consume tons of books and movies and comics and music — but they’re not the new form I and many others are envisioning here… I think “gamers” or “ludologists” often have a distaste for interactive stories in their current forms not because interactive stories are not “games” per se, and not even because they’re often text-based instead of visual, but because the interactive stories built to date don’t have much agency. I feel the same way. (Go here for more on story vs. game.)

Sorry to possibly set off yet another terminology debate — I’m really tired of them — but does it bother other people as much it bothers me to hear the term “digital storytelling” or worse, the oxymoron “interactive storytelling”?

If you assume a primary pleasure of interactive experiences is agency, as I do, then the suffix “-telling” should be avoided. I’m interested in experiences in which the player is collaborating with the system to help make, to co-create, to have meaningful affect on the story, not be told a story.

Noah and I will be speaking at the next UC system graduate conference, narr@tive: Digital Storytelling, as will UC faculty Kate Hayles and Rita Rayey. The conference is at UCLA and will end with a reading of student work at the Hammer Museum. The call for paper abstracts and electronic literature is out – deadline, March 1. Although the site doesn’t mention the date of the conference, I beleive it will take place April 22 and 23.

In a recent discussion about interactive works that try to fuse fiction and reality, the lead writer for Online Caroline mentioned how it can be disturbing if players step over the line when interacting with a virtual character who is supposed to be real and have real feelings.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to somewhat fully fleshed-out and reactive virtual characters, the first thing players (or at least males) usually try to do is push it to its limits, to try to break it, to see how far things can go — e.g., behave badly or cruelly, swear, act lewdly or inappropriately, flirt excessively, etc. So, for an experience in which a virtual character is supposed to be real, when players act inappropriately, I could see how it would seem more disturbing.