Grand Text Auto

Lawmeme reports that Second Life, an avatar game discussed in recent posts, has made a decision to let player-characters keep the intellectual property rights they create. Players, for instance, have the right to sell movie rights for their character. See Participant Content under the Second Life terms of service agreement. Of course, the player also grants Second Life nonexclusive rights to the content, but nevertheless, this is a fascinating decision with regard to virtual property. I think it also has some interesting implications regarding the idea that games can be a creative environment, in which players actually make new “works” that could have some economic value.

I haven’t yet had the chance to write a reaction to Randy Littlejohn’s impassioned article about interactive drama on Gamasutra from two weeks ago (requires free registration); I hope to post something next week. However I just discovered a discussion board hidden within Gamasutra called “Letters to the Editor“, where a lively debate about the article has already been going on. :-)

Actually it’s best to start reading the discussion starting from an October 3 letter that responds to Craig Lindley’s excellent game taxonomy article (that I had linked to in the midst of the Frasca fracas we had about a month back), and then work your way up through the next 17 or so “letters”.

No time for a full report on this conference or even on the last one that I went to, but, speaking of narrative intelligence and America’s Army, one program awaiting funding from the DoD is called “Episodic Memory” and seeks researchers who take something of an NI approach to memory and experience. There have been many interesting things at this DARPA/IPTO Cognitive Systems conference, which announces another big AI push, the presentation on this program by Doug Gage is one thing that stood out as being of to Grand Text Auto folks. Since many of us know already why, in general, it can be helpful to think of memory as being organized into narrative, I’ll instead mention the specific military uses that Gage discussed:

Janet Murray is announcing a new PhD program in Digital Media at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Applications are due Feb 1.

I must say, it looks pretty tempting… great people, warm weather, land of soul food… I’d want to go there if I were looking to get a degree.

Just discovered a discussion that occurred a few weeks ago over at buzzcut about the lack of emotion in games, similar to the discussion we had recently here about the lack of games that address the “human condition”. Buzzcut is written by David Thomas, who also writes for DenverPost.com. Reading his blog I just discovered he was at LevelUp (here’s his pics), but I didn’t happen to meet him. It always sucks when you later realize you wish you’d met somebody in person when you had the chance.

I’ve given myself an hour to writeup my impressions from the LevelUp conference, which will be a challenge because it was a busy 3 days. I’ll give some highlights, anyway. (Here’s a WSJ article previewing the conference. And here’s some pics courtesy of Reality Panic.)

It was an energetic event in a pleasant city called Utrecht, at that town’s University, about 10 miles south of Amsterdam. The city center had pretty canals lined with restaurants, cafes and shops, an clean and efficient train and bus system, and lots of well-dressed people on bicycles. Our weather was pretty warm, making our 20 minute walk to and from the hostel enjoyable.

I arrived at 7am local time (1am body time) on an “overnight” flight from Boston, and the conference started at 9am — and I made it on time! (Just a wee bit tired, but the sunlight shining through the large windows of the Rem Koolhaas building where the conference was held helped keep me awake.) Everyone was surprised at how many attendees there were — about 500 in total, perhaps 20% American, and overall probably half students (grad and undergrad) from northern Europe. The lobby was lined with GameCube, PlayStation and XBox game consoles, so games and gamers were always in your peripheral vision as you chatted between sessions.

Terra Nova links to a personal account of a first kiss in the virtual world, There. It’s both sweet and disturbing to me. (Mostly because everybody looks like J.Crew models, but I know you can create less perfect-looking avatars. Which suddendly reminds me of the new reality show Average Joe I was just watching last weekend. I knew I wasn’t crazy when I alluded to just such a connection…)

(And I’m further unsettled (and intrigued) by the link in the Terra Nova post’s comments to Seducity.com… I didn’t know such a site existed yet! Wow… see you there… gulp?)

This is probably old news to most of you, but I just heard about the US Army’s latest recruiting tool, America’s Army. The army spent $4.5 million to develop the game, and is reporting that it has been wildly successful. In a Chicago Tribune story, the game’s project director, Col. Casey Wardynski, reported that on the night of Oct. 28 alone, “1.3 million games got played . . . At six minutes a game, that’s 150,000 hours of game play, where kids were virtually inside the Army.” Wardynski praises the game as a cost-effective recruiting tool. The game takes kids from basic and special forces training to virtual battlefield operations.

I guess it’s one way to keep those body bags filled.

What’s next? The CIA could be at work on America’s Effective Intelligence: Mission One — Learn to Translate Arabic. Maybe the State Department is working on America’s Diplomats: Mission One — A Nonviolent Solution.

Nah. Where’s the fun in that?

Game designers and academics Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca have begun a new blog called Water Cooler Games that “explores the emerging field of games [that] want to do more than simply being fun: they want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions. This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment.” I’ve added it to our blogroll.

I’ll be curious for a discussion that talks about the fine line between persuasion and propaganda, vis-a-vis political games…

On the blog Gonzalo mentions that his political commentary game Sept 12 (discussed recently here on GTxA) has now gotten over 100,000 unique hits.

Poet Jason Nelson visited Stockton last week to give a reading and to visit with my New Media Studies students. Nelson is the hyperkinetic wizard behind heliozoa.com and a future project that hovers around technology culture called Secret Technology. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals including Beehive (Brown University), Boomerang (UK), Epitome (Madrid), 3rdbed (NYC), Nowculture, Blue Moon Review and others. In addition his work has been featured in art galleries worldwide.

There’s an extensive new article about interactive drama on Gamasutra called Agitating for Dramatic Change, by a game designer named Randy Littlejohn. It looks like a really great read — addressing in detail many of the issues we talk about here on grandtextauto. In fact he goes into detail about our interactive drama project, Facade, more so than any other paper to date not written by us.

If you haven’t registered with Gamasutra yet (for free), this article is surely worth the effort!

I somehow managed to pause halfway through Narrative Intelligence, edited by Grand Text Auto‘s own Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, and mentioned on here before. After losing track of the book for a while, I’ve finally finished reading it. Even knowing something of the breadth of inquiry undertaken by those in narrative intelligence, it’s a rich and surprisingly diverse collection. Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium 1999 are supplemented with other selections important to narrative intelligence research. One effect of the collection is to make me sorry that I missed the NI symposia and the active days of the NI group at MIT. But I’m glad this book is still around as a contribution to the academic discourse, and I hope future work will build on the insights in it.

NI researchers all share a concern with intelligence (human and computer) and with the use of narrative to organize events, but the field (if “field” is the best word for it) encompasses many different concepts and approaches, as Michael and Pheobe explain in their introduction. This means that people are more likely than usual to find a few essays to be gems and to find that others are of no use. In my case – as my interests seem to be pretty in keeping with the “typical” set of NI interests, assuming there is such a thing – I found something to redeem each of the articles, although it wasn’t always what I expected. For instance, an essay that didn’t provide me with any insight into the expected topics of computing and narrative (one about the design of a documentary about a band) offered helpful discussion on topics I didn’t expect to read about, such as the consistent ways that youth culture expresses itself within a mainstream culture.

Four months ago I expressed interest in trying the new Star Wars Galaxies mmorpg. Although I’m not a fan of rpg’s, the idea of an online Star Wars universe has so much appeal that even a cynical non-gamer like me was ready to give it a try. I’ve been so busy lately that I hadn’t had a chance to try it yet — and now, unfortunately, it seems my delay may have been for the best. As of late there have been a few writeups about SWG‘s many problems, echoing what seem to be design problems with today’s mmorpgs in general. I think these critiques are very instructive not just for mmorpg design but as case studies of the challenges of interactive-experience genre innovation.

They seem to be coming fast and furious… this one in Sydney in February: IE2004: Australian Workshop on Interactive Entertainment. Most appealing is that the first eight topics of interest in the call for papers are AI & narrative / interactive drama / believable agent -oriented topics. (via Game-Culture)

Also, there will be a mini-symposium in the afternoon just after the Level Up conference ends, called FLUX: Game Industry in Transition; reserve your seat. Sadly my flight home leaves a few hours beforehand, so I’ll miss out.

From November 12 through March 28, Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center will have an exhibition called Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences: Storytelling and Computer Games. “The exhibition derives from research of the How They Got Game Project at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, a project seeking a path-finding narrative for the historical and critical appreciation of computer and video games. … A free conference on Friday, February 6, entitled ‘Story Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer Games,’ presents speakers from the industry and academia, addressing aspects of the role of narrative in computer games,” including Warren Spector, and Haden Blackman of LucasArts. (via GamesNetwork)

I find interactive drama to be a fascinating topic. It’s a fairly undefined and unproven thing, which makes it a lot of fun to think about, and attempt to build. Frustrating and humbling, too, of course.

Here’s a few rambling thoughts on the topic (many not new), partly motivated by a short essay about reality television that I recently came across while surfing.

While I’ve thought and read about interactive drama a lot (but am always finding more!), and with Michael have come up with an approach to it, a question I keep asking myself is: what exactly do you *do* in an interactive drama? What is it exactly? How does it operate, on a design / structural level?

The extensive list of presentations for March’s Game Developers Conference in San Jose is now online, and it looks as stimulating as ever! If you’ve never been to a GDC before, this looks like a great year to make the trip. There are a lot of talks to look through, so I took the time to pull out abstract excerpts of the ones I imagine would have particular interest to the GTxA crowd. Note there are a couple of presentations that specifically address issues of game research.

This conference has been getting better over time. It’s still definitely an industry conference (versus, say, the brand new Level Up, an academic one); GDC consistently and primarily offers hard-nosed, practical advice and information on building better games. But in recent years it seems to be trying to include more theoretical, experimental thinking and research. Cool.

I just discovered the online journal Image and Narrative via Jan Baetens’s review of The New Media Reader. Image and Narrative is described as “a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term” and its current issue includes essays with titles like “Comic strips and constrained writing” (which hits a couple of my interest buttons right there).

I got to spend my long weekend up at Brown University, where I met up with numerous digital media folks in literature and the arts, including several of my collaborators: Rachel, Noah, and William. I also got to talk with Robert Coover and Talan Memmott and see some of the work they (and Noah, and William, and others at Brown) have been doing in the TCASCV, where they’ve been bringing literature into virtual reality in the Cave Writing project.

I saw Screen (by Noah and other collaborators) finally, which I’ve seen documentation of but hadn’t gotten to experience. I also saw a dynamic word lattice that was part of Talan’s in-progress project and heard about William’s in-progress museum of words to rotate and manipulate. An A.R. Ammons poem has been used as the framework and text for one complete, elaborate piece; a piece called Hypertable provided a setting for several shorter works that incorporated texts in different ways, one of which is pictured here.

112 games have been entered in 2004’s Independent Games Festival. Some dozen or so finalists will be chosen by a jury to compete at the Game Developers Conference in March in San Jose. The games’ development times range from 3 days to 8 years. Most seem like smallish web-based games, and I don’t see as many genre-busting works as I’d like, but I’m excited by the ~50% increase in the number of entries from last year.

Also, last weekend was the 2nd annual Independent Games Conference, sponsored by GarageGames. Looking at the schedule, it appears to have been a low-budget version of the expensive Game Developers Conference, with a few independent-games-oriented sessions thrown in the mix.

On nettime Mark Stahlman writes:

As the fellow who “coined” the term NEW MEDIA (circa 1990, in preparation for the America Online IPO, whereupon Steve Case awarded me this email address), I have often been asked — So what the HECK is (er, are) New Media, anyway?

I couldn’t help but answer:

“Simulations and games, in many forms and for many subjects, are among the most recent innovations in instructional technique. Some are hardly ‘new media,’ however, because they are as simple and familiar as card or board games.” (p.93)

– James A. Robinson, “Simulation and Games.” In _The New Media and Education_, edited by Peter H. Rossi and Bruce J. Biddle. Aldine Publishing, Chicago, 1966.
http://www.getcited.org/pub/101220511

Then I realized that GTxA folks might be interested in the rest of this chapter’s introductory paragraph:

Greg Costikyan posts a strong, unhappy reaction to newsgaming.com‘s Sept 12. I was glad to read zang.org’s balanced reaction to Greg’s post. (Mind you, Greg is someone who lives a block from Ground Zero in NYC, who saw the towers fall.)

Without getting into the politics (other than to say I find Sept 12 to be a useful, thought-provoking piece, and exciting new genre for games), I’m not sure why Greg and some of his commenters are so vitriolically opposed to calling Sept 12 a simulation. Greg writes, at the height of his vehemence,

But to call this a “simulation,” as the creators do, is fucking obscene. Simulation of what? Where’s the research? What systems are simulated?

I just moved to Boston, and a few days ago happened to walk by Brookline Booksmith, noticing a sign that said Adrienne Eisen will be reading from her new book, called Making Scenes. I thought, huh, Adrienne Eisen, the hypertext writer, has a print book?

I’ve been a fan of Adrienne’s work since her first web-based hyperfiction, Six Sex Scenes, came out about 7 years ago now. We’d had some email discussions in the past — she’s a Petz fan — but we hadn’t met in person, so that was fun.

Here’s a quick link to Noah’s blog where he mentions his newly received copy of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s new book, Rules of Play. I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on it, especially after seeing their presentation at GDC last March.

I must say, between Rules of Play, The New Media Reader, Narrative Intelligence, The Art of Interactive Design, and the upcoming First Person and Twisty Little Passages (and the others I’m surely forgetting), this has been quite a year for meaty new books.

Recently, we drivers have been discussing how to make the things we write on Grand Text Auto available under a Creative Commons license. I believe we all agree that things we write for the blog (and photos we take and images we create for the blog) should be available under the Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license. However, checking the checkbox and putting that license statement on the main page would suggest that we’re licensing content to which we don’t own the rights. That’s why I chose to indicate individually that particular entries by me are licensed. It’s clunky, but a broader, incorrect offer of a license throws those legitimately licensed items into suspicion.