Grand Text Auto

To celebrate Prom Week’s release on on Facebook and Kongegrate, we thought we’d share some of the details about what’s going on inside of the heads of Prom Week characters.

As we’ve posted before, Prom Week is a game where the player gets to shape the social lives of 18 highschoolers by controlling what social actions they take with one another. What each character wants to do, and how each character chooses to respond, is determined by over 5,000 social considerations.

Local Santa Cruz game developer and perennial guest speaker Graeme Devine is visiting UCSC tomorrow (Wednesday the 22nd) to give a talk titled “Social Games are DEAD!” In his own words:

Everyone on the planet is rushing to add a social element to their game, picture app, music app, whatever app. Our widely held view of acceptable application development has narrowed to freemium social games that have to monetize. Somewhere along the way we forgot that games should be fun experiences and we became analysts. Let’s talk about that.

This week, the Digital Humanities and Asian American Studies Departments will be hosting a series of events regarding race, technology, and critical studies. 

ON THURSDAY, February 23rd in Carson L02 at 4:30pm, Lisa Nakamura, interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, new media and cinema, and critical / cultural studies, will be gracing us with her presence with a talk titled “Trash Talk: Instrumental Racism as a Procedural Strategy in Online Games.”

Interactive story author Emily Short spoke at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, as part of the ongoing Inventing the Future of Games speaker series. Emily, best known for her work on groundbreaking interactive fictions such as Galatea and Savoir-Faire, spoke about her recent work with Richard Evans (AI Lead on The Sims 3) developing an interactive story system centered around character and conversation in Jane Austen’s universe. (Emily and Richard’s company, Little Text People, has recently been acquired by Linden Lab; Emily stressed that the ideas presented in the talk represent work done before the acquisition.)

Mark J. Nelson has posted a very nice note about word-unit palindromes, mentioning that I have been tweeting palindromes-by-word as “@nickmofo” recently.

Nelson points out the paucity of such palindromes in the printed (and digital) record, and the lack of discussion about these. There are a few famous palindromes of this sort, including one that he mentions, “You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?” Another fairly well-known one is “King, are you glad you are king?” and another is “So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so.”

Whenever someone mentions the word “video game” in a conversation about art, many common schemas spring to mind. Many consider video games art in and of themselves, though some may disagree. However, most neglect video games’ potential as a tool for creating art. We often think of artistic tools as the paintbrush or chisel or even the mouse or tablet, but rarely do we consider games viable tools. Isn’t that contrary to the notion of a “game?”

It happens more quickly than we ever anticipated.

Everybody makes jokes about the apocalypse, but it’s not so funny when it shows up in the middle of the night on your back doorstep.

They come in twos. Silently, they assemble in the park, the shopping district, the back alleys of downtown Manhattan, communing…planning… Marking their courses, they disperse in pre-planned regiments to blend themselves in among the people. By the time their surveillance period is finished, they have gathered more than enough information for a successful invasion, and no one will be able to stop them. And what would be the point? After all, they’re only balloons…

Designer Gulch by Brendan Howell is another remix of my oft-remixed poetry generator, Taroko Gorge. This one is installed in the lobby of the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule.

Delve into all the adolescent angst, drama, and scheming of the week before a high school prom in this online game, which uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence system to enable players to shape the social lives of 18 hapless high school students. Find dates for them, break up and make up, forge new friendships, make enemies — it’s up to you to determine whether the Prom will be a magical wonderland of disco ball lights or a nightmare of existential crises!

Play it now!!!

by goyo

BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP!

I’ve participated in three conferences on digital and literary and poetic topics recently – and haven’t participated, unfortunately, in a barbecue.

The Critical Code Studies (CCS) Working Group 2012 is an online discussion – or, I suppose, several discussions – that started on January 30 and runs until February 20. It’s organized by Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino.

At In Media Res, a project of MediaCommons, I was part of the digital literature discussion last week. This was organized by Eric LeMay.

Prom Week is about to be released and Expressive Processing is about to come out in paperback — a confluence that has me thinking about humanities-based game design, something I’ve been more actively mulling since an NSF workshop on the Future of Research in Computer Games and Virtual Worlds that UCI hosted in 2010.

Obviously I’m not the first person on this scent — on some level people have been discussing humanities-based game design at least since Brenda Laurel’s dissertation. But working on Prom Week helped me realize that I think we need to go beyond “operationalizing” models from the humanities or applying humanities ideas gleaned from studying other media as design heuristics (though these are also important approaches).

When first making my way into the world of new media art, my first instinct was to look for works focusing on the computer: coding, languages, digital, analog. Anything apparently technical seemed appropriate. But when digging deeper, I encountered works that seemed reminiscent of those wonderful gadgets and gizmos from Doctor Who, seemingly ordinary objects and structures that became “bigger on the inside” or had “hidden secrets to reveal.” That’s what I found in the works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.

In 2005 film critic Roger Ebert set off a cyber lucha libre when he declared, “Video games can never be art.” In his own words, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of the great poets, filmmakers, and novelists.” Ebert delivered his statement through his Chicago Sun Times blog. Almost immediately, it was countered with a mix of arguments coming from game designers, gamers, critics, and scholars.

How much influence should aesthetic have when considering new media art? Are pieces that explore a concept through technology with little or no thought to the aesthetic values still considered new media art, or just visual representation of data?

*Based on artist Ken Feingold’s work If/Then*

Why did he do this? Why did he make me smart? Why did he make me ask questions?

Did he realize at the time that he might give me too much? Numbers, sensors, speech, processing…How do people do it? Manage all that information? I don’t think, I analyze.

I sit here stuck on a platform, staring at the sky. I can’t even turn around. I’m fixed to stare at the wall in front of me.

Can artificial intelligence “think” on the same level as human beings? That is a question that has been in debate for decades, since the development of computer programming. Although artificial intelligence started out as a scientific fascination, it has been incorporated into the area of digital art, comprising one of the major themes in this relatively new art form. It may seem strange that something as “scientific” as artificial intelligence can be even remotely related to the term “art”. However, as a part of digital art, artificial intelligence is explored as a type of life form—composed of digital information—that evolves and develops on its own in the framework of specified programs. Many digital art projects addressing artificial life focus on “the inherent characteristics of digital technologies themselves: the possibility of infinite ‘reproduction’ in varying combinations according to specified variables; and the feasibility of programming certain behaviors for so-called ‘autonomous’ information units or characters” (Paul 140).

The Boston Globe calls it the scientific community’s Arab Spring. Perhaps the comparison is bombastic, but this issue actually goes beyond science. It’s a question of whether the results of our research, scholarship, and critical writing as academics will be held hostage from our own universities and completely locked away from the public view, or whether we can put aside the artificial scarcity of information that commercial publishers have created and foster better, open communications.

Our colleagues in the sciences are the main ones who are taking a stand in this particular case – a boycott of commercial, closed-access publisher Elsevier – but others can stand with them.

If you haven’t, please read about the issue with Elsevier specifically, for instance in the Chronicle and the Guardian. These are good old news stories in which one side says it’s right and then the other side says it’s right, and so on.

Two new pieces of writing this morning have me thinking about the future of game dialogue.

Clint Hocking suggests that our cultural expectations of dialogue need to change — dialogue isn’t bad because it’s written as a way of players coming to understand their impact on the game world. He talks about an “evolution of our cultural sensibilities” that “causes film dialogue to feel strange and old-fashioned” because it isn’t written toward this goal.

That makes sense, but the problem is that canned dialogue, even moreso than canned animation, is going to hit a wall quickly if you actually let players have an impact on the game world.

Cassandra uses a mismatch between her and Gunter’s feelings about cultural knowledge base items to shoot down his attempt to ask her out.

Hello! I’m Aaron A. Reed, lead writer on Prom Week, and I wanted to talk a bit about the challenges the writing team faced bringing eighteen characters to life during the most exciting week of their lives. (So far, at least… I’m pretty sure Lil is going to go on to do great things.) I’ve previously worked on large-scale interactive stories before, like my 2009 project Blue Lacuna, but Prom Week presented authoring challenges on a whole different level.

Yo dawg, I hear you like blog posts. So I put a link to a blog post in your blog post. The link goes to my “Curator’s Note” on In Media Res about very short programs to generate music, in which I also mention how poorly suited prevalent Web systems are for transmitting and discussing code.

So my inspiration for the following story is artist Daniel Canogar’s piece Hide 2. The portrait was created by inscribing many different fingerprints ( all from different people) digitally; the prints blurred and overlapped creating only partial prints.When I looked at it, it  made me think of big mixing pot were everyone was mixed together by their finger prints. So I decided to write a story where the melting pot was literal.

Dr. Cecil Brown began his lecture Games Blacks Love to Play by citing Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 observation that the games people play mirror the surrounding culture. Brown uses this stance—that games teach us about the culture they come from—to explore the history of African Americans, the interplay between black and white play cultures, and the effect these diverse forms of play had on American culture at large.

Brown divided American history into three stages. First, slave culture, in which outdoor physical play predominates. Under slavery, blacks rarely learned to read and write, as punishment was having your hands cut off. Black culture, thus, was primarily oral and kinetic out of necessity. Second, segregated culture, characterized by dance. Thirdly, integrated culture, which our digital culture is a part.

“Our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert.”

Kenneth laughs, quoting the prophecy of Donna Haraway. He wiggles his fingers limply as the cyborg pins him to the wall. “It’s quite apt, don’t you think?” He turns to me and grins. “Who knew that giving all artificial lifeforms links to communicate with each other would lead to this? Now I’m the canvas, and this– this machine, the painter…” He turns and stares the creature in its webcam. “What’s your name, then?”

“ALICE.”