Grand Text Auto

My dissertation work aims to build intelligent game AI by learning from replays. However, the major limitation of this approach is that the AI cannot be developed until a large number of players have first played the game. Fortunately, large-scale beta testing is becoming more popular for games. These beta cycles result in mountains of data that can be used to build AI for games. One of the most notorious beta releases is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft 2, which ran from February 17 to June 7. The only AI provided with this release was “very easy”, which means that Blizzard may be analyzing how players actually play the game before finalizing the AI.

A recent article highlights Dartmouth College’s rather unusual approach to game design by basing the process in humanistic thinking. Influenced by Professor Mary Flanagan’s commitment to social change design and human values through the Values at Play project, the students enrolled in Dartmouth’s games courses bring their eclectic backgrounds to the design process to make unique games. Currently in the works at the lab: games for pressing healthcare issues, a game on sustainability and biodiversity, metadata games, and research with the Games for Learning Institute, focusing on the links between industry designers’ everyday knowledge and popular learning theories.

A recent article highlights Dartmouth College’s rather unusual approach to game design by basing the process in humanistic thinking. Influenced by Professor Mary Flanagan’s commitment to social change design and human values through the Values at Play project, the students enrolled in Dartmouth’s games courses bring their eclectic backgrounds to the design process to make unique games. Currently in the works at the lab: games for pressing healthcare issues, a game on sustainability and biodiversity, metadata games, and research with the Games for Learning Institute, focusing on the links between industry designers’ everyday knowledge and popular learning theories.

During the ELO_AI conference, David (jhave) Johnston shot a couple of wonderful little short films of people responding quickly to the question “What inspired you to get involved with electronic literature?” The results: 51 Keywords (33 seconds) and 51 Responses (18:25).

If you want to know about the future of newspapers, you might look at the ones that are thriving rather than the ones that are struggling or collapsing. I learned recently that there is at least one fairly new, very successful newspaper company – Metro International. With a price point of zero for their tabloids, they offer advertising-rich layouts and tiny stories that (for clarity’s sake) don’t jump to other pages. It’s the newspaper equivalent of that gag on Suck.com where Terry drew a Web page full of advertising that had a tiny “content banner.” (Wish I could find it … but at least Suck.com is still online, for those who want to look.) Having recently read about this newsprint wunderkind, I picked up this weekend’s issue to see what they actually write Metro stories about…

‘Kasumi’s Stolen Memory’ is a DLC mission for Mass Effect 2 that adds a new perspective to gameplay in the Mass Effect series. While the DLC contains the formulaic loyalty mission for the new character, it also puts Commander Shepard in a new role in which the player interacts in a formal social setting. Shepard’s mission is to assist Kasumi in infiltrating an extravagant party in order to reclaim Kasumi’s personal artifact contained in the vault of the party’s host. Part of the DLC is a new formal wardrobe for Shepard (pictured below), that while only providing a reskinning, changed my perspective of the character. Playing through this mission reminded me of the scene from the interactive drama Heavy Rain in which the journalist (Madison Paige) needs to infiltrate a nightclub to acquire information from the owner. After drawing this comparison, I found myself asking the question: Can Mass Effect 2 be considered an interactive drama? Can the player have meaningful participation in the development of the plot in an action game?

Emily Short wrote an intriguing post about the parser in IF – actually, somewhat against the parser in IF. She explores alternatives to what she calls the “command line” in IF (not entirely inaccurate, but not the connection I’d most want to make) and ends up finding it to be more or less the worst of all systems except all the others, like democracy. The post has already garnered about 50 comments. In it, Short writes:

We have a two-part accessibility problem. One part is the interpreter: people don’t want to download separate files and don’t want to have to figure out file formats … The other problem is the parser.

Sparked by the strong interest in the Procedural Content Generation Workshop upcoming at FDG 2010, I have been working with Julian Togelius and Rafael Bidarra to create a special issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games (IEEE TCIAIG). Deadline for submissions is November 1, with publication aimed for June, 2011. Details below the fold.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Procedural Content Generation
IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games
Special issue editors: Julian Togelius, Jim Whitehead and Rafael Bidarra

Just posted at ebr (Electronic Book Review) is Whitney Anne Trettien’s article “Computers, Cut-ups, and Combinatory Volvelles.” (We already love computers and cut-ups, but be aware that volvelles are extremely cool.) Some illustrations are still to come, but the article’s text and references are now up … I believe in link early, link often.

I posted the talk/skit I performed with Rob Wittig at the ELO_AI Conference, All Tomorrow’s Parties. I was planning a talk on the early days of the ELO, but a few weeks before the conference, John Cayley asked if I could modify my talk to make it more specifically focused on the Tribute to Robert Coover, which was a subtheme of the conference. My goal was to keep some elements of that early history, while delivering the sort of light roast that Coover deserved. That is, to make Coover laugh. I think that Coover and the members of the audience who had actually read some of his books appreciated it, though it did leave me with some explaining for the literalists in the audience who actually thought I was seriously considering spanking my maid.

The Electronic Literature Organization’s conference at Brown University has new concluded – the workshops, performances, screenings, exhibits, and sessions all went very well, as did the coffee breaks and other times for informal conversation. Many thanks to the organizer of ELO_AI (Archive & Innovate), John Cayley!

The conference was a celebration of and for Robert Coover, co-founder of the Electronic Literature Organization and major American novelist, whose teaching and promotion of electronic literature has been essential to the field. Robert Coover was toasted and at least lightly roasted, heard papers presented on his work, and did a reading of the “recently renovated Hypertext Hotel” – a famous early project by students which did indeed turn out to have some recent renovations.

Now that I’m out of my academic robe and back into my more comfortable usual attire, I wanted to send a blog-based shout-out to those in Comparative Media Studies who finished their work in the past year and were awarded masters degrees on Friday:

• Jason Begy
• Audubon Dougherty
• Madeline Clare Elish
• Colleen Kaman
• Flourish Klink
• Hillary Kolos
• Michelle Moon Lee
• Xiaochang Li
• Jason Rockwood
• Nick Seaver
• Sheila Murphy Seles
• Lauren Silberman

Hurrah for Technology, ‘ology ‘ology oh – and for these recent MIT graduates.

Lately, some of us in the lab have been having a discussion on the difference between content selection and content generation. Where does one end and the other begin? At some level, procedural content generation uses content selection. So what’s the difference?

The Diablo franchise is well-known for their randomly created levels. But is it content generation or content selection?

This week’s ELO_AI conference is dedicated to Robert Coover, the American novelist and Brown University professor who cofounded the ELO and has taught electronic writing workshops at Brown since the 1980s. He has been an important advocate for electronic writing, and did a great deal to make it part of the American literary conversation. I’ll be saying more about Coover during my talk at the conference and during the banquet. But I thought I would share this Robert Coover Criticism, a little generator I threw together to mark the occasion. The generator is built from reviews of his work and interviews he has done over the years.

We at Tiltfactor send out a tribute to Canadian game inventor Chris Haney, one of the designers of Trivial Pursuit.  We’d also like to those who have come before us to enrich our games, especially those at Dartmouth:  Thomas Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, inventors of the BASIC programming language, invented at Dartmouth College in 1964; Richard Tait, Dartmouth Alum and inventor of Cranium; Steve Russell, one of the students behind the game Spacewar! at MIT, finished his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College in 1958; John Donahoe (a really nice guy), with Ebay and Skype; and Ernest Everett Just, a distinguished African American biologist who graduated from Dartmouth in 1907,  Dr. George Stibitz, faculty and inventor of the first digital computer in  1940, and those who, in 1956, created the field of artificial intelligence research at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades!

The first reviews of Expressive Processing have begun to appear, and the three I’ve seen come from three distinct perspectives: a game development veteran who has become a professor, an industry computer scientist with an AI background, and a public relations intern with a games-focused website. I think the collection of perspectives is interesting, but it’s hard for others to take a look because two of the three reviews are behind paywalls. This post provides a quick peek at all three, which may be particularly interesting for those curious as to what’s being said in places where their browsers can’t tread, and identifies an area of disagreement that I hope will be addressed further in future reviews.

catch it all tomorrow with a Tiltfactor open house 3-6pm hosted by Digital Humanities Professor Mary Flanagan and her student design team in 304 North Fairbanks, Dartmouth College;

followed by  “Rebooting Our Democracy”
a public lecture by Prof. Lawrence Lessig
7:00 p.m.  Thursday, May 27, 2010
Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall  Dartmouth College

Lawrence Lessig is Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics,
and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  He is the author of Remix (2008),
Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), and The Future of Ideas (2001).  He has won umerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.
This event is free and open to the public.

J.R. Carpenter has taken apart and reassembled my poetry generator Taroko Gorge. (The first to appropriate and rework that piece, as far as I know, was Scott Rettberg, who created Tokyo Garage.) J.R.’s piece – one might call it a tract of sorts – is simply called Gorge. See if you can stomach it, and for how long.

Also, check out J.R.’s project Story Generation(s), which involved reworking two of my 1k Python programs and which launched May 8 at PW10 Performance Writing Weekend. The project includes a JavaScript port of “Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR.” This is generally not a bad idea; I wrote Taroko Gorge originally in Python (a programming language I prefer for when I’m thinking) and converted it to JavaScript for easy web viewing.

My collaborator Mark Marino is putting on a conference at USC which looks to be a great event. (I don’t pimp conferences on the blog here unless I’m involved in organizing them or planning to attend; I’m certainly submitting to this one.) Note that abstracts are due very soon – June 1.

Announcing a 1-Day conference on Critical Code Studies at the University of Southern California

Critical Code Studies @ USC

July 23, 2010
Hosted by The Center for Transformative Scholarship & The Institute for Multimedia Literacy

Keynote: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University

At Tiltfactor we’re designing a suite of games that inspires users to tag photographs with “expert” data. Using their input, are building a searchable database of terms that users can explore to find the photographs they need. But how should such a database be constructed in order to be searchable? To answer this question we need to decide exactly what we will be sorting.

If you want to sort dates, design a timeline; if you want to sort names, just make an alphabetical list.

Mary Dooms, a middle school teacher in Illinois who has used interactive fiction in her teaching, recently asked me if I knew about any uses of IF in teaching in higher education. That’s a good question.

She had found Utah State’s Voices of Spoon River and Myth Mechanic. I know right off that Jeff Howard has taught The Crying of Lot 49 using IF, and that students read IF and create it as a digital literary practice in two of my classes, Interactive Narrative and The Word Made Digital.

After the Digital Humanities Symposium last week and the visit by Filmmaker Marcin Ramocki, Dartmouth is happy to host this week Helen Nissenbaum
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science. Nissenbaum will be giving a talk on “What’s Wrong with Behavioral Advertising?”

Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science NYU
May 18th at 3pm     105 Thornton Hall
Co-Sponsored by the Philosophy Department, Digital Humanities, and ISTS

We concluded the Spring 2010 21W.750 (Experimental Writing) today by composing a definition of the class’s title phrase, based on what we learned during our studies this semester.

EXPERIMENTAL WRITING (vbl. n., c. 1872)

1. The elephant is tiring. X-raying with yttrium, the pact seems tame, empty. Of yore, a raisin says “nope” to an igloo.

2. The octopus, magnificent, eats a tiger and an elephant. (a) Turn no oblog torpor. Revel! (b) An acrobatic cat, loyal, limp, is politicized.

3. What Twitter rhetoric: lame, incredible, empty. Tomatoes, made sarcastic, ignite both earrings.

Avatars discovered in the tenure process? Mobile spaces for transmedia exhibitions? Ancient manuscripts in MRI machines? Teaching with databases instead of texts? How are technicians, scientists, artists, designers, and humanists pursuing 21st-century research? How are institutions of higher education affected along with the scholars? As witnessed in scientific fields, new technology radically affects the ways in which scholars pursue their research. Digital technologies foster new questions about materials, practices, archives, and networks, and the digital affects the ways in which resources are archived, queried, searched, created, taught, and studied.

On page 141 of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (excellent) Expressive Processing, there’s discussion of a citation of from Jesper Juul:

Unlike most literary fictions, however, the worlds of many games are, in Juul’s terminology, “incoherent” (which is one of the things that limits Juul’s interest in discussing games in terms of narrative, as opposed to fiction). These are worlds in which significant events take place that cannot be explained without discussing the game rules, such as the many games that feature multiple and extra lives without any element of the game fiction that points towards reincarnation.