Grand Text Auto

Three new issues of grand, textual, and sometimes automatic writing of different sorts are out. Creative digital writing can be found in the new issue of New River Journal, which includes:

• “All the News That’s Fit to Print” by Jody Zellen
• “The Wave” by Heather Raikes
• “Digital Paintings” by Karin Kuhlmann
• “A Sky of Cinders” by Tim Lockridge
• “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” by Mark Marino
• “Semantic Disturbances” by Agam Andreas
• “(NON)sense for to from Eva Hesse” by Carrie Meadows

The Sims are arguably the most popular human characters ever created in digital media. The game named after them — The Sims (Wright et al, 2000) — is one of the best-selling games ever released, and has produced chart-topping expansion packs, sequels, and ports to new platforms. Perhaps surprisingly, the game is focused entirely on interaction with and between these characters and their environment. There is no shooting, no platform-jumping, no puzzle-solving, and not a single test of speed or agility. (more...)

A new book by N. Katherine Hayles: Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary was released today from the University of Notre Dame Press. The publication of the book is a major event for the field of electronic literature. In addition to the printed book, each copy comes with a CD-ROM of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. In addition, there is a great website accompanying the book at newhorizons.eliterature.org that includes syllabi for electronic literature courses, a blog/forum, and an additional online anthology of essays by students and scholars of e-lit.

The concerns about work such as Wright’s get to the heart of what is involved when we use computer models to make non-abstract media. As Ian Bogost puts it in Unit Operations, “the relationship or feedback loop between the simulation game and its player are bound up with a set of values; no simulation can escape some ideological context” (2006, 99). Or, as Ted Nelson put it succinctly two years before SimCity’s release, “All simulations are political” (1987). (more...)

It is too late for you to write the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia entries for World of Warcraft, Bill Gates, and cell phones, but these and other articles await your writing and editorial work. Don’t try to spend it elsewhere; at least, not officially. The small number of literate children who lived between the 5th and 12th centuries in England are counting on you.

In the early 1980s, Will Wright was working on his first game: Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984). Wright was crafting an attack helicopter simulation, focused on flying over islands and open water, attempting to destroy a set of factories working toward the creation of an unstoppable war machine. Then, reflecting on the landscape editor he created for authoring the game, Wright had a realization: “I was having more fun making the places than I was blowing them up” (2004). From this the idea for Wright’s genre-defining game SimCity (1989) was born. (more...)

I face a dilemma. As of today, the blog-based peer review of Expressive Processing has completed chapter seven (“Authoring Systems”) and is embarking on chapter eight (“The SimCity Effect”). But I’m not sure what follows after chapter eight.

In the version MIT Press sent out for blind peer review, the next chapter (“Playable Language”) is incomplete. (more...)

Rhizome is now in the midst of the sixth year of our Commissions Program — a singular initiative that supports the creation of original works of new media art work. This year, we will award seven artists/ collectives with commissions ranging from $3000-$5000.

Rhizome Commissions Program
Deadline for applications: midnight, March 31, 2008

We support: New Media Art, by which we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and also works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Commissioned projects can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, or the web.

From one perspective, the challenge faced by Terminal Time is the primary focus of the entire computer science research area of “natural language generation” (NLG). This work focuses on how to take a set of material (such as a story structure, a weather summary, or current traffic information) and communicate it to an audience in a human language such as English. On the other hand, very little NLG research has taken on the specific version of this challenge relevant for Terminal Time (and digital media more generally): shaping this communication so that the specific language chosen has the appropriate tone and nuance, in addition to communicating the correct information. Given this, digital media (such as games) have generally chosen very different approaches from NLG researchers for the central task of getting linguistic competence into software systems. (more...)

Tuned to a dead channel: Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak with flash programming by erational.org.

In my first recording experiment, I recorded a net broadcast from a friend in France, who provided me with a silent digital signal. This produced a completely silent recording. … After some research, it seemed that the voices required some background noise in order to take shape. The net broadcast transmitted a signal of white noise, that I digitally recorded. While recording the broadcast from France, I asked questions of whomever might be listening and recorded them separately into another recorder with an open-air microphone. I took the white noise broadcast recordings, slowed them down (as the voices are said to be in the higher registers), and filtered out the lower frequencies.

The co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons rose in fame, in his lifetime, to the point of gathering an obituary in The New York Times. But Pat Harrigan pointed me to Paul La Farge’s 2006 essay in The Believer as a more substantial reflection on the history and hobby of D&D.

The big annual awards event for interactive fiction, the 2007 XYZZY awards, has just concluded. Admiral Jota’s Lost Pig, winner of the IF Comp, took four XYZZY awards including the big one, Best Game. I was pleased to see that the uncanny Deadline Enchanter by Alan DeNiro won the award for Best Use of Medium. Congratulations to these and other winners: James Webb, Maryam Gousheh-Forgeot, David Fisher, Stephen Granade, and Christopher Huang. And, congratulations to all the nominees this year.

Creator of ELIZA/Doctor, awarded the Norbert Wiener Award by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, author of Computer Power and Human Reason.

Play with a nice child

Face the dark winter

Have your head spontaneously catch fire

Gravitation is a new, free, low-res game for Windows, Mac, and Linux by Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage. After you play, you’ll probably want to read Jason’s note on the game.

Picture a darkened theater. An audience watches, presumably somewhat disconcerted, as “a montage of Tibetan Buddhist imagery and Chinese soldiers holding monks at gunpoint” unfolds on screen. A computerized voice tells them that:

There were reports that Buddhist monks and nuns were tortured, maimed and executed. Unfortunately such actions can be necessary when battling the forces of religious intolerance. (Mateas, 2002, 138)

Underlying the words, one can hear a “happy, ‘optimistic’ music loop.” (more...)

If I’ve been remiss at blogging over the past few months, it’s not from lack of interest; my finite time at the keyboard has been consumed with work. (Even keeping up with the daily unfolding of Noah’s excellent book takes a bit of time — well worth it though!)

About 9 months ago (time flies!) I posted my thoughts on an improved natural language understanding interface for interactive comedies/dramas. NLU is one of the R&D fronts I’ve been working on since that post — improved drama management and authoring tools being the other major fronts.

In that post I talked about the advantages, from an AI-implementation perspective, of limiting the player’s input to only eight words. After some further design work, I’ve now brought that number down to six. In my estimation, six words of natural language, per utterance, seems to be the smallest number that still allows a player to be highly expressive in a natural, conversational way.

Given its name, it is probably no surprise that Selmer Bringsjord and David Ferrucci’s Brutus system specializes in stories of betrayal. Here is the beginning of one:

Dave Striver loved the university. He loved its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. He also loved the fact that the university is free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world — only this isn’t a fact: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the PhD, to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one’s dissertation. This was a test Professort Edward Hart enjoyed giving. (Bringsjord and Ferrucci, 2000, 199–200)

The story continues for roughly another half page. (more...)

Michael Lebowitz began work on Universe at around the same time that Scott Turner began his work on Minstrel, and the two systems bear a number of similarities.² Both focus on the importance of authorial actions, rather than simply character actions. Both emerge from the scruffy AI tradition — Lebowitz had recently written his dissertation at Yale under Schank’s supervision, contributing to Schank’s model of dynamic memory, especially in relation to story understanding.³ Descriptions of both also emphasize the importance of the “point” or “theme” that the system is working to communicate through each act of generation (Lebowitz, 1984, 175). (more...)

My early experiences of digital media were as an audience member. I remember playing text-only games like Hunt the Wumpus on mainframe terminals at my mother’s university — as well as interactive fictions like Zork I on my father’s early portable computers (a Kaypro and an Osbourne). I remember playing graphical games like Combat on a first-generation Atari console that belonged to my cousins — as well as Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator on my friend Brion’s first-generation Atari home computer. Brion would later guide me in more arcane explorations of computer code, as we attempted to creatively alter the binary files of games we played, saving them back to the Atari’s tape deck. But I think it was earlier, when I was ten years old, that I first sat down to program at a “blank slate.” (more...)

Yesterday’s post finished up chapter six (“Character and Author Intelligence”) and today’s begins chapter seven (“Authoring Systems”). As it turns out, number six was another informative chapter, for me, in terms of the blog-based peer review process.

The best thing, undoubtedly, was the opportunity to hear comments from the creators of systems discussed in the chapter: Jeff Orkin and Scott Turner. Of course, many book authors are able to interview system authors when researching a book, but I suspect it’s unusual to get involved in a public conversation (before publication) around the specifics of how the manuscript characterizes the work. I’ve found this very helpful. (more...)

Given the history of AI, it is no surprise that systems such as Tale-Spin and Minstrel were built to embody models of human cognition. The assumption that human and machine processes should — or must — resemble each other runs deep in AI. It continues to this day, despite the counter-example of statistical AI.

With Tale-Spin and Minstrel both emerging from the “scruffy” end of symbolic AI, we might assume that this area of AI was particularly given to building its systems on human models. And perhaps it is true that a neat researcher would not have made Turner’s opening assumption from his description of Minstrel: “To build a computer program to tell stories, we must understand and model the processes an author uses to achieve his goals” (1994, 3). (more...)

I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game is an ultradifficult pastiche of early platformers. You could play that, or you could play, or watch someone painfully play, China Miner, a genuine early platformer that is exceedingly difficult. (Thanks to Jesper for first telling me about the amazing China Miner.) Both of these are hilarious and well worth dying for – repeatedly.

Check out josh g’s post about a heated discussion dealing with the inclusion of Lost in the Static (discussed previously on here) in the GDC program while a list of 300 game ideas (one of which was the basis for Lost in the Static, two of which were realized in other GDC-discussed games) didn’t make the cut.

I guess the main thing at issue is what status game ideas posted online should have when compared to actual games.

The truth is, executing a project is often a very important part of it – you can then show it to others, and you can adjust your concept and redesign repeatedly when you start working through the actual process of producing.

We can see, in Minstrel, symptoms of a much larger problem. One which Turner, alone, could have done little to address. By the late 1980s it was clear that AI systems in general were not living up to the expectations that had been created over the three previous decades. Many successful systems had been built — by both “neats” and “scruffies” — but all of these worked on very small sets of data. Based on these successes, significant funding had been dedicated to attempting to scale up to larger, more real-world amounts of data. But these attempts failed, perhaps most spectacularly in the once high-flying area of “expert systems.” The methods of AI had produced, rather than operational simulations of intelligence, a panoply of idiosyncratic encodings of researchers’ beliefs about parts of human intelligence — without any means of compensating for the non-simulation of the rest of human intelligence. Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel, in their history of the Lisp programming language (1993, 30), note that by 1988 the term “AI winter” had been introduced to describe the growing backlash and resulting loss of funding for many AI projects. In this vacuum, assisted by steadily increasing processing power, a new form of AI began to rise in prominence. (more...)

Speaking of Scott Turner (author of Minstrel, a major subject of the EP chapter currently being discussed) he recently drew my attention to an article in the Guardian titled “Automatic writing.”

Philip M Parker, a professor of management science at Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France, patented what he calls a “method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing”.