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Long have people puzzled over the strange system of Dan Shiovitz’s game Bad Machine (available online at Poems that Go.) But the attempt at careful discussion I made in my review of Bad Machine now seems unnecessary, because a page that explains everything has recently come back online.
It’s spring break, so I decided to take a trip to Maryland and hear a talk…
Scott Rettberg’s talk at MITH (University of Maryland). I was pleased to hear Neil Fraistat plug Grand Text Auto in introducing Scott…
Scott uses the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 (eds. Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, Strickland) to discuss the notion of genre in e-lit. There is no established publishing model, economic market. This causes problems with in presenting work in the classroom, assigning work.
This is the last in my series (1 2 3 4) of posts about two story generation systems that were first published about in the mid-1980s: Minstrel and Universe. I think they’re not just interesting in themselves, but also in the lessons they give us for how we might approach story generation today (including interactive story generation). In fact, I think they’re interesting in helping us think about how we might design any system meant to exhibit behaviors we consider “intelligent” — behaviors meant to be interpretable to a human audience as similar to things we do ourselves.
Join us this Thursday March 9 at 7:30pm for a presentation about the development of Façade at my local indie dev hangout, the Portland Area Game Developer Interest Group (PAGDIG).
I’d make a joke about the rain in Portland, but that’s just a myth Portlanders perpetuate to keep too many Californians from moving here. ;-)
As mentioned in the first post of this series (1 2 3), the primary designer of Universe is Michael Lebowitz (also, according to the acknowledgments in Lebowitz’s 1984 and 1987 papers, work by Paula Langer and Doron Shalmon made significant contributions to the project and Susan Rachel Burstein helped develop many of the ideas). The Universe system shares a certain intellectual heritage with Minstrel and Tale-Spin, and it also has another unusual shared feature in common with Tale-Spin. As we see with Tale-Spin‘s “mis-spun tales,” the most famous story attributed to Universe has a somewhat more tenuous connection to the project’s output than one might assume. Here is the story:
There’s a new issue of CIAC’s Electronic Magazine, an online French and English publication of Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal. This Winter 2006 issue is “Hyperlittérature IV: contraintes / Hyperliterature IV: constraints,” and it includes an article by Patrick Ellis on my Ad Verbum (2000) and Neil Hennessy’s Jabber (2001).
February’s Living Game Worlds symposium, held at Georgia Institute of Technology and hosted by the GVU and Ivan Allen College/LCC among others, was a superb thinktank, bubbling forth ideas, strategies, studies, art forms, and communities around computer games.
In my previous two posts (1 2) I gave some background about two story generation systems, Minstrel and Universe, and outlined the basic set of plans and goals used by Minstrel. In this post I’ll discuss the main engine Minstrel uses for creating new stories: transformation and adaptation. As we’ll see, it’s both intriguing and problematic.
Leading IF author Emily Short has released two new games, and Graham Nelson, IF author and creator of the widely-used IF system Inform, has a new IF offering, too. Graham’s piece is entitled The Reliques of Tolti-Aph. Emily’s new games are Damnatio Memoriae (set in the Savoir-Faire universe) and Bronze (a “fractured fairy tale” based on the legend of beauty and the beast). They were all coded in the soon-to-be-released Inform 7, and they come with lavish virtual “feelies” such as PDF manuals, a map, and a walkthrough (for the weak). Among these is Emily’s IF Instruction Manual and similar instructions in the Bronze manual, which will prove very useful for IF newcomers.
As mentioned in my previous post, the first publication about Minstrel appeared in the mid-1980s. The system was brought to completion over the course of a decade, resulting in Turner’s 1994 publication of The Creative Process: A Computer Model of Storytelling and Creativity. Over the first few years of Minstrel‘s development, some of the ideas at its foundation continued to evolve. Particularly, in Schank’s lab the model of dynamic memory and its adaptations was extended into the idea of “Case-Based Reasoning” (CBR). The basic idea of CBR is in some ways quite close to that of scripts: in the main people do not decide what to do in each situation by reasoning from first principles, but rather by drawing on previous knowledge. However, rather than suggesting that each of us has a “restaurant script” and a “sports event script” and so on, case-based reasoning assumes that we remember many cases, and reason from them — much as the learning of previous cases is formalized in legal and business education. (I’m adapting this account from 1989’s Inside Case-Based Reasoning.)
We’ve had quite a bit of writing about literary work using digital computation since the 1990s (e.g., Landow’s Hypertext; Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory; Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck; Aarseth’s Cybertext). But there’s been surprisingly little written about two story generation systems that got their start in the mid-1980s: Minstrel and Universe. They’ve caught my attention recently, so I’m planning to write two or three posts (after this introductory post) about them. I’ll be contrasting them with the best-known story generator, Tale-Spin — which, if memory serves, is written about in all but one of the books mentioned above.
On ifMUD I learned about an elegant and geographically-contextualized real-time system for delivering news headlines.
It’s slick. All it needs now is a PointCast logo … if one is still available.
How to write sinister computer overlord dialouge?
Now get this straight, pal – no one User wrote me. I’m worth a couple million of their man-years! I’m bigger than all those little wimps put together! Humans they can’t even keen their social order in one piece. [Continue …]
No one has lived in the past. No one will live in the future. The present is the only form of life. It is a state of existence which is indestructible. [Continue …]
I read a great BBC article on Tactical Iraqi thanks to my U.K. correspondent. You may remember our previous post here relating a bit from Elizabeth Losh’s presentation at DAC about Tactical Iraqi; certainly, if you were at DAC you’ll remember her discussion of it, in which she (as a peace activist) argued against outright dismissal or opposition to the game, explained its workings, situated it with regard to video game genres, and critiqued it in terms of how it dealt with gender, race, and language. The official page on Tactical Iraqi is quite informative about the basics of the system itself.
This Friday and Saturday (February 17-18) at UC Irvine there’s a free single-track conference in Humanities Instructional Building 135. I’m looking forward to great presentations, given that it’s organized by smart folks (Barbara Cohen and Peter Krapp) and the speakers include Mark Hansen, Erkki Huhtamo, Henry Lowood, Lev Manovich, Tara McPherson, Robert Nideffer, Mark Poster, John Seely Brown, Rita Raley, Jennifer Urban, and other luminaries. You can check out the online schedule, and if you want to catch me I’m presenting at 3:15 on Friday.
More big name film directors are getting into games — James Cameron of Titanic Terminator fame will be creating an MMOG for his “completely crazy, balls-out sci-fi” film in development, Project 880. “We’ll create a world for people [the game] and then later present a narrative [the film] in that world”. The game will developed with Multiverse, newly formed by two Netscape veterans to create a MMOG platform for indie game development.
The ELO is hosting a Windows, Mac and Unix re-implementation of James Meehan’s pioneering 1981 story generation system, Tale-spin. Warren Sack re-implemented it in 1992 as Micro-Talespin. Installation instructions are included there.
At this August’s Intelligent Virtual Agents conference in Marina del Rey (submissions due April 7) there will be a GALA — a Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents. Neat. GALA submissions due June 15, with an award for best student entry.
Mark Bernstein points us to a clever new fiction, Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde. “In this world, it is sometimes possible for people to jump into books and interact with their characters… The books, it turns out, have their own police force which protects the integrity of literature from outside agents…”
Lastly, there’s an interactive story / adventure game in this March’s IGF —
To those in the area – please come by for this great digital poetry program!
A reading of digital poetry
hosted by Charles Bernstein
part of the MACHINE series
Wednesday Feb 15 … 5:30PM
Arts Cafe, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia
Two brilliant examples of anagrammatic work have come my way today:
Anagrams (mostly) of “Van Helsing” and “Man on Fire” on the Flatbush Pavilion marquee in Brooklyn. (Thanks to Brian Kim Stefans)
An anagrammap of the London Underground. (Thanks to markm on ifMUD)
This fall the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, soon to be the new home of the Electronic Literature Organization, has lined up a great series of lectures focused on electronic literature and digital archives. I’ll be giving a talk, “Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing” on March 7th, and there are many other talks I wish I could attend, including talks by Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, Shelley Jackson, Alan Liu and Joseph Tabbi, and Scott McCloud.
There’s a new (ink and paper) issue of Open Letter all about the work of Kenneth Goldsmith; it just launched at the Kelly Writers House. Kenny’s brand of “uncreative writing” (“typing, not writing”) imports ideas and the determination to follow through on them from the world of visual arts. His recent books include The Weather, which transcribes a year’s worth of radio weather reports; Day, a book of about 900 pages that is a re-typing and scanning of a single day’s New York Times, and Soliloquy, which reproduces in print a week’s worth of Kenny’s recorded utterances. See his EPC author home page for links to online versions of all of these, except the one that’s fit to print.
[Update, Feb 16: Beta-testing is complete, and Façade v1.1 is now available for download. The original post requesting beta-testers is below.]
Seeking volunteers to do a quick beta-test of Façade v1.1, sporting the following new features:
Now’s a great time both to apply for some funding from Turbulence and to offer your support to one of digital media’s most important institutions.
You can get funding by applying (before February 28th) to Turbulence’s New England Initiative II. The first round of this provided the support for Regime Change and News Reader. The new round’s projects will be featured both at the Turbulence site and at Art Interactive.
Eurographics 2006 is hosting a “Graphics Meets Games” competition. Submissions consist of small 3D games that showcase a novel form of interactivity and/or novel graphical effect. Doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of prizes, but if you win you can say “I won a game competition.” Details are on the Eurographics website.
I’ll be speaking at several upcoming conferences in the coming month, including next week’s Living Game Worlds 2006 Symposium that Michael M. mentioned a few posts ago, to be held at Georgia Tech; the College Art Association’s annual conference in Boston (panel on Global Artistic Practices and Internet2 Technology), and the GDC Serious Games Summit with a great panel of educational gamers. Also of note in April is the International Digital Media and Arts Association and the Miami University Center for Interactive Media Studies “CODE” conference , where I will be keynoting. If you are a GTxAutoer and are at one of these events, come on over and say hello! I’ll be giving a sneak peek of new artworks, essays, and games for ’06.
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