Grand Text Auto

One of Kevin Dill's game credits: Master of Orion 3

“The Art of Game AI: Sculpting Behavior with Data, Formulas, and Finesse”
Kevin Dill, Lockheed Martin

Date: Monday, March 15
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Place: E2-180 Simularium
Hosted By: Michael Mateas

Abstract
This lecture will explore the challenges that are involved in constructing believable AI behavior, the mindset that one must adopt to accurately model these behaviors, and the techniques that can be used to construct them. The attendee will leave with a broad summary of how to approach the artistry of constructing artificial behaviors – and will likely have adopted the annoying habit of assigning values and formulas to everything they see around them.

The CNET News article, GDC: What’s next for video game AI?, features demos of EIS research projects delivered at the AI Summit at GDC along with the latest AI demos from Richard Evans and Ian Holmes. The AI Summit session, Experimental Game AI: Live Demos of Innovation, included demos of EIS’s Starcraft agent and The Prom, a system featuring play in social space.

A demo of The Prom, or Promacolypse, was given by Michael Mateas at GDC's AI Summit.

A demo of the Starcraft bot was given at GDC's AI Summit.

This surprisingly broad lecture on game design was given by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to help students review for the final exam in our Foundations of Interactive Game Design class. However, if you are not one of the 300 students in the class, you might find it quite interesting to share with a friend. Perhaps you know someone who is very serious about games but is a little too attached to their fanboyism to see the bigger picture. Tell them to skip past the first two minutes of class business and jump right into the real intellectual meat.

The Global Game Jam 2010 concluded over 30 days ago, but the treasure trove of indy creations it left behind remains largely unexplored. Then again, how is anyone supposed to review some 1000 games created specifically for an event that shuns any global judging? Who has that kind of time anyway? Certainly not overworked grad students!

But I’m here to tell you, you should try! Among these games you can find some of the most innovative zero-budget designs ever devised in the span of 48 hours and you can see the source code that produced them. I’m writing this review partly in hope of inspiring similar reflections from GGJ enthusiasts and partly in anticipation of our upcoming talk at the GDC Education Summit on this year’s Global Game Jam.

AIIDE 2010 has posted a call for papers, just in time to advertise the conference at GDC. The deadline for papers and the industry track is May 16, 2010.

This year AIIDE will also be hosting a StarCraft AI competition!

The clustering of WoW Feral Druid forms (Bear on top, Cat on bottom)

Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note that this is inferred from statistics choices, it is not a simple flag that is set in the data itself.

The group (Copyright Robinson Kuntz/Santa Cruz Sentinel)

EIS is now able to claim “big in Santa Cruz” after being featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the local newspaper (I’ve also heard reports of the story being syndicated to the San Jose Mercury News for the wider Bay Area).

If you never found the five minutes to play Jason Rohrer’s Passage, previously discussed, you can now play Passage in 10 Seconds as interpreted by Marcus Richert. Thanks to Jason Scott for the link.

We need to tag 64,000 photographs with expert data.

Thousands of people are going to come and help us, some for hours at a time, and we will attract them through the pleasure of play. How can tagging an archive of old photographs ever be an enjoyable experience?

Contemporary designers are more and more mixing play with work, and at Tiltfactor, we’re interested in how this happens, and how one can foster expertise in the process. We’re also interested in how values manifest in these data-driven systems. In making games for the social good, and games that result in real-world contributions, the designer must rely on ideas beyond innovative game mechanics and good old-fashioned playtesting. The data entry system for repositories such as databases need to be so enjoyable, well-organized, and instantly rewarding that people approach the tasks with motivation playfully like… a game.

Here’s an interview with me, on YouTube, focusing on ppg256.

“Façade tried to solve this problem by replacing the parrot with something more like a brain-damaged human; Heavy Rain, by comparison, is probably the best-trained parrot in history.” From Archie Bland’s Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons?

“Developing Games for 2020″
Bob Mitchell, ohai

Date: Thursday, February 25th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Abstract
Students at UC Santa Cruz today will be among the engineers, artists, designers, and producers leading game teams in 2020.Review some of the changes to interactive entertainment over the last ten years in order to look ahead to the possibilities in 2020. The most obvious changes will be in the hardware our games run on. The more difficult predictions will be figuring out what our players want from their games.

I’m here in Banff (in Alberta, Canada) at the cutting edge, or maybe the precipitous edge, or, as I’d prefer to think, the connecting edge. The occasion is In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge: A Gathering, organized by Steven Ross Smith.

The presenters include: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah.

John Davison (image from the San Francisco Chronicle)

“The breadth of video game development” (working title)

John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro

Date: Tuesday, February 23rd
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

John Davison (image from the San Francisco Chronicle)

“The breadth of video game development” (working title)

John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro

Date: Tuesday, February 23rd
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

Some of the Tiltfactor team members are attending Toyfair this week researching product development and educational toys. We especially enjoyed meeting folks at Rubbing Hands, a small company in Connecticut. They showed us their games including Fred and Capture the Gag, which were very well designed with interesting play dynamics.
We in turn shared Vexata,

our awesome board game that manifests in the rules various human values. Aimed for the middle school market, it is informed by our work on Grow-a-Game!

Space Invaders Enterprise Edition

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve released Space Invaders Enterprise Edition (Java, cross-platform executable), the first prototype program from my newly announced research direction, Zenet.

Space Invaders EE is a clone of code from Coke and Code, and as a tutorial for how to create games. However, it’s not the game itself we’re interested in (although it is pretty fun…)

The magic of Space Invaders Enterprise Edition is actually under the hood. I’ve separated out the game logic from the Java source into a file parsed by a rules engine. This means we can easily view the game design, without it getting muddled with too much implementation code.

“Players are Artists, Too”
Henry Lowood, Stanford University

Date: Thursday, February 18th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

“Geração sobre a fala” (“My Generation about Talking,” Nick Montfort) Tradução para o português, Cicero Inacio da Silva.

“My Generation about Talking,” a text generator which I first presented at the Software Studies Workshop on May 21, 2008, is now available in Portuguese translation, thanks to Cicero Inacio da Silva. It was made for use in a presentation, but the program is set up to allow a user to play the entire presentation or to access any of the fifteen individual voices, each of which affirms repeatedly in some way.

Did you know Tiltfactor has a YouTube channel? We have videos on the lab in general, the Playcube events, news coverage of the game LAYOFF, video of Massively Multiplayer Mushu and Massively Multiplayer Soba, and more.

“Animating the Gesture Style of Particular Individuals”
Michael Neff, UC Davis

Date: Friday, February 12th
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 599
Hosted By: Professor Marilyn Walker, Dept. of Computer Science

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for Engineering 2.

Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009 are now online. The conference was a great success; DAC continued to lead the way in the culturally engaged study of digital art and media. Many thanks go to Simon Penny, who was director of the conference, and others at UIC: Ward Smith, Liz Losh, and Sean Voisen. The theme leaders for this conference put together very strong series of papers that were both focused and relevant. I hope those of you who didn’t make it to Irvine will visit the proceedings and see a bit of what happened at the latest instance of this extraordinarily rich series of gatherings, where the study of video games, digital art, digital literature, performance, and the cultural aspects of online and computing experience have been explored so well over the years.