Grand Text Auto

Local sound artist/electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman released an extraordinary piece on the b-side of his November 2009 cassette hallicrafters, inc. The piece is called 10 poke 54272+int(rnd(1)*25),int(rnd(1)*256) : goto 10 and is 18 minutes of sound produced by a Commodore 64 emulator running the BASIC program that is the title of the piece.

The memory locations beginning at 54272 are mapped on the Commodore 64 to the registers of the SID (Sound Interface Device). By POKEing random values into them, the SID, although it is a musical chip, is stimulated to produce sounds in what probably seems like a non-musical way: based on the effect of register settings and the sequence produced by the system’s random number generator, a polynomial counter.

Jason MacIntosh at The Gameshelf has just posted a great 10-minute video introducing interactive fiction, with specific discussion of some good games to begin playing. I’m there offering some unconventional ideas about why it’s interesting for those new to IF to start off by playing complex, difficult games.

Command your space bovine!

In space, social interactions are sparse. Space Cow Clicker overcomes this problem. In this parody of a satire, you command a battlecruiser (Space Cow) in an epic battle  to click enemy units. The first player to click all of the opponent forces wins: To click is natural, to command is Bovine!

A great event will be taking place in Mexico City at the end of April, one that is sure to help us connect computing and creativity in new ways. I’m helping to organize ICCC-11 and am planning to be there. I hope some of you will submit to this conference, and that I’ll see some of you there. -Nick

2nd International Conference on Computational Creativity

April 27-29, 2011
Mexico City, Mexico
http://iccc11.cua.uam.mx

Original contributions are solicited in all areas related to Computational Creativity, including but not limited to:

1. computational paradigms for understanding creativity, including heuristic search, analogical and meta-level reasoning, and re-representation;

device design by Ed Flanagan

We’re taking a moment to reflect on the lab’s move to Dartmouth. First, we found some press to share if you’d like to chart our progress with us! In an upcoming post, we’ll review all of our new games. It has been a lot of fun setting up camp at Dartmouth and we’re thankful for the support and enthusiasm around us. Thanks to colleagues near and far, friends, advisory board, the administration at our home institution, our emerging program, staff, interns, and STUDENTS!
Go Tilt!

+ + +

“Acting for embodied interactive narrative”

Ken Perlin, NYU

Date: July 16th, 2010
Time: 1:15pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 192

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 School of Engineering.

Abstract

The transition from game play to emotionally believable embodied interactive protagonist-driven narrative requires something more radical than better animation blending or motion capture.  It requires rethinking the process of virtual acting from the ground up.  We must abandon linear thinking altogether and create virtual actors that can move, emote, interact and respond in real time with plausible expression, emotion and body language.

There have been a variety of recent news reports on the relationship between computer ownership and education patterns around the world. The NY Times article from 9 July 2010, Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality, is one of the many articles discussing the recent studies by economists about class, income, computers, and academic achievement. Duke researchers just released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper called “Scaling the Digital Divide.” It examined the introduction of broadband internet service from 2000-2005 in North Carolina. Their study examined the simultaneous effects on middle school testing scores in that period. Unfortunately, there were lower math scores as broadband was introduced, an after several broadband providers appeared to serve an area, there was a decrease in reading scores.

The study ultimately suggests that home computers and Internet access may have a negative effect for those already poor, and can contribute to widening academic achievement gaps between groups. Indeed, a study with middle schoolers and free laptops in Texas noted “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”

What happens to game designers when they don’t know the “right” answers?

This is especially important in situations where designers need to somehow verify crowdsourcing data. What data can we obtain with the resources we have?

Well, what do we have?

1) In the case of our Metadata Games project for Archives, we have a huge collection of photographs.

2) Users who might want to interact with these photographs, and the user accounts they create.

3) The competitive relationships between players that might be fostered within our games.

Try our online version of the Grow-A-Game© cards!

We are currently waiting for the arrival of our new editions of Grow-A-Game, so our ordering area is offline for the moment until they are in.

About 2 weeks ago, at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, CA for Foundations of Digital Games Conference, professionals gathered to present academic efforts in “all areas of research and education involving games, game technologies, gameplay and game design. The goal of the conference is the advancement of the study of digital games, including new game technologies, capabilities, designs, applications, educational uses, and modes of play.”

In case you missed it (and other than what you’d find in the conference proceedings), we shared every meal, played several games of poker, and sang show tunes as Jesper Juul played the piano (for not one but) two nights in a row. I have to admit that I’m lucky enough to both love what I do and all those in my professional family.

In April, I blogged about adding chat capabilities to EISBot, with the goal of achieving the Eliza effect in StarCraft.  Nicholas Carr responded to my post, criticizing my approach:

The sure way to distinguish the computer’s messages from the human’s is to recognize that the computer has a rather sentimental attachment to the apostrophe and the comma.

The lab is in full swing with several projects: Metadata Games, a game exploring biodiversity, and some games for health– right now, HIV games and games to combat sexual assault. Interns this summer are: Max Seidman, Alicia Driscoll, and visiting for the summer from USC, Mike Ayoob. Folks working with us this summer include Playmatics, Cecile Williams, Robinson Tryon, Vanessa Moy, and Sukdith Punjasthitkul. Welcome!

and…Finally!  After 7 years, we have Tiltfactor bling! Soon available on our web site.

The blog edition of my presentation at the Electronic Literature Organization’s ELO_AI Conference, Brown University, 5 June 2010

The process of writing and programming the first two full-scale interactive fiction pieces in the new system I have been developing, Curveship, has been a part of my poetic practice that I have found interesting and has also been a useful activity from several perspectives. Here I focus on the project Adventure in Style. I will also mention The Marble Index, a project that contrasts with Adventure in Style in an important way. These two pieces, still in progress, are initial explorations of the potential of Curveship and of the automation of narrative variation. My hope has been that these two games will serve as provocative interactive experiences, whether or not those who interact with them are interested in Curveship as a research project or as a development system. Of course, it will be very useful if they also serve as demonstrations of how Curveship works. I have, additionally, used these two projects to help me determine what additional development is critical before I release Curveship.

Here’s something with a good point and that’s worth watching: “Girls suck at video games” / “Les filles sont nulles aux jeux vidéo.” It makes me wonder about several things, and puts me in mind of a previous conversation about gender, gaming, and work, but for now, I’ll just mention one thing I’ve been pondering: Could a generally similar idea have been expressed as effectively in an actual video game? Or perhaps the answer to that is an obvious yes. How would it have been different if it was done as a game rather than a video?

The 2010 Summer courses at Dartmouth have begun: Virtual Cinema, which is an exploration of Machinima practices as well as a hands-on studio course in game-related movie making, and Games and Playculture, a theory seminar on play.

Visitors to the classes include designer and theorist Celia Pearce, designer Tracy Fullerton, machinima maker Claus-Dieter Schulz, senior level designer Zach Wilson, screenwriter Lisa Dethridge, and Hugh Hancock of Strange Company (machinima).  A very exciting term in a very beautiful New Hampshire/Vermont summer (rainbow spotted today! reminding me of the students’ beloved game…

I spent this weekend at @party 2010, the first (and hopefully not last) demoparty of this name. The event was in the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts – a bit outside of Boston. I heard four live music performances, saw an early cut of Jason Scott’s almost-finished Get Lamp documentary, and saw and heard grafix, music, and demos (wild and windows) in the Saturday evening compos. There were great tunes, a truly excellent 4k windows demo, an incredible demo running on an Arduino, and much more. Many thanks to the organizer, Metoikos, and everyone who helped her out. And, a big thanks to the demoscene!

Jim Andrews has launched a new collaborative blog, NetArtery, together with Andy Campbell, Chris Funkhouser, Cliff Syringe, Gregory Whitehead, and Jhave Johnston, an innovative and funky group of writers who play in a number of interesting forms of digital and other writing on the network. Should be an interesting one to watch.
# Jim Andrews

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