What is “the mark of the narrative”? In chapter 1 of her book, Marie-Laure Ryan, discusses the transmedial nature of narrative and gives a broad definition provided by H. Porter Abbott:  Narrative is the combination of story and discourse.  I believe the distinction of story and discourse is quite novel and under-appreciated in the area of interactive storytelling.  For the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to deconstruct the nonlinear in narrative to give deeper insight into what this relationship between story and discourse actually entails.  The term nonlinear takes many meanings depending on context, which is a result of the complexity in the meaning of both story and discourse.

(Spoilers for Facade in the following sections.)

Level 1 – Story-level Nonlinear

Do ’stories’ ever start where they start? For the most radical sense of nonlinear, the answer is almost always: no.  The only types of “narrative” that would fit into such a pure definition would be in games like Spore or a documentary on the beginning of the universe.  Stories that start at the beginning of time build an easy case for telling a story from beginning to end; otherwise, there is always something that can be presumed about a character’s history or the history of a conflict, no matter how reasonably early you start the story.  If it is assumed that any presumable details are substantially irrelevant, then it must also follow that the subsequent sequence of events must be conveyed in the order of which they occur.

In a previous post, I wrote about amnesia in games.  The wide use of amnesia in games and other forms of media is a typical indication of this story-discourse distinction– that a character with amnesia, similar to the audience, ’starts’ with no prior knowledge events, implying that, at the start of the presentation, events have already occurred.   On the other hand, the narrative convention of amnesia could also be used to disregard any past details and maintain linearity.

A more concrete example of the story-discourse discrepancy is in the interactive narrative Facade.  In real time, this interactive experience lasts about 10 minutes of present time, but recollects, perhaps, a decade of dramatic history.  I would say that the story-level non-linearity is, first, apparent in the large amount of undisclosed back story.  Secondly, the subsequent events to follow tell the story of the user character learning about Grace and Trip’s relationship from various points in time.

Level 2 – Discourse-level Nonlinear

A more typical use of nonlinear narrative is (according to wikipedia): “Nonlinear narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order.”

I find that breaking chronology is one type of nonlinear, but the linearity of a story depends on more than just the temporal.  It is also a product of the space or perspective that the story is being told.  One could string together a sequence of events such that they are in chronological order, but yet alternate in telling the history of China and the history of Rome.  Temporal and perspective disruptions actually permeate through all 3 levels non-linearity, but for simplicity sake, the distinction will be made on the discourse-level.

Temporal

In the wikipedia definition, the use of ‘chronological’ restricts  linearity to be dependent on ordering and time.  It follows that the timeline of nonlinear films ambitiously lists a number of movies that are told with broken chronology.  In the previous section, I describe most narrative as nonlinear.  In this section, it is more likely to find linear occurrence, because on the discourse-level, nonlinearity is more mildly applied.  For example, in the absence of time travel, human beings live linear existences (both by perspective and temporally), but the way in which we discover the world, learn about history, and recollect the details of a drunken evening is entirely non-linear.  In that sense, a given narrative can be both linear and nonlinear at the same time.

Perspective

In movies, it is rarely the case that the perspective of one single character is followed.  There are two types of linear perspective.  First, if a narrative follows the experience of a single character.  Second, if a narrative is given from a global perspective and tells the story as a series of tightly coupled events in relevance.  Linearity, at this level, can come in all sorts of granularity, but to be wholly linear a narrative must be chronological with an unbroken perspective, whether biased or objective.

In regards to both the temporal and the perspective, Facade is clearly linear on the discourse-level.  You enter the apartment, you leave the apartment, and your experience is not disrupted neither temporally nor are you ever separated from your initial perspective.

Level 3 – Interaction-level Nonlinear

General representation of the story timeline in Facade from beginning to end

The common use of nonlinear in games is (according to wikipedia): “A game with nonlinear gameplay presents players with challenges that can be completed in a number of different sequences. Whereas a more linear game will confront a player with a fixed sequence of challenges, a less linear game will allow greater player freedom.”

A more narrative definition is: “In video games, the term nonlinear refers to a game that has more than one possible plotline and ending, leaving the gamer to take the path that most suits their style of play. This increases replay value, as players must often beat the game several times to get the entire story.”

Clearly, Facade was created with an extremely nonlinear gameplay in mind, but only for 10 minutes if content.  In those 10 minutes, the user can potentially reference a predetermined past that spans a number of years.

Application

In understanding the relationship among narrative properties, such as, story, discourse, perspective, rhetoric, and presentation, systems have been tailored to turn convention into technology.  Briefly, I will conclude with applications in Terminal Time, the Oz Project, and future thoughts.

Terminal Time

The Terminal Time Artificial Intelligence architecture is based on 3 major components: knowledge base, ideological goal trees, and story experts. The knowledge base is a vast knowledge web… Ideological goal trees are utilized to choose and join historical events found in the database in accordance with viewer responses. Story experts utilize narrative conventions to plan, compose and evaluate final story texts.

The story of Terminal Time is represented by the predesignated time periods shown on the timeline below.  The presentation is determined by the audience interaction and manipulation done through the ideological goal trees.

The OZ Project

Figure 1 shows the Oz system architecture. The architecture includes a simulated physical world, several characters, an interactor, a theory of presentation, and a drama manager. A model of each character’s body and of the interactor’s body are in the physical world. Outside the physical world, a model of mind controls each character’s actions. The interactor’s actions are controlled by the interactor. Sensory information is passed from the physical world to the interactor through an interface controlled by a theory of presentation. As shown, the drama manager influences the characters’ minds, the physical world, and the presentation theory.

The Oz Project uses a drama manager to direct interactions, not merely through a dramatic experience, but through a high evaluating dramatic experience.  A presentation module is directed by the drama manager to appropriate story elements to the user.  Presumably, the ’story’ is loosely represented in the “World.”

Future Thoughts

From the deconstruction on nonlinear, there are clear distinctions and layers of narrative to consider.  These distinctions, I’d like to, for now, describe briefly as:

• The Objective layer is a formalized representation of events, event artifacts, and existents.
• The Perspective layer is a formalized representation of operations, motivations, and reactions of intelligent existents.
• The Investigative layer is a formalized representation of observable or retrievable information from artifacts and existents.  Anything intelligent or influenced by something intelligent would carry manipulated information.
• The Presentation layer is a formalized representation of discourse.
• The Interactive layer is a formalized representation of the manipulation of discourse.

Further analysis is especially relevant to the study of procedural and generative storytelling.  To be able to formalize and model these aspects of story and discourse presents new avenues in the ways we can use technology to tell stories, but also breaks these endeavors into smaller problems that can addressed and reassembled.

….Making what is possible, practical.

From the panel “Textual Studies and Video Games”

Matt Kirschenbaum: Preserving Virtual Worlds

The project takes a broad view of virtual worlds, from Zork to Doom to Second Life. They are fun, economically important, and platforms for creativity – and threatened, hard to preserve. Companies don’t preserve their own IP. DRM hinders preservation. Funded by NDIIPP. UIUC, Maryland, Stanford, RIT, Internet Archive, Linden Labs. Research preservation problems and approaches. Strategies: store, migrate, emulate, reinterpret. We deal with software, not data, and there’s a strong argument for emulation, as with facsimiles. Use OAIS Reference Model with SIP, AIP, DIP. Determine what to preserve, who is the community, what representation information to store. What are the boundaries of the game as object or experience – OS, hardware, mods, fanfic? The case of Adventure… OAIS representation diagram for the game. FRBR standard: work, expression, manifestation, item. See http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw

Nick Montfort: The Atari Video Computer System and Platform Studies

No notes here, but there’s a video of me speaking about Racing the Beam and these topics at the Berkman Center.

Steven E. Jones: Editing the Universe in Spore

(A push-media presentation.) The meaning of games emerges in performance, improvisation. Improv has developed theater games. Facade based on improv, has AI and natural language input. Magic 8-ball is a game-like object and joke a within. Games involve seeking out intelligent life – a connection with Spore. Players should feel “more like George Lucas than Luke Skywalker” -Wright. Evolve creatures, open into space exploration. A search for Wright’s intelligence behind the game, in part. Hybrid model where all can build and share, no risk of others destroying your planets. What if text were at the core? Digital humanities could learn about continual re-editing from Spore. HRIT, markup-agnostic scheme.

From the panel “Theorizing Digital Textuality”

Matt Kirschenbaum: Stephen King’s Wang

(Photo of Norman Mailer’s laptop, behind glass at the HRC.) SK did have a Wang word processor and wrote a story about one where insertions and deletions would change the world, “Word Processor of the Gods.” [Sounds like he was ripping off that season one Twilight Zone episode "A World of his Own," the one with the dictaphone!] Other early Wordstar and word processing references in fiction. Interviews have references in mid-1980s. Didion: writing became less like painting, more like sculpture. Almost all literature is now born digital. Have to deal not only with material on physical media; there’s also the cloud. But data is persistent, too. Many writers have digital materials in archives: Four of Rushdie’s laptops. How much data should scholars be allowed to see? MP3 playlists? High scores? Porn? DFW’s deleted and recovered drafts? Many opportunities and dangers. SK’s Wang, by the way, was sent to California for repair and never returned.

Laura Mandell: Encoding and Visualizing Poetry

A tool for visualizing poetry, a collaboration with artist Ira Greenberg, who wrote a book on Processing. Background: Tukey’s exploratory analysis. Snow’s visualization of the Cholera outbreak. Organization of the Poetess Archive. In digital media, a wheel might replace the TOC. After some work on poem analysis and correlation, moved to visualize poems instead: Several examples. 19th-century model of scholarship is still current, and rejects the ludic and aesthetic. Berger’s Ways of Seeing has given the impression that visual images are propaganda.

Joseph Viscomi: Blake’s Oddest Book

The Song of Los. Text pages and plates differ by 4cm in width. Most radical experiment Blake had done in combining painting, text, and printmaking. Oblong format in earliest version. Order we thought we had was wrong. A two-column copper plate was masked to print two pages. Blake used a sort of lithographic process five years before lithography. Digital reconstructions of various sorts, some on screen and some facsimiles, make the case that the book was originally imagined in this unusual format, then printed as we know it.

Contact: Felicia Rice, Program Manager, 831-459-1554, danm@ucsc.edu
Application deadline: February 15, 2009

SOFTWARE as CULTURE — A RESEARCH FOCUS AT UC SANTA CRUZ DIGITAL ARTS AND NEW MEDIA MFA PROGRAM

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with software art, software design, and software studies. The university’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has “Software as Culture” as one of its research foci for the collaborative faculty-student projects in 2010-2011. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who develop and critically engage software.

The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. At the core of the diverse DANM curriculum are collaborative research projects, in which small clusters of students work with professors on artistic, technical and theoretical research. Over the course of three quarters, these groups engage in the development of faculty-initiated research in one of four focused areas: Mechatronics, Participatory Culture, Performative Technologies, and Playable Media. These collaborations result in publications and exhibitions. In this intensive two-year program, students also take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts, culminating in the development of individual thesis projects. These works are premiered in the program’s annual MFA exhibition. The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.

In the Software as Culture / Participatory Culture collaborative research group, MFA students will work with UCSC’s strong faculty to experiment with and investigate the software that underpins cultures of intellectual and everyday life. In many scientific disciplines today it is believed that software is the best model of the object of study. This is an operating principle in molecular biology, operations research, neuro-psychology, immunology, game theory, economics and many other sciences. This digital ideology of science should be distinguished from something far more pervasive: digital life leaks outside of professional circles and flows beyond the technical vocabularies of specialists’ dialogues. We propose a project group to interrogate these new, software-based conditions of life and collaboration through a combination of software studies, software design, and software art.

The Software as Culture collaborative research group will be led in 2009-2010 by Warren Sack (author of the entry on “Memory” in the recent MIT Press book “Software Studies: A Lexicon”; creator of the argumentation game “Agonistics” (see http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/artbase101/); and the social technology “Conversation Map” (see http://rhizome.org/editorial/2262)). Other UCSC faculty in this area also include Noah Wardrip-Fruin (co-editor of MIT Press books such as the “New Media Reader” and associate director of the Software Studies Initiative (see http://lab.softwarestudies.com/) and Michael Mateas (co-creator of Independent Games Festival finalist Facade and contributor to the MIT Press “Software Studies” book).

More about DANM:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/

More about Software as Culture and the area of Participatory Culture at DANM:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/ParticipatoryCulture

So I was happy to upload $2.99 for Erik Loyer’s Ruben & Lullaby yesterday. Apple may have rejected Gabo (why??!!??) but they have let this one through. As you might expect, a “story you can play” about a couple embroiled in a fight, where you influence if they stay together or break up, appealed to my sensibilities. ;-)

I enjoyed Ruben & Lullaby. It me took a few tries to get a hang of the controls, and the agency is a bit muddled (a familiar critique), but I did manage to get the couple to stay together after a few tries.

I met Erik last May at the ELO conference, and he mentioned he was working on a piece like this, originally for the Wii. It’s cool to see it come to life on the iPhone — had it been for the Wii I wouldn’t be able to play it.

I’d love to see more interactive art/story experiments like this on the iPhone. It truly does seem like an opportune moment for micro-transactions for interactive art. (Ian, I’m waiting for the first iPhone antigame!) But Gabo’s rejection is pretty disconcerting. Then again, it took Apple months before they let loose the fart apps… so maybe “unpleasant” interactive art won’t be too far behind.

On the other hand, fart apps have made Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars; perhaps that’s why they weren’t held in any longer.

Next week I’ll be in Siegen, Germany for Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Organizers Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a program in which I’m honored to participate, including my former Brown colleagues John Cayley and Roberto Simanowski as well as my current UC colleagues Rita Raley and N. Katherine Hayles.

The conference theme, as one might expect from the title, arises from examinations of works such as locative narratives, literary immersive environments, and what the organizers call “stagings” (using AR Facade as an example). I was invited, in part, because of my work on Screen (hopefully there’s no pun intended with the conference title).

I’m certainly interested in, and sympathetic toward, literary work that uses interfaces that move beyond the standard screen. But as I put together my presentation, I find myself wanting to use a chunk of my time to vent my frustration with tantalizing literary interfaces that do little to harness the combinatory possibilities they open. For example, at the Hybrid Ego show at this year’s Ars Electronica, I was excited to get my hands on Tablescape Plus. But while it was listed in the catalog with literary-sounding words (”users can develop new stories by changing the arrangement of the screens”) to me it was actually just an interface demonstration, with no fictional world beyond characters that could be made to bow to each other, sit next to each other, etc. Each combination resulted in an animation, but no state or history of the system could impact anything else. People with no histories and no futures aren’t characters. Events that happen in no consequential order aren’t stories.

Of course, by the time I’m saying such things I’m getting myself in trouble. How can I explain being not quite taken by genieBottles but completely charmed by Judy Malloy’s card catalog fictions? Is it just that I’ve actually played with the genieBottles and not Malloy’s catalogs? Or is it that largely unconstrained combinatorics are something that only a few talented writers can pull off (like Queneau) and since I have liked Malloy’s writing in forms with more technological shaping at work, I assume I’d like the catalogs as well? Or is it that randomness is also a form — and I know I’ve seen Malloy pull that form off?

In any case, whatever the route I end up taking, you can be pretty sure that I’m going to conclude that processes are a powerful authorial tool for literary work — and my hope is that we will increasingly use complex interfaces in concert with process repertoires and literary visions that stretch beyond randomness.

DANM’s Playable Media research explores the potential of computational systems for the creation of new media forms that invite and structure play. This group works to understand and create new ways for computer games and related forms to engage audiences, make arguments, tell stories, and shape social space. Ongoing Playable Media work combines game design and artificial intelligence research with writing, art, and media authoring.

In less official language, this is a way to get an MFA while working with people who have helped create pioneering combinations of computation, play, and language like Facade (Michael Mateas) and Agonistics (Warren Sack) — as well as with yours truly and the rest of the DANM faculty.

We’re starting the Playable Media group in Spring 2009 with a small number of students who entered DANM before the announcement. And DANM students were certainly creating playable media projects before now, like Mike Treanor’s Reflect. But I’m hoping that this year’s applications include a cadre attracted by the chance to get an MFA working with the particular group of faculty we’ve gathered at UCSC.

The version of the Expressive Processing manuscript used for both forms of peer review begins with an introductory chapter composed, in part, in response to a desire to let people know what is at stake right up front. I wrote it to let readers know, from the beginning, what I am advocating and why it matters to me. I also wanted a first chapter that could be assigned as a stand-alone class reading (as so many monograph chapters are) and function to make my case.

In the blog-based review I got a number of important comments on this chapter, especially on my discussion of process intensity and The Sims. In the course of that discussion I also learned a number of things about the blog-based review form that still hold true in my conclusions about this project. (more...)]]> http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/05/blog-based-peer-review-some-preliminary-conclusions-part-2/feed/ 4 http://grandtextauto.org/2008/03/17/ep-85-facade/ http://grandtextauto.org/2008/03/17/ep-85-facade/#comments Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:34:47 +0000 Noah Wardrip-Fruin http://grandtextauto.org/2008/03/17/ep-85-facade/ I first met Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas at a 1999 symposium on “Narrative Intelligence” sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium was organized by Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, two of the final Oz PhD  ...

Andrew's reply appears first, with sections of my original email as blockquotes. Michael's is next. While the tone of all this is, obviously, informal, I think there's valuable information in their replies that I want to make available to others interested in these topics.

Andrew Stern's reply

Anyway, it looks to me like ABL's "reflection" extensions are similar to Phoebe's meta-level controls. Is that roughly right? Whereas Phoebe's concern about observable, motivated transitions between behaviors was something that you treated more on an authoring level (with beat goals that involve transitioning in, for example) rather than on an architectural level?

It's been a while since I read Phoebe's thesis, so I don't exactly remember her meta-level controls; but I do remember her discussion of transitions, and you're right, in Facade we achieved that with transition-in and transition-out beat goals, as well as some specialized global mix-ins, such as "metacommentary", e.g. a sarcastic reading of "Well, we're all friends here...", by the less-favored character after a particularly tense beat, before the next beat begins. Also there were lots of transitions between beat goals in the Therapy game (second half of the drama), when Grace or Trip would say things like, "No, let's talk about Grace now".

Would you say, also, that setting the non-interactive early part of a behavior was in part to avoid the dithering that is part of Phoebe's schizophrenia critique of the observed actions of behavior-based agents?

Our goal (not fully achieved) was to never have non-interactive parts of behaviors. But, only some of the time (perhaps 25% of the time), behaviors are fully interruptable. Other times (perhaps 75% of the time), we force the first few words of a beat goal to be spoken, even if the player tries to interrupt them. This can result in a 2-3 second delay in responding to the player, if the player speaks at the beginning of that line. The primary reason for this was to force the drama to progress forward, at least a little bit, on a regular basis.

I'm not sure it really helps solve the schizophrenia problem; the characters can still be directed by the player to talk about different things quite often.

Rather, I think we alleviated the schizophrenia problem by making the current pool of responses at any one time all work towards similar narrative goals, in various ways. e.g. if Grace and Trip are fighting over her decorating (which at a more abstract level is about the tension of maintaining a facade), and you bring up the topic of sex, they'll perform some global mix-in (that further reveals tension between them). They switched topics, but it all goes towards the same narrative goal -- perform and reveal the tension between them.

Meanwhile, it sounds like the design goals for Petz and Babyz were all about observable, motivated behavior - but without the "needs meters" of the Sims or the architectural support for transitions of the Expressivator. Andrew, do you have some pithy comment about this somewhere that I could quote? Also, is there anything architectural from the Petz or Babyz projects that ended up in Facade, or is it more the design attitude?

Well, the concept of transitions between behaviors is an inherent requirement for fluidity and lifelikeness for any character, I think. There were Petz/Babyz versions of those transitions -- little behaviors like "looking around for what do next" or "looking to the player for reassurance, for a pet/tickle" after finishing one behavior (e.g. eating) and going on to another behavior (e.g. playing). There were little ad hoc behaviors like that scattered throughout Petz and Babyz. My "idea" to make such transition behaviors wasn't motivated from a theoretical standpoint, but simply from the perspective of what obviously seems natural and required for lifelike behavior, discovered by design iteration and my own playtesting.

Regarding architectural similarities between Petz/Babyz and Facade, in 1994-1995 I had read the Oz Project papers, shortly before starting work on the Catz AI in early 1996, which evolved into the Petz II AI in 1997, Petz III in 1998 and Babyz in 1999 (Ben Resner did the original Dogz 1 AI, in 1995, which was a basic state machine). I was influenced by the goal-and-plan architecture of Bryan's Hap, and Scott's Em emotion system, and implemented my own version of those. Hence my excitement to meet Bryan at the 1997 Socially Intelligent Agents symposium.

By Petz III, my custom goal-and-plan architecture was relatively sophisticated; as needed, I coded what could be called meta-behaviors -- behaviors that activated or deactivated other behaviors. But these were relatively simple and ad hoc, compared to ABL's elegant implementation of it. By Petz III the architecture was starting to get messy, since I was implementing goals and plans in C++, without the benefit of the cleaner syntax and organization of Hap.

My 1999 Babyz paper describes or alludes to some of these mechanisms.

While was I was doing simple and ad hoc versions of what we'd eventually be doing in Facade, these were of course all in the domain of language-free characters (animals and babies), whose actions were more abstract than Grace and Trip's, so the cause-and-effect causality chains could be much looser. So while I was able to apply my experience building Petz and Babyz directly to architecting and authoring Facade with Michael, our ABL idioms for Facade were significantly more complex.

Michael Mateas's reply

Regarding the reflection support in ABL, we were directly influenced by her work in the Expressivator. In her work, she implemented meta-level controls in an ad hoc way; it wasn't built into the language. The meta-behavior support in ABL sought to extend the work she'd done in meta-level controls, and build it directly into ABL. The most powerful idiom for meta-behaviors that we came up with is the factoring of beat logic into canonical beat-goal sequences and handlers (where the handlers are all meta-behaviors). This particular idiom for meta-controls is unique to Facade; the only conversational Oz work that was done was Scott Neal Reilly's work in The Office and The Playground, but he didn't use meta-behaviors, and thus didn't factor his conversational interaction this way. But handlers certainly shares some overlaps with Phoebe's work, in that she used meta-behaviors to sequence transition behaviors, and part of what handlers do is sequence transitions.

As Andrew says, we use transition behaviors in our beat structure. I'm sure our thinking on this was influenced by us both having read Phoebe's dissertation.

Joint behaviors help alleviate schizophrenia by making it easy to provide much tighter behavior coupling across agents. This tighter coupling makes it easy to add "signaling" behaviors that communicate the intentions between agents. So, while joint behaviors don't in themselves automatically address the "schizophrenia problem" in multi-agent interactions, they enable idioms that allow you to easily address it.

The issue of the player being able to make the characters talk about lots of topics in a short period of time isn't schizophrenic by Phoebe's definition. By "schizophrenia", she's referring to agents switching between behaviors in a way that has an internal logic for the agent, but is completely inscrutable to an outside observer. When the player makes the characters in Facade switch topics, it makes sense to the player that the characters are switching topics (because the player is the person who brought the topic up); schizophrenia would happen if the characters then abruptly switched back to their original topic, or abruptly switched between topics, with no transition (leaving the player going "huh?", even though, in the internal state of the characters, they are popping a conversation stack or something). The combination of the handlers and the beat goal behaviors (the beat goal behaviors have retry logic built into them) address this, and thus hopefully appropriately signal the character's inner life to the player.

It's interesting that Phoebe was driven to focus on how to signal the inner life of characters through a critical-theoretic analysis of agent architectures. I find this to be interesting work in its own right, because I like critical reads of AI technology, but this particular problem is bread-and-butter to designers and artists. As Andrew points out, he added these signaling behaviors to the Petz because, of course, as a designer, it's all about making your interactions readable. And this is the crux of Expressive AI - that by taking design and art seriously, all kinds of new requirements and research directions fall out of it, like making sure behavior communicates the intentions and inner life of a character, making sure that multiple characters are coordinate on the accomplishment of author-level goals (distinct from character-level goals), etc.

As I hoped would happen, I found it really interesting to experience our various literary and ludic works together in one place. I think they play off each other in both obvious and non-obvious ways. For example, you've got [giantJoystick], an overgrown re-creation of the Atari 2600 controller, which thirty years ago was probably the first exposure to digital media for all of us, side-by-side with a proto-Holodeck, AR Façade, as futuristic a working prototype of digital fiction I've ever played, a fully-working version of such perhaps we'll see when we're all old and gray. You've got Screen, a story constructed as a massive black rectangle with flying white text floating in the middle of the gallery, next to Implementation, a story constructed as a massive collection of small white rectangles and black text, mounted on the gallery walls, the walls outside the gallery, and the wide world beyond.

I also really like how the blog literally has a presence in the gallery, with gallery visitors' guest entries showing up here on the blog, as well as being printed out and hung on the gallery walls.

The symposium was good too, although I felt just the start of what could be a bigger and better one. We each presented our current lines of work and concerns (the text of mine is at the end of this post), followed by some freewheeling discussion (blogged by Mark at WRT), responding to thoughts and questions from the audience. That was great, though in addition, in a future gathering, I'd love to have each us directly address and discuss a set of focused topics. (Noah brought a few seed topics for us, but we didn't really get to them.) Some of us did manage to admit various feelings of guilt about this or that, so it was therapeutic in that way. ;-)

---

Here are a few comments on Augmented Reality Façade, which I played for the first time at the show. (Don't miss Scott and his Unknown collaborators' experience with it.)

I mentioned to Blair MacIntyre and Steven Dow of the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, where the AR was put into AR Façade, how remarkably suited the original Façade was for augmented reality adaptation! The drama takes place in a single location, with only two characters, and is primarily dialog driven, making minimal use of physical action, other than the player walking around. These were all design decisions we had made long ago, for reasons other than AR adaptation (see our initial 2000 paper for details), so it was really interesting to see how well they applied to AR.

For me, both the highlights and problems of AR Façade were in the interface. A highlight: being able to reach my arm out and put it around Grace's shoulders, to hug her, was really cool. That was a big improvement over clicking on Grace to hug her in the original desktop verison. I thought Blair, Steve and the rest of the AR team did a good job merging the animation of Grace and Trip with the real-life environment; the head tracking worked pretty well, I didn't feel any vertigo or motion-sickness.

The primary problem I found with AR Façade, it being a lab prototype making its first public showing with understandably rough edges, is in the delay between the player speaking her dialog and the dialog actually being transmitted to Grace and Trip. In AR Façade, a human "wizard" is hidden behind a curtain, and via a mic and surveillance camera is listening to the player speak and watching her perform. The wizard, in real-time, manually enters the text of what the player is saying to the Grace and Trip, as well as actions she takes, e.g., hugging. Much of the time though, the text was entered to the AI 5+ seconds after being spoken — the time it takes for the wizard to listen to it and type it in, plus any required simplification of the phrasing. Recall, the original AI (basically unaltered for AR Façade) can only handle about 8 words at a time, as frequently as every 5 seconds or so; of course, people often verbally speak faster and lengthier than that. (Also, at the time of the opening, the wizards were mostly newbie gallery docents just learning how to be wizards; over time they will surely get better at it.)

So, AR Façade suffers from a third layer of potential communication breakdown, the wizard intermediary, on top of Façade's original two potential breakdowns that I outlined in a past post on NLU interfaces, namely 1) at times the NPCs may not literally understand your words due to parser/NLU limitations, and 2) when they do understand your words, at the particular moment when you spoke, they may be unable to respond or are only able to respond in a limited way, for a variety of reasons, such as content limitations.

Additionally, as a technology-based artwork situated in a gallery, it is cumbersome that AR Façade requires a human wizard to make it run, which arguably diminishes the AI appeal of the piece, even though the original AI is still in operation. (Voice recognition doesn't work well enough to replace the wizard, especially for emotionally-rich speech.)

Still, all that said, AR Façade is a remarkable combination of technologies and designs, a real taste of what the Holodeck could be like. Like Façade, it is a research/art experiment, for which many people are willing to forgive the rough edges in order to experience a new form of digital fiction. And it's free to play, until mid-December, so go check it and the rest of show out!

---

Finally, here is the text of my future directions presentation at the symposium. I had pre-written this as a blog post, in the spirit of the show being borne from the blog. (Moved to its own top level blog post. -ed)

I've enjoyed reading a couple rather different responses to the Grand Text Auto show at the Beall Center for Art and Technology. One appeared in New University, the campus paper at UC Irvine. The general take of "Big Joy Stick, Big Fun at the Beall Center" is probably clear from this sentence:

Anyone expecting guns and violence because of this title might be disappointed, but any student who is interested in the future of video games, digital literature or technology or their impact on culture will be pleasantly surprised.

Mark Marino, at GTxA's neighboring collaborative blog Writer Response Theory, has a rather different take in "The Exhibitionists of GTxA." Here's a sample:

What stole the show for me was the three-dimensional rendering of Facade, created in collaboration with the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. After having beta-tested and played Facade for far too long, to be able to see and explore this physical rendering of Trip and Grace’s apartment constructed was a bit like Going to Disneyland, and entering it was like going to Disneyland and encountering Mickey and Minnie’s “World of Baggage” in Toon Town.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to acknowledge the coverage, linking, and reblogging of Richard Chang at the OC Register, Maggie Greene at Kotaku, Liz Losh at Virtualpolitik, Simon Carless at GameSetWatch, the staff at Squeeze OC, Joseph Serna at the Daily Pilot, Ian Bogost at Water Cooler Games, Bruce Sterling at Wired, Tracy Fullerton at USC IMD, Marisa Olson at Rhizome, Jo-Anne Green at Turbulence, Matteo Bittanti at Video Ludica, Souris Hong-Porretta at Hustler of Culture, the city guide editor of Orange Coast Magazine, the staff of ArtSlant, of course my Screen collaborator Andrew McClain on The Fluther Blog, and the others that are out there. Feel free to point out ones I've missed.

* GamesTM, a slick print magazine in the UK, published an article "Behind the Mask" in their current issue. It's pretty similar to the Games for Windows article on Façade from last May, reaching a British readership this time.

* The under-development augmented reality version, AR Façade, to be publicly debuted at the upcoming Beall show, landed an AP article in June, which according to the AR Façade website, was featured online at USA Today, Business Week, MSNBC, International Business Times, International Herald Tribune, Forbes, Washington Post, Fox News, and in approximately 50 other news outlets around the world, and blogged at EnGadget.com, TheRawFeed.com among others. There was even a video piece on USNews.com, but that seems to be gone now.

* Online mag bit-tech.net has a new article, "The World of Indie Games", with some coverage.

* Someone named branjor recently created a nice video review for "gamersdaily" and posted it on YouTube.

* Here's a podcast review by Bobby Blackwolf on allgames.com. (Actually this is from 2005, but I just discovered it.)

* Recently there was a slew of forum activity on somethingawful.com, including the posting of over a dozen of stageplays. It’s cool to see that new people are picking it up and having fun with it.

The previous Part 2 post from last December asked and briefly answered several questions: how to achieve content richness for non-linear, real-time interactive stories; how to create satisfying agency; and briefly, how to find funding for this kind of work. Most of the discussion in the comments focused on business plans and funding, which impact the design and technology issues, because resources and time in the production schedule are needed to achieve the design and technology goals.

In this post the primary questions I'd like to address are:
What are the pros and cons of having an open-ended natural language interface for an interactive drama/comedy game?
Is natural language the right choice right now?

Related questions left over from the previous post include,
How well did the natural language interface work in Façade?
Can the failures of the natural language interface in Façade be overcome?

For the sake of this discussion, when I use the term "speak", I mean it to be equivalent to "type"; for now I'm not going to distinguish between speaking into a microphone, which requires speech recognition, versus requiring the player to just directly type their dialog in a la text chatting, which avoids the need for speech recognition.

As we've long argued, such as in our 2003 GDC paper (pdf), a key to making games about people is to give players the means to express themselves more deeply — their feelings, attitudes, thoughts and ideas, with some nuance and their own personality. And just as important, to have the game's NPCs and drama manager truly listen, respond, and alter the events of the game in meaningful ways. Allow the player to say more, and have it matter.

We believe such rich player expression is fundamental to making playing games more meaningful for players. This is in contrast what seems possible with purely physical game interactions such as running, jumping, shooting and manipulating objects in the gameworld. A richer level of expression requires language, and perhaps gesture as well.

But wait, is it true that language and gesture are required to expand the player's range of expression? Couldn't developers do more to have purely physical action translate into more meaningful expression, which joysticks and controllers already do a reasonable job supporting?

Perhaps. Having the player choose to go certain places, physically picking up and using objects, and so on, I think could be designed to have more meaning than what we've seen in games to date. As examples, the stealth-based sub-genre of action games such as Thief and Splinter Cell, and thought-provoking quests such as Ico and Shadow of the Colossus offer more nuance and meaning from their physical action than what you find in typical games where the player is merely trying to destroy enemies and survive. The Tale-of-Tales folks are taking this approach, I believe.

That said, there are still so many things a player cannot express through physical action alone — the particular way a player feels about someone or something; descriptions of one's self and others; ideas, thoughts, desires, fears, beliefs, the list goes on and on. Language and gesture are truly necessary tools for meaningful expression — there's just no getting around that.

But wait, in regards to expanding the range of expression — what about offering players limited but context-dependent choices? Aren't there only a few things a player would typically want to say at any one time anyway, and there's no need to offer a broad range of expression at all times?

In fact, as I'm sure you're all familiar with, the status quo interface for allowing players to non-physically (verbally) express themselves in a game is to have them choose from a context-specific, multiple-choice list of pre-written lines of dialog. Multiple-choice lists leads to subsequent multiple-choice lists, with the overall "conversation" having a branching-tree structure.

The primary strength of the context-dependent menu approach, in my view, is that each choice is understood by the game (since its meaning is hardwired into the conversation's branching-tree structure) and that each choice will (or should) lead to a believable response. In games in general, it is very important that the player feel understood, and not become frustrated by giving input that is misunderstood or ignored by the game.

But there are many drawbacks with context-dependent menus, that we've blogged about before. A major one is that the player is limited to speaking only what the game designers have offered, typically only 3 or 4 choices at any one moment. Yet isn't that enough? If the choices are changing everytime something happens, aren't there only 3 or 4 things I, as the player, would care to do at anyone time anyhow?

The short answer is, no. I hear that argument being made from time to time, and it's shortsighted. When analyzing the range of what players try to say in Façade by studying their stageplays, conducting further design experiments, as well following our own design intuition, it becomes clear that there are a dozen or more different ways players want to be able to react to a given situation in any one moment; add nuanced variations to each of those dozen or more ways, and the number of unique player moves at any one moment required for satisfying play is in the hundreds.

Another problem with dialog menus is that if the pre-written phrases are written in a specific style, they may not feel like the player's own voice. Or if the phrases are written in a generic style, they may feel like bland and uninteresting things to say.

These issues combine to make dialog menus fall short of giving players the means to meaningfully express themselves. (It should be noted that by limiting the expressiveness of the player in this way, it is far easier for the game developers to implement.)

A second approach to player expression is to eschew the first-person conversational natural language that dialog menus offer, and instead supply the player a set of high-level commands, with parameters, expressed in the second-person, such as "yell angrily", "ask joe about the banana", or "flirt with Henry"; see more examples here. If the interface allows the player to freely combine any command with a range of characters, objects and adverbs, then the resulting range of player expression is far greater than the multiple-choice list approach.

Yet a major drawback of commands is, obviously, they are not natural language. The NPCs are speaking to you in their own natural words, yet you'd be speaking or acting back to them with commands, and often somewhat generic ones. You don't have your own voice, or the means to express yourself in your own individual way with your nuance and style. I argue that a command interface feels less meaningful than if you could speak naturally, in your own words.

But wait — couldn't the non-naturalness of a command interface be overlooked if the player's expanded range of expression results in a greater range of interesting and meaningful responses from the NPCs and game? That is, can we sacrifice naturalness for the holy grail — greater agency?

Well, typically, in games with command interfaces, few combinations of the broad range of commands and parameters are actually supported at any one moment of the game. In any one moment, many command-parameter combinations are deflected, ignored or rejected. So although a command interface is formally more expressive than a multiple-choice list of natural dialog, pragmatically, players often only have a small number of meaningful choices at any one moment — and we're back to the problems of only offering players a few context-specific choices, with the added frustration that you don't know exactly what those choices are.

ALL of this actually comes back to the biggest technical challenge for creating more meaningful games: content. Once you expand the interface to allow players to express more that a few choices at one time, in service of making the games more meaningful to players, the game will need to have a much richer capability for meaningful responses! This requirement is perhaps even more challenging to implement as a natural language interface itself. I briefly addressed this fundamental issue in answers 1 and 2 in the previous post.

Getting back to command-based interfaces... Games using the command-based approach include text-based interactive fiction, and the LucasArts adventure games, though in both cases, most of the commands are not for expression of the player's feelings, attitudes, thoughts or ideas, but for physical action, such as pick up, use, examine, walk, etc. (Please point out any game examples with commands that do more non-physical action! Fable?) A new twist on the command interface is Chris Crawford's Deikto for Storytron, allowing players to construct more complex expressions, akin to a sentence diagram.

These command-based games have the non-natural language problem described above, at a minimum, and each have the deflect/ignore/reject issue as well, to varying degrees (well, how Storytron performs is this regard is not yet known, since interactive stories with built with it haven't been released yet).

That brings us to a third way — to give the player a totally open-ended natural language interface, in which players can speak (or type) anything they want. In such an interface, players could be given the freedom to speak at any time, as in Façade, or in a turn-taking fashion, as in chatterbots like Eliza and ALICE.

Finally we have an interface where the player is given the means to express themselves in their own words, without limitation! Hallelujah! With such an interface, new genres of games can be created with interaction centered around the comedies and dramas of real life, such as the kinds of content we find in many of the most popular TV shows (Friends, Seinfeld, Desperate Housewives). These new games can be about the subject matter that has mass appeal (versus just fans of the action genre); suddenly games could become appealing to all those people who have had little or no interest in them to date. Think about all the people you know who don't yet play videogames — perhaps your female friends who love good movies and TV shows, but find action and puzzle games boring or juvenile; perhaps these are your parents or older folks, who like sending email but hesitate to pick up a controller, even a Wiimote; these might be friends, men or women, who need something more sophisticated in their entertainment, but need it to be short and sweet, because they're busy people.

The problem with this vision, of course, is that an open natural-language interface means little if the game isn't listening. In the previous post, Black and White developer and now Sims 3 lead AI engineer Richard Evans commented the following:

Natural language creates a huge gap between the player’s expectation and the reality - this inevitably creates disappointment. Use of natural language in Facade was (imo) over-ambition which served to lessen the perceived quality of the other areas where Facade really innovated. In an interactive product, you want to innovate in one or two core areas, and be massively risk-averse in the others.
...
You write “Façade attempts to allow the player to speak anything they like to the characters”. This is strictly speaking untrue - Facade allows you to *type* anything you like to the characters, but most of it isn’t *spoken* to them, because they mostly don’t understand what you are saying. It allows you, for a brief moment, to *think* you can speak anything you like, but when you realize the (inevitable) limitations of the natural-language comprehension, it leaves you feeling disappointed. Psychologically, you want your player’s “Ooo-Wow” feeling to slowly increase over time, not to be unsustainably high for the first 4 minutes, and then tail off.

(As a side note, Richard is equating the term "speak to" as the same as "be understood", where as I am considering "speak" or "type" to be the same as "utter", separate from "be understood".)

Let's break these problems down, and talk about ways to improve them. Depending on how well these problems can be addressed will, I believe, determine the viability of an open-ended natural language interface in a commercial product that people are willing to pay money for.

First let me characterize the severity of the language understanding problem in Façade. When studying traces of Façade players, we found that the NPCs:

• fully understand the player and respond well approximately a third of the time (satisfying);
• partially understand and at least adequately respond about a third of the time (fair);
• and don't understand and may respond poorly about a third of the time (frustrating).

For a commercial product, a ratio of 33% satisfying, 33% fair, 33% frustrating won't fly. I'd suggest we need to improve that to at least 60% satisfying, 30% fair, 10% frustrating, for people to pay money for it. My guess is many players could live with 10% frustrating, given the benefits of the interface.

Of the unsatisfying responses when you interact with the NPCs in Façade, let me further break them down into the ways that things can go awry. Note that when the player feels frustrated, there is no easy way for them to know which of these problems is occurring. When things go awry, it could be that:

1) the NPCs literally don’t understand the particular words and/or the sentence structure of what you’re saying – even if what you’re saying is quite reasonable or obvious;
2) the NPCs do understand your words and sentence structure, but at the particular moment when you spoke, they are unable to respond or are only able to respond in a limited way. This can happen for a variety of reasons:

2a) they are wrapped up in a tense moment that is cumbersome for them to interrupt and respond;
2b) they are free to respond but don't have a good response, due to their limited repertoire of dialog, even if what you said was quite interesting and reasonable;
2c) they understood what you said, but at this moment they’re purposefully ignoring you what you said, because they actually don’t want to respond to it.

You might assume that Problem 1, literal misunderstanding, is what is going wrong most of the time when playing Façade, but that's not true. We haven't measured it precisely, but when a response is unsatisfying in Façade, a misunderstanding error is responsible approximately a third of the time; therefore, overall, this error occurs for ~20% of all things the player types (33% of 66%).

While a 20% misunderstanding rate is not as high some of you might have thought, it's still pretty high and needs to be improved.

Yet content, problem 2b above, is an even bigger problem to solve, the root cause of the remaining two-thirds of unsatisfying responses in Façade, equivalent to ~40% of all player inputs. (Issues 2a and 2c above are design choices, that can be as present or absent as the developer wishes, especially if 2b is solved.)

Okay, let me summarize my analysis so far:

• Physical action alone, while a clear interface, doesn't significantly expand player expression
• Similarly, dialog menus, while a clear interface, doesn't significantly expand player expression
• A command-based interface, while it expands the range of player expression, is too generic and unnatural to feel satisfying
• An open-ended natural language interface would expands the range of player expression in a natural way; but it requires both the game to have a very rich range of response, and a parser capable of understanding the player's natural language input.

Alright, now I'll give the core of my argument for this post, which also addresses the "is the right interface, right now?" question:

Even modest success in achieving the content and parsing requirements mentioned above would justify use of an open-ended natural language interface for interactive drama/comedy, because the bulk of the players the games would ultimately appeal to — the largely untapped market of TV and movie lovers who dislike current games — would forgive the interface's shortcomings to get a chance to finally play games that interest them.

Thoughts?

I'll spend the rest of this post talking about how to improve the parser misunderstanding problem, one of the two problems requiring at least modest solutions. (Regarding the content problem, again I'll refer you to my brief response to this issue in answers 1 and 2 of the previous post; it warrants much further discussion.)

(Note that the Façade parser, as well as The Party's parser, actually translates the player's natural text input into discourse acts, essentially parameterized commands just like the "yell angrily", "ask joe about the banana", or "flirt with Henry" examples that I excoriated earlier. So why not just have players directly enter discourse acts? Well, even if the player's natural language does ultimately get turned into discourse acts under the hood, the process for the player of entering natural language is a lot more, well, natural. Also, a single natural language input, such as saying "martinis are gross" in Façade, could translate into several discourse acts at once, such as "refer-to drinks", "criticize Trip" and "agree Grace", especially if Grace had just said "maybe you'd prefer a mineral water?" It would be cumbersome and unintuitive to manually enter all three of those discourse acts simultaneously with a command-based interface.)

On Façade, surprisingly little time was spent developing the parser itself, also known as the Phase I parsing rules (see pdf). We only spent about 8 person-weeks on that part of the engine. For The Party significant resources will be applied to improving this — hopefully 9 person-months months or more. The technical details of how we plan to improve this are too detailed to go into here, but I anticipate significant improvements.

(I should reiterate that we do not need to solve the Turing Test here. We "only" need to understand what will be typically spoken in the context of the drama/comedy being played. The range of input required for a specific domain, such as a crazy cocktail party, is still very large, but is hopefully only a small fraction of what passing the Turing Test would require.)

In addition technical improvements to the parser, there are design techniques we can implement to lessen these misunderstanding errors.

First, in Façade, we limited the number of words players can utter to about 8 at any one time. This limited the complexity of what players could enter, making the job of the parser easier, but still allowing significant expressivity for the player. Admittedly, this results in an asymmetric interface: the NPCs can speak more than 8 words at a time to you, but you can only speak 8 words back. Nonetheless, I think this was a reasonable tradeoff that players generally accepted, and we plan to stick with it for The Party. (Note that with a speech interface, there would be no way to limit the length of the player's input.)

A major new feature we could add to the interface for The Party is an optional real-time display of the how the player's words will be interpreted, viewable before the player hits enter and actually "speaks" the dialog. For example, imagine that the player, a man in this case, has typed "hey, what are you doing later tonight" to Joanne, one of the more attractive characters in the game, but hasn't hit "enter" yet. Beneath the player's text appear the parameterized discourse acts "flirt with Joanne; hint at rendezvous".

This real-time display would tell the player how their words will be interpreted before the player truly speaks them, giving the player a chance to backspace and re-word what they are saying if they wish. As another example: if the player, a woman this time, says something more complicated to an NPC named Fred, like "you remind me of my favorite cousin", the interpretation display might only read "express positive; refer-to family", which is not all she meant to say — i.e., the parser couldn't understand the deeper meaning of that expression. So she might backspace and re-type something more direct, like "i like you, you're funny", which would display "praise Fred; ally Fred".

Arguably, the displaying of the interpretation of the player's dialog could reduce immersion and the naturalness of the interface. It could break the illusion (to the extent it exists) that the game is understanding more than it actually is. I think focus testing is required here to help us understand if this feature helps more than it hurts. (Some players may prefer it, it would be an optional feature.)

Another major new feature we could add to The Party is rewind. If the player says something, and then gets a reaction they don't like, they could have the option to rewind the action to just before the last thing they spoke, or 10 seconds in time, whichever is shortest. The ability to undo a misinterpretation by the parser could really help alleviate player's frustration when it happens. (We'd only offer one level of undo; the player is not given the option to rewind again until speaking something new, or waiting until another 10 seconds has gone by.)

Rewind would also affect gameplay itself, hopefully enhancing it; it would be a mini-version of the replay value in the overall game itself. It would be fun to say something, get a reaction, rewind, say something else, see a different reaction, rewind again, etc. (Overall, both Façade and The Party are designed to be replayed many times, to see how things can turn out differently each time, with The Party offering much more replay value than Façade.)

Finally, although this may seem antithetical to my previous arguments, we could also expose the discourse acts to the player, offering an optional command-based interface. While this would have all the drawbacks of command interfaces I mentioned earlier, it could appeal to hardcore gamers who may prefer the tradeoff of a crystal-clear interface over naturalness. A drawback would be that players probably would rarely enter multiple discourse acts at once, diminishing the reactions they could activate if they were creating multiple simultaneous discourse acts via natural language. But still, it may be a good thing for those players, also worth focus testing.

In sum, I hope I've made a reasonable case for why an open-ended natural language interface could be viable for a commercial interactive drama/comedy project. Ultimately it relies on creating a moderately successful parser (e.g. with no greater than a 10% failure rate), and the ability for the NPCs and drama manager to respond richly enough, to do justice to the player's now greater range of expressivity.

The good news for us is, it was all videotaped, edited, broadcast on cable in 2003, and is rentable on Netflix.

The vision of interactive drama I'm referring to, first put forth by Brenda Laurel in her 1986 dissertation “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System” and 1991 book Computers as Theatre, and expanded upon in the mid 1990s by Joseph Bates' Oz Project team at CMU, has a single naive player entering an artificial, dramatic story world, with all the other characters played by improvisational actors guided by a drama manager, who is monitoring the plot as a whole to fashion a coherent, Aristotelian tension-arc style story, centered around the player.

The Oz team, to test their software architecture before operationalizing it in code, enacted a live-action version of the system with The Bus Station, a short interactive drama centered on an innocent person who gets involved in a life-or-death situation. A theater stage on CMU campus was dressed up to look like a bus terminal, and several improv actors (the interactive characters) were brought in, coached beforehand about their roles in the drama. A director (the drama manager), hidden above the stage, is able to give real-time direction as needed to the actors, each of whom were secretly fitted with wireless headsets. Finally, a naive person (the player, not an actor) was brought on stage, and told to pretend they want to buy a bus ticket to visit their grandmother. Little do they know, a robbery by knife point will soon occur, with a loaded gun thrown in the mix. Afterwards, the player stated it was a very intense, engaging experience; the experiment was considered a success. Much coding was done, character prototypes built, many papers published, and company spun out.

Michael and I essentially picked up where the Oz folks left off, incorporating techniques from Petz, conducting several more years of design and technology R&D together, to build a first complete, playable, drama-managed experience, Façade; we're now continuing on with The Party.

There are several well-known fictional enactments of this vision, most notably the Star Trek Holodeck (first aired in 1987, preceded by Star Trek: The Animated Series' "recreation room" in 1973); and the movie The Truman Show (1998), similar to Philip K. Dick's 1959 novel Time Out of Joint. There's a less-known, amazing short story by Richard Powers, Literary Devices, from 2002. One could also draw similarities to lucid dreaming (1 2) and the variety of philosophy and sci-fi about simulated reality in general.

But — it turns out that a satirical reality TV show has gone the furthest towards fully enacting this vision of interactive drama, at least once, for a single real person.

I've alluded to the similarities between reality TV and interactive drama in the past, but until now, I hadn't witnessed the connection realized so perfectly. It's called The Joe Schmo Show, and it's rentable and purchasable. I highly recommend it. I found it fascinating, hilarious, brilliant, and instructional.

From the Wikipedia page:

One man, Matt Kennedy Gould, thinks he is one of nine contestants on a reality TV show called Lap of Luxury. Unbeknownst to Gould, everyone else on the show, including the host, is actually an actor, and the show itself is in fact an elaborate hoax centered around him. Lap of Luxury is not a real reality show, but a parody of reality TV, designed to elicit comedic reactions from Gould.

I won't write up descriptions or spoilers here of the events on the show; you can find summaries of all eight episodes written up on more than one site (1 2), including a second season, that I haven't seen. But I'll make a few comments about this reality show about a reality show — this live-action single-player story/game.

In the various incarnations of interactive drama I listed above, it makes sense to distinguish between those in which the player knows the drama is fake (e.g. the Holodeck, The Bus Station, Façade), versus those with a completely naive player (e.g. Joe Schmo, The Truman Show, Time Out of Joint, Literary Devices). The player's experience should be different in intensity for the two cases, specifically, a completely naive player should experience events more fully, since she thinks they truly are real. Gould in fact got to experience that with Joe Schmo.

But, actually, there are multiple levels of un-reality in Joe Schmo. Gould did know all along he was on a reality TV show — a contrived, constrained version of real life — so he knew to expect some fabricated tension. He just didn't realize what the true nature of the show was, actually centered around him and the emotion turmoil he was being put through.

As hoped and planned by the show's drama management (the hidden crew of directors monitoring Gould's every move and coaching the improv actors), Gould was carefully manipulated over the course of a week into feeling a range of intense emotions, including a very strong catharsis at the end.

Just as interesting, Gould managed to greatly surprise the drama managers and actors more than once with his unpredictable actions, forcing the team to think quickly on their feet and rearrange their plans, and overall cause them to sweat bullets for days. Realize, if Gould were to discover the true nature of the show, it would have been ruined and un-airable, and a financial loss for the production company. (In season 2 in fact, there are two naive players, and reportedly one of them discovers the truth halfway through, and then is recruited to become one of the actors, to keep the other still-naive player in the dark.)

I won't tell you how Gould took the news when he finally discovers the truth — that's part of the intrigue of watching the show. I will say though, there were eerie parallels to the scene in The Truman Show when Jim Carrey's character asks his "best friend" (an actor) for the truth, and the friend boldly lies to keep the deception going.

Although players of single-player digital interactive drama, e.g. Façade-style games, wouldn't have the benefit (or danger) of possibly believing the drama was real, plus the shock of finally discovering it was fake, I think some of the pleasures and thrill could be of the same nature — just not as intense. However, I wonder, if we set the interactive drama in an online world, where there are both real players and AI's, perhaps we could create that same level of uncertainty and intensity, if players don't know if other characters are human or AI. In fact, from this thought experiment, this is the first time I've seriously considered online worlds as a medium for interactive drama. Till now, we've shied away from the concept of multiplayer interactive drama, since it's probably harder to build than single player. But now I'm wondering if the payoff of potentially greater intensity for the player may be worth it.

In sum, I think Joe Schmo actually helps to validate interactive drama as a form, and even offers an example solution for those still confused about how story and game can be deeply combined. I say this at least in terms of structure; the show of course required some intelligent improv acting and directing, at a level AI can't yet pull off. But overall, Joe Schmo is, I think, a lower-hanging fruit to reach for than the Holodeck.

(Too bad I hadn't seen it before Second Person was finalized!)

Here's a link that expires in 3 days, but I've taken the liberty to cut-and-paste the whole letter here:

Art For Art’s Sake

In reading about the exploits of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (“Sex, Lies, and Video Games,” November Atlantic), I was reminded of a scene from the film version of Fahrenheit 451. The fireman’s wife, Mrs. Montag, is sitting in front of her room-sized television screen watching a soap opera. Suddenly, the characters turn to her and ask, “What do you think, Mrs. Montag?” What she decides determines how they proceed. François Truffaut (and Ray Bradbury) used this scene to depict the mesmerizing power of video media, which is exerted at the expense of all other forms (especially books) and entraps people with an enveloping technological superiority.

Messrs. Mateas and Stern turn the warning on its head and call it art. But books (or any traditional art form) have one thing that interactivity will never have: a natural respect for the human need to experience perspectives different from one’s own. Whereas adding one’s own point of view to a movie or video game would ultimately only reinforce that point of view. In the end, however clever it may be, it is an act of narcissism, not art.

Andy Voda
Putney, Vt.

The first paragraph is simply a fear of new media, no biggie.

But I haven't come across the concept of couching interactivity, particularly first-person agency, as narcissistic. It's funny — to many players and gamemakers, us included, the holy grail is to make an interactive experience centered around you — yes, you, Time's Person of the Year for 2006. This is one of the distinguishing, progressive features of interactive media, a major reason it's an exciting new form, or arguably a revival, in digital form, of much older forms of art and communication, e.g. oral storytelling/making.

What this commentor perhaps hasn't considered, is that even in an interactive story where you are the star, there are NPCs (and human author(s) behind them) with minds of their own, speaking and imposing on you their perspective of the events. Sort of like life.

Also, with games, there is the option of making it with "hybrid" perspectives in which you influence the actions of a player character who has thoughts and perspective of their own (pretty much the status quo for IF, no? Personally, I prefer an player character that I have complete control of, without being told what they're / I'm thinking.)

Actually, I suppose this does remind me a bit of Gonzalo Frasca's point about the need to step outside immersion and maintain a critical stance while playing (1 2), an idea that I agree with.

After the Party: Introversion Software, One Year on from IGF 2006

Behavioral Theory in the Design of Serious Games

Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant

Can You Make Them Cry Without Tearing Your Hair Out? Emotional Characters

Casual Games Summit
An impressive lineup of successful casual game developers discussing design, business, etc.

Dealmaking for Developers 2007: Challenges for Growing an Independent Studio

Developing Next-Gen Grads: Collaborating On Proactive Student Experiences

Early Lessons in Digital Distribution

Evolve: Character Pipeline Advances for Next-gen Titles

Game Design Challenge: The Needle and Thread Interface
"The Game Design Challenge is back for another year, with three talented designers tackling a very unusual design problem. Their assignment? Design a game with a highly unorthodox input device: a square of fabric, a needle, and some thread. At the session, each panelist will present a unique solution to this game design enigma, and the audience plays an important role as well ? by voting in the winner of the Game Design Challenge 2006."

Game Studies Download: Top 10 Research Findings

How Casual Games Will Kill the Console (And Why That?s a Good Thing)

Independent Games Summit
A diverse lineup of indie game developers including a panel on innovation in indie games, Telltale's Dan Connors on episodic indie games, the "casual cash cow" by Eric Zimmerman, and many more.

Interactive Storytelling Boot Camp
A tutorial on contemporary techniques and methodologies to help you "alchemically combine story, emotion, and gameplay into the nonlinear elixir called 'interactive storytelling.'"

Making Games for the Other 90%

The Metagame: A Battle of Videogame Smarts
The Metagame combines a gameshow format with strategic competition and lively debate. Inspired by Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, in the Metagame six videogame sages compete in a battle of aesthetic analysis and critical connections.

Next-Gen Conversational Characters for Serious Games
Michael and I are giving this presentation in the Serious Games part of the conference.

Performance Driven Facial Animation

Persuasive Games: Introduction to Procedural Rhetoric
You'll never guess who!

A Practical View on Interactive Storytelling: Drama Games
Santiago Siri (of the blog Games Are Art) will "show some practical demos on how we can use interactive storybuiding tools to create games that don't only explore territories, but can explore ideas and emotions as well." Part of the Serious Games summit.

Sex in Games: The Business End / Designing the Erotic

Sharing Control
"this next generation of gaming should be equally remarkable for its emphasis on broadband-enabled social systems, multiplayer games, and user-generated content. This panel will grapple with the benefits and challenges of *sharing control* with gamers. Issues include: how can developers involve consumers in the design process, how can user-generated content help and harm a game, what are the best ways to prevent "low quality" UGC from frustrating the community, and how can user-driven marketing be encouraged?"

Simulated Characters: The Power of Euphoria in LucasArts' Next-gen Games

SPORE's Magic Crayons
Chaim Gingold on "why Spore's editors look and feel as they do, how they interoperate with the game's tech, gameplay, and high level concept. How games and software that enable player creativity work, from a design standpoint. Techniques for designing and incorporating player expression into a game."

Ten Games You Need to Play: The Digital Game Canon
"Developers will learn about what the best games of the past can teach game designers now and in the future; game researchers will learn about the history of game development; and everybody will learn why it is important that we preserve the games you need to play."

Your Project Name, LLC: Funding Projects by Forming New Companies

 
Finally, here are two posters that look interesting:

Comparing First-Generation Drama Engines
Patrick Dugan sez: "Significant advances have been made in the field of interactive storytelling and drama, both in terms of conceptual design tools and working engines. This session evaluates four drama engines, Storytron, Rocket Hearts, Drama Princess, and Facade's, and uses fresh perspectives and models to compare their strengths, weaknesses and aesthetics."

Experience Variance Through Multiple-Perspective Management: A New Paradigm in Interactive Storytelling
"Methods in communicating stories and literary ideas have long been expressed through various forms of media. In an era of interactive technology, the introduction of experience variability to the art of storytelling requires some form of intelligence or management on behalf of the medium itself."

While the material on Spore, E3, etc. will be very familiar to GTxA readers, the piece does delve into Will's background and personal life more than anything else I've read on him.

(Also there's a new short piece on serious games in The Utne Reader.)

Jonathan Rauch wrote the piece and really managed to make a great case for how video gaming (and creative computing) can transcend its current licensed, hyperviolent state. He also gave a good account of Façade that is accurate without being overwhelming in its technical details. Gripping journalism is often built on oppositions and conflicts; here, the conflict is Andrew and Michael vs. the conventional world of videogaming, which, I think, is not a fabricated opposition.

The article conveys Andrew's and Michael's views on interactive drama, and - despite some talk of hill-climbing - how the problem of interactive drama requires revolutionary rather than incremental improvement. It gives a portrait of each of them, too, allowing the reader to distinguish two-earring-wearing, bushy-brown-haired, large-headed Michael from extraordinarily-average-looking Andrew.

Via the magic of subscriber-supplied temporary URLs, I offer this link to the story (update: scanned in), which will last no more than two days. And perhaps less, if the link police come by to put me in the link jail.

A final note, which may intrigue you to read on: Rauch's article also reveals that The Party, Michael & Andrew's work in progress, will have audible sexual moaning. Stay tuned for more here on Grand Text Auto.

Recently, in an email exchange with Jim, he and I started talking more concretely about a problem that also came up in our earlier theoretical discussions: getting students access to games. We can't do what people do with the last generation of "new media" (film and video). We can't do group showings, because students need to experience the games individually and in small groups. We can't send students to the library media center, because libraries may be set up for individual experiences of laserdisks, but not game disks.

My initial, temporary solution -- for my grad students this Fall -- is visible in the syllabus linked above. I've gotten friendly lab folks to help me set up a Mac lab with some relatively current commercial software (e.g., The Sims) and a lot of older games running in emulation or ported versions (e.g., Doom, Karateka, Zork I, etc). In addition, the students are assigned to buy the Atari Flashback 2 (giving us games from Pong to Pitfall!) and we're installing an Xbox 360 in the lab (for Oblivion, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and other games TBA as I work with students to build the agenda for the last three seminar meetings). Finally, we're looking at current, freely-available Mac/Windows games like Facade and Disaffected! as well as web-available games like September 12th and the original SimCity (now on EA's site in a Java port).

Jim's solution is a bit different, because he's working with a much larger number of students, and undergrads (as I will be this coming Spring). He wrote in a recent email:

We're working with our local library to make some older systems and carts available for checkout by students during the CMPS 80K course. We'll have 5 NES, 5 N64, and 5 PS2 systems available, with 5 games each of note. I'll have two or three assignments that make use of the systems during the quarter. Curiously, we're most worried about the PS2 access, since emulators are freely available for the NES and N64. But, we think students will have fairly ready access to PS2s of either their own, or their friends'.

I can see this solution working, but it also makes me uneasy. I think, if we're going to have non-web games as part of our curriculum we should provide the ability to study them in a lab environment. It's more important for computer games (which can be tricky to run in emulation, which can differ from platform to platform, etc) than it is for film -- and yet we don't structure our film curricula to assume that students can just check out a DVD. Of course, Jim goes further, checking out both the game and the platform. Is that the right solution?

With either approach, giving students access to games in an academic environment presents many challenges, including those of copyright for older games and emulators. I mentioned to Jim that for my course we were going to be using the Apple II ROM that Apple gave permission for Nick and me to distribute with The New Media Reader -- otherwise playing Karateka would have been impossible. Further, for other games, I just don't have enough lead time to work out a legal way to make them available. Jim wrote:

This is a huge problem for game studies education, since there is no good legal way to provide access to students of a large number of older games. Buying lots of old consoles and older games for checkout to students is a fragile solution. Creating an enormous old console game lab is very expensive in space and maintenance. Legal copies of some older games of interest are sometimes quite expensive, and not readily available in large quantities (the great space shooter Radiant Silvergun for the Saturn regularly fetches $150 on EBay).

So, that's where Jim and I are now. I think we'd both be very interested to hear the solutions others have devised for providing access to games, the thoughts others have about how we might move forward in this area, any suggestions/ideas people have about our syllabi, and any pointers people have to interesting related developments. There's a lot of energy going into thinking about game curricula these days -- witness the recent GDC discussion where they invited faculty and students to share their desires, and learned that at the top of the list for the students was "more 'game studies' -- games as creative entities, including genre theory and game analysis." I'm very interested to hear what GTxA readers are thinking.

That's the good news. The not-so-good news is we suspect some of you won't be able to run it, as it requires at least a 2.0GHz G4 or G5. (Or 1.0GHz dual processors, or 1.8GHz Intel Core Solo.) Several beta-testers ran into this problem.

We're also working to make it available via direct download at Download.com.

Anyone have any recommendations of what Mac sites we should contact, to get the word out?

Again, many thanks to Ryan C. Gordon who ported Façade from Windows to the Mac on his own time as a volunteer, and did a fabulous job. He does this for a living, so hire him if you're a business looking to port your software.

I'd like to share a little bit about my experience playing Facade in a crowded, privacy-free, communal environment: the frat house. An avid reader of GTxA, I had been following the development and release of Facade closely, but that was most definitely not the case with my brothers. The week it was released, I downloaded it late on a wednesday night, installed it and played through it a couple of times while everyone was in bed. I was engrossed in the story and amazed at the emotional connection I actually felt to the virtual actors.

The next afternoon, I fired it up while my roommates were there and played through a little bit. They noticed and asked a lot of questions about the game. As I played, I noticed my interactions changing to demonstrate not how I would act or how I felt, but what I thought would elicit the most interest from my roommates. "Can I try it?" one asked. Of course.

He played it through a couple of times, feeling up Grace on the first, coming on to Trip on the second. We laughed at the reactions and joked about how goofy the game was. I could tell that my roommates' reactions would be quite different from my own, not having followed the game or cared about its 'intended purpose'.

I went to class, to work, and then to bed. Waking up in the middle of the night, I went into my room to get some water when I found my roommate on my computer. I came into the room and over his shoulder saw him playing Facade, well into the story development. He typed in a couple of responses before noticing I was in the room and appeared a little embarrassed. I asked him what he thought of the game and he replied that he wanted to see if he could keep them together. He didn't say that he was trying to win, or that he had found a hilarious new response, but that he wanted to keep 'them' together.

This surprised me. He had naturally formed the same emotional connection that I had felt, and his real-life moral compass was guiding his responses. Quite different from the playthroughs earlier that day. And he was not alone. It was not uncommon after more guys saw someone else playing to ask for a turn, and then to show up when nobody was around to play through 'as themselves'.

My point is: you've made a great interactive story and this experience gives me hope that more nontraditional game narratives could actually work in the 18-26 male demographic - if the barriers to their emotional engagement ( i.e. the presence of other 18-26 males) can be overcome. Thanks again for all your hard work.

This anecdote was a pleasant surprise to read, since most feedback from guys of that age range has been pretty vitriolic. (Probably the more sensitive souls who find it interesting to interact with a couple whose marriage is crumbling aren't going to go out of their way to give feedback; this emailer was a welcome expection.)

We've witnessed several examples of groups of people playing Facade and enjoying themselves, but come to think of it, I would want to play interactive drama privately too.

Likewise there have been a few times that I've watched guys play, who have in my estimation briefly "let themselves go", playing unselfconsciously for a moment, causing me to feel slightly embarrassed for them, as they've acted in some pretty revealing ways.

Anyhow, this gives me some renewed optimism that a commerical interactive drama, even one about relationships, if done well, could actually sell a few units to young guys, a sizeable market. Maybe the guys would have to secretly purchase and play (not unlike another type of commonly purchased guy-oriented digital entertainment ;-).

Also, it makes me wonder about how different, i.e. compromising, it might be to play a multiplayer interactive drama. Shy / guy players might not feel as free to act sincerely.

Or, wait even less if you're willing to beta-test! If you have OS X 10.4.7 or higher, and can download and give prompt feedback on this beta-test version of Façade, please send email to info at interactivestory dot net by end of day Monday, August 7.

Sadly I don't own a Mac (though I got to know OS X well when I worked at Zoesis in 2004). But I did play with the build on my friend Corwin's laptop, and it looks and plays exactly like the original Windows version, thanks to the original choice to render in OpenGL, and Ryan's porting skills.

I was impressed with the games in the show,
co-curated by Giles Askham, Louise Clements, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow, and Corrado Morgana. Morgana wrote an essay for the catalogue entitled 'Critical Gaming,' and in a short space gives a solid introduction to the field. Folks will be familiar with my fellow blogger's Facade project... this work was certainly a hit at the show; one girl played four times and had to be asked to share her station with others! The Endless Forest by Tale of Tales, was shown -- it is a beautiful multiuser game in which players take on the role of a deer who wanders through a magical forest occupied by other creatures, such as deer with human like faces. Players can interact with each other and even dance together. This art game is beautiful, noncompetitive, and frankly just stunning.

This game ran counter to Jetro Lauha's Truck Dismount, where players interact with a physics demo type of environment with the goal of maximizing the destruction of the crash test dummy character ‘DJ’. Yes, you actually try to crush the dummy, and yes, there is gore. Furtherfield, the organization affiliated with the HTTP gallery, showed their Visitor's Studio, which is an online multi-user play/jamming environment: an online place for real-time, multi-user mixing, collaborative creation, many to many dialogue and networked performance & play.

I have to say, objects are gratifying.

My hopes for the piece were certainly met, and then some. Not only was the stick a magnet for collaboration, but it also became a play object in and of itself. Adults seemed to want to touch it (the stick part is coated in a nice rubber to get that 2600 feel) and kids just did 'ring around the joystick' laps when they weren't whooping it up over Asteroids or Breakout.

The gallery was abuzz with discussions: some regarding the stick concerned the role of the body, the scale, nostalgia, the reinvention of childhood, having 'permission' to play...

I made new friends. Giles is one. He earned high scores on all of the games; he can also solder and is handy with duct tape.

Sondra is another! I met a slew of people actually and would love for those node.Londoners to drop me an email!
And the valiant Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, who run the gallery. They are the most wonderful organizers and very generous humans. Good energy comes forth from them! Unfortunately due to the crowd I don't have a photo of them together!

Finally, old friends came to the show: Sara Diamond, Tom Donaldson, and Lizbeth Goodman held out til the end of the opening. I didn't get to chat too much about Stanza's(pictured below with self and Tom) new work, but I will keep an eye on his web site. It was thrilling to catch up with Tom, with whom I was once locked in a 24 hour habituation cage by Sara Diamond at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival as a social experiment-- it's how we met and have been friends since!
Many folks are asking if the [gJ] can show in the US. Its spoken for at the moment, however, touring in Europe until 2008. However it is part of an edition, so may soon appear in a park or museum near you! Look for forthcoming giganticisms from yours truely...

Saint Petersburg is a beautiful city, and so when the Summer Literary Seminars invited me to teach a workshop for students interested in hypertext (considered broadly) I wanted to propose projects that would get us out into the streets. Our first project -- Sticker Saint Petersburg -- was inspired by work like Implementation, Logozoa, and The Bubble Project. Though no one tried to use the opportunity to establish the truth of Nick's earlier comments on Russian stickers, four of the students (Mike Alber, Ben Stark, Bill Stobb, and Guy Tiphane) have given me permission to put their work online.

Some of the work engages Saint Petersburg landmarks:

And some of the work is in out of the way, unexpected places:

In other news, if we have any GTxA readers in St Petersburg, I'll be giving a reading at 7pm on Tuesday (July 4th) at the Mayakovsky Library's "American Corner" (Fontanka 46). Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to invite extra people to Sunday's fascinating event, "Contemporary Media: Out of Control." This was organized by Dmitry Golynko-Volfson and Marina Koldobskaya, who brought us to the summer residence of the Saint Petersburg branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (of which Marina is the director) on the island of Kronstadt. Dmitry kicked things off with an analysis of the current state of digital/media art in Russia, then posed some provocative questions. Next I presented a couple pieces and gave my opinion on the current state of the digital revolution in the U.S. After this Anna Kolosova showed an interesting surveillance piece -- involving her making an installation in real-time by printing out screen captures from the online activities of visitors to an Internet cafe who decided to go ahead and use a computer with a prominently-posted privacy warning. She made the piece in different room of the same cafe, and had some provocative discussions with her subjects. Next Jeff Parker, one of the main SLS organizers, presented an exciting-looking forthcoming hypermedia piece titled The Drinking Game. It begins as a promotional site for a fictional game and then moves into a more ethereal, narrative mode. Finally Kirill Shamanov showed a couple of his pieces: one a series of animations designed to "program" officials with their own oaths of office (he sent customized animations to Putin and Bush) and the other specially-minted zero Ruble coins (which garnered him the attention of both the media and the ministry of finance). Translation allowed for the event to include presentations by monolingual artists (like yours truly) as well as for the dialogue to include both SLS participants and an invited group of local media artists.

Today I'm teaching again, and will be inviting the larger SLS crowd for the first hour, during which I'll share my thoughts on "Computer Games and the Future of Fiction." Besides stickers, last week's class meetings focused on writing games/exercises from Dada, Surrealism, and the Oulipo. (Our workshop's full title is "Hypertext: Writing Artworks, Networks, and Games.") This week, as one might guess from my lecture topic, we're moving into computer experiences (including Facade) and tabletop games (including Betrayal at House on the Hill). I'm very happy with my students thus far -- who are quite diverse, including a Brown student who just finished his first year, a writing professor from Wisconsin, and a retired member of the team that founded Logitech. I'm looking forward to our second week.

• Devil's advocates: Clive Thompson calls interactive narrative "dry water" and a "nonstarter", noting (via GTxA) that interactive poetry is more prone to success; and Greg Costikyan opines,

  To me, the search for the interactive narrative game is one of those things that people have bashed their head against the wall about since the beginning of computer games - and if you want to bash your head against that wall, that's great. Sooner or later someone will break through the wall, but me, I'll go do something else.

  Bam... bam... bam...
   

• Clive again, on next-gen characters' ever deeper descent into the Uncanny Valley. Reacting to a preview of Indigo Prophecy sequel Heavy Rain,
  

  This wouldn't be so bad if the designers were actively trying to create some eldritch, sephulchral nightmarescape straight out of Goya's Black Paintings. But no ... they're trying to create a spunky, cute, realistic girl. God almighty, these people must be stopped. This stuff is hideous beyond description...

(Interestingly, Clive seemed to like our foray into interactive narrative, but didn't seem to like our attempts at avoiding the Uncanny Valley...!)


• Pontification at Terra Nova on the future of MMOGs.
• In light of Noah's series of posts on creative systems for narrative: a new book by generative music researcher David Cope, Computer Models of Creativity.
  

  Cope departs from the views expressed by most with his contentions that computer programs can create and that those who do not believe this have probably defined creativity so narrowly that even humans could not be said to create.

• Gamasutra interview with Ralph Baer, "Father of Home Video Games". President Bush approves, apparently.
• (re)Actor: The First International Conference on Digital Live Art, September 11 in London; cfp due May 26.

Now, one could imagine an indie festival where all entrants must have a low budget, and/or cannot yet be distributed on a major label, and in fact get disqualified if they get signed before the competition finals, even if they were already accepted as a finalist. (Slamdance, the other high-profile indie game festival currently out there, is to date, intentionally or not, a "true indie" festival as such.) But in the case of Darwinia, it was low-budget sweat and tears, and even Steam is still pretty indie-ish — it's a pretty young, small-to-medium-sized label, technically indie.

Kudos to Introversion! Sounds like the award ceremony was thrilling.

(This of course parallels the controversy over Savage in the 2004 IGF, which beat out an early version of Facade for the awards that we hoped we had a chance to win for — technical, audience, grand prize. As GTxA readers know Facade went on, competing with a completed version, to win Slamdance 2006. Which went almost totally unreported by the game media, I might add.)

Ah, awards. Love 'em, hate 'em.

Like last year, perhaps the most interesting GDC reportage to comment on is the now-annual IGDA rant session (proficiently transcribed again by Alice at Wonderland), organized by Gamelab's Eric Zimmerman and this year starring ex-Gamelab now area/code developer Frank Lantz, experimental gameplay workshop organizer Jon Blow, ex-XBox evangelist now CAA Seamus Blackley, resident curmudgeon Chris Crawford, and special appearances by Robin Hunicke, Jane Pinckard, Chris Hecker and Jason della Rocca. Reactions below:

Frank Lantz said,

Alright so I’m going to rant about the “immersive fallacy”. ... I think there is a widespread and largely unexamined belief in this community that computer games are evolving towards an infinitely detailed and utterly seamless simulation. That this is their destiny. To evolve to a star trek holodeck, a seamless simulation indistinguishable from real experience. So what’s wrong with this? Why does the phrase ‘the player will be able to go anywhere and do anything’ sound like nails on a chalkboard to me? It’s based on a very naïve and unsophisticated understanding of how simulation, how representation works. ...

The Holodeck is a vision for the future of interactive entertainment that we often point to, as the easiest shorthand for what character-centric experiences could become. (Versus, say, Second Life's targeting of the Metaverse.) My understanding of the Holodeck, and I believe the way was portrayed in Star Trek, is as a dramatic world, where exciting events are always happening, a place where you don't have to bother with the mundane. So lumping the Holodeck into this rant seems incorrect. Further, I'm not sure who the folks are he's speaking about that seem to want a perfect simulation of the real world, with all the boring bits left in.

Seamus Blackley said,

[Y]ou hear a whole bunch of people bitching and moaning about how their awesome games aren’t getting published by those jackass publishers who wouldn’t know a good game if it smacked them in the head. I used to really be into this. Now all I can say is let’s just stop fucking ourselves and realise what’s happening here. We don’t HAVE a good business around most of the ideas we wanna make. We can’t go to guys like EA who, incidentally, are really smart - and present them a business case for some of these ideas.

This is probably the best nugget of wisdom from the rant. A big reason, for example, we don't see advanced interactive stories being commercially made is because there's no urgent reason to invest there — games as they exist (running, jumping, shooting, strategy) are selling quite well, to mostly young or almost-young men — and the market for something more interesting has yet to be proven. (Another big reason: it's technically difficult to innovate into high agency interactive stories. But you know this.)

Gamelab's move to self-publishing is a reflection of Seamus' concerns; a project funding model as such is what we're actively pursuing as well.

Further reality check from Seamus:

You guys are the future, and it’s a beautiful future if you open your mind and actually think about business a bit more. Maybe even fucking read something about business a bit more, hey? Those poor fuckers giving you millions of bucks for an idea they’re not really sure about, their jobs are on the line. Think about that.

Jon Blow suggests that maybe it'll be up to the next generation of game developers to lead the way:

What if innovation is like a fossil fuel in the sense that it’s a finite expendable resource? How many times can you think up wacky stuff that no one else has thought about? It can’t be infinite right? Are we going to run out of innovation? So .. why do we.. feel like games need game play innovation in order to be good? Innovation acts like a shiny thing that distracts us from the fact that most games at the core .. just.. aren’t very good. If you’re old and you’ve played lots of games, every game is the same thing and just not very interesting. How important is it that you kill the Nazis and get the blue card key? It’s not. ... Maybe we need to become fossil fuel for the next generation to come along and show us how it’s done.

The current breed of game designers should quit their corporate jobs and go indie, and self-publish. While a sacrifice in terms of salary and security, that would certainly be a boost to innovation.

Chris Crawford was predictable:

I have to tell ya, there’s nothing better that can be done because the games industry is d.e.a.d. Now when I say dead, I don’t mean totally dead, I mean brain dead. The product is going out the door, money is coming in. But what’s up here? Nothing. There’s no creativity. There’s no creative life in this industry at all. It’s just a dead creature. We put food in, shit comes out. ... I’ll just mention that I’m going down the corridor to the maternity room where there’s an infant that has a better future than the games business and it’s called interactive storytelling.

I agree in sentiment, of course, but I don't paint things as black and white as Chris. There are some amazing game-games out there, excellent entertainment, no doubt about it. The game industry isn't dead, it's just stuck in an infantile phase.

Jane Pinckard has constructive advice, the kind of advice I give and live by:

No more ranting! Let’s go do stuff. For every problem that you see go out there and do something about it. The internet is full of rants, don’t just write about it! Who cares! Read any games forum and you see the same things year after year after year. No innovation. We need this, we need that. It's about what you DO that counts.

Seamus ended it with:

We own the future and it’s ours not to fuck up.

During the pre-game tour, we snacked and saw demos in 'the aware home', which was a lot of fun. Some of the researchers, including fellow blogger Mateas, are creating living artworks based on the home.

Later, I was one of the lucky few who, along with Will Wright
(pictured suiting up)
- was able to experience the Augmented Reality (AR) version of Mateas-Stern's Facade project. It rocked! Most of the experience was creepy, and quite believable - how is it that I spent time talking to 2D vector graphic people in their apartment, reaching for a cocktail proffered by said vector graphic??

But - huzzah! - the adaptability of human nature prevailed. Within seconds it felt utterly natural to be touring Trip and Grace's apartment and commenting on the new furniture. Blair MacIntyre, Michael Mateas, and the GVU should be congratulated on the whole experience and in particular for the construction and interior design of Trip and Grace's apartment, from real furniture within the Technology Square Research Building to the, ah, detailed interior design.

Here, Michael M. and I leave the AR room, dazed, thrilled, and a little distraught from our reality augmentation;
and look!
game scholars on a bus! Katie Salen, professor at Parsons School of Design, is caught with with Will Wright, Joell Jones, JanetMurray, and Celia Pearce.

Day two, I particpated on an art-focused panel with Michael Mateas, Jay Bolter, and Jane Prophet, a thoughful and thorough art-sci researcher from the UK.

When developing Façade we took direct inspiration from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf; we actually hadn't thought about No Exit. But in hindsight Façade does seem to share as much thematically with Sartre's play as Albee's. Façade's characters aren't that likable, more like Sartre's and less like Albee's outrageously hilarious George and Martha. Also, No Exit and Façade are both one-act plays. So thanks to Patrick for making that connection.

Patrick points to Façade as an example of paidia — unstructured and open-ended play — and to the Sims as the most commercially successful paidic interactive entertainment. (This is opposed to ludic play, which is your typical rule-based, goal-oriented game.) Patrick surmises there's an untapped market demand for paidia. (I keep wanting to type paella, but maybe just because I haven't eaten dinner yet.)

It's interesting — while I certainly don't think of interactive drama a la Façade as rule-based or strictly goal-oriented play, it's certainly not unstructured either like the Sims. Interactive drama, to earn its title and actually offer the player some of the pleasures of drama, needs to retain some degree of economy and efficiency, pacing, tension building, etc. — qualities I find the Sims sorely lacks. (I get paidic enjoyment from the Sims, not dramatic enjoyment.)

What we're striving for here, with Façade as an early example, is collaborative generativity. In such an experience, the player and the system each act creatively in real-time through meaningful dialog and action. If each party is skillful, a moderately well-formed drama results. Players can form and pursue a variety of goals if they wish. In its ideal form, this is not unstructured play, but cooperative, open-ended creative performance — creating a structured play, actually. It's less about emergent behavior and more a connection between two creative agents, the human player and the artificially intelligent drama manager, who make and take offers to and from each another, like in structured improvisation.

I see Façade borrowing the open-ended aspect of paidia, but not as much the unstructured part. I think people seek structure in art, interactive or not, and we're actively trying to give it to them, to build those smarts into the system. At the same time, we want to offer players the open-endedness to say or do anything they want at any time, to support and reward a variety of player goals, for players to not be constrained to operate only within a particular moment's mini-game or small set of options in a multiple-choice dialog menu. An open-ended interface is one of primary ways Façade distinguishes itself from adventure games like Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit), Grim Fandango, or command-based IF.

Of course interactive drama can be built to optionally allow players to have a chaotic, unstructured experience. Sometimes that's what the players want to have, which offers the fragmentary pleasures of emergent behavior, e.g. Trip and Grace attempting to play it straight when players act like zombies or murderers. Screwing around, acting inconsistently or trying to break the system is allowed in Façade, but probably is less rewarding ultimately than actively collaborating with the system. Note, as we mention in "Behind the Façade", collaboration with the system does not mean you should just agree all the time with Grace and Trip; actually it often means conflicting or disagreeing with them, but in ways that you think might propel the drama forward in productive ways (as opposed to trying to “break it”).