Grand Text Auto

Once again, Purple Blurb offers readings and presentations on digital writing by practitioners of digital writing. All events are at MIT in room 14E-310, Mondays at 6pm. All events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and Humanistic Studies.

September 14 — Noah Wardrip-Fruin is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009), co-creator of Screen (among other works of digital writing), and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip Fruin, and Mary Flanagan, half of the art-theory collaboration Grand Text Auto, gathered at the Digital Games Research Association’s 2009 Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory in Uxbridge, UK. Mateas is speaking on “Operational Logics,” Wardrip Fruin’s paper is “Agency Reconsidered,” and Flanagan is presenting the co-written paper, “Anxiety, Openness and Activist Games: A Case Study for Critical Play,” and speaking in an interactive workshop called ““Some Assembly Required”: Starting and Growing a Game Lab.” In between these presentations, both of Flanagan’s more recent books (Critical Play and re:SKIN), and Wardrip Fruin’s Expressive Processing are available in the MIT bookshop on site!

I’m happy to announce the publication of my first monograph, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. As the subtitle suggests, this book is a software studies take on the past and future of digital fictions and games. As of today it’s available in bookstores as well as online — and a PDF of the introduction can be downloaded from the MIT Press site.

How do we understand moments of “agency” with games and other forms of digital media — what Janet Murray characterizes as players’ “satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”? Last month our DiGRA 2009 abstract on this topic sparked a thoughtful discussion. It pushed the co-authors (Michael Mateas, Steven Dow, Serdar Sali, and yours truly) to take a closer look at what our definition of agency might be — not just what might encourage or diminish it — and how our thinking breaks from the past. As we worked to complete the full version of the paper we decided that our paper would focus on agency as a “phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computational model.” Anyone interested in reading the version we submitted to DiGRA can do so after the break.

By Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern

(This is the text of the talk we gave at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference just now. Mark Marino already has a reply online.)

Introduction

In the 1960s, Eliza, and specifically that system running the famous Doctor script to impersonate a psychotherapist, prompted conversations and controversies about anthropomorphic concepts of the computer, artificial intelligence and natural language understanding, user interfaces, and even psychotherapy. Decades later, Janet Murray hailed the system as the first electronic literature work, saying it was at that point still the most important one. All this was the result of a rather small amount of code that lacked multimedia elements, contained very little pre-written text, and was developed by a single person, Joseph Weizenbaum.

Noah just spoke at HASTAC II (Irvine, CA) about the process of reviewing Expressive Processing here on Grand Text Auto. Noah has of course written about this review process here on the blog. I don’t intend to thoroughly blog HASTAC II; anyway, it would make little sense to recapitulate Noah’s presentation here, since we know about the process first-hand and via his writing about it on here. But here’s a quick paraphrase of the Q&A:

Q: How did the press react? Do they think this will work in other fields? What will happen with this model?
A: Acknowledgment that it was a good investment of time for me, but only those who are really interested will do it in the future.

I occasionally make posts composed of link dumps, to help GTxA readers find articles they might enjoy and may have missed. This time I need to split the dump into two parts, the first part being a set of articles ranging from the slightly over-the-top to the truly hyperbolic. I will gently attempt to challenge, refute or debunk each as I go. :-)

• Hypertext boring? That’s the assertion Ben Vershbow made in a post that leads with a commentary on Hypertextopia, spawned from an earlier GTxA post. I’ve certainly been one to vent my issues with hypertext as a form for fiction, but “boring”, hypertext isn’t. Like Nick’s Portal v. Passage post, Ben’s post spawned a good discussion though, including reactions elsewhere (1 2 3); in the discussion, Ben admits to being deliberately provocative. (As a side note, btw, Ben is a developer of CommentPress, used to implement Noah’s Expressive Processing blog-review project here on GTxA.)
   
• In the annual GDC rant session, Clint Hocking asked:

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

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

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

With today's post of section 1.6, we've reached the first major milestone of the Expressive Processing review. The entire first chapter has now been posted. Given this, I'd like to ask for further thoughts about issues that have been raised — and also invite wider discussion.

Here are some of the comments that stand out most for me, thus far: (more...)

With my early-summer plans completed, I've just posted a copy of my dissertation -- Expressive Processing: On Process-Intensive Literature and Digital Media -- at my revamped personal website. As I write on that page:

This work represents my initial take on a set of topics that I currently wrap up under the heading "expressive processing." There are two things I particularly mean to get at with this phrase:

I spent Thursday at the ACH/ALLC conference in Victoria. I was invited to participate in the panel Story Generation: Models and Approaches for the Generation of Literary Artifacts, organized by Jan Christoph Meister and Birte Loenneker. The panel consisted of three presentations: Chris and Birte with "Dream On: Designing the Ideal Story Generator Algorithm", Federico Peinado (whom I met at TIDSE last summer) with "A Generative and Case-Based Implementation of Proppian Morphology", and myself with "Beyond Story Graphs: Story Management in Game Worlds". Chris and Birte define paper-and-pencil story generation architectures with the aim of pushing on structuralist narratology. The goal of the work is to integrate various narratological theories, reveal where these theories are underspecified (their architectures are much more detailed than narratological theories expressed in natural language), and push narratology in new directions. Reminds me of some of Marie Laure-Ryan's work, particularly in Possible Words, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Birte coined the term "computational narratology" (has a nice ring to it) to describe this work. Fernando, a Ph.D. student working with Pablos Gervas (who has himself done work in poetry generation), described a case-based story generator based on Propp's story functions. Given an initial user query specifying the story functions that should appear in the story, the system recalls the most similar story from its case base and performs generate-and-test on the retrieved case. This consists of randomly tweaking the story (performing story function substitutions) many times, stopping when a story is found that both includes the functions requested by the user and satisfies constraints captured by the ontology. He is starting a project with Birte to implement within his system the architectural theory she and Chris have developed for discourse-level manipulation (e.g. flashbacks, flash forward). Finally, I talked about what happens when generation is combined with real-time interactivity, presented story management as a far more scaleable and robust alternative to story graphs, described the author-centric viewpoint that infuses my approach to Expressive AI (I don't care about automation for automation's sake, but about building architectures with powerful authorial affordances), and gave an overview and comparison of both the beat-based drama manager used in Facade and the search-based drama manager proposed and Bates and Weyhrauch and recently revived in my own work (more on this in a later post).

Previously at GTxA we've discussed the issue of whether media artists and theorists should program (1 2 3 4), mentioned Mary Flanagan's and Ken Perlin's new procedural literacy project, and generally championed the idea that new media artists, game designers and theorists, media and software studies theorists, and generally anyone involved in cultural production on, in or around a computer, should know how to program. Of course people have been talking about the importance of procedural literacy for awhile, with Seymour Papert describing his work with teaching children to program in Logo in the 1980 book Mindstorms, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg describing procedural environments in which everyone, including children, can build their own simulations in the 1977 paper Personal Dynamic Media, and Ted Nelson crying in the wilderness that "you can and must understand computers NOW" (including programming) in his 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines. But a couple of months ago Mark Guzdial turned me onto an even earlier argument for universal procedural literacy, one given by A. J. Perlis in a talk at a symposium held at M.I.T. in 1961 to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and published in the collection Management and the Computer of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.), MIT Press. The symposium consisted of 8 talks, with two discussants responding to each talk, and was attended by such luminaries as C. P. Snow, J. W. Forrester, Herb Simon, J. McCarthy, and A. J. Perlis. Perlis' talk, The Computer in the University, focused on the role the computer should play in a university education.