Grand Text Auto

Today Inside Higher Education is running an editorial of mine.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts convened a historic workshop — it was their first jointly funded project. This meeting marked the beginning of a new level of national conversation about how computer science and other STEM disciplines can work productively with arts and design in research, creation, education, and economic development. A number of projects and follow-up workshops resulted in 2011. I was lucky enough to attend three of these events and, in the midst of all the exciting follow-up conversations, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about the digital humanities?

Yesterday I held a paperback of Expressive Processing in my hand for the first time.
(This takes its price down to around $13 at places like Amazon.) I’ve also learned a number of interesting things about the book since it was published — learning more about what others think of it, of course, and also more about how the research and thinking behind the book is influencing my own work as a digital media creator. I wrote about the creation-focused set of lessons last month, in a post called Humanities-Based Game Design.

I gave a lecture yesterday with Jesper Juul and Clara Fernandez-Vara called “Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History.” It was part of the Game Education Summit at GDC and Frank Cifaldi wrote a nice discussion of a couple of the key themes for Gamasutra.

We put our slides together on Jesper’s computer, so I don’t have them all, but here are mine with my presenter’s notes (what I actually said varied, of course).

The nice thing about teaching game history now is that we’re very close to agreeing on the list of essential games, from around the world, that students need to master in an introductory game class

A number of people asked me to post my introductory slides from the “What is a Research Game” session at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Here they are with my presenter notes.

Well, what is the current role of games in universities? Here’s the stereotype: Social scientists still talk with people, but now those people are WoW players, Humanists still think deep thoughts, but now they’re about Passage, Computer Scientists still build systems, and still only far enough to publish papers, Educators still do the same type of instruction, but now they add points and badges, Artists still make and exhibit pieces, but now they reference game culture

Prom Week is about to be released and Expressive Processing is about to come out in paperback — a confluence that has me thinking about humanities-based game design, something I’ve been more actively mulling since an NSF workshop on the Future of Research in Computer Games and Virtual Worlds that UCI hosted in 2010.

Obviously I’m not the first person on this scent — on some level people have been discussing humanities-based game design at least since Brenda Laurel’s dissertation. But working on Prom Week helped me realize that I think we need to go beyond “operationalizing” models from the humanities or applying humanities ideas gleaned from studying other media as design heuristics (though these are also important approaches).

Two new pieces of writing this morning have me thinking about the future of game dialogue.

Clint Hocking suggests that our cultural expectations of dialogue need to change — dialogue isn’t bad because it’s written as a way of players coming to understand their impact on the game world. He talks about an “evolution of our cultural sensibilities” that “causes film dialogue to feel strange and old-fashioned” because it isn’t written toward this goal.

That makes sense, but the problem is that canned dialogue, even moreso than canned animation, is going to hit a wall quickly if you actually let players have an impact on the game world.

What was the first work of digital literature, or digital art? What was the first video game — the first computer game played with graphical display? These are the sorts of questions that come up when we start rummaging around in the pasts of fields, thinking about the boundaries, and thinking about trajectories that might have been.

I offer my thoughts on these questions — one answer considered, one initial and speculative — in the new book Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka.

It’s winter in Rio, but I still spent a serene morning watching the waves, while mist clung to the green hills behind.

So why the picture of a sign? It’s something even more unusual, for a visitor from the US, than a beautiful beach: a mall billboard advertising an event full of professors!

In this case it’s the Regions of Narrative / Regioes Narrativas event that brings me to Rio, running the 24th and 25th at the House of Science / Casa da Ciência. It looks like a great event — with some familiar faces and some people I’m looking forward to meeting. I’ll be talking about the present and future of game narrative, including Prom Week.

Pat Harrigan and I have just published an essay on the remarkable game Twilight Struggle in a new book that Greg Costikyan and Drew Davidson edited for ETC Press: Tabletop: Analog Game Design. We find Twilight Struggle fascinating — it is not just a game about the Cold War, in which one recapitulates many key events of that period through play, but a game that requires thinking like a cold warrior.

We have three great talks on games this week at UC Santa Cruz. All are free and open to the public. Please help spread the word!

Monday
Title: Mama Ludens vs Fanboi – What is wrong with the Gaming Revolution?
Speaker: Jessica Enevold, Assistant Professor at Lund University, Sweden and Managing Editor for the journal Game Studies
Time and Place: 2pm Monday May 16th, Engineering 2 room 599

Tuesday
Title: What will the games business look like in 5 years?
Speaker: John Davison, VP of programming at CBS Interactive for GameSpot and Metacritic
Time and Place: noon Tuesday May 17th, Media Theater (M110)

Inventing the Future of Games is a one-day symposium happening today in Silicon Valley. It gathers some of the brightest minds from universities and industry to discuss potential futures of game design and technology. To follow/discuss on Twitter the tag is #IFOG2011, and for updates afterward you can connect with the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media via Facebook or Twitter, or keep an eye on our Vimeo channel.

This morning I gave a talk in the GDC Education Summit — Interactive Storytelling: Preparing Students to Innovate — and I’m posting my slides below. As for the topic, my talk description ended up being pretty accurate:

We want students to create innovative games, but innovation in interactive storytelling can be hard to imagine for students, both undergraduate and graduate. Designing an interactive story isn’t a secret art or a matter of magical technology. It’s the design of a system, of elements and operations, just like other parts of games. We can prepare students for this work by helping them understand the history of mainstream and trailblazing projects, get experience with the tools and models available, and learn the strengths and limitations of different approaches. This lecture introduces ideas and systems your students can work with now.

At UC Santa Cruz we’re looking for someone to help us conceptualize, launch, and run a new “Center for Games and Playable Media.” We’re seeking someone who would be interested in representing Santa Cruz at events, working with the new center’s affiliates (in industry, government, etc), imagining how new game research technologies could be made into experimental games, and working with students and faculty to bring the game-related activities at Santa Cruz to the next level.

Excerpts from the official information are below. People can apply by going to http://jobs.ucsc.edu and searching for job number 1002822. Also, feel free to leave comments with questions.

NextSpace in Santa Cruz is ending its 2010 What’s Next lectures with a talk titled “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Future of Gaming and Social Media” — 7 p.m. Thursday, December 2, on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Our own Michael Mateas will be one of the panelists, along with CBS Interactive’s Simon Whitcombe and Sol Lipman of AOL / Rally Up.

The first reviews of Expressive Processing have begun to appear, and the three I’ve seen come from three distinct perspectives: a game development veteran who has become a professor, an industry computer scientist with an AI background, and a public relations intern with a games-focused website. I think the collection of perspectives is interesting, but it’s hard for others to take a look because two of the three reviews are behind paywalls. This post provides a quick peek at all three, which may be particularly interesting for those curious as to what’s being said in places where their browsers can’t tread, and identifies an area of disagreement that I hope will be addressed further in future reviews.

I have lots of book news to share. The quick news is that Kotaku’s running an excerpt from Expressive Processing and MIT Press has now published a paperback of Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media — taking the price down to around $15 at online booksellers.

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

Heather Logas only has through tomorrow to make the crowdsourced funding goal for her indie storygame — or all the funding pledged so far is lost. Heather describes the game by saying:

Remember those Choose your own Adventure books you used to love as a kid? The game is a bit like that, if it was the fevered brain child of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and H.P Lovecraft.

At UC Santa Cruz, the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program is organized around collaborative research groups. For those applying this year (deadline February 15th) I’ll be leading a group on the theme “Playable Fictions.” This is a great way for writers, game designers, and related sorts of digital media artists to get an MFA while working in the midst of groups dedicated to pushing the boundaries of this field: the EIS lab in particular and also the larger interdisciplinary DANM cohort. We have a great list of faculty to work with here, including Michael Mateas, Warren Sack, Sharon Daniel, Marilyn Walker, Jim Whitehead, Arnav Jhala, yours truly (Noah Wardrip-Fruin), and many more. While most EIS members are CS PhD students, DANM has been a fruitful entry point for artists like Aaron Reed and Mike Treanor. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me with questions about the work we do and/or contact DANM for admissions questions.

EIS PhD student Teale Fristoe spent last summer at Microsoft Research working on Kodu, the exciting new platform for game creation. Now we’re developing a proposal to extend Kodu with support for deeper characters, social situations, and dynamic stories — providing the first high-level computational support for the kinds of games that research shows girls want to create. We’re looking for your input!

Specifically, we’re seeking seed funding through the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. They’ve just opened the first phase of the competition, which involves public comments on very short (300 word) summaries of the ideas. There are hundreds of them. If you comment on our proposal now you can help us make it better — and also help it stand out from the crowd.

The design of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves should make integrating gameplay and fiction easier in two particular ways. First, it’s linear, so there’s no need to worry about unexpected traversals of the fictional space. Second, it’s almost entirely scripted — a matter of how adeptly things are accomplished, rather than what approach is taken or what tasks are attempted — so there’s little chance of unexpected emergence from game mechanics coming into play in places, times, or combinations other than what the developer intended. Given these advantages/limitations, the game’s creators shouldn’t have much trouble making sure that gameplay action is solidly motivated by, situated in, and consistent with the fictional world.

Distinguished Lecture: Frank Lantz
Interim Director, NYU Game Center and Creative Director, Area/Code
Wednesday, Nov 18th, 2-3:30pm
Engineering 2, room 506

“Innovations in Game Design: Through Practice to Theory”

Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has been an innovator in the field of game design for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

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.

Steven Dow, Michael Mateas, Serdar Sali, and I have an abstracted accepted for DiGRA titled “Agency Reconsidered.” We’re working on the full paper this month, and will certainly share it when available, but one of the things I value about blogs is that they provide a place to do academic work in public. So I’m posting the abstract here, along with some thoughts on where we’re going for the final paper, and I’d appreciate any ideas/pointers that people have. Suggestions and criticisms that arrive now (rather than after it’s completed) are much more likely to shape the final paper.