FDG 2009 was a fantastic conference, filled to the brim with various gaming academic luminaries, fascinating papers and a wide variety of interests. I’m looking forward to 2010, as it’s just down the road in Monterey!

Luis and Gay Tony in GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony

Last week, the second and final installment of the Episodes of Liberty City downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV, The Ballad of Gay Tony, was released. Unlike the more sullen story of Nico Bellic, clawing his way up from nothing, Gay Tony’s Luis begins with a crisp suit, good job, plenty of cash and all sorts of expensive items to wreak havoc throughout Liberty City. What marks out GTA IV’s DLC from a simple mission pack or extra campaign is that it offers the chance to experience Liberty City from a new perspective, reimagining the gameplay, and thus, the game, in the process.

This is something I heartily commend.

Casting our minds back through the mysts of tyme, in ye olden days, expansion packs for PC games were popular stop-gaps between development cycles. Often, the best packs would invite a new experience, for better or worse. Blizzard’s Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft III included some fairly awful squad-based levels, eschewing the base management aspect the original. However, the attempt was there, the price of development was low, and the cost to the consumer was reduced too. Win-win. Now that DLC has become entwined in the fate of games on the current generation of consoles, we see this trend returning.

Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island

While GTA IV asks players to see the city through the eyes of a new protagonist, with new motivations and financial status (equaling new mission, weapons and cars, gameplay-wise), Burnout Paradise’s expansion, Big Surf Island is an unashamed distillation of the core game. Criterion took all the aspects that made the original fun: huge jumps, secret areas, inventing Tony Hawk-esque routes to create the most exhilarating run, and shrunk it down into a tiny area, converting the game from a weak beer to a hard shot of tequila. It’s a wonderful addition to the game. In fact, the only problem is that the island is too much fun. Driving between both areas, linked from a bridge, is now a jarring experience: the jumps, twists and turns of the new island give way to open, flat, straight, roads of the original. Roads that once seemed exciting and fast are now tedious and one-dimensional.

The difference between these expansions and those that the PC cultivated is that while we need to build new content, we can still situate the player in the same environment that they know, playing off their familiarity with surprise and nostalgia. The re-imagining of these games shows just how many play-styles modern games are capable of supporting, if only the developers had the time to do so. There are strong parallels with MMOs here, visiting the old friend of Azeroth after six months away can reveal new secrets and functionality, delighting players for years on end. Revisitating promotes an ownership of virtual worlds that were hitherto transient places, existing for a single game, for a single purpose.

I hope this signals a new style of development, building on solid foundations to support ever more complex and ever more exciting gameplay, refining original ideas over time, rather than creating monolithic pieces that remain the same forever. The intent is the same as the (arguably failed) episodic gaming movement of a few years ago, but the execution different.

And now, back to Gay Tony. I have some skyscrapers to base jump off.

June 3-6, 2010
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by the ELO and Writing Digital Media 
at the Brown University Literary Arts Program
dedicated to Robert Coover

The Electronic Literature Organization and Brown University’s Literary Arts Program invite submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference to be held from June 3-6, 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

• electronic literature
• writing digital media
• language-driven digital poesis
• literal art

We welcome papers and presentations on a broad range of topics. The conference will focus on the theory, criticism, close-reading, practice and archiving of language-driven digital art and poetics. Our gathering will also embrace all the related cultural practices that continue to be addressed by scholars and artists in our growing field:

• expressive processing
• computational art
• artificial cognition and intelligence
• aesthetic gaming
• information art
• codework
• digitally mediated performance
• network & media art & activism

In addition we will give a special welcome to papers that engage with the contribution that Robert Coover has made to our field. A festschrift comprised of papers from the conference is proposed and Professor Coover will be our chief featured eWriter. (Other featured speakers to be announced shortly.)

In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Program of Language-Driven Digital Art, concentrating on but not confined to installation works. We plan to show the selected work in gallery spaces close to the conference venue in downtown Providence over a two week period. Subject to funding restrictions, selected artists will be awarded bursaries to assist with attending the conference. Submission guidelines will be posted on the conference website by mid November.

Deadline for Submissions: December 15, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: January 25, 2010

PLEASE NOTE: Deadline for full papers will be May 1, 2010 to allow for reflection and exchange on the papers prior to the conference and to get head-start in the publication process.

The basic cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100.

Conference registration covers access to all events, the reception, some meals, and shuttle transportation.

All conference attendees are also expected to join the ELO before the conference and this can be done at registration.

We are planning to implement online submission and registration. Before submitting, please consult the conference website at …

http://ai.eliterature.org

… where these facilities will be available and where you will find much more information about both the content and the form of the conference and arts program.

After consulting the website, for further queries and all email correspondence contact:

elo dot ai at eliterature dot org

The above address should be used for all conference business. It will checked by myself and also those colleagues and students who will be assisting me with the conference organization. But I appreciate that you may sometimes also want to get in touch with the conference organizer:

John Cayley, Literary Arts Program
Box 1923, Brown University
68 1/2 Brown Street
Providence, RI 02912, USA
office: +1 401 863 3966, John underscore Cayley at brown dot edu

The Conference is currently sponsored and supported by The Electronic Literature Organization, Brown University Literary Arts Program, Brown University Creative Arts Council, Brown University Library, and the RISD D+M Program.

Any organization or individual in receipt of this call who would like to sponsor and support this major international conference, please get in touch. External sponsors are being sought and will be appropriately acknowledged.

That’s the preface to my mentioning that a new issue (vol. 3, no. 2) of Eludamos is now out.

Also, that journal has issued a new call for papers:

The new call for papers for “Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture” is now open, and again, we cordially invite submissions dealing with everything that is relevant to the field of game studies.

All articles undergo a double blind peer review process except for
papers submitted to the game review section. We expect all
submissions to be in English and accept full papers only. For further
specifications about our submission guidelines please
consult the Eludamos site.

Eludamos also seeks volunteers to do editorial and proofreading work:

We are happy to announce that since its initiation three years ago, not just Eludamos’ readership but also its submission numbers have grown steadily. Thus we are looking to expand the ranks of our editors and proof-readers. Please note that all positions are honorary.

We are specifically looking for a book review editor. The editor’s responsibility would be to identify “hot topics” and to solicit reviews of new publications that deal with them.

We are also hoping to attract two volunteers for copy editing / proof reading.

Please send a short statement of interest via e-mail to the following address: ajahn2 at uni-goettingen dot de

On Tuesday 3rd November, Flanagan is speaking in a Lunchtime Gallery Talk at 12:30pm related to the exhibition currently on, The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan.

The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing will present a talk by

Mary Flanagan

author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009)

Mary Flanagan is the creator of [giantJoystick], and author of [theHouse] among other digital writing works. She is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth, where she directs Tiltfactor, a lab focused on the design of activists and socially-conscious software.

Flanagan investigates everyday technologies through critical writing, artwork, and activist design projects. Flanagan’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums, festivals, and galleries, including: the Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, and The Banff Centre. Her projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Flanagan writes about popular culture and digital media such as computer games, virtual agents, and online spaces in order to understand their affect on culture. Her co-edited collection reload: rethinking women + cyberculture with Austin Booth was published by MIT Press in 2002. She is also co-author with Matteo Bittanti of Similitudini. Simboli. Simulacri ( SIMilarities, Symbols, Simulacra ) on The Sims game (in Italian, Unicopli 2003), and the co-editor of the collection re:skin (2007).

Flanagan is also the creator of The Adventures of Josie True, the first web-based adventure game for girls, and is implementing innovations in pedagogical and values-based game design.

Using the formal language of the computer program or game to create systems which interrogate seemingly mundane experiences such as writing email, using search engines, playing video games, or saving data to the hard drive, Flanagan reworks these activities to blur the line between the social uses of technology, and what these activities tell us about the technology user themselves.

A representative from the MIT Press bookstore will be at the talk offering copies of Flanagan’s books for sale.

Second, a symposium on complex systems will take place next Friday (Nov. 6) that I thought would be of interest to many of you. It’s on Complex Systems and will be held in Spanos Auditorium at Thayer.  Keynotes will be given by Duncan Watts (Yahoo!), George Conrades (Akamai Technologies), and John Donahoe (eBay).

Fantastic! Join us!

Yo Frankie! An open source platformer created using Blender.

I recently gave a presentation on the landscape of open source software in computer games at the Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, where I am currently visiting the Libresoft research group. My slides are available here.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender.

A disappointment was the state of open content sharing. While some sites, like OpenGameArt and New Grounds provide tagging with a Creative Commons license, far more common are sites like Google’s 3D Warehouse that have site-specific terms of use, and provide no ability for artists to indicate they are willing to share their work via Creative Commons or an open source license.

Koster's "A Theory of Fun for Game Design"

I’m a new member of the lab here, and that means that I’ve got a lot of learning to do. I need to learn about the different projects in the lab, learn about the various systems involved in those projects, and even about programming languages used in those systems. But I also need to learn about the theory that drives those systems, and more broadly, the theory that motivates the work in the lab. So for the past few days, I’ve been reading articles–and even a short book–about the theory of fun in games.

Why is this important to the lab? Here at EIS, we build AI systems that work with games. Many of them are focused on building a particular type of experience, or enabling developers to do something new. And since we’re building game experiences and tools to assist in their creation, we need to be able to talk and think seriously about what makes games good or bad. If you build an AI system that enables some new mode of interaction in a game, it’s often not enough to say that it’s new; you usually want to make a claim that it’s good, and that involves either user testing, or some theory that you can point to to claim that it’s probably good. Additionally, before you even build the system, you want to be able to design it according to principles that will help ensure that the finished product is good. And so we study the theory of fun in games in order to better understand the medium with which we work, and the ways in which we can expand and contribute to that medium.

These are my thoughts about fun in games, distilled from the reading that I’ve been doing. First, fun isn’t something that games are. Fun is something that people have (often while playing games). To put it technically, fun is a property of an experience (which is what occurs during a particular instance of gameplay). When we say that a game is fun, we’re making a generalization about the kinds of experiences it helps us have. The reasons that a game helps us have fun experiences are not always directly under the control of the game creator, so it’s important to recognize this. As game creators, we need to think about what aspects of the game experience we can control, and what aspects we cannot control. When these uncontrolled aspects get in the way of fun, can we adjust the controlled aspects to compensate for this? Can we even detect the uncontrolled aspects? A good example of this is player behavior in multiplayer games. The game creator doesn’t have direct control over player behavior, and player behavior is important for whether or not the game is fun. But the game creator can exercise limited influence over player behavior through psychological cues, and can give players control over their collective behavior to try to ensure a positive experience. Things like the ability to mute other players or vote to kick players in first person shooters are an example of this. The game creator can’t prevent players from behaving in a way that annoys other players, but ey can give the players tools to help mitigate this behavior. So the first step towards an understanding of fun in games is to recognize that the fun isn’t in the game, it’s in the experience of the game, and because of that, game designers should pay attention to all aspects of that experience, including ones that they cannot control directly.

Given this understanding of fun, one might ask: “What makes game experiences fun?” But I think that there’s another question that should be answered (or at least considered) first: “What does it mean to be fun?” To be more precise: is fun a monolithic concept, and we classify experiences as simply fun or not, or is it a group of related concepts, meaning that things can be fun for different reasons or in different ways? My answer to this question is that to some degree, both descriptions are valid. If you ask someone whether something was fun or not, they can often give a simple yes or no answer in the broad sense, and even though a more detailed analysis is possible, this simple, broad, yes-or-no sense of fun is still valid. In fact, I think that sometimes it’s not useful to break down why an experience was fun, because the reasons can be extremely complex and specific. On the other side of things, there are multiple ways in which an experience can be fun. Things can be fun because they’re challenging, or because they’re beautiful, or for many other reasons. There are a few of these reasons that feature prominently in most games, and those reasons are what the literature focuses on. But I believe that it’s important to also acknowledge the role of other, more minor varieties of fun, because each way in which a game can be fun has the potential to become the main variety of fun in a game that targets it. The “observational immersionist” style of games mentioned in the previous post is a good example of this: in many games, part of the fun lies in exploration and appreciation of beauty. But when this kind of fun becomes the focus of the game, the result is a game that feels very different than many mainstream games, which often focus heavily on challenge as a source of fun.

So using this idea of many varieties of fun, we can ask what the sources of fun are. How do we create the different types of fun? This distinction between a kind of fun and a cause of fun is often subtle, and in some cases perhaps unnecessary, but I think that it’s important to keep the two separate. For a simple example, we can identify challenge as a particular kind of fun. A more thorough analysis would perhaps be more specific, but we can say that in general, people have fun through experiencing and overcoming challenges. This is a kind of fun. How do you create it? You create challenges and let the player experience them. So challenging situations create “challenge fun”. Seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s important to note that there are some constraints on the challenging situation: in very broad terms, it can’t be too simple or too difficult (Of course, this means different things for different people, which is a reason for thinking of fun as a property of an experience rather than a property of a game). More subtly, there are any number of situations that could count as challenges, and produce challenge fun. Maybe the game itself is quite easy, but a community of players has taken to playing it without looking at the screen. In this case, the experience may have the property of “challenge fun”, even though the challenge is not a part of the game: it’s a part of the particular game-experience. So the separation of “types of fun” from their causes is useful in order to think clearly about the goal: the creation of fun experiences (of course, other goals are possible, but that’s perhaps a subject for another blog post).

I’ve rambled on a bit about fun and games, and I haven’t really addressed the meat of the problem in detail, but I think I’ve given an overview of one way to think about and look for fun in games. The hard work, which is actually classifying the different types of fun and their causes, is the subject for more than a blog post; in fact, it’s the subject of several books and research papers that I’ve been reading through. But the important points are that fun arises from experiences, not directly from games, and that there are many types and causes of fun, some of which have not been explored much in the context of games.

• “Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story” by Nicole Lazzaro.
• “GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games” by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
• “An Experiment in Automatic Game Design” by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

One other thing that I’ve not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it’s cited by most of what I’ve read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.

• Social Networks and Networked Cultural Practices
• The Evolving Cultural Landscape of Electronic Literature
• Remix Culture, Machinima, and Mash-ups
• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Producing Interactive Audiovisual Art Forms
• Collective Narratives Online, and
• Approaches to “Close Reading” and “Close Writing” Digital Artifacts

The seminar will be organized by the LLE Digital Culture group, which has invited contributions from about 20 international researchers and artists. In addition to the scholarly seminar Nov. 9th and 10th at the University of Bergen, two evening programs will take place Nov. 8th and 9th at Landmark Café at Bergen Kunsthall, to showcase innovative work (performance descriptions) and will be open to the public. Anyone interested in attending can register on the conference site. We will also be filming the performances, and intend to make some version of those recordings publicly available after the event. As with the Electronic Literature in Europe conference we held here at UiB last year, which helped to strengthen a European electronic literature network, it is my hope that this conference will serve to help build new relationships and strengthen connections between artists, writers, and researchers working in different aspects of collaborative interdisciplinary network-based art, and to suggest some directions for future creative activities and research. It should also be a good deal of fun. I’m looking forward to it.

Animation Production
The Film and Media Studies Department at Dartmouth College is accepting applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position in animation production. Candidates will be expected to teach both introductory and advanced level courses in animation production that represent a spectrum of animation formats, from hand-drawn and stop motion, to 2D Flash and 3D Maya. The ideal candidate will also be able to offer courses to supplement our critical studies curriculum in one or more of the following areas: international media studies, new media formats, media history/theory.

The Film and Media Studies Department offers a major and minor and averages an annual enrollment of 450 students in our course offerings. The department’s curriculum emphasizes an integration of media theory, history, and practice, and faculty have a history of inter-disciplinary teaching and research. Our majors and minors often double-major or minor in other intellectual and artistic fields, and the department’s current animation offerings are electives in the Computer Science Department’s Digital Arts Minor.

Candidates should hold a PhD, MFA, or equivalent terminal degree (or be near completion) and demonstrate potential for original artistic production and/or scholarship.

Candidates should submit only a letter of application, CV, and names of three references to:
Prof. Amy Lawrence, Chair
Department of Film and Media Studies
Dartmouth College
319 Wilson Hall, HB 6194
Hanover, NH 03755
e-mail: film.job@dartmouth.edu

Deadline: November 15, 2009

Dartmouth is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and has a strong commitment to diversity. We welcome applications from a broad spectrum of people, including women, persons of color, persons with disabilities, and veterans.

Pseudo 3D graphics is the road less traveled these days, but this non-polygon method of making racetracks and other planar spaces appear to be 3D is fascinating. It’s written up very clearly, with code, example images, and discussion of games that use unusual pseudo-3D techniques, in an article by Louis Gorenfeld. I like how the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed – the method is treated as neither strictly inferior or “way better” than what we usually think of as 3D. This one’s not only relevant to platform studies, but an obvious topic for a blog called Post Position. Thanks to Josh Diaz for the link.

Babyfucker, Urs Allemann, trans. Peter Smith, biligual edition, Les Figues Press, 2010

“… mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.” —Borges

Babyfucker is far more disturbing than the title suggests. The book, written by a Swiss author, spawned a controversy in Germany in 1991. It begins unabashedly with the sentence “I fuck babies,” which the narrator declares to be his sentence. It is the reader’s sentence, too. However, there are no detailed representations of infant pedophilia. There is terse, detached description of an impossible garret, filled with baskets of babies, supplied with a spigot and drain for morphine-laced milk; trepidation at humanity and new life; a man who sees himself in the mirror as a baby — then as made up, limb by limb, of babies. If there are specific sexual visions here, they must belong mainly to the reader, not the text. Among other unsettling things, the volume (which is yellow and pink, tiny, and cute) shows the reader’s involvement in literary atrocities, in any violation committed by shared imagination.

I presented right after on ppg256, my series of poetry generators.

Jason Scott continues to back up Geocities, and, in the process of doing this, has posted page-heaps of under construction and email icons. Warning: ginormous.

Jason Nelson presented his new, uncanny, crapcredible game, Evidence of Everything Exploding.

Jason McIntosh has a great video about a non-digital game, Diplomacy, that he and friends did during a day-long session, wearing more-ot-less nationally appropriate hats.

zzzZRT: Unit compliance -- 0%. Unit appears incapable of mentioning people with any other first name. Attempting repair...

Jill Walker Rettberg has a short and insightful video about blogging as a way of learning.

Robert Pinsky’s libretto was sung in a musical reading of Tod Machover’s opera Death and the Powers at Cambridge’s A.R.T. on September 17. The workshop presentation (check out the photos) was a major milestone toward a full production of the digitally augmented “robot pageant,” which I found zestfully written and very cleverly framed.

Lots of people are playing and reviewing Interactive Fiction Competition games. A list of way-many reviews was put together and is being updated by Yoon Ha Lee.

Pablo Gervás’s contribution, “Computational Approaches to Storytelling and Creativity,” provides a clear introduction to the concept of creativity and the history of the term, analyzes the relevant features that storytelling systems can work upon, gives an outline of work in computational creativity so far, and continues with a capsule summary of several important storytelling systems. The last one of these is my system nn, which I renamed “Curveship” as I started focusing on a public release of the software.

In the nn system for interactive fiction (Montfort 2007) the user controls the main character of a story by introducing simple descriptions of what it should do, and the system responds with descriptions of the outcomes of the character’s actions. Within nn, the Narrator module [now called the Teller] provides storytelling functionality, so that the user can be “told” the story of the interaction so far. The Narrator module of nn addresses important issues in storytelling that had not been addressed by previous systems: order of presentation in narrative and focalization. Instead of telling events always in chronological order, the nn Narrator allows various alternative possibilities: flashbacks, flash-forwards, interleaving of events from two different time periods, telling events back to front. It also captures appropriate treatment of tense depending on the relative ordering of speech time, reference time, and event time. Focalization is handled by the use of different focalizer worlds [now called concepts] within the system. Aside from the actual world of the interactive fiction system, nn maintains additional separate worlds representing the individual perspectives and beliefs of different characters. These can be used to achieve correct treatment of focalization (telling the story from the point of view of specific characters). [pp. 57-58]

In discussing the systems, Gervás notes (and I agree) that the other systems he discussed, ranging from Klein’s Novel Writer and Meehan’s Talespin to The Virtual Storyteller and Riedl’s Fabulist, are system for inventing stories, while nn’s Narrator (Curveship’s Teller) is the only system for telling stories. He writes:

If the processes for inventing stories in the reviewed systems rate low in terms of creativity, the rating obtained by processes for telling stories is even sadder. The challenge of how to tell a story has received very little attention in general, and it is mostly tagged on as a final stage to systems that concentrate on inventing stories. The nn system is a notable exception in that it involves a significant effort to model computationally some of the basic elements contained in Genette’s work on narrative discourse (Genette 1980): relative order of presentation and focalization. However, all the systems that tell the stories they invent do in fact include default solutions to many of the technical challenges involved in telling a story. [p. 60]

Although Gervás has provided a good take on the system, I’ll just note one way in which Curveship (née nn) does a bit more than the article might suggest to reader and one way in which it does less.

Genette described five categories of narrative discourse: order, frequency, speed, mood (which includes focalization), and voice (which includes distance). Curveship can vary not only order and focalization; it also allows for significant variation in the other three categories. I hope this will be of practical interest to interactive fiction authors and to those seeking to teach narrative theory using Curveship. However, the main research advances that have been made so far are in the two areas that Gervás indicates: order and mood (specifically, focalization).

While Curveship can automatically creative narrative variation based on parameters, I have to note that I am not putting it forth as a creative system. This makes it unlike many of the programs discussed in Gervás’s article and in this issue of AI Magazine. Given a specification for telling (which is called a spin), the system can make the appropriate changes and generate suitable text. However, the system does not, by itself, determine how a story should be told. The code that individual IF authors and AI researchers write is needed to accomplish that task.

Of course, formalizing the elements of narrative variation is necessary for any principled system that is supposed to vary the telling of a story. I hope that Curveship’s Teller will be deeply relevant to work in the creative invention and telling of stories, and that it will be used not only to enable new sorts of learning systems and interactive fiction pieces but also, in modified or unmodified form, as a component of creative systems.

Tale of Tales

Starting with The Endless Forest, Tale of Tale’s have consistently created environments that exist for the purpose of being looked at and explored.  This may not sound all that unique as most 3D games have environments that are explored, but the difference is that these games exist solely for this purpose.  To them, game environments are not containers for gameplay, but rather are the reason for gameplay.  By only affording the player navigation controls, the player’s mind is free to embark on a journey of induction and introspection.  In their own words, Fatale “offers an experimental play experience that stimulates the imagination and encourages multiple interpretations and personal associations.”

Tale of Tales are not alone in creating games for this purpose.  Games that encourage observation and consideration of their environments can be said to form an art movement that I am referring to as the observational immersionist style.

In the second and main act of Fatale, the player controls an entity that can look upon a courtyard inspired by John Wilde’s 1891 interpretation of the biblical story of Salome.  The story goes like this: a girl, Salome, falls in love with John the Baptist and he rejects her.  She then performs a dance and demands and receives his head as a reward.  The game takes place after these events.  It is night and there is a girl, Salome, devoid of any strong emotion staring out into space with the head on a plate next to her.  Around the scene are a number of objects, candles and two other unmoving characters.  The game does an amazing job of telling the story through what Jenkins calls embedded narrative.  The player then explores the world looking for lit candles and extinguishing their flame.  Mechanically, you could label the game as a mere collect-a-thon as much of the game involves scouring the world for these candles.  But the formal rule system doesn’t account for the strong sense of place created by what the player sees and hears while locating these candles.  The surreal juxtaposition of objects and characters, along with the somewhat unsettling soundscape, is the real take away from this game.

For example, at one point, the character Salome (next to the head…) is revealed to be wearing an iPod Nano and earbuds.  Without being an expert on the history and uses of the story of Salome, I cannot offer any particularly sophisticated interpretation of implications of this, but it did inspire identification with this character from another time and was definitely a reflexive moment.

Salome with an iPod?

However, this is not to say that the mechanics are of no significance and Fatale doesn’t heavily rely on its formal rule system.  Despite Tale of Tales’ consistent and explicit rejection of the notion that designers should focus on rule systems to encode personal expression (they even go so far as to claim that rules are destructive to art), in practice they seems to champion a particular set of rules – those that serve to emphasize the environment.  By providing novel and slow moving navigation controls, the player’s mind is freed up to notice the somewhat surreal and temporally inconsistent objects that fill the world of Fatale.  Also, once a candle is found, an “ideal” composition is assumed by the camera that gives a clear and aesthetically pleasing perspective on the objects surrounding the candle.  Given this perspective, the player can then extinguish the candle by holding the cursor, represented as smoke, steady over the flame.  Once extinguished, the scene becomes darker and the candle’s flame replaces the smoke and serves as a small “flashlight” to more carefully examine the scene.  Often, this transition point, where the scene gets darker and the player starts to control the flame, is used as an opportunity to highlight certain elements of the scene (e.g. the iPod).  In this way, Tale of Tales uses rules to encourage the observation and consideration of Fatale’s environments.

Judith

Tale of Tales are certainly not alone is creating games that seek to encourage the observation and reflection about their virtual worlds.  My game Reflect was created with this goal in mind, though attempted keep the player’s attention by adding mechanics about looking and navigation.  Terry Cavanagh’s game Judith, while having a more narrative focus, has gameplay that involves navigating and observing a low fidelity 3D house.  Tracy Fullerton’s The Night Journey seeks to inspire introspection through observation and exploration with a defamiliarized world and control

Osmose

scheme.  Char Davies’ virtual reality projects, Osmose and Ephémère, can be said to be created at least partially for this purpose as well.  As a fringe example, Bioshock is praised far more often for how it created such a strong sense of place/space than its FPS gameplay.

The experiences these games provide are constructed through focused observation of the land and sound scapes.  Game rules, rather than being metaphorical, or simulations of real world phenomena are used to emphasize the environment.  Through means of sensory observation these games succeed in creating a strong sense of immersion and here I label them as part of an observational immersionist movement.  I’ve been noticing, designing and trying to speak with people about games like Fatale for a few years now and I’ve struggled with a label to this approach by.  Labeling movements helps for discussion and education but I by no means want to imply that these designers are collaborating or are even intentionally adhering or limited to this particular style.

The observational immersionist approach, as discussed above, seems to be important to what Tale of Tales have been trying to accomplish with their games.  I’m not certain if this phrase will resonate with anyone else, but if nothing else, coming up with it helped me describe what I loved about Fatale.  So, if you haven’t already, support these great artists and buy Fatale now!

Further information on talks and scheduling information is after the cut.

Talk: Computational Intelligence for Content Creation, Julian Togelius (ITU Copenhagen)

9am – 10am, E2-180 (Simularium)

This talk will outline how various techniques and methods from computational intelligence, such as evolutionary computation and neural networks can be used to procedurally generate game content. The central idea is that content creation is seen as an optimization problem, with models of player behaviour and player experience used as objective / fitness function for the content being optimized. Examples that will be given include track layouts for racing games, rule sets for Pac-Man-like games, and level designs for Super Mario Bros. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how other successful techniques from computational intelligence, such as collaborative filtering, can be subverted to serve the needs of procedural content generation.

Talk: Experience Management through Narrative Content Generation, Mark Riedl (Georgia Tech)

10am – 11am, E2-180 (Simularium)

Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience.  We as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and to educate. In this talk, I will argue for automated narrative generation as an approach to procedural content generation. A computational system capable of narrative generation can automatically produce stories, movies, computer game quests, and agent behaviors that are customized to an individual’s preferences, needs, and desires. Narrative generation also facilitates dynamically created interactive experiences that balance plot coherence against player self-agency.  I will describe our approach to narrative content generation, experience management, and potential implications.

Demo Session (Expressive Intelligence Studio)

11am – Noon, E2-392

1. Launchpad: Rhythm-Based Level Generation for Platformers, Gillian Smith
2. BIPED: Computational Support for Playtesting Game Sketches, Adam Smith and Mark Nelson
3. WideRuled: A Simple Interface for Author Goal Based Story Generation, James Skorupski
4. EMPath: An Application of Declarative Optimization-Based Drama Management, Sherol Chen

Talk: Using Procedural Generation for Human-Computer Collaboration, Kate Compton (EA/Maxis)

1:45pm – 2:45pm, E2-180 (Simularium)

There exists an underlying predisposition in procedural generation to treat the generation algorithm as a stand-alone, completely autonomous black box.  When the game needs more content, the algorithm supplies it.  This ignores one of the greatest advantages of procedural generation: since it runs in real time, the player should be able to engage, modify and direct the system as it is running.  In turn, the system can respond to the player’s actions: modifying, correcting, guiding, and judging them.  I will discuss several examples of user-guided procedural generation in current games, as well as show examples of how it can be used in the future.

Panel: The Future of Procedural Content Generation, moderated by Michael Mateas (UCSC)

5:30pm – 6:30pm, E2-180 (Simularium)

Panelists are Julian Togelius, Mark Riedl, and Kate Compton.

A print story also appears on the station’s website.

StarCraft

I’ve been interested in developing AI for StarCraft for several years now. I recently came across the Broodwar API project, which provides hooks into StarCraft. It enables developers to query game state as well as issue orders to units. The Broodwar API makes it possible to write custom AI bots for StarCraft.

There are several benefits to using StarCraft as an environment for evaluating game AI. StarCraft is a robust, commercial RTS game that has been around for over 10 years. The game is more complex than current research systems due to its distinct races, deep tech trees and large map pool. Also, StarCraft has developed a large following of players, resulting in a huge number of game traces available for analysis.

The Broodwar API provides several features that make StarCraft a viable AI testbed. First, the API provides a flag for enabling or disabling perfect information.  When the flag is disabled, the “fog of war” is enforced. There is also a flag to enable or disable user interaction. Second, the API can be used when running single or multiplayer games. Therefore, bots can be configured to compete against a human, the standard StarCraft AI or another bot utilizing the Broodwar API.

StarCraft is launched using a 3rd party application, which injects the Broodwar API. The AI module communicates with the ProxyBot using sockets.

My goal is to develop an AI system for StarCraft that integrates planning and data mining techniques. The target planning language is ABL, which compiles to Java code. In order to enable communication between StarCraft and ABL, I built the StarCraft ProxyBot, which uses socket communication.  The ProxyBot makes it possible to develop a Java-based StarCraft AI system.

The top image shows the player's view of a StarCraft game. The bottom image shows the proxy bot's view of the game state.

Fantastic Monkey Island 2 render in Crysis.

If anyone is yet to be convinced on the power of a great portfolio, I bet the creator, Hannes Appel, can look forward to an inbox stuffed with job offers in the coming weeks.

[Via Offworld, .tiff]

“Hello, my name is Ian Bogost” (press Click to Play in the top right).

I’m glad there’s no English translation of the web site, I like not knowing why he’s there. It’s like when you see Matt Damon on Japanese commercials, and you have no idea what he’s selling.

Ian Bogost = Matt Damon. You heard it here first.