Utensils in a Landscape, Chris Edwards, Stray Dog Editions, Vagabond Press, 2001

Searching for something suitably disruptive in the landscape of Australia, where Jacket is rooted, I found this. The first poem is made from sometimes misquoted bits of The Book of Common Prayer and Burroughs’s “The Cut-Up Method …” With technical and abstract language, folklore, Mallarmé, and guy-on-guy action, the book offers all sorts of utensil viewing. And later, in “but me,” this reflection:

My project, which began in
one room of the abyss, soon spread toward a perimeter
you can imagine, should you be inclined to do so.

I usually prefer projects in which sources are altered sparingly and systematically – Craig Dworkin’s “Legion” is a brilliant example. These approximate centos work, though. The invented language weaves with the appropriated, making it seem that Edwards could have done it all with his pen – or all with his scissors.

They were all instituted to function based off of mass audience interactions and they all deliver strong and dramatically-compelling narratives.  The idea of interactive preexists video games and virtual worlds, and it’s alway refreshing to go back and examine new ways that interactivity plays out in our world today.

American Idol is the most “house-hold” of the three, mostly because it is most accessible, simple, and easy to digest.  The TV show draws you into the parallel narratives of all the contestants on the show.  Of course, for a contest where individuals have the opportunity to go against the odds in order to live their greatest dream, American Idol pulls on some core intrinsic desires among all people.  Overall, it benefits from this need to satiate a desire for the dramatically compelling and perhaps, affect the outcome of something that matters to somebody.  Maybe to abstract even further, it’s to give people a sense of being part of something important or interesting (albeit, there’s not a whole lot of agency as an audience to American Idol).

Although lonelygirl15 is presented under the guise of some sort of reality entertainment, it’s actually an almost fully-scripted experience.  I had the privilege to come across it right before it was revealed to be staged by filmmakers.  On youtube, I watched the vlogs of a sheltered religious girl, both deep and yet simple, share about her struggles with emerging adulthood.  The vlogs progress to reveal that she is in some sort of dangerous cult and in preparation to be a human sacrifice.  Her and her friends go against the odds, break away from what is expected of them to change the world.

The narrative, for the first series, was absolutely compelling, creative, and unexpected.  As these “actors” performed on their youtube channels, they also interacted with non-actor viewers in, what would be, typical internet conversation, as if the characters were real people.  Throughout the series, other “viewers” would fall into the lime-light only to be revealed as other staged characters for the narrative.  The lines between real and fabricated were able to be blurred by the power and culture around web 2.0.

In comparison, longelygirl15 wins for having far more agency (and creativity).  American Idol, on the other hand, unifies the convergent stories of real life to form one emergently cohesive experience, as opposed to having it made up. Still, lonelygirl15 is an immersive space where anybody can interact as themselves or their own creation to fit the “reality” of the storyworld.  User created content is commonly integrated and acknowledged by the staged actors, but also expected and accepted as expansions of the world.  Thus, the lonelygirl15 community has created a universe where anyone can participate in this psuedo-reality youtube drama.

I believe that the most unlikely-acknowledged interactive experience is that of Invisible Children.  Three film-makers go to Uganda to discover a story that’s changed the world and so many lives.  I have a few friends who were roadies for the Invisible Children non-profit that emerged from the film, and their stories are more captivating than any reality TV show or modern fiction.  The film-makers are indeed great storytellers, but they’ve given over authorial control and engineered their experience to be driven by interactivity.  On one level, anyone can volunteer and be a prominent acting agent.  In so many other ways, events and ideas are employed to gather as much participation as possible, all the while authoring the story as it unfolds.  Invisible Children is the archetypal example of a modern-day interactive documentary that continues to make itself as a result of its “fan-base,” showing us that changing the world in observable and distinct ways is perhaps the greatest of all agency.

The overly-analytical side of me believes that mass media has disillusioned us to feel things only when they are made up.  The truth is: our imagination is based off of those possibilities and even the desire to experience something so powerful for ourselves.  Mass media makes it so easy that we forget to pay attention to those things in our own lives, and the agency we have in the world around us, such as what the Invisible Children narrative space is trying to do.  Our creative media should be representing the reverence we have for the real things in our lives, not the replacement, because we are, in fact, able to live out the things that captivate us about fiction in our real lives.  I believe that the beauty of fabricated experiences speak to us, because of how possible those situations actually are.

So, if your life is boring and you need to be entertained, why not join and be entertained by the meaningful narrative that is around you?

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.

Like a number of you, I’ve talked with Heather at places like GDC (she also worked with Michael at GA Tech way back when). You may have also played games she worked on at places like Telltale. I’d love to see what she’ll create if the funding comes through. She’s more than 2/3 of the way there, as of this writing, with close to 100 backers. So, if you can, take a moment to make a pledge!

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.

It is difficult to imagine anything but D&D as a wholesome family activity after this commercial:

Perhaps this old classic Tom Hanks movie
Mazes and Monsters, may have had more influence than one would have imagined.

Edmund McMillen (http://edmundm.com/), renown indie game designer

Kate Compton, EA/Maxis technical artist and avid indie game jammer

Alex Neuse, founder of local Santa Cruz game studio Gaijin Games (http://www.gaijingames.com/)

All of the talks should be great, so I hope you can make it!

Along with the other members of the board of SASDG, I am working on a proposal to the ACM for the creation of a new Special Interest Group on Computer Games, to be known as SIGGAME. We’re looking for potential members.

The goal of the new SIGGAME is:

To foster, promote, and communicate high-quality research in the science, design, engineering, technology, educational applications, and culture of computer games.

Since the creation of computer games includes expertise from almost all areas in computer science and engages issues from multiple disciplines including social science, fine art, and liberal arts, SIGGAME will intersect, enrich, and cross-pollinate many traditional research areas. SIGGAME will provide a common forum in which researchers and practitioners in the many disciplines that have a stake in computer games will have a chance to meet and interact.

Part of the proposal involves gathering names of individuals who would join the special interest group. More potential members improves the chance that ACM will approve the proposal.

If you would join an ACM SIGGAME once it is formed, please email the
following to me, Jim Whitehead <ejw@cs.ucsc.edu>:

• Name
• University/Company
• email address
• If you are a current ACM member

Thank you!

I attended Super Happy Dev House 36 and presented a lightening talk about the upcoming AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition. The competition is interesting to the hacker community at Super Happy Dev House, because the Broodwar API enabling the competition is a reverse engineering project providing direct access to game state and units in StarCraft. There are several projects built on top of the Broodwar API which enable developers to write StarCraft AI in a variety of languages including Java, Python, LUA and C#.

In the presentation, I discuss the motivation leading up to the StarCraft AI Competition and the technology enabling it. Follow the competition at EIS,  Google Code, YouTube, Twitter and Slashdot.

As we prepare to publish a photo book of Implementation we have been gathering and tagging new photographs submitted by people around the world at a dedicated Flickr site. We have gotten in hundreds of new photos and the process of using flickr to organize the material has been very interesting. I’ll write more about that process later, but for now I wanted to share this. Along with some others I have been putting Implementation stickers up in Bergen. As I photograph the stickers that people have put up, I have been recording the location information and adding that to flickr. Above is a Google maps/flickr mashup created with iMapFlickr. With this map, you can explore Bergen and explore Implementation. Have fun.

4pm, Jan 26th 2010
Tiltfactor lab

Additional links to Oliveros’ artifacts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9GJCL3PpYA
running electric charges through herself
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpJ2JjZhcFI

Pauline Oliveros, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound — forging new ground for herself and others.

Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly effects those who experience it and eludes many who try to write about it. “On some level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would seem to be very close to that level.” John Rockwell Oliveros has been honored with awards, grants and concerts internationally. Whether performing at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., in an underground cavern, or in the studios of West German Radio, Oliveros’ commitment to interaction with the moment is unchanged. She can make the sound of a sweeping siren into another instrument of the ensemble.

Through Deep Listening Pieces and earlier Sonic Meditations Oliveros introduced the concept of incorporating all environmental sounds into musical performance. To make a pleasurable experience of this requires focused concentration, skilled musicianship and strong improvisational skills, which are the hallmarks of Oliveros’ form. In performance Oliveros uses an accordion which has been re-tuned in two different systems of her just intonation in addition to electronics to alter the sound of the accordion and to explore the individual characteristics of each room. (Tuning Chart)

Pauline Oliveros has built a loyal following through her concerts, recordings, publications and musical compositions that she has written for soloists and ensembles in music, dance, theater and interarts companies. She has also provided leadership within the music community from her early years as the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (formerly the Tape Music Center at Mills), director of the Center for Music Experiment during her 14 year tenure as professor of music at the University of California at San Diego to acting in an advisory capacity for organizations such as The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, and many private foundations. She now serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been vocal about representing the needs of individual artists, about the need for diversity and experimentation in the arts, and promoting cooperation and good will among people.

Mon générateur d’histoires “The Two” est désormais en ligne avec une traduction française, “Les deux” , de Serge Bouchardon. La version anglaise était auparavant disponible en Python. C’était le second de trois générateurs de 1k que j’avais réalisés à la fin de 2008. “Les deux” génère des histoires toutes simples de trois lignes, mais dont l’effet de sens n’est peut-être pas si simple. Les versions anglaise et française sont à présent disponibles en JavaScript et sont ainsi facilement accessibles sur le Web.

My story generator, “The Two,” is now online along with a French translation, “Les deux,” by Serge Bouchardon. The English version of the story was previously available in Python. It was the second of three 1k story generators that I wrote near the end of 2008. “The Two” generates three-line stories in a straightforward way, although the effect may not be straightforward. Both French and English versions are now available in JavaScript, so they can be run from the Web easily.

Also, Steve Reich, eat your heart out. And let it be a dish served cold.

Gatz, Elevator Repair Service, directed by John Collins, at American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA, Jan 7-Feb 7 2010

This play answers the question “what’s six and a half hours long, uses every word of The Great Gatsby as its text, and cannot be staged in New York?” Gatz is an admirable, extreme adaptation. Most of the words are spoken by Scott Shepherd, who reads Nick’s dialogue and his narration. A large cast voices other parts and also puts on effective dumbshows. On the empty space of the stage, a low-rent, aging office makes a second space which then is wittily made into a third, one which includes West Egg and Gatsby’s mansion. The set initially harbors a (broken) computer but is made to connect to the 1920s via windows, a swivel chair, and other elements. Actions are carried out before they are verbally narrated, so that the words sometimes become a sort of comical rimshot, anticipated by the actors; both actions and words get space of their own this way, too. The result, odd as it may seem, is both playful and faithful, capable of satisfying avant-garde theatergoers as well as great books enthusiasts.

The lowdown on Zork’s name, inasmuch as a lowdown has been provided in print, was given by authors Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson in 1979 in the article “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” Computer 12:4, 51-59 (April 1979):

The first version of Zork appeared in June 1977. Interestingly enough, it was never “announced” or “installed” for use, and the name was chosen because it was a widely used nonsense word, like “foobar.”

This is a clear explanation, but it raises the question of how this particular nonsense word came into wide use at MIT. It seems reasonable to pursue this question, and reasonable that there would be some discernable answer. After all, there’s a whole official document, RFC 3092, explaining the etymology of “foobar.” It could be interesting to know what sort of nonsense word “zork” is, since it’s quite a different thing, with very different resonances, to borrow a “nonsense” term from Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll as opposed to Hugo Ball or Tristan Tzara. “Zork,” of course, doesn’t seem to derive from either humorous English nonsense poetry or Dada; the possibilities for its origins are more complex.

Slouching from “Zorch”?

In the first part of “The History of Zork,” The New Zork Times 4:1 (Winter 1985), Tim Anderson adds to the earlier discussion and suggests a possible derivation for the word:

Zork, by the way, was never really named. “Zork” was a nonsense word floating around; it was usually a verb, as in “zork the fweep,” and may have been derived from “zorch.” (“Zorch” is another nonsense word implying total destruction.) We tended to name our programs with the word “zork” until they were ready to be installed on the system.

“Zorch” is listed in Peter R. Samson’s 1959 “TMRC Dictionary” – the dictionary of the Tech Model Railroad Club, an organization that was important in helping to begin and foster recreational computing. The term meant, at that time, “to attack with an inverse heat sink” – that is, to attack with a heat source – and is explained as “Another of David Sawyer’s sound effects, which I reinterpreted as a colorful variant of ’scorch.’” It could also be imagined as a variant of “torch” – either way, the application of heat is suggested. This definition is consistent with the sense of “zorch” that Anderson gives, although a bit more specific. It is quite possible that “zork” does derive from “zorch,” as Anderson and others guess, but it is not clear why a word so derived would then be used as a placeholder program name. It’s also at least arguable that “zork” sounds less destructive than “zorch,” as the unintimidating back-formations “scork” and “tork” suggest. If that’s the case, why would a less intense term come to be used when the original term is more intense and very comical? While the “zorch” etymology might be right, it at least seems worthwhile to look to other possibilities.

Textbook Examples

“Zork” occurs occasionally, although rarely, as a proper name in various print sources in the decades leading up to 1977. Google Book Search reveals that some more nonsensical uses occur in some textbook examples in the 1970s. In Introduction to Experimental Psychology by Douglas W. Matheson, Richard Loren Bruce, and Kenneth L. Beauchamp (1970, 2nd. ed 1974) the meaningless “zork” model is introduced as a contrast to a medical model. “Zork” is also used as a fictional place name in Henry F. DeFrancesco’s 1975 Quantitative Analysis Methods for Substantive Analysts. There is some chance that the term was picked up from such a source. Zork explicitly pokes fun at the material nature of textbooks by including a “this space intentionally left blank” joke, which refers to a message sometimes printed on textbook’s blank pages to let readers know that they have not been left blank due to a printing error. Given this, it would be hard to rule out to possibility of the term “zork” coming from a textbook. Of course, the term could have appeared at MIT indirectly, in an example given in a lecture, on a problem set, or on a test, even if a book with the example in it was not assigned as a text. But there is nothing to strongly recommend this etymology, either. And while the former textbook example is clearly the more vivid, it is also much less likely to have been encountered by the Zork authors, since MIT lacks a psychology department.

There has been some speculation – specifically, in this mailing-list thread – that the term “zork” may come to MIT via John Brunner, whose poetry chapbook A Hastily Thrown-Together Bit of Zork was published in 1974. Although the sense of the word as it appears in the title is completely consistent with the MIT meaning of the term, it is not clear that this 24-page pamphlet, published by Sqaure House Books in an edition of 200 (50 numbered and signed), had made it to MIT by the time Zork coalesced, beginning in 1977. Nevertheless, the idea of a science-fictional vector for the term is appealing.

How Brunner Happened upon “Zork”

On the unnumbered second page of A Hastily Thrown-Together Bit of Zork, Brunner notes that “the title resulted from Simon Joukes’s first encounter with a typewriter that didn’t speak Flemish.” According to this history of Dutch and Flemish fandom, Simon Joukes was active in Flemish fandom and was a part of the club Sfan, helping to publish Info-Sfan, which became SF Magazine.

Here is a Belgian typewriter, manufactured by Olivetti. (This blog post is the source for the image.) The letters are laid out just as they are on a French typewriter, in the AZERTY scheme. As you can see, if you’ve learned to type the word “WORK” on a typewriter like this, and someone then substitutes a British (or US) typewriter without your noticing, and you then try to type that word without looking at the keys, you’ll type “ZORK.” (Since the “W” and “Z” are switched in this layout, the same thing would happen to a British typist who uses to a Belgian typewriter without noticing how the keys are labeled.)

It’s particularly appealing that this etymology makes zork an altered form of, or an alternative to … work.

Another Science-Fiction “Zork”

Brunner’s use of “zork” in the title of his book was not the first appearance of the word in science fiction. The word made an appearance earlier in Lin Carter’s novel The Purloined Planet, published in 1969. It was used in the name of an important character … “Zork Arrgh.”

It’s likely that Brunner at least glanced at the name of this key character. Lin Carter’s novel was published in a Belmont Double edition with “two complete science fiction novels.” The other was Brunner’s The Evil That Men Do.

While Simon Joukes may have typed out the word “Zork” and directly inspired Brunner’s 1974 title, the word may have rang out to Brunner as interesting and particulaly amusing because of Carter’s earlier use of it.

“Zork” and How She Is Spoke

There is some chance that people at MIT saw Brunner’s slim book of poems, but it seems far from certain. As of this writing, WorldCat lists only four university libraries in the United States that have this limited-edition book. MITSFS, the MIT Science Fiction Society, boasts the world’s largest open-stack library of science fiction and has 83 titles by Brunner in its catalog – but A Hastily Thrown-Together Bit of Zork is not among these. The Evil That Men Do / The Purloined Planet is in the collection, however.

Even when all of these additional leads are considered, it seems there is no strong conclusion to be drawn about the deeper etymology of the name of MIT’s, and Infocom’s, most famous text adventure. “Zork” might have been a corruption or further development of “zorch.” It may have entered the argot because of its use in an amusing curricular example, perhaps thanks to Quantitative Analysis Methods for Substantive Analysts or another textbook that hasn’t yet been ingested into Google Books. Or, science fiction may have been the vector for the word. If it was, though, it seems likely that it made its way into MIT speech not because of Brunner’s book of poems, but thanks to Zork Arrgh, a key character in 1969 novel by Lin Carter, one that was sitting on the shelves at MITSFS.

Perhaps more evidence will come to light, and the origins of the word “zork” as it was used at MIT in the late 1970s will become clear. Or, it may be that the origins of the word are lost forever – obliterated in a nook of a subculture’s linguistic history that has been irreversibly zorched.

A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, Jesper Juul, The MIT Press, 2010

Juul’s latest, like his Half-Real, offers many insights, particular and general, while being succinct and clear stylistically. The book is not just about matching tile games, although there’s a good chapter on them and their genealogy. It’s about the moment in the history of videogaming where games overflow their “hardcore” niche and begin to appeal to everyone. Juul describes the stereotypes of casual and hardcore games and players; then he demonstrates, using data from many interviews, exactly how they’re wrong. An important, high-level innovation involves figuring out how to study both games and players – in this case, to understand what exactly is meant by “casual games” and how much of what we associate with that has to do with “causal” modes of play. There’s also an excellent analysis of the social space of play in front of the screen, in Guitar Hero and Wii games. A Casual Revolution will be valuable for academics and those in industry, and will help keep the sun shining on games.

The album sc140 features 22 tracks, each one generated by no more than 140 characters of SuperCollider code. You can download 80 MB of MP3 (for the weak!) or grab the source code (less than 4 KB, with all the formatting) and, if necessary, install SuperCollider, which is free in every sense. Here’s a November New Scientist blog post about the album.

On the visual and literary side, check out Pall Thayer’s Microcodes, tiny art pieces in Perl. Thayer also offers a PDF guide to the appreciation of tiny programs. Some of Thayer’s program incorporate play with the human-legible dimension of code; “WAR has NO value,” now on the front page, is a simple and nice example of this.

The album sc140 features 22 tracks, each one generated by no more than 140 characters of SuperCollider code. You can download 80 MB of MP3 (for the weak!) or grab the source code (less than 4 KB, with all the formatting) and, if necessary, install SuperCollider, which is free in every sense. Here’s a November New Scientist blog post about the album.

On the visual and literary side, check out Pall Thayer’s Microcodes, tiny art pieces in Perl. Thayer also offers a PDF guide to the appreciation of tiny programs. Some of Thayer’s program incorporate play with the human-legible dimension of code; “WAR has NO value,” now on the front page, is a simple and nice example of this.

nick: so, I just have this question about the way you (and someone else) reacted to gender stereotyping in a nightmarish/dystopian/stereotypical game environments

nick: you wrote While there are some glaring stereotypes that take away from its freshness and originality (especially in regard to gender; the character’s wife is in the kitchen with a frying pan in the morning and tells the character he is late for work; the office execs are all male, etc.) about Every Day the Same Dream [previously on Post Position]

nick: it struck me because I was describing a student project to a poet

mary: y

nick: one which was completed before that game launched

nick: but had a similar stereotyped/nightmare world made of words in 3D space

nick: one of which was “wife”

nick: and my poet friend said “spouse”!

mary: ok….

nick: but I don’t understand why these negative-valence spaces that embody stereotypes in all these other ways

nick: are supposed to be equitable when it comes to gender

mary: well…

mary: I am not partial to other stereotypes either

mary: unless they are spoofed in incredibly interesting ways

mary: but

nick: I read Every Day the Same Dream as having entirely white people, too

mary: for example if I brought them all up all the time, I’m a horrible harpy broken record, and that isn’t my point in life. But not bringing things up = acceptance

mary: yes exactly

mary: I agree and I had that in there and then cut it out.

mary: for reason above.

nick: well, I guess I would point those things out as being consonant with the project rather than as taking away from it

nick: the game (and my student’s project) seems to be saying “here is an even more exaggerated version of the stereotypical world”

mary: well that could be. But everdayness, monotony, boredom could be happening to two people following that routine, two men, women, or one of each if we’d like. Or three for that matter. It just the frying pan and housewife just needs to go.

nick: well, they do, eventually &smiley;

mary: Since there are more women than men, why could not the character be a woman going to a drudge job?

mary: but you’re trying to make the game an image of reality instead of nightmare hegemony

nick: you could make the office workers men and women of different races

mary: it annoys me — I have not collected the numbers, but it annoys me that existentialist moments appear to happen more with male characters. 1984. etc.

nick: then, I’d argue, the game would not become more realistic or effective; it would have this sort of parody of workplace diversity in it

mary: well I did add diversity to the LAYOFF game. Everyone started white, the artist (who was Asian) defaulted to white)

mary: well then perhaps that would speak to me as a player as an effective parody

mary: mock diversity says something else, and is interesting. especially in college ads.

nick: yes, but I see that (LAYOFF) as trying to poke a hole through the abstract, we-don’t-expect-this-to-represent-reality type of game to show something about the real world

nick: which is admirable, but it isn’t the same project as these other games

mary: I guess I am rejecting the repeated aesthetic of abstract commentaries that use a represention of all white men.

nick: I’m asking because I’ve heard the same comment twice about the same type of game, from two people whose perspectives I very much respect, but I don’t understand the problem with this particular context – with a dystopian game exhibiting sexism among other stereotypical ills

mary: ah ok

nick: so it’s not that the sexist portrayal is wrong for the context, but that you could have made a different game which made the same point without it?

nick: maybe?

mary: yep

mary: and possibly a more interesting game, through reworking or challenging these stereotypes

mary: but that remains to be seen in implementation

nick: Jason Rohrer gets complaints about Passage having only a guy avatar as an option

mary: i can see that.

nick: of course, he also has described Passage as autobiographical (although I argue with his use of that term)

mary: it’s not automagically horrific to include men in a game!

nick: sure, and it’s not automatically good in every way to include a hot chick avatar

mary: right.

mary: it is about intentionality

mary: and I don’t think molleindustria was intentionally critiquing white heterosexuality.

mary: in fact…

nick: do you think if the sexism in Every Day the Same Dream were somehow called out as such (I don’t have any ideas about how), and critiqued, it would be better?

nick: perhaps even better than making a gender-neutral version?

mary: possibly!

mary: but that isn’t the point right now.

mary: of that game.

nick: I’d say it was being critiqued about as much as the automobile was

mary: and granted, 6 days, its a miracle.

nick: yep

nick: well, it’s worthwhile to think about how to improve on a 6-day project like that, though

mary: Hm. It feels different. The automobile isn’t on the receiving end of dates who have sexist attitudes, or jobs with racial bias. Possibly certain critiques are touchier than others.

nick: I guess my feeling is that a sexist world (treated critically) would be more in keeping with the project, or with a project like that, than a gender-neutral one

nick: maybe it’s easier to critique the automobile

mary: that could be true. Then husband and wife could both go to work, but he brings home twice the salary and she still has to cook

mary: that makes it more interesting to me.

nick: ha

mary: it pays attention to a lived condition.

mary: a detail. see what i mean. could be the same for race and such. but details are hard to put into ‘dreams’ and broad strokes, unless we think about it cleverly

mary: I appreciate your inquisitveness here nick.

nick: I guess the game includes a lot of stereotypes, and from my standpoint I don’t see it buying into any of them. but some do call for more critique and treatment

nick: I appreciate the convo

mary: Bringing this stuff is actually harder than ignoring it and moving on.

mary: but I think we need to tease out these implications

mary: not all stereotypes are created equally

nick: I think we should do a blog post, actually

mary: ok i’m game.

Nissan Datsun 510: Fastest Car on the Planet

Forza Motorsport 3 is, as described by one of the designers, “car porn.” And, well, that beauty above? That delicious, glistening, throbbing piece of machinery? That’s a Nissan Datsun 510 from 1970. You’re free to take a moment right now, if you need one… imagining yourself astride the seat, hand gripped on the gear shift, thrusting forwards through the forest…

At least, that’s what Forza 3 would have you think.

Once you’re back from your “moment,” please continue over the jump to see exactly what I’m talking about.

The video linked above is aptly titled “Forza Motorsport 3 Drag Race WTF.” It shows a very fast race car being soundly beaten by one of those beautiful Datsuns. This driver was not the first person to notice. The problem is that the Nissan is able to be upgraded with the engine from a Skyline, amongst other upgrades, which boosts the car’s horsepower output to a phenomenal degree.

What’s happened here? Who’s to blame? Is anyone at fault? Here be the dragon of emergence.

Dominant strategies are one of the first aspects of a game to be communicated around the Internet. As soon as they are discovered, the viral potential is enormous. Some members of the community will revel in them, some will be disgusted, and many will be ambivalent until they’re upset by them directly.

In order to talk about the problem effectively, we need to enforce the boundaries of the problem (not doing this can lead you to arguing with a psychologist until you’re blue in the face about the possibility of solving of the Turing Test¹ )

1. This is not a bug in the implementation (unlike Modern Warfare 2’s javelin glitch), but a bug in the game design itself.
2. The bug is a direct result of the emergence from having a very large number of combinations of cars and upgrades.

Doing some very rough mathematics, let’s assume there are 400 cars, each with a possible 25 upgrades that could be applied. This would give us:

This is, undoubtedly, a big number. It’s very, very rough: 25 upgrades is something I’ve pulled out of the air, and you can’t apply all upgrades at the same time (ie. you can’t apply two different types of exhausts). A more realistic number might be more along the order of:

The number gets very big due to the number of different upgrade combinations, which causes the tree of the possibilities to blow-up very quickly. Scientists dramatically call this an “explosion.”

That said, it is something we can enumerate, and 13 billion isn’t that many possibilities for a computer. However, for a human game designer, we’ve escaped the realms of human processing possibility, and there’s no way one person could ever understand such a state space.

The 'S' is for Software!

This is one of those problems where my ego imagines myself donning some sort of cape, adorned with fine circuit boards and transistors, and allowing myself to exclaim “software engineering to the rescue!” We could have detected the Nissan Datsun problem before the release of the game by encoding a set of designer expectations that we can test for. These expectations we’ll more formally call “assertions.”

A sample expectation, in this case, would be “An E-class car can’t win drag races in less than 25 seconds” or “An E-class car can’t beat upgraded B-class cars in a drag race.” We add them to a software program, benchmark all the possible cars, and come back and see which of our assertions failed. Perfect!

Such a program wouldn’t take long to create, so obviously there are hidden problems here. Here’s a few:

1. Encoding assertions, while not hard, exercises a part of the brain we don’t often use. What’s important to assert, and what isn’t? Programmers wrestle with this problem every day: which part of my software do I need to test the most? It’s not an easy mindset to be in, but it is possible.
2. Forza 3 takes about 3 seconds to benchmark the top speed of a car. If we ran that test across our low-ball estimate 13 million cars, it would take 1.2 CPU years. Against our conservative estimate of 13 billion cars, it would take 1276 CPU years. Oh dear. But! This just means that a brute force approach to testing isn’t possible. If we just look at the characteristics of the problem, maybe we can do better. Winning a 1 mile drag race is all about horsepower… what if we just calculate the statistics for each car and compare the HP? With a completely made up number of 0.1 seconds to calculate, we bring the numbers down to 15 days and 42 years, respectively. Some intelligence of searching (like testing the most expensive parts first) should improve the time it takes to get useful results.

As you can see, the struggle with designing correct emergent systems is a fight that designers are doomed to lose.

On the one hand, emergence is the key to making great games, experimentation and choice are a linchpin of the form. We can’t get rid of it, nor try to artificially constrain it. On the other hand, emergence creates systems that encourages abuse, being poked and prodded by millions every day. All it takes is one to communicate their results, and it’s all over. Gamers don’t want to lose in races to Datsuns. Testing against the emergent properties is going to become very important. I’m currently exploring this problem, and I hope to have something to show you all soon.

Until then, I’ll spend some time making the back of my Datsun look pretty. It’s all you’re ever going to see.

1. The Turing Test is well within our grasp if you understand the boundaries of the test: convincing someone else you’re human with just textual responses does not require sentience!

We’re asking Dartmouth students to propose to take on one of these five game challenges — more info will be sent on some of the projects upon inquiry. Approved proposals could launch student individuals or teams into game-stardom! Students who develop one of these games for Tiltfactor (with ample feedback from us) up to a working, fun, usable prototype will receive a Tiltfactor Fellowship, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000. Students of course will receive a design credit in the finished work.

The games include flash based game plans, as well as card games and board games.

Let the games begin! For more specifics, contact Professor Flanagan.
Respond with “tiltfactor fellowship” in the subject line!

Also, a short interview with me about interactive fiction and computer games is online at RPG Examiner. Thanks to Michael Tresca for his interest, his questions, and for posting the interview.

A second article, though a little short, struck us as offering an important nugget of information. In Barbara Strauch’s “How to Train the Aging Brain,” the journalist interviewed neuroscientists on the challenges and benefits to an older mind and the types of learning we benefit from in different stages of life.  A quote from the article that relates to Tiltfactor and our method of Critical Play: “Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should ‘jiggle their synapses a bit’ by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.”

While there are some glaring stereotypes that take away from its freshness and originality (especially in regard to gender; the character’s wife is in the kitchen with a frying pan in the morning and tells the character he is late for work; the office execs are all male, etc.), the game has a nice polish, another interpretation of the plight of the worker-drone already much explored in film (from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Mike Judge’s Office Space and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer.)

Made in about a week on a low budget, it sets a great example for other indie mini-game designers that with a strong design sensibility, good music, and clear choices. Congratulazioni!