This was posted on March 12 and yet no more than 22,000 people know about it by now. So, I figured that I’d better mention: Home Taping is Killing Music. (Thanks to Allen on ifmud.) And remember … whenever you violate copyright, God kills a kitten.

It doesn't look like the apocolypse

The title: Farmville Killed Gaming, V-Worlds, And Your Dog (tongue-in-cheek)

The premise: “…it seems the talk of GDC 2010 was… Farmville. Specifically, how metrics-driven game design (such as what Farmville uses) will destroy fun as we know it.”

The response: “i take particular exception to your statements about killing dogs. zynga is a dog loving company named after my dearly departed dog zinga.” (Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga)

Other luminaries, such as Raph Koster, wade into the discussion at the comments thread at Broken Toys.

For what it’s worth, I personally agree with Jennings’ conclusion that games aren’t cannibalizing themselves as we know them in order to cater to new markets. I think metrics-driven development is a useful, exciting tool that helps developers better understand their audience. No-one can ever claim Zynga’s game lineup is not catering to some segment of society. Just because we’re used to The West Wing, doesn’t mean other people can’t enjoy American Idol, whatever you think of it.

As Michael Jackson sang, if you want to be my baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or while, but it might matter if video games’ representation of minority races and women is absent, extremely scant, stiff, stereotypical, or obligatory. Why not add diversity of this sort to the list of things we’re willing to devote effort to – those things we want positively imagined and powerfully simulated in our games?

I tested the bot against several human players on the International Cyber Cup and was surprised to discover that the bot achieved a win rate of over 30% when tested in 40 matches.

Protoss versus Protoss (EISBot at 7 O’ clock)

Protoss versus Terran (EISBot at 11 O’ clock)

Protoss versus Zerg (EISBot at 7 O’ clock)

Ken is giving a talk titled:

“Graphics, Games, Characters and Touchpads — a tour of recent research”

Date: Tuesday, March 16
Time: 11:00am
Place: E2-180 (The Simularium)

Abstract

This talk will provide an overview of various recent
research,mincluding Games for Learning, pressure sensitive touch
devices, emotively expressive procedurally animated characters,
intuitive 3D modeling, and ideas about bridging the divide between
programmers and non-programmers.

Ken Perlin's Responsive Face demo.

Bio

Ken Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at
New York University, directs the NYU Games For Learning Institute. He
was also founding director of the Media Research Laboratory and director
of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests
include graphics, animation, user interfaces, science education and
multimedia. He received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and
turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in
feature films and television, as well as the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer
Graphics Achievement Award, the TrapCode award for achievement in
computer graphics research, the NYC Mayor’s award for excellence in
Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science
faculty at NYU, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the
National Science Foundation. He has also been a featured artist at the
Whitney Museum of American Art. Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from New York University, and a B.A. in theoretical
mathematics from Harvard University. Before working at NYU he was Head
of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY. Prior
to that he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at
Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. He has served on the Board of
Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH, and currently serves
on the Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association.

Francisco J. Ricardo of RISD’s Digital+Media Department has written a deep and detailed blog post, “From Objecthood to Processhood.” In it, he defends artists, their work, and their discourse about the digital, responding to Henry Jenkins’s 2000 article “Games, the New Lively Art,” which celebrates video games but isn’t as keen on the work of artists. He also describes the transition from a focus on the artwork, an object, to consideration of art as process, concluding with reference to my ppg256 series.

Also, a rather innovative defense of BASIC is advanced in “Where Dijkstra went wrong: the value of BASIC as a first programming language,” a post by Mike Taylor, who, by the way, has a totally sweet banner at the top of his blog. Edsger W. Dijkstra, who was my teacher at the University of Texas, is known for his work on structured programming and just about as well known for his quick denunciations of COBOL and BASIC. The post argues that BASIC is useful to programmers and allows them to discipline their thinking about programs. I would defend BASIC for a different, although not inconsistent, reason: The huge outpouring of innovative, diverse, creative programs – often very short ones – that were written in the 1970s and 1980s, making programming a widespread activity and showing people the potential of the computer for (among other things) amusement, simulation, play with language, and production of visual art. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and I wrote a bit more on this back in 2003 in our introduction to two BASIC programs on The New Media Reader CD-ROM.

One of Kevin Dill's game credits: Master of Orion 3

“The Art of Game AI: Sculpting Behavior with Data, Formulas, and Finesse”
Kevin Dill, Lockheed Martin

Date: Monday, March 15
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Place: E2-180 Simularium
Hosted By: Michael Mateas

Abstract
This lecture will explore the challenges that are involved in constructing believable AI behavior, the mindset that one must adopt to accurately model these behaviors, and the techniques that can be used to construct them. The attendee will leave with a broad summary of how to approach the artistry of constructing artificial behaviors – and will likely have adopted the annoying habit of assigning values and formulas to everything they see around them.

Biography
Kevin Dill has 9 years experience in the games industry as an AI developer and AI lead. He has 7 game credits, including Master of Orion 3, Axis and Allies, Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species, and Iron Man. He now works at Lockhead Martin, where he develops AI for training simulations that include a mix of live acting, mixed and augmented reality, and even animatronics. Kevin has a BA in Computer Science from Carleton College and an MS in Computer Science from Northwestern University.

This surprisingly broad lecture on game design was given by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to help students review for the final exam in our Foundations of Interactive Game Design class. However, if you are not one of the 300 students in the class, you might find it quite interesting to share with a friend. Perhaps you know someone who is very serious about games but is a little too attached to their fanboyism to see the bigger picture. Tell them to skip past the first two minutes of class business and jump right into the real intellectual meat.

If nothing else, it’s some tasty 0-day pirated education.

The Global Game Jam 2010 concluded over 30 days ago, but the treasure trove of indy creations it left behind remains largely unexplored. Then again, how is anyone supposed to review some 1000 games created specifically for an event that shuns any global judging? Who has that kind of time anyway? Certainly not overworked grad students!

But I’m here to tell you, you should try! Among these games you can find some of the most innovative zero-budget designs ever devised in the span of 48 hours and you can see the source code that produced them. I’m writing this review partly in hope of inspiring similar reflections from GGJ enthusiasts and partly in anticipation of our upcoming talk at the GDC Education Summit on this year’s Global Game Jam.

THE 2010 EVENT

We kicked off the inaugural GGJ back in 2009 with 53 sites in 23 countries. At the end, we had over 330 games produced. At this year’s event we had 138 jam sites in 39 countries and nearly tripled the number of project submissions. In addition to the expected jam powerhouses, Nordic Game Jam (Denmark) and Dutch Game Garden we had big participation from Israeli Game Developers, METUTECH-ATOM (Turkey), NYU Game Center, Tumbleweed Game Jam (Norway),  and Game Jam Sydney. In the US we had 55 jam sites in 30 states which accounted for 40% of total sites. There was great representation from Canada (10 sites), UK (8 sites), Germany (5 sites), Brazil (5 sites) and Finland (4 sites). Participation in Japan was not as high as it could have been due to bad timing with Japanese University schedules. We also approved first-timer sites in Colombia, Russia, Poland, India, Pakistan and Philippines and Malaysia. See the whole list.

There were many incredible stories from the jam sites. Only one actual jammer showed up to the site at the Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. But he and the organizer worked all weekend and together submitted Bacterial Invasion. It’s actually a decent, polished game with at least 3 levels (that’s as far as I got). I personally spent the weekend with the jammers at Santa Cruz who contributed 9 games. An audience choice vote was held with the “2D bullet hell shmup” RoboPunk narrowly beating the online virtual boardgame Sinistrum.

MY LIST OF INTERESTING GAMES

Big disclaimer. I have probably played only about 50 games which is barely 5% of the total! I’m certain I left out great gems that I will have to get to later, but I’m sure great games will emerge on their own. So don’t take this as anything other than a personal favorites list in progress. As a reminder, the 2010 global constraint was “deception.” This actually make it harder to review these games because quite a few of them implement the constraint as a surprise which you don’t want to spoil.

Kawaii Maximum Overkill

If you’re looking for cute, fuzzy, Mac friendly game of “love leading to death”, look no further than Kawaii Maximum Overkill from the Paris Game Jam. It’s a full 3D rendered game with beautiful art work. You play some kind of a limbless pig-like devil incarnate. Smaller creatures follow you around, express affection and try to touch you (which actually kills you). Your job is to lure them to a designated area so they can eaten! Yea, it’s a little dark, but brilliantly executed with just the right degree of difficulty, 3 nice levels and great music/sound.

One of the games making the biggest buzz, (if web hit rates are any indication) is Gnilley, from Game Jam Sydney. Advertised as “a thing with a microphone”, the game makes use of the mic as a controller in an otherwise routine 2D dungeon explorer game. The instructions are simple: “Yell –> Succeed”. The team made a great demonstration video on their website. This game is certain to be developed further and be published for real. Great job guys!

Limonus

Let me now ask you a question. What was the last game you played that featured suicide-bombing citrus fruit? That’s right, somebody went there! A team from IGDA Recife (Brazil), to be exact. In Limonus you deploy self-sacrificial lime-soldiers against insects who want to kill your lime-king. Your soldiers either blow themselves up taking an ant hill with them, or perform a harakiri and spread their acidic juices on to oncoming wasps. As you might have guessed, it’s not serious and it would be a real stretch to find any social commentary in this game. So, September 12th, it’s not, but  it does have great animation, engaging game-play and its own level designer. The latter is especially useful because the first level is rather difficult. It’s also web based. Always a plus in my book. Play it online.

In contrast to Limonus, The Mirror is designed to evoke some kind of social commentary, even if it is the “do it yourself” kind of commentary. The game is the latest work of Swedish experimental game developer Cactus (Jonothan Soderstrom) and his teammates at the Nordic Game Jam. Cactus is known for disturbing imagery and this game is no exception. You are interacting with what look like facial features on a vaguely phallic surface.  There are things that look like pimples with well known religious symbols on them and can pop them and move them around.

From Retro Affect Studio in Gilbert, Arizona come the game Depict1. The graphics and text instructions definitely pay homage to many things “retro”. The game play starts out like a familiar platformer but takes a deceptive turn. I can’t say much more, except it would be worth your time to check it out.

Author / Professor Jasper Juul of Ludologist fame, currently at NYU Game center, submitted what has to be considered the first “response” game in Global Game Jam’s short history. This “conceptual game” is called 4:32 and it is a response to Petri Purho’s 2009 GGJ submission 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness. That game itself was a reference to John Cage’s postmodern “musical” composition, 4′33″. In the spirit of the original Cage piece which pushed the boundaries of “music”, Purho’s 2009 submission pushed the boundaries of “game.” His submission lacked any interaction whatsoever beyond just starting the program. Now Juul’s response promises a boundary push of its own. Again, I won’t spoil it for you but a spirited discussion has started already. Try playing it first, though. Start here.

RRRJ

Another game that gets downright philosophical is RunRunRunJump by Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab. You play a giant capital letter “I” traveling along a (mostly) 1D line made up of what looks like “Magnetic Poetry” tiles, each with a word written on it. The word is the thing you have to do like “run” or “jump.” If you land on “fail”, you promptly lose. I don’t know if the designers intended for this but playing this game immediately reminded me of Kian Bashiri’s You have to Burn the Rope. If the comparison is valid, then RRRJ is like YHBR on steroids. This work takes performative deconstruction in games to a whole new level. Whereas YHBR gives you explicit instructions in the title and the initial screens, RRRJ gives them to you on every single step of the game! Whereas Henrik Nåmark’s “Now You’re A hero” is music that makes meta-references to the player in the game, Daniel Perry’s music in RRRJ makes meta-references to the music itself by literally singing “bass” and “melody” the whole time. More could be said of this, I’m sure. Just play it. You won’t be sorry.

Well, that’s all I have for now. I might follow up with more reviews later. I hope it was wroth your time.

AIIDE 2010 has posted a call for papers, just in time to advertise the conference at GDC. The deadline for papers and the industry track is May 16, 2010.

This year AIIDE will also be hosting a StarCraft AI competition!

Intro: "When I was 5 years old, I had a crush on Super Mario"

EIS was featured on current.com

The Game Developer’s Conference is less than a week away, and for those who don’t get to see what goes on during this amazing week, we, at the Expressive Intelligence Studio, put together a mini documentary about the “People Behind the Products.” Now, we aren’t film-makers at EIS, but in addition to doing some awesome research, it’s important to make the things we do accessible to especially those who only experience games as consumers.  To be honest, the best part of what I do, isn’t that I get to “play games,” but that I’m able to be part of creating games.  The creating process involves so many talented and creative people, and some of the best parts of video gaming is a bit hidden from those outside our community. I’m not sure what stops people from knowing more about us, but the purpose of this mini documentary is to invite those who appreciate being on the audience side of games into our community.  My hope is that we can enable more and more people to embrace the technology in ways where they aren’t merely consumers and grow the community around this inevitably magnificent technology.

Interview with LittleBigPlanet on the red carpet after the Game Developers Choice Awards

The producers at current.com chose our video to be featured in the tech section, and we were instantly voted up to the #1 spot in tech and #7 spot overall.  Thanks to all those who helped make this possible.

So, here’s our video into the unseen world of video games (watch, vote, comment, enjoy!):

Credits:

• Sherol Chen
• John Dalessi
• Russ Fan
• Fernando Galvan
• Ken Hullet
• Godric Johnson
• Tim Kim
• Kathleen Kralowec
• Ron Liu
• Bill Manegold
• Mark Nelson
• Adam Smith
• Anne Sullivan
• Jim Whitehead

Special Thanks:

• Digital Media Factory
• United Business Media
• Expressive Intelligence Studio and Supporting Members

Intro: "When I was 5 years old, I had a crush on Super Mario"

EIS was featured on current.com

The Game Developer’s Conference is less than a week away, and for those who don’t get to see what goes on during this amazing week, we, at the Expressive Intelligence Studio, put together a mini documentary about the “People Behind the Products.” Now, we aren’t film-makers at EIS, but in addition to doing some awesome research, it’s important to make the things we do accessible to especially those who only experience games as consumers.  To be honest, the best part of what I do, isn’t that I get to “play games,” but that I’m able to be part of creating games.  The creating process involves so many talented and creative people, and some of the best parts of video gaming is a bit hidden from those outside our community. I’m not sure what stops people from knowing more about us, but the purpose of this mini documentary is to invite those who appreciate being on the audience side of games into our community.  My hope is that we can enable more and more people to embrace the technology in ways where they aren’t merely consumers and grow the community around this inevitably magnificent technology.

Interview with LittleBigPlanet on the red carpet after the Game Developers Choice Awards

The producers at current.com chose our video to be featured in the tech section, and we were instantly voted up to the #1 spot in tech and #7 spot overall.  Thanks to all those who helped make this possible.

So, here’s our video into the unseen world of video games (watch, vote, comment, enjoy!):

Credits:

• Sherol Chen
• John Dalessi
• Russ Fan
• Fernando Galvan
• Ken Hullet
• Godric Johnson
• Tim Kim
• Kathleen Kralowec
• Ron Liu
• Bill Manegold
• Mark Nelson
• Adam Smith
• Anne Sullivan
• Jim Whitehead

Special Thanks:

• Digital Media Factory
• United Business Media
• Expressive Intelligence Studio and Supporting Members

The clustering of WoW Feral Druid forms (Bear on top, Cat on bottom)

Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note that this is inferred from statistics choices, it is not a simple flag that is set in the data itself.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing someone move beyond the common averages and deviations that are commonly performed on WoW Armory data; there’s so much more there than that!

A highly recommended read for anyone interested in the golden nuggets buried in that data set.

The group (Copyright Robinson Kuntz/Santa Cruz Sentinel)

EIS is now able to claim “big in Santa Cruz” after being featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the local newspaper (I’ve also heard reports of the story being syndicated to the San Jose Mercury News for the wider Bay Area).

Thousands of people are going to come and help us, some for hours at a time, and we will attract them through the pleasure of play. How can tagging an archive of old photographs ever be an enjoyable experience?

Contemporary designers are more and more mixing play with work, and at Tiltfactor, we’re interested in how this happens, and how one can foster expertise in the process. We’re also interested in how values manifest in these data-driven systems. In making games for the social good, and games that result in real-world contributions, the designer must rely on ideas beyond innovative game mechanics and good old-fashioned playtesting. The data entry system for repositories such as databases need to be so enjoyable, well-organized, and instantly rewarding that people approach the tasks with motivation playfully like… a game.

Crowdsourcing is already being done successfully in a few other games. Particulary inspiring for us is the work of Luis von Ahn and his “ESP Game” that is reportedly played by some users more than 40 hours a week! But there are obvious issues with crowdsourcing that such work suggests need fixing. Simple match mechanics inspire players to provide only the most common, obvious tags regarding a given image. The key problem is that archives are specific. They require specialized, precise information in order for their contents to remain relevant or useful to the people who wish to use them.

Professor Mary Flanagan has said that “Crowdsourcing is great for lowest common denominator data. But we also need to go beyond crowdsourcing and tap groups from each group’s base of expertise.” Our design team is thus challenged to encourage students, researchers and common users to be able to search for ridiculously specific items inside a given archive by traveling paths laid out by our players.

“Computer, show me happy pictures containing any species of duck in Florida before the year 1954.”

Boom.

Our designs for our metadata research are presented within a small suite of enjoyable games that encourages players to think harder and to dig deeper into the depths of human knowledge. More on these designs to come.

~Tiltfactor Team Member Brendan S, who is using a mental-mapping program called x-mind that is insanely useful (and free!). Check it out at www.xmind.com.

Date: Thursday, February 25th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Abstract
Students at UC Santa Cruz today will be among the engineers, artists, designers, and producers leading game teams in 2020.Review some of the changes to interactive entertainment over the last ten years in order to look ahead to the possibilities in 2020. The most obvious changes will be in the hardware our games run on. The more difficult predictions will be figuring out what our players want from their games.

The challenge for the game industry is to adapt and to continue building fun and engaging experiences. Start preparing for this future today.

Biography
Bob Mitchell is the Lead Client Engineer at ohai, an internet startup making handcrafted massively multiplayer online (MMO) games for everyone. He joined ohai after eleven years at Sony Online Entertainment where he was the Director of Technology and a programmer on four (MMOs): EverQuest, PlanetSide, EverQuest II, and Free Realms. His various contributions to the games released at SOE included user interfaces, localization, game systems, server architecture, numerous Flash minigames, PlayStation3 downloadable titles, installers, web integration, and project management.

Bob graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in systems engineering and was a technical manager at QUALCOMM before returning to his childhood passion: computer games.

The presenters include: Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, J.R. Carpenter, Maria Damon, Ram Devineni, Craig Dworkin, Al Filreis, Christopher Funkhouser, Kenneth Goldsmith, D. Kimm, Larissa Lai, Daphne Marlatt, Nick Montfort, Erin Moure, Lance Olsen, Stephen Osborne, Kate Pullinger, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula, Fred Wah.

The presentations (which include critical papers, but also many readings, screenings, performances, and artists’ talks) have been provocative and have unfolded new types of beauty and new understandings of process.

On Thursday, February 18, I was honored to join Larissa Lai and Chris Funkhouser as part of the opening reading. I read from Implementation and ppg256, concluding with the premiere of a new poety generator in this series, ppg256-5:

perl -le '@a=split/,/,"conceptual,digit,flarf,maximal,modern,pixel,quiet,real";sub f{pop if rand>.5}sub w{$a[rand@a]}{print f("post").w."ism ".w."s ".f("the ").w."\n".(" "x45)."WHAT DOES ppg DO?";$a[rand@a]=~s/[aeio]/substr("aeio",rand 4,1)/e if $l++>5;sleep 5;redo}'

As I explained in my talk the next morning, this program is based on a section in the middle of Tristan Tzara’s February 1921 Dada Manifesto, a section that begins:

cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver paste

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

expressionism poisons artistic sardines

WHAT DOES DADA DO?

If you run ppg256-5 (which is the real way to experience the program) it might begin:

postmodernism flarfs digit

WHAT DOES ppg DO?

realism reals the conceptual

WHAT DOES ppg DO?

Because this section of Tzara’s manifesto ends “50 francs reward to the person who finds the best way to explain DADA to us,” so I concluded by presentation similarly, offering a 50 character reward for the person who finds the best way to explain ppg to us. Chris Funkhouser said, “It does a lot with a little.” John Cayley offered that “ppg combines atoms of language.” These aren’t bad explanations, but the most impressive so far has been from Travis Kirton, who, without having any previous experience programming in Perl, created and sent me this modified version of ppg256-5:

perl -le '@a=split/,/,"illmn,imgn,ltr,mut,pxl,popl,strlz,pnctu,typfc,poetc,glmr,idl,ion,cptl,cpsl,cvl,atom,pltc,txtul,erotc,rvl";sub f{pop if rand>.5}sub w{$a[rand@a]}{print f("de").f("over").w."izes ".w."ation".f("s")."\n".(" "x45)."IS WHAT ppg DOES!";sleep 5;redo}'

A run of this may begin by outputting:

deltrizes ionation

IS WHAT ppg DOES!

deoverltrizes mutations

IS WHAT ppg DOES!

I’ll have to see if anything can top that and earn the 50-character reward.

Here’s what’s being said on Twitter about the conference. I’ve found that one participant, Claire Lacey, has been writing about In(ter)ventions on her blog poetactics. Finally, here are just a handful of memorable (mis)quotes to give you another impression, however slanted, of this gathering:

Stephanie Strickland: “The front of your wave is the back of someone else’s.”

Steve Tomasula, in reference to Magritte: No one ever says that this isn’t a cigarette:

My mishearing of Maria Damon, who was discussing healthy eating with someone as we were descending a staircase: “You need a multi-prawn strategy.”

D. Kimm: “We are always unknown to someone.”

John Davison (image from the San Francisco Chronicle)

“The breadth of video game development” (working title)

John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro

Date: Tuesday, February 23rd
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

I’m very pleased to announce John Davison will be coming down to UC Santa Cruz to give a talk on the wider business models in video games. He’s been in the video game journalism industry for almost twenty years, working his way up from magazines in the UK all the way to Executive Vice President of content at GamePro (stopping off at Ziff-Davis and founding What They Play along the way).

This promises to be a great talk, so don’t miss it!

John Davison (image from the San Francisco Chronicle)

“The breadth of video game development” (working title)

John Davison, Executive Vice President of Content at GamePro

Date: Tuesday, February 23rd
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Chris Lewis, Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

I’m very pleased to announce John Davison will be coming down to UC Santa Cruz to give a talk on the wider business models in video games. He’s been in the video game journalism industry for almost twenty years, working his way up from magazines in the UK all the way to Executive Vice President of content at GamePro (stopping off at Ziff-Davis and founding What They Play along the way).

This promises to be a great talk, so don’t miss it!

Space Invaders Enterprise Edition

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve released Space Invaders Enterprise Edition (Java, cross-platform executable), the first prototype program from my newly announced research direction, Zenet.

Space Invaders EE is a clone of code from Coke and Code, and as a tutorial for how to create games. However, it’s not the game itself we’re interested in (although it is pretty fun…)

The magic of Space Invaders Enterprise Edition is actually under the hood. I’ve separated out the game logic from the Java source into a file parsed by a rules engine. This means we can easily view the game design, without it getting muddled with too much implementation code.

Rule engines are commonly used in enterprise-level companies to decide things like car insurance premium you pay. Let’s start using this for something more fun!

A description of how it all works is after the jump.

Here’s a snippet from some of the rules file, written for the Drools rule engine:

Hopefully, this is sort of readable, even to the non-programmers out there. Let’s start with the first rule, which reverses the aliens. The aliens, by default, keep moving every tick a certain amount horizontally. The rule says “find me an alien, where there is an alien somewhere in the game that has hit the edge of the screen. Then swap that alien’s movement direction and move it down by 10 pixels.” The rule repeats for all the aliens in the game, eventually being fired on every one and reversing the direction for all of them.

To help illustrate the value of this, compare the “Process bullets hitting aliens” code, to the original:

Ouch! Not too readable! What’s happening here? Well, the code has two loops. The first loop gets all the objects in the game. The second loop does the same. When the first element of the first loop is tried, it then tests that object against all the other objects in the game to see if they have collided. Eventually, all the objects in the game will be tested against each other. If they do collide, there’s some code elsewhere to decide what to do (a bullet and an alien colliding results in them both being removed from the game).

This is exactly the same behavior as the collision code in the rule file gives. I much prefer the rule engine implementation, and I hope you do too. Double loops are hard enough for programmers to understand, let alone game designers who we can’t assume are able to understand all the nuts and bolts of modern games programming (which is very difficult).

Space Invaders Enterprise Edition offers a different approach. By separating the game logic from the implementation, we have a game design specification that we can give to programmers and game designers, that we can read easily and be able to spot any bugs in it. Try spotting a bug in that double loop code!

I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the power of the Drools rule engine yet. That’s for another post, and what forms the basis of the Zenet project that I am working on. There’s more to come!

As with all my announced work, the code is open-sourced under the BSD license, so you can see how it works, modify it and re-release it without any limitation whatsoever. It’s not too easy to build (email me if you have trouble) but once you get going, try changing some of the rules, or adding new ones, and see how easy it really is.

Date: Thursday, February 18th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

Abstract
It is easy to provoke debate by posing a simple question, such as, “Are digital games a form of art?” A less controversial observation would be that it takes a lot of artists to make a digital game. This dichotomy between the theoretical exercise and the practical observation frames my interest in the creative player. As I have written elsewhere, it strikes me that rumination about the status of games as artistic works, while stimulating and useful, often distracts attention from more important aspects of expression through the medium of interactive computer and video games. Let me say before I am misunderstood that critical attention to game design, art and programming, all as parts of defining the authorial or artistic roles of game developers is a core problem for game studies. Players would not be using games to express their talents if game developers had not given them compelling games. Now that I have said that, let me reveal my point-of-view: The creativity of players is as compelling as game design. Player creativity has defined the digital game as a platform for personal or artistic expression. Player creativity, including the multiple forms of performance and spectatorship that it has spawned, deserves more attention from game studies. Players are artists, too.

Henry Lowood is curator for history of science & technology collections and film & media collections at Stanford University. After being trained in the history of science and technology and receiving his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, over a period of more than twenty years he has combined interests in history, technological innovation and the history of digital games and simulations to head several long-term projects at Stanford, including How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames in the Stanford Humanities Lab, the Silicon Valley Archives in the Stanford University Libraries and the Machinima Archives and Archiving Virtual Worlds collections hosted by the Internet Archive. He is leading Stanford’s work on game and virtual world preservation in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project funded by the U.S. Library of Congress. He is also the author of numerous articles and essays on the history of Silicon Valley and the development of digital game technology and culture. With Michael Nitsche, he is currently co-editing The Machinima Reader for MIT Press and just completed guest-editing a volume of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing on the history of computers and games.

“Geração sobre a fala” (“My Generation about Talking,” Nick Montfort) Tradução para o português, Cicero Inacio da Silva.

“My Generation about Talking,” a text generator which I first presented at the Software Studies Workshop on May 21, 2008, is now available in Portuguese translation, thanks to Cicero Inacio da Silva. It was made for use in a presentation, but the program is set up to allow a user to play the entire presentation or to access any of the fifteen individual voices, each of which affirms repeatedly in some way.

The program is in Python and will run from the command line in OS X and on many Linux systems. It will run on Windows after Python for Windows has been installed.

• “Geração sobre a fala” (vozes_sim.py)
• “My Generation about Talking” (yes_voices.py)

Date: Friday, February 12th
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 599
Hosted By: Professor Marilyn Walker, Dept. of Computer Science

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for Engineering 2.

Abstract
In this talk, I will provide an overview of some of the work we have done
towards building gesture animation systems. The motivating goal of this
work is to develop systems that take novel text as input and provide as
output an animated character that says the text while gesticulating
appropriately in the style of a specified target subject. Our process
starts with video or motion capture of a person whose gesturing style we
wish to imitate. An analysis of this data is used to build a statistical
model of the person’s particular gesturing style. Using this model and
input text tagged with theme, rheme and focus, our generation algorithm
creates a gesture script. This script is passed to an animation system,
which enhances the gesture description with additional detail. It then
generates either kinematic or physically simulated motion based on this
description. The system is capable of generating gesture animations for
novel text that are consistent with a given performer’s style, as was
successfully validated in an empirical user study. Time permitting, I
will also discuss recent work on modeling lower body movement and new
tools for analysis-based synthesis.

Michael Neff is an assistant professor in Computer Science and
Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. Before
coming to Davis, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute
for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany. In 2005, he completed his
Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto. His main research
interests focus on character animation, in particular, the modeling of
expressive movement, physics-based animation, human gesture, animation
tools and the application of performing arts knowledge to computer
animation. At Davis, he is working to bridge the art and technology
communities on campus, collaborating with computer scientists, dancers,
choreographers and geologists. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER
Award, the Alain Fournier Award for his dissertation (2005) and a best
paper award from Intelligent Virtual Agents (2007).