Grand Text Auto

What is “the mark of the narrative”? In chapter 1 of her book, Marie-Laure Ryan, discusses the transmedial nature of narrative and gives a broad definition provided by H. Porter Abbott:  Narrative is the combination of story and discourse.  I believe the distinction of story and discourse is quite novel and under-appreciated in the area of interactive storytelling.  For the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to deconstruct the nonlinear in narrative to give deeper insight into what this relationship between story and discourse actually entails.  The term nonlinear takes many meanings depending on context, which is a result of the complexity in the meaning of both story and discourse.

Last week (March 18-21) I was at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference in New York City, at NYU. I took a few notes on the talks that seemed like they’d be of most interest to GTxA readers:

From the panel “Textual Studies and Video Games”

Matt Kirschenbaum: Preserving Virtual Worlds

The project takes a broad view of virtual worlds, from Zork to Doom to Second Life. They are fun, economically important, and platforms for creativity – and threatened, hard to preserve. Companies don’t preserve their own IP. DRM hinders preservation. Funded by NDIIPP. UIUC, Maryland, Stanford, RIT, Internet Archive, Linden Labs. Research preservation problems and approaches. Strategies: store, migrate, emulate, reinterpret. We deal with software, not data, and there’s a strong argument for emulation, as with facsimiles.

Warren Sack — the software artist and theorist behind projects like Agonistics and Conversation Map — is leading up a new MFA for “artists working with software art, software design, and software studies.” Michael and I plan to lend a hand. Application deadline is Feb 15th, and there’s more information after the jump.

For a few months now my electronic life has been all iPhone all the time, whether it’s reading news and blogs, developing a game, even the occasional phone call. If I had time to play games though, I’m not sure the iPhone would fit the bill just yet. There may be 4000 game apps currently available, but I’m still waiting for that breakthrough app that appeals to me, top-selling fart simulators notwithstanding.

Next week I’ll be in Siegen, Germany for Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Organizers Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a program in which I’m honored to participate, including my former Brown colleagues John Cayley and Roberto Simanowski as well as my current UC colleagues Rita Raley and N. Katherine Hayles.

The conference theme, as one might expect from the title, arises from examinations of works such as locative narratives, literary immersive environments, and what the organizers call “stagings” (using AR Facade as an example). I was invited, in part, because of my work on Screen (hopefully there’s no pun intended with the conference title).

I’m certainly interested in, and sympathetic toward, literary work that uses interfaces that move beyond the standard screen. But as I put together my presentation, I find myself wanting to use a chunk of my time to vent my frustration with tantalizing literary interfaces that do little to harness the combinatory possibilities they open. For example, at the Hybrid Ego show at this year’s Ars Electronica, I was excited to get my hands on Tablescape Plus. But while it was listed in the catalog with literary-sounding words (”users can develop new stories by changing the arrangement of the screens”) to me it was actually just an interface demonstration, with no fictional world beyond characters that could be made to bow to each other, sit next to each other, etc. Each combination resulted in an animation, but no state or history of the system could impact anything else. People with no histories and no futures aren’t characters. Events that happen in no consequential order aren’t stories.

The Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at UC Santa Cruz is organized around a set of collaborative research areas — and I’m happy to announce a new one in Playable Media. The official description reads:

DANM’s Playable Media research explores the potential of computational systems for the creation of new media forms that invite and structure play. This group works to understand and create new ways for computer games and related forms to engage audiences, make arguments, tell stories, and shape social space. Ongoing Playable Media work combines game design and artificial intelligence research with writing, art, and media authoring.

[This is a continuation of part 1]

The version of the Expressive Processing manuscript used for both forms of peer review begins with an introductory chapter composed, in part, in response to a desire to let people know what is at stake right up front. I wrote it to let readers know, from the beginning, what I am advocating and why it matters to me. I also wanted a first chapter that could be assigned as a stand-alone class reading (as so many monograph chapters are) and function to make my case.

In the blog-based review I got a number of important comments on this chapter, especially on my discussion of process intensity and The Sims. In the course of that discussion I also learned a number of things about the blog-based review form that still hold true in my conclusions about this project. (more...)

I first met Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas at a 1999 symposium on “Narrative Intelligence” sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium was organized by Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, two of the final Oz PhD students. They managed to bring together a number of their mentors, colleagues, and friends with a wide range of people pursuing different facets of the intersection of narrative, character, and AI. The Zoesis team was present, showing off their most advanced demo: The Penguin Who Wouldn’t Swim. Bringsjord and Ferrucci discussed active development of Brutus. Stern described his company’s newest commercial product based on believable agent work: Babyz. Mateas and his collaborators premiered Terminal Time. It felt like the field was blossoming with new projects, pushing the state of the art to new levels. (more...)

While researching my forthcoming book (about which more news soon) I've posted selections from correspondence about a number of influential digital fiction systems, including James Meehan's Tale-Spin (1 2), Scott Turner's Minstrel (1 2), and Michael Lebowitz's Universe (1). Now I'm pleased to continue the series with some information from GTxA's own Andrew and Michael. I emailed them to learn more about the relationship between Façade and two earlier efforts: PF Magic's "Petz" series (on which Andrew worked) and Phoebe Sengers's The Expressivator (created at CMU while Michael was there).

I thought the opening of the Grand Text Auto group show at the Beall Art+Tech gallery went very well, especially when you consider how elaborate the three large installations were. All of the artworks worked, installations and otherwise! And they were physically arranged to fit nicely in a somewhat small space, without feeling overly cramped. Thanks again to all those who put so much time into organizing and setup. (I wasn't one of them. ;-)

As I hoped would happen, I found it really interesting to experience our various literary and ludic works together in one place.

I've enjoyed reading a couple rather different responses to the Grand Text Auto show at the Beall Center for Art and Technology. One appeared in New University, the campus paper at UC Irvine. The general take of "Big Joy Stick, Big Fun at the Beall Center" is probably clear from this sentence:

Anyone expecting guns and violence because of this title might be disappointed, but any student who is interested in the future of video games, digital literature or technology or their impact on culture will be pleasantly surprised.

It's been over two years since Façade's release, and bits of coverage continue to appear in a variety of formats. In the unlikely event you're not sick to death of it, please read on.

In this post I'll make a case for natural language understanding interfaces in interactive drama and comedy. This is Part 3 of what's becoming an intermittent developer-diary series about design and technology issues in play as we develop a new commercial interactive drama/comedy project.

The previous Part 2 post from last December asked and briefly answered several questions: how to achieve content richness for non-linear, real-time interactive stories; how to create satisfying agency; and briefly, how to find funding for this kind of work. Most of the discussion in the comments focused on business plans and funding, which impact the design and technology issues, because resources and time in the production schedule are needed to achieve the design and technology goals.

In this post the primary questions I'd like to address are:
What are the pros and cons of having an open-ended natural language interface for an interactive drama/comedy game?
Is natural language the right choice right now?

Related questions left over from the previous post include,
How well did the natural language interface work in Façade?
Can the failures of the natural language interface in Façade be overcome?

Matthew Kennedy Gould is a lucky guy. Not just because he won $100,000, a trip to Tahiti, and got playfully handcuffed to a buxom blonde while they soaked in a hot tub after wrestling together in a pit of honey. No, Gould is lucky because he is the first person I'm aware of to have experienced true interactive drama.

The good news for us is, it was all videotaped, edited, broadcast on cable in 2003, and is rentable on Netflix.

The vision of interactive drama I'm referring to, first put forth by Brenda Laurel in her 1986 dissertation “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System” and 1991 book Computers as Theatre, and expanded upon in the mid 1990s by Joseph Bates' Oz Project team at CMU, has a single naive player entering an artificial, dramatic story world, with all the other characters played by improvisational actors guided by a drama manager, who is monitoring the plot as a whole to fashion a coherent, Aristotelian tension-arc style story, centered around the player.

I just got the latest Atlantic Monthly in the mail, and in it there's a letter to the editor commenting on November's article about our efforts to build interactive drama. It contains an unusual critique, one that I'd never considered; I think it's worth posting here for discussion.

Here's a link that expires in 3 days, but I've taken the liberty to cut-and-paste the whole letter here:

A vibrant lineup for this March's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is now fully online, packed with interesting talks. Here's a few that caught my eye, listed in alphabetical order. (My eye is more business-oriented these days than it used to be.)

After the Party: Introversion Software, One Year on from IGF 2006

Behavioral Theory in the Design of Serious Games

Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant

Can You Make Them Cry Without Tearing Your Hair Out? Emotional Characters

Continuing the recent trend of feature articles about games and game designers in highbrow magazines (1 2 3), Will Wright is profiled in The New Yorker by one the magazine's tech-friendly writers, John Seabrook, and accompanied by a sweet illustration by Istvan Banyai (one of my favorite contemporary illustrators).

While the material on Spore, E3, etc. will be very familiar to GTxA readers, the piece does delve into Will's background and personal life more than anything else I've read on him.

(Also there's a new short piece on serious games in The Utne Reader.)

As subscribers to The Atlantic Monthly may have already noticed, there's a story in the November issue, mentioned right there on the cover and called "Sex, Lies, and Video Games." It's a detailed, seven-page article about Façade, with shots of Grace and Trip. There are quotes from Will Wright and from an anonymous video game executive who explains that people like to "blow shit up."

Jonathan Rauch wrote the piece and really managed to make a great case for how video gaming (and creative computing) can transcend its current licensed, hyperviolent state. He also gave a good account of Façade that is accurate without being overwhelming in its technical details. Gripping journalism is often built on oppositions and conflicts; here, the conflict is Andrew and Michael vs. the conventional world of videogaming, which, I think, is not a fabricated opposition.

Last summer an email from Jim Whitehead kicked off an interesting GTxA thread on teaching computer games. Since then, Jim has taught his Foundations of Interactive Game Design and helped launch the new undergraduate degree in computer game design at UC Santa Cruz (where they've also recently hired GTxA's own Michael). I've also recently put together a draft of the syllabus for my Fall graduate seminar in computer game studies, where I tried to put into practice some of my thoughts from the conversation we had here last summer.

Recently, in an email exchange with Jim, he and I started talking more concretely about a problem that also came up in our earlier theoretical discussions: getting students access to games. We can't do what people do with the last generation of "new media" (film and video). We can't do group showings, because students need to experience the games individually and in small groups. We can't send students to the library media center, because libraries may be set up for individual experiences of laserdisks, but not game disks.

Download Façade for Macintosh (131MB) via BitTorrent at interactivestory.net, and spread the word! First time players, please post your feedback here, thanks!

That's the good news. The not-so-good news is we suspect some of you won't be able to run it, as it requires at least a 2.0GHz G4 or G5. (Or 1.0GHz dual processors, or 1.8GHz Intel Core Solo.) Several beta-testers ran into this problem.

We're also working to make it available via direct download at Download.com.

Anyone have any recommendations of what Mac sites we should contact, to get the word out?

We received an interesting piece of feedback email the other day, and got permission from the sender to post it here:

I'd like to share a little bit about my experience playing Facade in a crowded, privacy-free, communal environment: the frat house. An avid reader of GTxA, I had been following the development and release of Facade closely, but that was most definitely not the case with my brothers. The week it was released, I downloaded it late on a wednesday night, installed it and played through it a couple of times while everyone was in bed. I was engrossed in the story and amazed at the emotional connection I actually felt to the virtual actors.

The next afternoon, I fired it up while my roommates were there and played through a little bit. They noticed and asked a lot of questions about the game. As I played, I noticed my interactions changing to demonstrate not how I would act or how I felt, but what I thought would elicit the most interest from my roommates. "Can I try it?" one asked. Of course.

Mac users that have been patiently waiting for Façade need only wait a few more days — Ryan C. Gordon, our gracious volunteer Mac porting expert (he does this for a living), that we met at IGC05, has just completed a beta build! It took a while, since he only had time to work on it in his spare time, but we hope you'll agree it's been worth the wait.

Or, wait even less if you're willing to beta-test! If you have OS X 10.4.7 or higher, and can download and give prompt feedback on this beta-test version of Façade, please send email to info at interactivestory dot net by end of day Monday, August 7.

well, the opening of Game/Play at London's House of Technology Termed Practice [HTTP] 22nd July was fantastic! This was the premiere of my [giantJoystick] (see below... ah... you can't miss it)

as well as several amazing screen-based games pieces.

I was impressed with the games in the show,

I guest-edited a just-released issue of the Iowa Review Web focused on the ways that different forms of new media writing reconfigure concepts of place and space. Another way of looking at the issue, however, is as a Grand Text Auto takeover of Iowa's finest web journal. The issue features Jeremy Douglass' interview with Nick Montfort on his interactive fiction Book and Volume and Brenda Bakker Harger's interview with Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern on their interactive drama Façade. I also interview Shelley Jackson on the various manifestations of the human body in her corpus of work, and interview Jane McGonigal on alternate reality gaming. A short introduction contextualizes the various approaches that authors of electronic literature have used to conceptualize space and place. I hope that you'll visit, read, and enjoy. Thanks to the authors and contributors and to Iowa Review Web Associate Editor Benjamin Basan for helping to put the issue together.

Saint Petersburg is a beautiful city, and so when the Summer Literary Seminars invited me to teach a workshop for students interested in hypertext (considered broadly) I wanted to propose projects that would get us out into the streets. Our first project -- Sticker Saint Petersburg -- was inspired by work like Implementation, Logozoa, and The Bubble Project. Though no one tried to use the opportunity to establish the truth of Nick's earlier comments on Russian stickers, four of the students (Mike Alber, Ben Stark, Bill Stobb, and Guy Tiphane) have given me permission to put their work online.