Only with the absurdity of this video can you accurately capture the almost-entirely failed message of Call of Duty.
Choice quote: “My girlfriend has walked in front of the telly again.”
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Non-Linear Stories v1.0: Choose Your Own Adventure
While every boy knows that Fighting Fantasy was like, you know, 900 times better, than Choose Your Own Adventure, the level to which Christian Swinheart goes to dissect the CYOA series is nothing short of phenomenal. His visualizations of the story paths, in particular, are beautiful depictions of a system in operation.
While I won’t bother trying to add anything to Christian’s epic foresight into the series, I have to say I was fascinated by Inside UFO 54-40:
The branch diagram for UFO 54-40 is unique in that it has one ending – the Ultima ending – which is completely disconnected from the rest of the story. It exists as an island, unreachable through choices but discoverable thanks to the random access nature of the book.
This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.
Or, in other words, was this a tacit acceptance of players making their own rules by exploring a system? Could this have been emergence in a primordial form?
Posted in Deconstructions, Gaming Culture 9 Comments
Frank Lantz at UCSC
Distinguished Lecture: Frank Lantz
Interim Director, NYU Game Center and Creative Director, Area/Code
Wednesday, Nov 18th, 2-3:30pm
Engineering 2, room 506
“Innovations in Game Design: Through Practice to Theory”
Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has been an innovator in the field of game design for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.
Over the past 8 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, Read More
cfml: the context-free music language
For the ears: cfml-prototype.mp3
Context Free is an excellent tool for exploring generative spaces in the domain of 2D visual art (and Structure Synth does a fantastic job in 3D), but can a language of circles, rectangles, and triangles mutated by rotates, translates, and scales be translated into the domain of music? The result is not just a rich analogy, but a fun and expressive software performance instrument.
Posted in Authoring Tagged cfml, generative art, language, livecoding, music, programming 6 Comments
AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition
The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment. The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.
Competition details are available here.
Procedural Literacy is the New Black
It has to have been 4 or 5 years since I’ve seen a recent Simpsons episode. After catching up on the last few episodes, I can really appreciate how “with it” the Simpsons have been. After all, it’s gotta be relevant if being parodied by the Simpsons. Particularly relevant is episode 21, where Bart’s teacher is replaced with a younger, hipper instructor, Zack– who turns what all the students consider to be “fashionable” into something functional.
Bart: “Then Zack skyped us, live blogged our spelling bee, and friended us on facebook!”
…
Zack: “Are you telling me you memorized that fact, when anyone with a cell phone can find it out in 30 seconds?
Martin: “I I…I’ve crammed my head full of garbage!”
The need for accessible procedural literacy is not a new idea. Just like opportunities afforded by traditional literacy, it is obvious that a divide will occur between the advantaged, procedurally literate and the rest. Right now, it is the case that a clear advantage goes to those who understand how computers work, how to use web 2.0, and own mobile technologies (as parodied by the Simpsons.) Eventually, those with really really good memories may stay ahead in the race, but for the average person, not fully using our extended cognition will leave us in the dust.
