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.

At the Digital Humanities Conference this year, I learned of the work going into the accessibility, organization, and processing of the information overload produced each day.  With all the stuff and information we live with, traditional approaches to managing our time, organization, and communication is changing faster than we are able to adapt.  As the upcoming  next generation of academics, I feel it is our responsibility to reform the way we are adapting to our new technology.  Creating something does not mean we will use it appropriately, nor that its benefits won’t come at the cost of something else.  On the other hand, the attitude “think about before all this existed– people did fine” clearly mistakes the gadgets and observable manifestations of technology, for the conceptual advancements that they represent and employ.

Thoughtlessly using new things, however, won’t help us find new solutions and, instead, creates large amounts of information pollution.   Either we waste our time with a technology that didn’t really benefit us, or we produced something that took more time than necessary to utilize.  We find ourselves under the demands of those counting on us for things that we are expected to promptly satisfy, while we try to optimize and build patience in counting on things from unreliable others.  Maybe I’m too idealistic to accept that this is just how things are… I mean, “think about before all this existed– people did fine.”

I dream of a world where one email is all that it takes… where people actually call you back …where I don’t have to call customer service 10 times and spend hours on the phone to correct a miss-billed invoice (– where’s the news-game for this?)

In another light, with all the information out there, on the news, in commercials, in advertisements, on the internet, on television, how can anyone know what to believe these days?  I know I’m left with a constant feeling of being manipulated.  Recently, I saw a video that presents information quite well.  At the very least, it convinced me that aesthetically pleasing videos packed with statistically significant facts is, probably, the most effective way to spread a message or “truth.”  Yet with such a well put together presentation, how do I know that this isn’t just a new way to manipulate my thinking?  At the very least, this video made me reevaluate my life, which, in the midst of so much information, is an impression I’m rarely left with.

Zack, Bart Simpson’s substitute teacher, eventually goes on a drunken tirade and gets himself fired for his repressed animosity against the education system.  Bart uses an over-the-top self-help book, which many find to be deprecated technology, to get his original teacher’s life together.  Education, books, pedagogical practices, and modern technology were all their own useful advancements.   Change isn’t a bad thing, but only if we actively try to make it good.  And if things are changing at a faster rate than we can manage, then our (lack-of) reliability will show for it.  Eventually, we’ll need to optimize ourselves, since we only have 24 hours in a day and a finite amount of memory.

I study and create technology, but it is also important that I know how technology is received, used, and understood.  Otherwise, I may find myself contributing to a greater problem at hand.  These days, I find that always having to catch-up with myself, is not how I’d like to live the rest of my life.  My “starred” g-mails don’t ever seem to go away, and the overhead to doing things seem to be annoyingly greater than necessary.  Our we just absurdly impatient?… perhaps, but the input of responsibilities grow at such a rate that our output can’t continue to keep up.  There are just more things to say no to, except everyone is too busy to read that email, much less reply.  In the midst of all that we are creating, defining, and doing, how can we even keep track of what everything means?

What then is “truth?”  Is it absolute? relative? subjective? pluralistic?… Perhaps, we are approaching the age of “procedural” truth and simple facts just won’t cut it anymore.

Over winter break this past year, I went to a conference in Chicago for Graduate and Faculty Christians. I found myself having to choose between the Engineering track and the Math track (I went with Engineering). At the conference were some well known researchers, such as Fred Brooks and Francis Collins.  It seemed, to me (at least), that this conference would be quite the unique experience (…and I can now say that I’ve sung hymns with a room full of engineers). I mean, how often do we encounter a large gathering of the intersection between Christians and Professors? … I digress; however, within the community of Christian “intellectuals,” there were some interesting presentations on non-religious research. In particular, was a talk titled, “Discerning Technology or Hippocratic Engineering.”

In his introduction, the speaker uses Spore as an example to demonstrate how we’ve managed to take recreate life within technology. He quotes, “SPORE isn’t a game for re-educating the intelligent design proponents of the present; it’s a game for inspiring the intelligent designers of the future.” At such an unusual conference, I gladly found myself at a session where 5 of the first 7 slides were celebrating video games. This leads the speaker into a discussion of “Technology Assessment, an implicit mandate.” He asks the question, should we be creating technologies just because we can?, giving quite a number of interesting cases and scenarios to consider (and concludes with a few under-explained tables and figures– “Base vectors of technological progress” and the “Environmentally Responsible Product Assessment Matrix” for example.) Overall, there was one point that remained unsettling for me….

In his discussion of technological progress, he uses the NAE’s “Engineering’s Grand Challenges” to give examples for consideration. These challenges supposedly advance technology and benefit mankind, which all seem straightforwardly good, except, the speaker points out, the challenge to “reverse-engineer the brain.”  He indicates that it might be irresponsible for researchers to work towards recreating technology to be human-like. More simply put, the potential bad outweighs the potential good in such a technology, and we shouldn’t try things for the sake of trying them.

I sought clarification on this, because “reverse-engineering the brain” is a bit obscure. Does this involve advancements in  human cognition, neuroscience, biotechnology, or the whole area of AI?  Surely, he does not think that the whole area of AI could be unethical.

Russell and Norvig divide areas in AI into 4 quadrants:

1. acting human (Turing test approach)
2. thinking human (Cognitive modeling approach)
3. acting rationally (Rational agent approach)
4. thinking rationally (Laws of thought approach)

On the NAE’s page, advancements in many medical and other practical applications were listed as “reverse-engineering the brain.” At the very least, these contributions are more likely ethical than not.  For clarification, the speaker argues it is not apparent that creating computers to be indistinguishable to human beings in thought (and, potentially, action) is a positive contribution.  Similar to the speaker, Russell and Norvig, although for different reasons, are also less inclined towards to human-based AI within computer science:

The study of AI as rational agent design therefore has two advantages. First, it is more general than the ”laws of thought” approach, because correct inference is only a useful mechanism for achieving rationality, and not a necessary one. Second, it is more amenable to scientific development than approaches based on human behavior or human thought, because the standard of rationality is clearly defined and completely general. Human behavior, on the other hand, is well-adapted for one specific environment and is the product, in part, of a complicated and largely unknown evolutionary process that still may be far from achieving perfection.

Upon clarification, it sounds like the speaker is skeptical of believable AI, but probably ok with other aspects of reverse-engineering the brain. So, how is a person who just celebrated the advancements in video games able to say that believability may not be ethical?

I take away 2 conclusions his puzzling stand: (1) the speaker is not familiar with research in game ai, and (2) the speaker does not know enough about the positive applications of believability.

Still, he raises a good point in asking what is “Hippocratic engineering?” Particularly, what are the concerns that face believability and its future? Perhaps, the speaker was wary of post-apocalyptic futures prophesied by science fiction, like the Matrix or, more recently, Shane Acker’s movie, 9. The fear that machines will outdo us and take us over may be a bit far fetched, but there is evidence that our relationships with technology have gone sour in the past.

The most famous example was with a program called ELIZA, named after Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.  The Wikipedia articles describes the ELIZA effect as:

The ELIZA effect, in computer science, is the tendency to unconsciously assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors. In its specific form, the ELIZA effect refers only to “the susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols — especially words — strung together by computers”

The concept of “the ELIZA effect” was based off of (ELIZA’s creator) Joseph Weizenbaum’s experience with his chatterbot’s reception.  Famously, he is quoted in saying, “I had not realized that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

At some point, between the ELIZA effect and total machine domination (inclusively), we are no longer solely using the technology, rather we are also being used by the technology. To a smaller extent, in this age, some people develop unhealthy dependencies or addictions to our current virtual worlds. So, am I going into an area that will eventually become a great detriment to society? A side from the scenarios that science fiction presents, I don’t find myself concerned with the ethics of believability. Maybe if I were researching how to make weapons of mass distruction, I’d be more thoughtful about what it is I’m doing.

Whether technology becomes its own intelligence or have its own individual cognitive process, is an ongoing discussion in philosophy of mind.  Regardless, believability, whether substantial or faked, has taken many forms in application. For instance, preteens take their $20 giga-pet eggs around with them, feeding, playing, and cleaning their virtual pets. If mistreated, they (the pets) even die. These days, I’m playing the cuter-than-ever facebook version of tamagotchi– Playfish’s Pet Society.  In the age of instant messaging, chatbots have become mainstream.  My favorites were the ones created for the unknowing Turing-test evaluator.

Since ELIZA, a good public understanding of the technology seems to have made it less likely for technology to be misused.   What predicates the ethical may then be contingent on whether a society is mature enough to use a technology wisely.

So, society, are we mature enough to handle Milo?

If all goes well, we’ll someday find ourselves informed like the stick figure in this xkcd comic and not Weizenbaum’s secretary …

First, if you haven’t heard about it, come tomorrow (9-9-09), The Beatles: Rock Band is released.  In preparation for its receptions, the game has instigated a lively inter-generational debate.  The lines are not so clearly drawn as to which communities or generations rest on which side, which makes it quite a unique situation.

Many people, including Seth Scheisel from the New York Times, find that in the sense of cultural influence and pervasiveness, The Beatles game is perhaps “the most important video game yet made.”  On the other hand, Ian Bogost can less-than agree with  Scheisel’s radical opinions on what seems to be yet another rhythm game.  The discussion, mostly followed on Ian’s blog (but also on the initial review itself), crosses from game to culture to history and back.  People of different generations and sub-cultures are intermixed and allied in atypical ways.  The Beatles fans are excited.  The Beatles fans who are also gamers are ecstatic.  Musicians are insulted.  Game researchers are unimpressed.  Anthropologists are interested.  Indifference permeates all across the board!

Join the discussion while you still can.  Chris Lewis, Mark Nelson, and I, from EIS, have already contributed our few cents.

Chris Lewis:

From my own viewpoint, at least, I think you’ve already decided that you dislike The Beatles, and that you dislike the NY Time’s over-the-top evaluation, and that you dislike Boomers as well, so here’s a game that lets you hate it so easily.

You don’t have to appreciate the Beatles, just like my Mum doesn’t have to appreciate Grand Theft Auto IV. Providing new ways with which to engage with cultural touchstones (and, as much as you might not like it, The Beatles have influenced a lot of pop music) can only be a good thing, whether that speaks to you or not. Guitar Hero was celebrated for opening up metal music to an entirely new audience, why shouldn’t that audience also have a chance to experience any and all musical genres?

While I agree with your assertion that it is “the present in the past”, so is releasing music on iTunes, and the long tail that goes along with it. So is the re-release of books with shiny new covers. So is renting a movie that was released in the 70s. So is playing Pong as a Flash game. All of these things are positive engagements and a preservation of a culture that might otherwise be lost. We should celebrate those who venture back to see the things that influence our culture today, not lambaste them for taking an interest in the past.

I hope that one day my grandchildren might play Grand Theft Auto IV, yet re-appropriated and represented to them in a manner so that they can engage with it too.

And so it is with Beatles Rock Band.

Note that:
a) I do believe this is very different to the horrible things Courteney Love has done. This game is the wish of the surviving Beatles, and I’m sure Harrison would have enjoyed fortifying his mansion with the money.
b) I don’t really like The Beatles. I passed up on seeing Paul McCartney for Basement Jaxx instead. But whether I like or dislike them isn’t the point!

Mark J. Nelson:

I wonder if some of the commenters objecting to a focus on the game’s cultural/generational symbolism read the New York Timesreview that serves as the springboard for this blog post. Is The Beatles: Rock Band interesting as a game, as interactive art, as anything else of that sort? Schiesel (the NYT reviewer) doesn’t even argue that point. Instead, he argues:

By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience.

In that sense it may be the most important video game yet made.

Never before has a video game had such intergenerational cultural resonance.

Perhaps Schiesel’s view of the game is wholly atypical, but if it’s typical, it’s hard not to take Ian’s point of view.

Me:

I’m actually very happy for all the Beatles fans out there, but really, it makes sense that they need to hype it up so much. If they don’t get people excited about it, it’s not going to make a whole lot of money. They’re trying to sell a game that is geared towards the intersection of people who play video games and people who like the Beatles. It will be interesting to see how tough (or easy) the market turns out to be for that. It seems like those two communities might not overlap very well.

I find myself underwhelmed with the Rock Band and Guitar Hero repertoires; therefore, I don’t have much interest in buying their games. With the new Beatles game, I am, again, left out in holding much appreciation for the music. Maybe when they come out with “Jazz Band Revolution”, “Gospel Music Revolution”, or “Michael Jackson Revolution,” I’ll be on the flip side

I also think that rhythm games are a bit played out and maybe instead of trying to score profit from the coat tails of the next legendary pop musician, they come up with even cooler forms of rhythm play. The drum set was a step in the right direction, and we should venture forward.

Me:

So, I admit I’m in the camp (called out by MJN) that did not (initially) read the NYT article, but it’s still the case that this game is banking on the hype, _especially_ of the impassioned few. Schiesel needs to stir up the fans, because, I presume, that many people *like* the Beatles… but not enough to celebrate and revere the game itself.

I do agree with Chris on letting them like what they want to like, but I also agree that to over exalt the less-than remarkable technology leaves uneasy feelings with those who are trying to advance the area. It’s sort of like that feeling some people get when they think of that one unnamed sports game that comes out every year, and how much money people spend on it. Admittedly, it’s a lot of marketing and keeping the consumers excited about the packaging instead of the product. (”$hit in a bag” is how I remember one keynote speaker putting it.)

I also agree with Ian and go further in saying that Schiesel, if he is an utterly revering fan AND a game reviewer, should show some mixed feelings with the premier of interactively experiencing the Beatles. In his NYT article, he seems to not mind that “mechanically, it is almost identical to previous Rock Band games.”

Still, I’m an evangelist (in some of the worst ways) and if there was to be a “Jazz Band Revolution,” I would log into my blog and exalt it to no end. Giving a game more than its due annoys me in (self-admittedly) hypocritical ways as a gamer and a listener of music, but as a musician and a researcher of games, I’d feel appropriately cheated.

I can only hope that some day Jazz music can be afforded the hype that Schiesel gives the Beatles. I’d be honored to have that opportunity to be one of the impassioned few.

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.

(Spoilers for Facade in the following sections.)

Level 1 – Story-level Nonlinear

Do ’stories’ ever start where they start? For the most radical sense of nonlinear, the answer is almost always: no.  The only types of “narrative” that would fit into such a pure definition would be in games like Spore or a documentary on the beginning of the universe.  Stories that start at the beginning of time build an easy case for telling a story from beginning to end; otherwise, there is always something that can be presumed about a character’s history or the history of a conflict, no matter how reasonably early you start the story.  If it is assumed that any presumable details are substantially irrelevant, then it must also follow that the subsequent sequence of events must be conveyed in the order of which they occur; otherwise, the story is nonlinear.

In a previous post, I wrote about amnesia in games.  The wide use of amnesia in games and other forms of media is a typical indication of this story-discourse distinction– that a character with amnesia, similar to the audience, ’starts’ with no prior knowledge of events, implying that, at the start of the presentation, events have already occurred.   On the other hand, the narrative convention of amnesia could also be used to disregard any past details and maintain linearity.

A more concrete example of the story-discourse discrepancy is in the interactive narrative Facade.  In real time, this interactive experience lasts about 10 minutes of present time, but recollects, perhaps, a decade of dramatic history.  I would say that the story-level non-linearity is, first, apparent in the large amount of undisclosed back story.  Secondly, the subsequent events to follow tell the story of the user character learning about Grace and Trip’s relationship from various points in time.

Level 2 – Discourse-level Nonlinear

A more typical use of nonlinear narrative is (according to wikipedia): “Nonlinear narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order.”

I find that breaking chronology is one type of nonlinear, but the linearity of a story depends on more than just the temporal.  It is also a product of the space or perspective that the story is being told.  One could string together a sequence of events such that they are in chronological order, but yet alternate in telling the history of China and the history of Rome.  Temporal and perspective disruptions actually permeate through all 3 levels non-linearity, but for simplicity sake, the distinction will be made on the discourse-level.

Temporal

In the wikipedia definition, the use of ‘chronological’ restricts  linearity to be dependent on ordering and time.  It follows that the timeline of nonlinear films ambitiously lists a number of movies that are told with broken chronology.  In the previous section, I describe most narrative as nonlinear.  In this section, it is more likely to find linear occurrence, because on the discourse-level, nonlinearity is more mildly applied.  For example, in the absence of time travel, human beings live linear existences (both by perspective and temporally), but the way in which we discover the world, learn about history, and recollect the details of a drunken evening is entirely non-linear.  In that sense, a given narrative can be both linear and nonlinear at the same time.

Perspective

In movies, it is rarely the case that the perspective of one single character is followed.  There are two types of linear perspective.  First, if a narrative follows the experience of a single character.  Second, if a narrative is given from a global perspective and tells the story as a series of tightly coupled events in relevance.  Linearity, at this level, can come in all sorts of granularity, but to be wholly linear a narrative must be chronological with an unbroken perspective, whether biased or objective.

In regards to both the temporal and the perspective, Facade is clearly linear on the discourse-level.  You enter the apartment, you leave the apartment, and your experience is not disrupted neither temporally nor are you ever separated from your initial perspective.

Level 3 – Interaction-level Nonlinear

General representation of the story timeline in Facade from beginning to end

The common use of nonlinear in games is (according to wikipedia): “A game with nonlinear gameplay presents players with challenges that can be completed in a number of different sequences. Whereas a more linear game will confront a player with a fixed sequence of challenges, a less linear game will allow greater player freedom.”

A more narrative definition is: “In video games, the term nonlinear refers to a game that has more than one possible plotline and ending, leaving the gamer to take the path that most suits their style of play. This increases replay value, as players must often beat the game several times to get the entire story.”

Clearly, Facade was created with an extremely nonlinear gameplay in mind, but only for 10 minutes of content.  In those 10 minutes, the user can potentially reference a predetermined past that spans a number of years.

Application

In understanding the relationship among narrative properties, such as, story, discourse, perspective, rhetoric, and presentation, systems have been tailored to turn convention into technology.  Briefly, I will conclude with applications in Terminal Time, the Oz Project, and future thoughts.

Terminal Time

The Terminal Time Artificial Intelligence architecture is based on 3 major components: knowledge base, ideological goal trees, and story experts. The knowledge base is a vast knowledge web… Ideological goal trees are utilized to choose and join historical events found in the database in accordance with viewer responses. Story experts utilize narrative conventions to plan, compose and evaluate final story texts.

The story of Terminal Time is represented by the predesignated time periods shown on the timeline below.  The presentation is determined by the audience interaction and manipulation done through the ideological goal trees.

The OZ Project

Figure 1 shows the Oz system architecture. The architecture includes a simulated physical world, several characters, an interactor, a theory of presentation, and a drama manager. A model of each character’s body and of the interactor’s body are in the physical world. Outside the physical world, a model of mind controls each character’s actions. The interactor’s actions are controlled by the interactor. Sensory information is passed from the physical world to the interactor through an interface controlled by a theory of presentation. As shown, the drama manager influences the characters’ minds, the physical world, and the presentation theory.

The Oz Project uses a drama manager to direct interactions, not merely through a dramatic experience, but through a high evaluating dramatic experience.  A presentation module is directed by the drama manager to appropriate story elements to the user.  Presumably, the ’story’ is loosely represented in the “World.”

Future Thoughts

From the deconstruction on nonlinear, there are clear distinctions and layers of narrative to consider.  These distinctions, I’d like to, for now, describe briefly as:

• The Objective layer is a formalized representation of events, event artifacts, and existents.
• The Perspective layer is a formalized representation of operations, motivations, and reactions of intelligent existents.
• The Investigative layer is a formalized representation of observable or retrievable information from artifacts and existents.  Anything intelligent or influenced by something intelligent would carry manipulated information.
• The Presentation layer is a formalized representation of discourse.
• The Interactive layer is a formalized representation of the manipulation of discourse.

Further analysis is especially relevant to the study of procedural and generative storytelling.  To be able to formalize and model these aspects of story and discourse presents new avenues in the ways we can use technology to tell stories, but also breaks these endeavors into smaller problems that can be addressed and reassembled.

….Making what is possible, practical.

This morning, I was driving with a friend in Delaware.  She’s a few years younger than I, but hangs out with a group of  post-grad, guy friends of mine.  On the way from Home Depot, she mentioned that she’s tried playing multiplayer Halo at a friend’s bachelor pad and “couldn’t get what was going on.”  She said she kept getting killed before she could figure out what to do.  Now, most, if not all, people experience this when playing their first FPS, but why does my female friend sound so much more discouraged than my male friends would in similar situations?  It appears that often, the guys I know find motivation or determination in being sub-par inplace of discouragement.

It reminded me of my college service projects.  In mixed gender groups, students, mostly non-carpenter ones, would go to poor places in Kentucky and Louisiana to build or repair homes.  After being on the stage crew in high school and volunteer carpentry for a few years, I’ve had opportunities to paint, put up drywall and insulation, roof, spackle, etc.  Whenever opportunity presented itself, I’d ask the carpenters in charge, “can I use the power tools?”  In that sense, I was never shy.  After a number of these volunteer trips, I’d noticed that the girls tend to busy themselves with hammering and painting.  So, as I became familiar with the tools, I’d find myself inviting the other female volunteers to try something new.  I would ask them, “Hey, you wanna try out the circular saw and cut some 2×4s with me?”

I have a hard time believing that so many people would rather be painting all day when they could be experiencing and learning other forms of useful handiwork.  I’d never had to twist anyones arm to convince them to stop painting, so why does such a casual suggestion make such an impact?  Is it because females trust that other females over males?  Is it because they need to see someone like them doing it before they’d be willing to try?  I’ve never worked with a female carpenter on these projects before, so that might have something to do with it.  Really though, I believe it’s because males don’t think females want to use power tools, and females don’t think that males want females to use power tools.  It’s a preception of gender that is beyond mere variety of skill levels in individuals.  Otherwise, why wouldn’t the guys be inviting the girls to try it?  And why don’t girls express interest in trying those sort of things more?

My friend employed the "build one of everything" in her first StarCraft experience

On one of my visits, at my friend’s house,  her younger sister was sitting in the living room as a bunch of us were setting up to play StarCraft.  These guys seem to come over often to play games, and the girls will just watch them play (or do their own thing).  My Delaware guy friends are at all levels of StarCraft proficiency– even though they are all mostly Korean, I’m sure I can take a few of them.   In regards to my less aggressive female friends, this is, again, a perception of gender that is beyond mere variety of skill levels in individuals.  I’m not convinced that the sister, in her own house, wouldn’t enjoy being included.  She should be afforded to opportunity to make an informed decision as to whether or not she wants to play StarCraft.  I asked if she wanted to learn a little bit about it, and, effortlessly, she tried a game or two with all of us– something that wouldn’t ever happen unless I was there to encourage it.

An example of being out of my own comfort areas is my wanna-be basketball playing.  I’d play more if I was good, but I can’t get good because I never play.  I’d love to play pickup.  I even make an effort to express interest in playing, but the combination of not many girls playing basketball, I’m not very good, and I feel like I’m ruining the game when I join, makes it less likely.  The pressure of people relying on my proficiency to make or break their enjoyment can get overwhelming.

On the other hand, when I started training at a boxing gym, my determination : discouragement ratio was skewed the other way.  Since I was my own team, I’d get beat up, if I didn’t try harder (which is of little detriment to my opponent).  In that same way, I suggested that my friend try to play a little Portal to work on orienting herself.  It’s a single player game that isn’t fast paced, so the determination : discouragement ratio is likely a bit more favorable for Portal than Halo.  After playing Portal, Halo may just be that much less confusing, and therefore, less discouraging.

Conclusively, the idea that girls don’t do things, because they don’t enjoy them as much as guys do can become quite a self-fullfilling prophecy (on both sides of the interaction).  I don’t think I’ll be shattering any glass ceilings, but maybe I can help those, like me, in areas that I’m comfortable in to make informed decisions as to whether they’d like to play video games or use power tools.

]]> http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/08/girls-tend-to-avoid-first-person-shooters-and-circular-saws/feed/ 7 http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/jazz-band-revolution-edutainment-and-lessons-learned-from-commercial-games/ http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/jazz-band-revolution-edutainment-and-lessons-learned-from-commercial-games/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:59:16 +0000 Sherol Chen http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/?p=228 “Jazz Band Revolution” …. Trust me, this is a great idea. A fellow EIS labmate recently gave a class presentation about the “Edutainment Fail.”  To its credit, edutainment is responsible for my first interactions with desktop computers.  Games such as Oregon Train, Logo Writer, some lemonade stand game, and that typing game were widely used in my early primary school years.  I suppose as games became more commercially available, the novelty of games in education were upstaged.  Still, it’s apparent that there is a great deal of learning that goes into playing some of the most popular games today, so it begs the question… Why aren’t games used for educational purposes more? Many bridges are in process being built to overcome the gap between the motivation to be entertained and the motivation to learn.  Similarly, there are many educational avenues from the experiencing to building of interactive experiences– whether it is to learn about the technology itself or to be engaged by the technology to learn.  Let’s be honest, everyone knows that games are more than just entertainment, yet why are they mostly seen as entertainment– If I am willing to learn for the sake of being entertained, surely, I am willing to learn USEFUL things for the sake of being entertained (if nothing else).  Being entertained should be assumed for all games; asking for a game that can entertain is like asking for a drink that will quench thirst.  Albeit, not all drinks will quench thirst, but we have more options than just water to quench our thirsts.  So listen up Activision, Harmonix, and Konami: Games are for more than just quenching my thirst for entertainment.

The main point I’d like to discuss is that games could be far more useful than they currently are.  Now, I can believe that it’s tough for games with non-lucrative purposes to catch up to the popularity of top commercial games today, but is it really that hard to have popular games today with a little more educationally purposed content?  I don’t think so… In fact, it wouldn’t take much to impact or enrich the gaming experience, if only we’d be more intentional about it.

Let’s take a look at the rhythm and music games of today:

Dance Dance Revolution. I won’t be displaying my Sandstorm DDR moves at the club, but I appreciate the excercise nonetheless.  The day I’m able to take my moves to the dance floor, I’ll be satisfied.  Till then, I’ll take my entertainment with a side of excercise.

Karaoke Revolution. Anything that involves pitch matching is great for ear training, and if used appropriately, you really are exercising your voice.  It’s great at parties, but there are so few songs per game, that my friends prefer the karaoke bar.  Among the selection I have to choose from, I usually only know a couple of the songs.  In that sense, I did “learn” a number of popular songs.  I learned these songs for the sake of being entertained, but do I find this knowledge useful?…. not really.

Guitar Hero. I don’t even have anything to say about Guitar Hero.  It exposes me to new songs and trains my sense of rhythm… and it’s entertaining.

Rock Band. I was in percussion ensemble when I was undergrad and took a winterim of drumset private lessons.  For sure, Rock Band trains up the coordination necessary for playing the actual drums– a win for edutainment in a commercial game.  As far as the music selection goes, I only knew 1 or 2 of the songs, and I had no choice but to learn and expand my repertoire of rock music.  Overall, I find that these games are very good at exposing me to music I don’t listen too.  The only thing that bothers me is that it’s likely I don’t listen to a type of music, because I don’t really like that type of music.

Despite not listening much to rock and alternative, I still purchase and enjoy these games.  It’s only fair that if I have to listen to music I don’t know anything about, so should other people.   I’m joking… That’s a terrible reason to make a game; however, a direction I hope could be taken is a game I call “Jazz Band Revolution.”

Concept art for "Jazz Band Revolution"

Jazz Band Revolution addresses the following needs:

• The desire to play real instruments. If Karaoke Revolution can pitch match my voice, then it should be able to pitch match the notes from my saxophone.  All we need is the horn mic input device.  Similarly, Instruments needing amplification can be plugged into the console via some input cable.
• The desire to read real notes. Is it that hard to use real notes instead of sliding bars with circle shaped indicators on them?  Notes on sheet music are typically immobile, but I’d settle for sliding staves of notes (which wouldn’t be all that different from how we read rhythm game music now).
• The desire to know about Jazz. Jazz music is not only rich with history and culture, it’s lineage is quite revered.  As a result, there are set standards that all people who listen to and play jazz would or should know.  It would be as simple as taking Hal Leonards “The Real Vocal Book,  Volume I” and digitizing it.  If you survey all the Jazz standard music books there is a great deal of overlap, indicating that there is a specific set of songs that everyone should know.
• The desire to voice chords. New challenges, such as converting analog chords from a guitar digitally into its individual notes, would need to be handled, but in the meantime could remain unimplemented and substituted for simpler models of play.
• The desire to improvise. The drums, in Rock Band, are often awarded a drum fill, but a side from quantity of input produced, everything else is ignored.  It’s not like your rhythmic accuracy and creativity are scored during the drum fills.  Programs, such as Band in a Box, on the other hand, channel the tendencies of Charlie Parker and other Jazz legends computationally using the melodic rules and rhythmic inclinations to imitate Jazz improvisation, and if a computer can be programmed to improvise, then a computer can process and score the improvisation of someone playing a game.

My Real Books

Objections?

• “I don’t own any real instruments.” Real instruments are a good investment for many reasons.  My saxophone, for example, appreciates in value with time.  If it isn’t worth it to own a nice instrument, then buy a cheap one, use a kazoo, or just sing instead.  Keyboards and guitars can be purchased for under $100 (and even cheaper if used), serve more purposes than just gaming, and don’t have controller compatability issues as a result of standardized sound input.
• “I don’t know how to play any real instruments.” There’s learning involved in DDR and Guitar Hero, so you’d learn just like any other game.  Levels of difficulty would ease a new player into the game by limiting the number of notes per song.  Additionally, many Jazz standards have very simple melodies.
• “I can’t read music.” The same sliding bars and color coded circles would be used just like in the other games.
• “I don’t listen to Jazz music.” Jazz music is good for your soul.
• “Real books are controversial in the Jazz community.” Musically speaking, there is a lot of room for criticism in trying to computerize the appraisal and representation of art forms.  I don’t have an answer for this one, except that I love my real book, but I know not to live by it.
• “Jazz isn’t about rules.” Yea, but you need to know the rules before breaking them.

“Jazz Band Revolution” is just one avenue towards the many possible wins for edutainment, more specifically, musical edutainment.  Parents who want their kids to play music need to realize that piano lessons aren’t fun.  Piano lessons typically aren’t fun because I have to practice everyday to be good.  If I’m a kid, then I’d probably rather be playing with my friends, than playing the same song over and over again by myself.  Basketball is fun.  “Starcraft: BGH Top vs. Bottom” is fun.  Rock Band is fun.  Playing real instruments can be fun too, just like how playing the fake ones are.

Is it really that hard?  I’m no expert, so, by all means, educate me.  Even post mortem, games not originally intended for education have been useful– such as studying the ecomony in MMOs.  I wonder how much a difference it would make, both for the reputation of games and also the enrichment of the experiences, if there were more intentionally educational content worked into commercial games.  Every little bit helps– just think of it as the free boost you get with your Jamba Juice.

I mean, why learn Al Bhed when I could be learning French?

]]> http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/jazz-band-revolution-edutainment-and-lessons-learned-from-commercial-games/feed/ 9 http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/distant-worlds-san-francisco-symphony-plays-celebrates-music-from-final-fantasy/ http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/distant-worlds-san-francisco-symphony-plays-celebrates-music-from-final-fantasy/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:00:36 +0000 Sherol Chen http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/?p=486

Sold out SF Symphony show

There are 3 takeaways I hope to convey in this post.  First, I’d like to share what it was like to be there Saturday night in the symphony hall.  Secondly, I want to describe what I thought about my second time at an FF concert (my first is described here).  Most importantly, I want to discuss a bit about the significance and meaning of such an event.  There is great meaning evident in the type of response that a video game event, such as this one, creates.  Unlike what is often described of video games in the media, this is not just an exploitation of fanaticism, rather, it is a celebration of the deeply meaningful presence Final Fantasy has had.  I cannot think of a better example to show that video games, rich and full of meaning, are about more than “just playing a game.”

After seeing the concert, there are certain things I’d do differently.  For one, I probably shouldn’t have started this post the night before the concert.  It sort of prepared me to over think the experience while I was there.  What makes it awesome is quite indescribable, and trying to explain it definitely takes away from the experience.  So I am going to put up my pics, finish capturing the moment, and forget as much about it as I can before the next time I go.  I suggest that if you plan to ever see a Final Fantasy show (and haven’t yet) that you similarly forget anything you know about it, or that you don’t read anything about it (and just take my word that it was awesomely moving).

1. What it was like to be there Saturday night…

30 minutes before the show

The show was set for July 18, 2009 at the Davies Symphony Hall.  Arnie Roth conducted the SF Symphony for the evening, and composer, Nobuo Uematsu, stepped on stage for a standing ovation at the end of the show.   Showing up 30 minutes early, there was no line to get in, and the seats were about half filled by the time I entered the concert hall.  I had heard about the show last minute and bought one of the last seats they had.  If I recall correctly, the cheapest tickets were $30 (for an adult) up to $90+ for the better seats.  I ended up paying $60 plus $10 for shipping.  From what I could gather, there weren’t many $35 seats and they were long gone.

Once I was inside the symphony hall, I was greeted by a number of ushers and directed to my seat in the D section of the first tier.  Musicians were warming up, as people filled in the seats, and above the stage was a big screen that read, “Distant Worlds, music from Final Fantasy.”  As the lights dimmed, a female voice informed us that the show is about to begin and to turn off all electronic devices (no cameras or phones).  Arnie Roth, the conductor and master of ceremonies, introduced the musicians, the composer, and the show to the audience.  He explained how such a production was put together, that the night had been sold out, and that Distant Worlds will be performed in Vancouver in October and Chicago in December.

The night was filled with moments of laughter and moments of noticeable tearing and sniffles from the audience.  Songs were from Final Fantasy I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VII, IX, X, and XI, and the screens showed a montage of cut scenes (which included scenes from FFXII and FF Advent Children), CG art, battle scenes, and original art by Yoshitaka Amano.  Cut scenes came in the form of pixilated sprites moving about to modern 3-d rendering and animation. The night ended with a standing ovation for Nobuo Uematsu and an encore performance of “One Winged Angel.”  With an intermission in between, the concert started at 8 and ended at 10 pm.

Standing ovation for Nobuo Uematsu

2. What I thought about my second time at an FF concert…

Civic Center in San Francisco

The last concert I was at was in 2005 in San Francisco during (my first) GDC.   By chance, a girl, going there with her FF XI MMO party, offered giving me a ride to the performance.  This time, I figured that the venue, being a few blocks away from the Civic Center BART station, would be easily navigated, especially since, I am far more familiar with SF than I was back then.  This time around, I regret not making more of an effort to invite someone along.  So, more or less, I kind of went by myself (again); (although, I did know a bunch of people who were going and ran into people I knew while I was there).  That day, in SF, was full of interesting encounters, meeting with old friends along the way, and circumstantially meeting a bunch of new people.    Most of my encounters were unexpected, which makes for great stories and friendships (I’ll spare the details).   Honestly though, I don’t really save money (or time) living this way, and I think I’m getting too old to keep it up (lol).

Of course, being my second time, I had some expectation of the event– live music with cut scenes projected in the concert hall.  If you were at “Distant Worlds” you might remember over half of the arrangements from “Dear Friends.”  Having listened to the soundtrack from Dear Friends quite a bit, I knew these songs pretty well and recognized them immediately.   New songs included: music from FFXI, the opera song from FFVI, and a JAZZ orchestra, swing rendition of the Chocobo song.

Throughout the whole concert, I could feel the an atmosphere of suspense and a constant feeling of butterflies (all over).  I laughed and cried with the audience from song to song and re-experienced the moments captured in each piece.  Each song summarizes the ups and downs of truly compelling stories, which I found to be a unique symphony experience.  The images tell the story fairly well, but it helps to have actually played all the games to have a full understanding of each song’s significance.

If I were to give myself advice as to how to go to an FF symphony concert, I’d say:

• Finish as many Final Fantasy games prior, but especially Final Fantasy 8.  I avoided finishing FF 8, b/c I heard that it wasn’t very good.  The SF Symphony has convinced me otherwise.
• Replay games on the newer systems.  I played the older FFs on NES and SNES, but the cut scenes were mostly of the remakes.  I did feel a bit disconnected because scenes didn’t look the way I remembered.
• Even playing a little bit of each games makes a difference.  I only got up to level 10 in FFXI, yet its music was one of the most memorable tear jerking moments of the night.
• Buy a seat that is as close to the musicians as you can afford.  I thought I’d like to be in a balcony, but I think I’d prefer to be as close to the performance as possible for a better sense of presence.
• Take a look through some of Yoshitaka Amano’s art.  I’m glad that I knew some of his work, b/c it isn’t a direct resemblance to the characters as they are typically shown.
• Bring a Friend.  I’m not going to the symphony by myself if I don’t have to anymore.  I just need to make friends who aren’t poor grad students or who love FF enough to pay the $$.
• Unless you live close to the concert hall, make good travel plans.  I was kind of exhausted when I got to the venue, I had too much stuff with me, and had to worry about how I was getting back/where I was going to spend the night.
• Don’t write a blog post the night before.  It’s best to be relaxed, carefree, and thought-less when you get there.

Maybe I’ll run into you next time!

Exiting the show

3. The significance and meaning of such an event…

To give a bit of context, video games, for me, had a special meaning during the late 80’s/early 90’s.  I’d venture as far to say that there is some era of video gaming around that time that is in fact quite special and sentimental to a majority of game players.  Whether it was a “Romantic Era” or a “Golden Age” is not my liberty to say, but roughly, this era begins with the launch of Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)  and ends at the launch of Yahoo! (March 1, 1995) or the launch of AOL 3.0 for Windows 95 (June 1995).  More specifically, this was the era of ubiquity for video games, before the ubiquity of the internet.

Final Fantasy spans 1987-present, preserving a solid lineage for where we’ve been to where we are now.   As a young child, immersed in the narratives of games, I was exposed to concepts of complex emotion, determination, struggle, loss, adventure, and accomplishment.  These defining experiences, captured in sound and scene, are easily lost throughout the years, but I can attest that the significance of these experiences are effortlessly resurfaced by the resounding presence of nostalgia.  Listening to the music that spans 20 years at the symphony hall both poetically and beautifully captures the progress of culture, technology, and our personal lives.

I’ve experienced so many profound things from video games, and it makes me sad that they both aren’t typically seen as such or created for these purposes more.  That’s why it was so meaningful when the San Francisco Symphony played celebrated music from Final Fantasy for so many people.

(Something went bad with the compression, but it’s probably for the best ^_^)

Trying to find traction in my pursuit of academic scholarship is quite daunting at times.  There are just so many people in the world doing so many interesting things, and it often feels like an endless catching up with the many experts of today.  What I do know is my childhood aspiration to tell stories through video games drives me on this adventure of discovery.  What I didn’t know was how many communities of thought there would be along the way: communities that care about stories, communities that care about games, communities that care about stories in games.  (It keeps me constantly feeling like the “the new kid” in school.)  And what I take away from this last conference is a new collaboration of interesting research questions that I could’ve very well been working on.  Not that I’m second guessing the path I’m currently on, but rather, I look forward to bringing my own discoveries to the intersection of all these communities.  So, let me share a little bit of what I learned about the Digital Humanities community.

While at the Conference…

In addition to being to numerous Computer Science and Game Industry Conferences, I’ve been to Jazz Conferences,  Multi-cultural Conferences, Religious Conferences, Asian American Conferences, and even a conference on “Profound Questions,” but what I am about to share with you is my first participation in a Humanities Conference. I’m currently sitting the Hoffman Auditorium at University of Maryland, College Park.  I registered today at 4 pm for the Digital Humanities Conferece hosted by the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities. Just to give you an idea of the spread in topics of this conference, the first friend I made studies Slavic languages at University of Pittsburgh.

Selected Poster Titles from the Poster Sessions

The opening keynote talks about “cultural analytics” (I’m paraphrasing from the introductory slide that he currently has on screen ^_^)

• analysis and visualization of large cultural data
• theoretical implications, interfaces/visualizations techniques
• methods for analysis of visual media and born-digital culture

The speaker is drawing attention to the increase of cultural data sets, of user generated content, and digitalization efforts by museums and libraries.  I’ve certainly taken for granted the mass amounts of cultural information (ie. web presence of all professional cultural agents), not to mention the actual culture of our information.  He continues to show tools and applications of these ideas, such as an approach in video summarization: which are linearized pixels from frames that are appended to form a 2-d representation of a video (another described application is the quantization of web comics).

I suppose, my first impression of this area is that it investigates the variety of cultural information whether it is a means to

• digitize the undigitized
• mine information for what has been digitized
• or to visualize and represent the information we derive from cultural data

I must admit that there is a lot I still don’t know about this community, but I’m having a number of great conversations while at the conference– some with people of shared research interests and some with people who have very non-related areas of research.

“Preserving Virtual Worlds: Models & Community” was one of the sessions more relevant to video games.  There was a lot of discussion on how virtual worlds are identified, quantized, organized, and archived.  It’s never occurred to me that these concerns were of substantial  interest to the museum, library, and cultural studies, but apparent that such research would face challenges in cohering all the aspects of an interdisciplinary area.  For example: in the attempts to preserve commercial games, researchers have limited accessibility (to the games) as a result of proprietary concerns from industry.  Notably, a lot of the preserved information is organized on the internet by fan bases.

After the Conference…

The books that were on sale during the conference

I’m sitting in my hometown, Delaware, after the conference thinking about what the intersections are.   Or specifically, how do these topics affect me?  Most directly, I found similar pursuits in how we quantize our complicated, not-so-straightforward representations of gameplay and enjoyment (the establishment of appropriate metrics is very important to scientists).  I also believe that through games and virtual worlds we can represent, capture, and preserve a lot of our culture and history by digitizing the undigitized in the form of interactive experiences.

My question is: how do we (re)tell these stories?

Sitting in Panera Bread reading the Conference Proceedings (photo taken by my XPS webcam)

]]> http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/digital-humanities-2009-my-first-humanities-conference/feed/ 2 http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/what-do-amnesia-immortality-and-mind-control-have-to-do-with-game-design-immersion-and-suspension-of-disbelief/ http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2009/07/what-do-amnesia-immortality-and-mind-control-have-to-do-with-game-design-immersion-and-suspension-of-disbelief/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:27:37 +0000 Sherol Chen http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/?p=206

What breaks your sense of presence in a story? The culture of video game playing has developed a tolerance for the common practices and limitations in designing and producing games.  We’ve stopped asking “why?” and have come to expect the typical input arrangements, the impermanence of death, and restrictions of our own free will.  Although much of the work in the EIS lab is focused on investigating new practices in creating and playing games, I’ve found, in my personal “research” of popular games, that despite the predictability, certain innovations in narrative are notably novel.

If we break down a game into layers of: paidia, ludus, and narrative, an area that is quite nontrivial is the connection between paidia and narrative.  Often, your paidia is constrained such that you don’t ruin the narrative layer in the game.  For example, it is common that your agency sucks in order to maintain the story elements.

(This post contains spoilers for: Final Fantasy 7, Planescape Tourment, and Bioshock)

More relevantly, in story driven games, the paidia and narrative layers find themselves compromising.  Ultimately, the paidia-narrative relationship determines the user’s agency in a game and the overall flow and presence in a story.  The question I want to pose is: What breaks your sense of presence in a story?

Three typical (sense of presence breaking) examples are:

1. Entering a story with no prior domain knowledge
2. The occurance of dying and respawning
3. Having a terrible sense of agency

In my experiences, I’ve felt that creative innovations in game writing and game design (or conforming the narrative layer to suite the paidia) were apparent in the following approaches:

1. Write into your story that the player character, at the start of the game, has amnesia.

Every game has some form of introducing a new user to the experience.  Usually, this includes teaching a user how to play in addition to priming the user of the introductory narrative context.  Early forms of this include opening cut scenes and easy challenges in the early game play.  Star Craft campaigns, for instance, introduce you to the complex build system by composing a story around a mission-based tutorial.  With very little contextual priming, the 1995 game, Chrono Trigger, starts with the player character as a red spikey haired young man being woken up by his mother.  My initial thoughts as I start this game are: where am I? who am I? what is going on? and what am I supposed to do next?  It follows that the protagonist, Crono, doesn’t have much of a personality represented throughout the game.  In contrast, player characters such as Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 and Pheonix from Phoenix Wright: Justice for All, with more complexly defined personalities and lives, are introduced to the player with temporary memory loss.  Suitably, the world must be explained to the player character and coincidentally presents information that the user needs to know.  As you are discovering the world around you, you are also discovering yourself as a character that is recovering from amnesia.

2. Write into your story a curse that makes the player character immortal.

Death is a common occurance in many games.  There are pretty typical approaches in handling life and death in video games.  It is expected that if you do poorly enough, you lose your life and will be set back in some way.  Super Mario employs extra lives.   Halo uses check points.  Final Fantasy uses save spots.   In midst of a big dungeon, there’s always that awkward explanation of “here and only at shiny spots like these can you save your progress.”  When you die, the game ends, but when you start again, you resume from previously saved state.  We just accept this as how things are, but Planescape Tourment takes it a step further.  In Planescape, the main character is “cursed” with immortality, and when he “dies,” he wakes up in a mortuary… the closest mortuary to the location of death (and no, time has not stopped nor rewound).  In fact, he’s lived and died so many times, that his lives, recorded in a tomb, have taken many possible paths (in addition to the path you are currently on).  Your living, dying, and resurrection, within play, is just an intentional feature of the story experience.

3. Write into your story how the player character was genetically engineered to be mind controlled on command.

It goes without saying that stories in games are fairly linear.  When it comes to choices, there really aren’t many that make a difference.  Eventually, you will go from point A to point B to point C with nominal embellishments along the way.   That’s just how games have been (in particular, JRPGs and action RPGs).  If I don’t accept the current quest, then the story stops until I decide otherwise.  In FPS campaigns, I accomplish the mission objective and await my next orders.  Bioshock, for example, is an RPG/shooter that progresses quite linearly.   You take in the presented circumstances, the interesting setting, music, and dialogue, and you go along with it.  For the sake of progressing through the story, you do what you are instructed (I mean, what else would you do?).  What’s different in this game is that you’re not meant to have a choice, because you, the player character, were genetically engineered to be mind controlled by the trigger phrase, “Would you kindly.”  For the first half of the game, you just go along with your lack of autonomy, and for the second half it is cleverly worked into the story.

…And voila, here are three instances where we have gone from typical constraint to novel feature.

Until we begin to formalize and create new ways in designing games, our paidia remains a bit limited.   Fortunately, we still have the expansiveness of our imaginations at the narrative layer’s disposal (in the meantime).

Let me tell you about how far game music has come since I was a young child…

When I was a young girl, I loved Final Fantasy.  All my school assignments, given that I had a choice, was related to Final Fantasy.  I’m such the evangelist, that I took a tape recorder (the one my mom used to learn English) and held it up to the TV to record the songs in order to play Final Fantasy music for people.

I remember at the end of the school day, Mr. Martin, my band director, was at his normal post of the hallway dismissing students, and I stopped to play him some selections from my tape recorder.   My plan was to get him into the music so that we could play it in my 4th grade band class.  I even remember holding the recorder up to his ear, playing the theme for the Big Whale, and trying to explain to him that the Big Whale was not only an airship, but a ship that flies to the moon.   I thought that perhaps Mr. Martin would like the music so much that he would automatically find a way for us to perform it.  That didn’t happen.  I did, however, take matters into my own hands, and sitting on my bed in 5th grade with my flute, I struggled to play the song from the Torian Castle by ear, writing down the notes that sounded right– my first musical transcription.  It wasn’t until middle school that I discovered NoteWorthy shareware and learned how to view the musical notation in MIDI files (I’d eventually have  a huge collection of FF MIDIs).

In high school, I was a percussionist in the marching band.  Our percussion instructor, Brent, would often arrange music for us (I played the vibraphone in the front ensemble).  Since marching bands come in all shapes and sizes, the music is often arranged and tailored anyhow, so I really thought that I could push for a Final Fantasy themed halftime show.  Eagerly, I told my instructor that I had a song to show him.  He immediately responded with, “we are not playing video game music for our show.”  Ouch!…, but persistent as I am, I told him it wasn’t video game music (…thinking that he wouldn’t know… and hoping that it was possible we could avoid any preexisting stigmas… however…).  I retrieved the midi file from rpgamer.com and he was totally on to me.  He said, “you’re going to tell me that a song from a rpgamer.com isn’t video game music?”  Later on, through ebay and video game sound tracks, I started my collection of video game music CDs.  The only progress that I made, in high school, with playing FF music was in self-teaching the Chocobo song on 4-mallet marimba (my first transcription of chords), Melodies of the Lute, the Final Fantasy 4 Prelude, and arranging a marching band medley of FF4 and FF5 tunes (that no one ever listened to).

I did of course try again in college marching band and was told that we couldn’t do it, because last time someone tried, they got sued; however, by college, my main interest was in Jazz music.   I took an independent study with a professor in Jazz theory, and (independently) I arranged the Theme of Love from Final Fantasy 4 for a sax quartet– my first attempt in arranging a Jazz tune.   It’s interesting how most of the music revolves around FF4, especially since, by then, there were already so many good FF songs to choose from.  It’s also interesting how FF music motivated a lot of my musical firsts.   In any case, my appreciation for Final Fantasy music was quite a lonesome endeavor.

I played my first FF in 1990, and 15 years later I was able to experience one of the most unanticipated emotional explosions of my life.  Below is a letter I wrote back in 2005 to my little brother.

To my little brother, written in 2005:

melodies of life you are the only one who understands….. i dont know how you would…or why i think so… i wasnt going to go, it was an extra $50, and i didnt know how to get there. this random girl at the conference talked me into it the night before, so i got on ticket master and bought myself a terrible seat (one of the last ones left) that night, i was picked up at the conference center by this girl and her final fantasy xi MMO party. i wore a grey skirt and a black top. we parked a good distance away, and the concert hall was at the top of a pretty steep hill. in my tall shoes i walked up (literally) 6 blocks. i entered the hall and saw all the musicians warming up their instruments in orchestra formation. there were big screens overhead that projected the concert logo, “dear friends, music from final fantasy.” as nobuo uematsu entered the stage, the crowd gave a standing ovation. i remember the mc was pretty horrible, it was some pretty blonde girl who had never played a video game before. i couldnt believe what i was about to experience. the songs i listened to from my  SNES and my nintendo were going to be performed by professional musicians. they played those songs, showing clips from those games, every final fantasy just about. when they played theme of love from final fantasy 4, these emotions they flooded my conciousness, and i i remembered….i remembered how much i loved playing these games, how much i’d forgotten about being a child. i picked up a piece of myself that i had left far behind and remembering made me cry. it wasnt mere nostalgia, no, it was that i look back and i can see how far back it is. u dont even know me from back then, still, i feel like you are the only person in the world who understands. i curled up into a little ball in the back of the hall and just cried like a stupid little girl. that night, i thought of you….i wished u were there, b/c you are the only person who understands that piece of myself. you played final fantasy with me…..that made me happy….in a way that i cant explain….when i was little i use to play final fantasy with my best friend, and those are my happiest memories… the music. it made me realize how far God has brought me….it made me realize how far He has brought the world. the music showed me that people can listen to video games in concert halls, and it can make them cry. it showed me how free i was to live out my dreams…..it showed me the great things to come….i could feel it through the music…. ….i wish you were there, so i didnt have to be by myself….

The following year at GDC 2006, I was recounting how I cried like a little girl at a video game concert to my friend, George, and I distinctly remember him saying…”I’m not gonna lie,… I cried too.” …I suppose, in that moment, I felt a little less alone in my appreciation.