DATE: October 14th, 2010 — 9:30am to 5:30pm

LOCATION: UCSC Campus, Engineering 2, Room 599
PRICE: Free (though UCSC parking pass required)
HOSTED BY: The UCSC Center for Games and Playable Media. Co-sponsored by the Digital Arts and New Media program and Institute for Humanities Research.

Symposium Topic

What would it take for computer games and digital literature to dynamically offer meaningful story choices based on past interactions, or draw analogies inspired by authors such as Virginia Woolf, or create avatars that are meaningful characters with individual motivations, or give us new means to understand the phenomena of narrative itself? Any of these would require research into fundamentally new computational models — but research that is deeply informed by insights of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. This free, one day symposium (the first event sponsored by the new UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media) brings together four leading international researchers with UCSC’s active research groups in this area.

Directions

Directions to UC Santa Cruz: http://maps.ucsc.edu/cmdirections.html

When arriving at the main campus entrance, stop at the parking and information kiosk on the right side of the road, shortly after you come through the main entrance. Park in the pullout next to the kiosk and purchase a permit from the kiosk attendant. The attendant can also provide you with a campus map and indicate the Engineering 2 building (the symposium location) and the Core West parking structure (the best parking location for the symposium). Please arrive at campus 20 minutes early to allow time for purchasing permit, parking, and walking to the symposium location.

Schedule

• 9:30-10:30am: Vadim Bulitko and David Thue, University of Alberta, Canada.
• 10:30-11:30am: Jichen Zhu, University of Central Florida.
• 11:30-1:00pm: Lunch Break
• 1:00-2:00pm: Mirjam Eladhari, Gotland University, Sweden.
• 2:00-3:00pm: Michael Young, North Carolina State University.
• 3:00-3:30pm: Break
• 3:30-4:30pm: UCSC Research Demos
• 4:30-5:30pm: Panel Discussion

Talk Abstracts

Agency for Everyone: A New Focus for the PaSSAGE Project

Vadim Bulitko and David Thue

Many forms of storytelling are well-suited to the domain of entertainment, but interactive storytelling remains unique in its ability to also afford its audiences a sense of having influence over what will happen next. While the need for new techniques in content generation and reuse is clear, a common assumption of the field to-date – that providing more opportunities for players to act will cause them to feel more agency – may not necessarily be true. Instead, we draw on research in Social Psychology to propose that players’ perceptions of agency depend not only on alternative actions being available, but also on the desirability of the consequences that occur. Toward testing this hypothesis, we present the design of a system which automatically estimates the relevance of in-game decisions for each particular player, based on a dynamically learned model of their preferences for story content. By actively choosing among several potential consequences of a given player decision, the proposed system highlights the relevance of each decision while accommodating for its players’ preferences over potential story content.

Analogy-Based Computational Narrative

Jichen Zhu

Narrative is one of the oldest creative forms, capable of depicting a wide spectrum of human conditions. However, many existing computational narrative systems are confined to the goal-driven, problem-solving aesthetics. Our current research focuses on using computational analogy to generate stories about characters’ inner world. Combining insights from literature, visual arts, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, our work intends to expand the expressive range of computational narrative.

Semi-Autonomous Avatars in Virtual Game Worlds

Mirjam Eladhari

Semi-autonomous agents are agents whose actions are controlled partly by users and partly by artificial intelligence (AI) components. In virtual game worlds (VGWs) users are represented by playable characters, called avatars. Penny (2001) proposed that ‘avatars can be fruitfully thought of as semi-autonomous agents, which have their own behaviours and intentionality, but are intimately tied to the user’s actions.’ What players can do in a given moment is determined by the action potential of their avatars, which in turn is determined by the game design. Avatar-specific properties can be used to represent the world in individual ways for different players. The same data can be used to automate avatar behaviours, such as reaction tendencies or subtle body language.

Cracks in the Fourth Wall: Digging into a Humanistic Phenomenon Using Computational Models

Michael Young

Research on computational approaches to narrative push the boundaries on a diverse set of computational techniques. At the core of the area, though, lies narrative itself. Narrative holds a position of privilege in our minds, being a fundamental mode of understanding the worlds around us. In this talk, I’ll describe a trajectory of projects from my research group and the role that the nature of narrative and its comprehension by people has played in setting our goals and the methods we use to achieve them.

UC Santa Cruz Research Demos

UC Santa Cruz researchers will demonstrate narrative intelligence projects which will include:

• The Prom: Dynamic social interaction models enable social puzzle-based gameplay with narrative progression.
• Grail GM: Technology supporting dynamic quest progressions for quest-based interactive stories.
• Spyfeet: A cell-phone-based, outdoor role-playing game project, using narrative motivations together with story and dialogue customizations to encourage physical activity for middle school students.

Bios

Vadim Bulitko received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and is currently an Associate Professor at the department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. His interests are in strong Artificial Intelligence, creativity and cognition. Vadim’s primary contributions are in the area of real-time heuristic search. He has also worked in emotion and culture modeling in virtual trainers, player modeling for adaptive story telling in role-playing video games, enemy prediction in tactical first-person shooters, hiding and seeking spatial patterns in human behavior and other areas. In doing so, Vadim has collaborated with Bioware Corp., Reykjavik University, Queensland University of Technology, Canadian Forestry Service, Syncrude Research and other institutions. He was the program chair for AIIDE ’10 conference, co-chair of an IJCAI’05 workshop on decision-making in uncertain environments, a workshop and tutorial chair for ICML’06 and a co-chair of the SARA’09 international symposium. In his free time Vadim enjoys photography, painting and sketching, hiking, martial arts, jogging, writing poetry, reading philosophy and playing video games.

David Thue is a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Canada. His ongoing research project, PaSSAGE (Player-Specific Stories via Automatically Generated Events), aims to employ techniques in Artificial Intelligence to mimic the creativity and adaptability of human storytellers, toward providing interactive experiences that are tailored to the preferences of each individual player.

Jichen Zhu is an assistant professor of Digital Media in the School of Visual Arts and Design at University of Central Florida, where she is also the director of the Procedural Expression Lab. Her work focuses on developing humanistic and interpretive framework of computational technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), and constructing AI-based cultural artifacts. Her current research area includes digital humanities, software studies, computational narrative, and generative art. Dr. Zhu received a Ph.D. in Digital Media and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She also holds a Master of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Science from McGill University in Montreal.

Dr. Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari is associate professor at the GAME department of Gotland University. Mirjam’s main area of research is AI-driven game design. The research approach she has adopted includes exploration of the social multi-player game-design space through experimental implementations of prototypes where both novel and established AI-techniques are used. Her dissertation work (2009) explored characterization and story construction in MMO’s focusing semi-autonomous avatars. Before Mirjam went into research (2003) she was lead game programmer at Liquid Media in Stockholm. Her first brush with game research was in the applied research studio Zero-Game of the Interactive Institute in Sweden where she was technical lead (2004).

R. Michael Young is an associate professor of computer science at NC State University, where he leads the Liquid Narrative Research Group. His work focuses on the computational modeling of interactive narrative. Michael received an NSF CAREER Award in 2000 and has received awards from NCSU for both outstanding teaching and outstanding activities in economic development. Michael was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Game Development from 2007 to 2008. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting and of the IEEE journal Transaction on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

I’m currently working on modeling stories through Answer Set Programming. My last research post was about using retroactive continuity in storytelling as rationalization mechanisms (defined by Abelson’s Goldwater Machine or my adviser’s Terminal Time) for story explanation. As more work goes into using logic programming in representing stories and characters, there are snags along with moments of small novel discoveries. Yesterday, Adam Smith was helping me work out a few snags in the event calculus for this story system. Overall, I want to anecdotally describe what working with believability in technology and expressive intelligence is like, along with giving some insights on formal models of story.

Earlier today, I was walking to the bus stop for a ride to work. As I walked up the sidewalk, I was audibly grooving to myself, “I’m into nuggets ya’ll,” finger snapping and head bobbing to the groove in my imagination. “What strange emergent behavior?,” I thought to myself. Even though there was no one there to notice, I laughed to myself, “what would God or some other omniscient being be thinking of these things we do in secret?” I suppose if there were some higher order of consciousness, they’d be thinking that it was some adorable, but yet human thing to do. Perhaps, these gods would be more amused by the things we do when we aren’t trying to make sense, than when we do.

Since the Foundation of Digital Games, Intelligent Narratives Workshop, I’ve been thinking hard about how we represent the requirement of “making sense” for believability. In our story space, we can create characters with traits, roles, and the potential to perform actions. We then create a dictionary of actions and rules/consequences of these actions. A major issue in our first system was the incoherence of why the characters choose the which actions to perform. Once we’ve declared that there exists human-like characters in this story, then it is expected that these characters act along the lines of:

1. they abide by common human behavior
2. their behavior results in dramatically compelling events
3. these events are disclosed as if being presented by a great storyteller.

All three of these are separate approaches to generating stores (character-goal driven, story-goal driven, and author/audience-goal driven). As a research problem, I find that the separation of story and discourse should be investigated separately, albeit, they seem inseparable in practice. With this in mind, 1 and 2 are the current primary pursuit of this story generator. (In regards to 3, Peter, another lab mate, sent me this interesting link on fiction conventions.)

Adam, more seasoned in logic programming, had suggested early on that I make a variety of small systems, while I am prone to build the one system that does everything. You can imagine the snags I find myself in. Here’s a great pragmatic programming guide for Answer Set Programming that addresses aforementioned snags.

One of the high level snags in the story generator is how characters behave. They do things that may not break the rules of the delegated actions, but they do them in ways that are not interesting or unconventional.

So, yesterday, instead of refactoring the current system, Adam was able to recompose a simpler version of this storyteller to address issues of “making sense.” These smaller systems can be built to capture the essence of small story vignettes. For instance, there is a story space that involves the characters, Michael and Noah, where Noah is a vendor who has 1 coffee and Michael has 1 unit of cash. We recognize the pattern of selling to occur when an item is exchanged (or ptrans-ed) from a vendor. We, of course, want to see Noah sell Michael a cup of coffee. This story is possible with 1 timestep and we designate this an occurrence of the expectation of selling when money is given to a vendor and another item is given back. Without further constraints, the story generator gives a number of stories such as, “Michael gives Noah cash for nothing in return” or “Noah gives Michael coffee for free” or, perhaps, “Noah gives Michael coffee that Michael then gives back to Noah,” none of which would qualify as selling.

As we went along we’d think of new story elements to create. Suppose we have three characters: Sherol, Adam, and Peter. In this case, Adam is the vendor who has coffee and both Sherol and Peter have cash. Now we introduce a new action called propel which we designate to be the act of throwing an object or the transfer of an object that no one receives at another character. In wanting to create the experience of “premeditated attack,” we designate that if one character purchases a weapon (with cash) prior to the attack, then it was premeditated. For the weapon, we create a new object called a rock and the rock is carried by Adam (who also has coffee). You can imagine how amusing the output becomes as we create these story elements to give a sense of coherency but allow the characters to act freely within the rule system.

Within our output, we noticed that there were instances where one character would give another character the money to buy the rock that is then propelled. We designated this to be “paid assassination.” In another instance, we noticed that sometimes when one character threw something at another, the receiving character would throw something back. That was called “counter attack.” Imagine this: “Adam sells Sherol coffee. Adam then gives cash back to Sherol. Sherol uses the money to buy a rock from Adam. Sherol throws the rock at Peter. Peter throws cash at Sherol.” This story satisfies the expectations of: selling, premeditated attack, paid assassination, and counter attack.

You might ask, “well, why would Peter throw money?” First, because we hadn’t given these objects any value in relation to each other. Second, the act of throwing merely loses the object forever and doesn’t transfer it to Sherol. Regardless, in small rule sets these occurrences are easily handled, while in the bigger system, trying to reconcile or repair why Peter marries the hot dog can become a daunting challenge. By defining story patterns as we go, these higher level actions (such as selling or counter-attack) help to make sense of a character’s behavior. This reminds me of Mark Riedl’s implementation of motivation through frames of intention in IPOCL. These story patterns can be used to constrain (more informed) story-goals to direct a higher level behavior built off of primitive actions by either requiring the occurrence or omission of these patterns.

With 60 lines of story generation code, Adam was able to create a variety of short story vignettes with the ability to designate patterns of story.

As a researcher working in creating believable behavior, it’s my academic pursuit to recreate what we can already do with the benefits of technology. Answer set programming has turned out to be quite powerful in getting the job done, and I find that getting used to using it as being the greater challenge. Now that I’m beginning to understand how to use ASP, I’m able to experience more and more of these small novel discoveries. Watching characters interact with one another in a story space with no rule-sets would be nonsense, watching characters interact while abiding by the rules of primitive actions is somewhat amusing, but being able to detect and designate higher order patterns makes it far more emotionally engaging.

As gods of our virtual simulations, we can watch the characters that we design (somewhat in our own image), for the pursuit of believability, act on their own free will. Perhaps, that’s one of the main reasons I love what I’m doing. I get to figure out new ways to recreate myself by shaping the rule-sets that determine free will for the characters in my story space. As I get deeper into building these models, I find myself more and more amused by the sorts of emerging behaviors that virtual characters are capable of, sometimes  because their behavior makes so much sense and sometimes because they don’t.

“McNuggets McNuggets WHAT?!”

About 2 weeks ago, at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, CA for Foundations of Digital Games Conference, professionals gathered to present academic efforts in “all areas of research and education involving games, game technologies, gameplay and game design. The goal of the conference is the advancement of the study of digital games, including new game technologies, capabilities, designs, applications, educational uses, and modes of play.”

In case you missed it (and other than what you’d find in the conference proceedings), we shared every meal, played several games of poker, and sang show tunes as Jesper Juul played the piano (for not one but) two nights in a row. I have to admit that I’m lucky enough to both love what I do and all those in my professional family.

All that aside, here is a sample of notable presentations at this year’s FDG…

Keynote: Game Design = Learning Design = Game, James Gee

James Gee gives the opening keynote to start off the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. He asserts that kids are built to be limited for their own good, and those are the principles of which the game designer must be aware. How do you walk the balance between giving the player an overwhelming amount of content and dumbing down the experience too much? What is the optimal concentrated sample at a given point in time? “Games are a guided experience on concentrated samples” and are designed with “preparation for future learning” in mind, tying learning to some affective/emotional charge.  He concludes, “it took a casual video game to teach kids in America that they have rights.”

Industry Talk: Microsoft Games Studios, Designing for Kinect, Shannon Loftis

Shannon Loftis, from Microsoft, gives a live demo of key features from Xbox’s Kinect.

• Natural User Interface: full body skeletal tracking, multi-array voice recognition and chat, human identification, digitization of people and objects
• Kinect Pillars: avateering (monkey-see-monkey-do), approachable, social, as fun to watch as to play, players play how they want to play
• Kinect detects with IR and heat-maps

She emphasizes the idea of “letting the consumer lead your design.” For instance, there are different ways people may prefer to steer a car in a racing game. Shannon demos a racing game, a pet training game, and a sports game.

Paper: “Outrun,” De-Simulating of 8-bit driving, Garnet Hertz

Hertz combines arcade console with golf cart to augment reality through computer vision. Notably, driving in real life is much slower than in any racing game, so the reproduction in 8-bit appears faster than the actual run. It will be out and running in October 2010.

Tutorial: Applied Game Design: The MDA of Bartok, Robin Hunicke and Ben Smith

Sets of poker cards, index cards, sticky notes, and a pen are laid across the room for the interactive tutorial on game design. The group splits up into fours and play games of uno. After a couple games, Robin asks us to rotate through three specified rules: (1) cumulative 2′s – where 2′s can compound the drawing with each subsequent 2, (2) show last card – where the last card must be revealed, and (3) out of turns – where there are no turns and everyone just goes.

Hunicke asks how each rule, a mechanic, creates a different dynamic in the given aesthetic. She instructs that we come up with an aspect of game (such as strategy, revenge, or suspense) and create a rule that makes it so. My rule was cumulative 2 with reverse on the change of suite (for revenge!), another was swap hands on 7, another no turns on Queen, and finally, play with all cards shown. It’s interesting how adding a rule changes how a game feels, and how Robin and Ben were able to recreate that experience at their tutorial.

Paper: Toward Effective Game-Based Social Skills Tutoring for Children, James M. Thomas and Melissa E. DeRosier

Computer science in conjunction with psychology do studies to show that game behavior of children share similarities to real life behavior. Experiments tested for in social literacy and behavior. The investigation aims to identify causes and solutions for children with unhealthy psychological tendencies.

Panel: Developers with Opinions, Jon Blow, Chris Hecker, Rod Humble

Developer panel opens acknowledging that the sky’s the  limit; however, no one seems to be reaching for the sky. Blow quotes three questions:

1. What are the toughest problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

If you don’t work on an important problem, you won’t do important work. Paraphrased analogy: Even if you believe life is all about luck and you want to get struck by lightning, you should stand where you are likely to be struck, not hide in safety. “The gaming industry has a lot of McDonalds but not a lot of fine dining.”

Paper: In search of lost time: On game goals and failure costs, Jesper Juul

Jesper Juul talks about failure. Players don’t like games where they fail all the time, and also do not like games when they fail, never. Failure design is not just about difficulty. Consider time, communication, repetition.

Time: are games too long or too short? Do people play for the goal or play for the process? Do we lose time with failure? Juul distinguishes between transient and permanent goals (Bejeweled versus Bioshock). Communication: How should failure be communicated? Let the player know how “uniquely stupid” they are? Repetition: what is cost of repetition from transient to permanent experiences?

Panel: Good, Bad, or just plain Ugly? Morality and Heavy Rain, Colleen Macklin, Karen Schier, Jose P. Zagal

“The real message of the game is about how far you’re willing to go to save someone you love.” -David Cage

The panel agrees that Heavy Rain is a unique experience. Macklin finds the ethics and genre in creating culture to be overlooked by Heavy Rain’s portrayal of characters and their obvious stereotypes. Schrier has issue with inaction in the game, sometimes it’s a mistake and sometimes it’s a valid choice– “failure of the game as a game.” Zagal finds the sex scene to be just an out-of-place thrill with little narrative significance. In regards to significance, Zagal notes that the game draws significance to the more mundane experiences in life.

Macklin concludes that Heavy Rain’s media identity crisis misleads the player into commitment, and that games should, instead, “enable play instead of feeling played as a player.”

Panel: Before It’s Too Late: The Preservation of Digital Games, John Romero, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Henry Lowood

Lowood asks, how do we archive virtual worlds and digital games? For example, building archives of what the developers do in cultural repositories and encouraging collections/libraries of games in libraries and museums. Finally, Lowood suggests that collaboration among player communities, archivists, and researchers as an integral function in digital game preservation.

Kirchenbaum fills us in on the nuances of the library congress and software. For instance, materials selected for the selection must be able to run on the library’s computers (PC not Mac). Within preservation of digital worlds, He identifies many preservable facets.

Romero started a project, the “Romero Archives,” interviewing developers and designers, providing the information freely available online. It presents a complete picture of the programming process in games. Romero aims to completely document the full works of designers and their thought processes via interviews. He’s interviewed developers such as Chris Crawford and Sid Meier. As advice to developers, Romero suggests that every idea, concept, and version be well maintained. “Throwing stuff away is a bad thing.”

I left out the talks given by my EIS lab mates, including my own on “RoleModel.” You can find the complete list of proceedings online, and also: here and here and here.

Radical Islamic website warns 'South Park' creators that they may end up dead for allegedly depicting Muhammad in a bear suit

I was shocked to see on CNN that a radical Islamic website had issued this message to ‘South Park’ creators:

“We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show,” the group said. “This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality that will likely happen to them.”

In a subsequent interview with Ayaan Hirsi, Hirsi says, “South Park episode of last week was not just funny… it addressed an essential piece in the times that we are living: [that] there is one group of people, one religion that is claiming to be above criticism.”

When asked whether they were afraid of being bombed, South Park creators said:

We’d be so hypocritical against our own thoughts if we said “ok, well, lets not make fun of them because they might hurt us. That’s messed up… ok, we’ll rip on the Catholics because they won’t hurt us, but we won’t rip on them because they might hurt us.”

[Spoilers ahead!]

The episode that sparked such controversy aired one week ago, and tonight’s episode revealed that, “just kidding,” the children of South Park had Santa Claus in the bear suit “pretending” to be the prophet, Muhammad. What an interesting instance of retroactive continuity.

Ok, so this isn’t the traditional application of “retcon.” Wikipedia describes:

Retroactive continuity (often shortened to retcon) is the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. Retconning may be carried out for a variety of reasons, such as to accommodate sequels or further derivative works in the same series, to reintroduce popular characters, to make a reboot of an old series more relevant to modern audiences, or to simplify an excessively complex continuity structure.

And it may not even really be retroactive, but perhaps to the credit of the creator’s foresight of cultural implications and public response, it is. In any case, I felt it is noteworthy in light of the research meeting I had earlier today where my advisor mentions the leverage that retroactive continuity has within the system I’m currently building.

My approach to story generation focuses on implicit character role satisfaction (such as victim or aggressor) as opposed to strictly plot generation. Making the mutability of plot a secondary concern, this system (which we are calling RoleModel) aims to explore the space of ideological models and novel implications of hot cognition in generating stories.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details of the system (you can read the paper if you really want to know), but the direction I’d like to see my work heading is towards a system that generates novel variations, while maintaining the integrity of the some authored (or partially authored) plot.

The Santa Claus episode has been pulled

For a whole week, we were correct to believe that Muhammad was parodied in a bear suit on South Park. That belief stirred strong emotions and international controversy. Today, it is correct to believe that Santa Claus, not Muhammad, was in that bear suit. The integrity of last week’s episode is maintained; however, a very consequential reality has been retroactively negated. South Park creates an unusually satisfying experience by using conventions of storytelling applied to an unconventional social situation. I hope that RoleModel can leverage these under-explored experiences and (similarly) apply them to immersive and interactive spaces.

The prototype system, “RoleModel,” will premier at this year’s Foundations of Digital Games in Monterey California.

Thursday, April 15, 2010
11 am -12 pm
E2-280
Hosted by Associate Professor Michael Mateas

Speaker: Daniel Kline from Crystal Dynamics

Title: How You Can Make A Great Game

In this talk, we’ll explore how anyone can make a great game.  We’ll
investigate what separates a good game from a great game, delving into
the presenter’s personal history for rich examples.  We’ll dig into
how to find the game that you want to make, and avoid common new idea
pitfalls.  And we’ll share game development best practices to help get
it done, with plenty of time to ask questions and share ideas.

Dan Kline has been a AI and Game Programmer and Designer for video
game consoles since 2001. He’s shipped 5 titles and has worked with
companies such as Activision, Blizzard, LucasArts, and Midway. He was
Head AI and Gameplay Engineer on Star Wars: Force Unleashed, AI
Programmer for Diablo 3, and designed the first two levels of Call of
Duty: Finest Hour. He is most recently of Crystal Dynamics where he
was a Senior and Lead Game Engineer on two unannounced titles.

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

EIS was featured on current.com

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

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

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

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

Credits:

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

Special Thanks:

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

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

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

lonelygirl vlog

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this point, most people should know of Google Wave.  Fewer have had an opportunity to start “waving,” as Google Wave is still in a “limited preview” stage.  Usually, I’m not the first in line to adopt a new technology, because I always need substantial convincing for why I should bother.  In the case of waving, I had a realization that many of my current communicative frustrations may be alleviated with a reorganization for how I understood conversations.  Immediately, I got on Facebook and announced that I’d really really want an invite to Google Wave– I was waving in matter of minutes (Thanks Kyle!).

Around the same time I started waving, I decided to play the game, Braid (I had heard so many wonderful things about this game, and, you know, better late than never).  In both of my experiences with Wave and Braid, I found myself  re-evaluating the common conventions as I had, from practice, defined.  With Wave, the norms of communication is challenged and with Braid, the meta-approaches to problem solving for platformer games.   What I’m left with is the realization that time does not immutably flow steadily forward in every context– something that I’d taken forgranted all my life, and when we change our frame of reference, so does our understanding of what is true.

An example from high school physics: if you are driving down the street and the car is your frame of reference, then relative to the car, you are NOT moving.  If the street is the frame of reference, then you ARE moving; however, if the car is the frame of reference, both the you and the car may not be moving, but the street, then, IS moving.  When you think about it, the street doesn’t really move, does it?  Well, it all depends on our frame of reference. The truth, in this sense, is relative to its environment.

I’m a couple years late with this comment, but Braid is brilliant (as its reception has to show for it).  For me, it was a challenge to play and yet innovative and refreshing at the same time.  Without ruining it, Braid changes how we perceive causality and the flow of time to work.  More simply, it totally messes with my head.  I find myself gradually learning a new set of mechanics and becoming fluent in the new approaches in achieving goals, but where I am woefully lacking was in the ability to problem solve in such a foreign context.

The way we’ve learned to play games has been based off a frame of reference where time flows immutably forward.  Typically (but not always), we are able to start over and try again– those outcomes are predictable.  Still there are games, such as Final Fantasy 8, which incorporate disruptions in the flow of time (and space) through mind transfers or quantum leaps in the narrative layer, and games, such as Chrono Trigger, which give some sense of agency in altering the past to change the future.  Constraints, in regards to narrative and story, make it difficult to produce emergent experiences (even when time flows steadily forward), leaving the affects of going back in time very controlled and scripted.  Braid, however, pre-establishes its intriguing narrative layer, and leads the player through unanticipated time bending experiences via its paidia during play, minus the dramatic agency of actual time travel.

Conventions that we set to be our rules change when our frame of reference is no longer what we based everything on. What we once considered to be universal, is no longer– things that would be impossible, no longer are.

Previously, I wrote a blog post in regards to the ubiquity of advantages in having sufficient procedural literacy:

That’s not to say that using something that does procedural things makes you procedurally literate… rather, to truly use a tool appropriately you have to know how it works, at least at a high level.  Whereas, people who use technology to be “fashionable” would not be procedurally literate.

I concluded with the cursory thought:

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.

I believe that truth isn’t relative, but is defined relative to its situation.   How we understand the systems, in which situations define our beliefs, is perhaps a more accurate model of absolute truth (although, I am at no liberty to make such claims).

Like Braid has done for platformer games, Google Wave has officially (in data-structure form) augmented our perception of conversation.  Usually, I find people less inclined to embrace Wave or accept that it is anything significantly new, but to be able to alter the past and explore a breadth of topics in conversation is far more accurate of how my mind works than flowing steadily, immutably, and serially forward.

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 …