Only with the absurdity of this video can you accurately capture the almost-entirely failed message of Call of Duty.

Choice quote: “My girlfriend has walked in front of the telly again.”

While I won’t bother trying to add anything to Christian’s epic foresight into the series, I have to say I was fascinated by Inside UFO 54-40:

The branch diagram for UFO 54-40 is unique in that it has one ending – the Ultima ending – which is completely disconnected from the rest of the story. It exists as an island, unreachable through choices but discoverable thanks to the random access nature of the book.

This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.

Or, in other words, was this a tacit acceptance of players making their own rules by exploring a system? Could this have been emergence in a primordial form?

Distinguished Lecture: Frank Lantz
Interim Director, NYU Game Center and Creative Director, Area/Code
Wednesday, Nov 18th, 2-3:30pm
Engineering 2, room 506

“Innovations in Game Design: Through Practice to Theory”

Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has been an innovator in the field of game design for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

Over the past 8 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world’s largest boardgame; ConQwest, which featured the first major application of semacodes in the United States; PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU; and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

Frank is also the Interim Director of the NYU Game Center. For over 12 years, Frank has taught game design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.

This lecture is free and open to the public. However, you will need to purchase a parking pass at the main campus entrance. The parking kiosk can provide you with a map to the Engineering 2 building and the best nearby parking.

For the ears: cfml-prototype.mp3

Context Free is an excellent tool for exploring generative spaces in the domain of 2D visual art (and Structure Synth does a fantastic job in 3D), but can a language of circles, rectangles, and triangles mutated by rotates, translates, and scales be translated into the domain of music? The result is not just a rich analogy, but a fun and expressive software performance instrument.

In creating cfml, I set my goal as making a translation of cfdg (the language for visual compositions) into the domain of live music. At the highest level this meant figuring out what sense of music I was going to map to. Context Free doesn’t do all kinds of visual art, really it can only place many many copies of a few primitives around the page with some interesting transformations applied to them.  After this, it is up to a graphics library to render these shapes to pixels and shoot them out the display. Over in the music domain I decided that a “single note played on a particular instrument” was a good primitive and that common musical transformations such as pitch transposition, time-stretching, and volume control would make nice analogs to cfdg’s geometric and color transformations. These primitive musical objects are handed to the system as MIDI events and are then rendered (live!) to a nice, sampled waveform and shot out the speakers for the audience to hear.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of several concepts in cfdg and cfml.  Keep in mind that cfdg has a custom, Java-like syntax while cfml inherits its syntax from Scheme.

The comparison above shouldn’t be too scary (once you get past the syntax change). But what prompted a syntax change in the first place? Surely parens have no more special relation to music than they do to visual art.

Here’s where things get tricky. Visual art is static, timeless, and purely spatial. Music, on the other hand, gives up almost all of its spatial detail in exchange for rich temporal detail. Music happens over time — and time isn’t something we can talk about in cfdg.

When making cfml, the best tool I knew of for algorithmic composition of music was Impromptu, a Scheme-based livecoding environment. An essential idiom in live composition in Impromptu is “temporal recursion” whereby a function schedules a call back to itself after a time delay. Having had such a great experience with Impromptu in the past (and being an appropriately lazy programmer) decided to create cfml as an internal domain-specific-language within Scheme, running inside of Impromptu and exploiting its musical performance libraries (for abstract musical note manipulation and MIDI playback). Mad propz @ Abelson and Sussman.

Time manifests itself in cfml not as a whimpy delay-by-n-beats operator, but two super-powered functional combinators called during and after. The composite (during melody harmony) immediately begins composing the melody and the harmony and assumes a total duration of the longer of the two pieces. Likewise, (after chorus verse) delays not only the performance, but even delays the composition of the verse until the chorus has finished performing. The result assumes the duration of the total duration of the sequence. Given the literal syntax shown in the comparison (which allowed simple, constant time offsets) you can create rich musical pieces from individual notes by composing (in the mathematical sense) chunks using the two combinators and a sprinkling of transformations (to pitch, volume, and duration). Ok, choose is a pretty powerful combinator as well, but it didn’t require nearly as much continuation-related magic to implement as they others.

The deferred composition in cfml isn’t just a gimmick to get the music playing sooner, it is an essential element of the language’s semantics. Consider the definition (define (song) (after (during melody harmony) song)). This simple rule is clearly recursive, and it is equally clearly missing a base case! If you tried to perform song you’d get an infinite sequence of notes.  Well, you’d get tired after a while and modify the rule to have a likely base case and the song would end naturally. Deferred composition not only saves the CPU work of deciding which notes to play later, it saves the human artist the work of deciding how to compose those notes that will come later. Livecoding is required as well, as there must be some way to affect the running program if you are ever going to tame that infinite recursion.

My hope is that cfml (in proximity to cfdg) makes it easier to think about generative art in domain-agnostic terms. There is a whole art (or maybe science (well, its clearly design)) to expressively crafting recursive definitions and tending nondeterministic rules while they are in the process of executing. There are teachable tricks to refactoring processes in-flight while preserving (or mutating) certain perceivable aspects. There are new spaces of concerns that go into the design of tools for this mode of artistic programming that don’t make sense in the big-project, enterprise software engineering mindset.

People talk agile, extreme, but try programming in a limited model of computation and responding to shifting client demands on a second-by-second basis by modifying the software while it runs. You’d be surprised by how relaxing it is. Really.

Ok, now that you’ve reached the end, go click the fancy image at the start of this article for a nice, practical comparison of cfml and cfdg. If you like what you see (and have a Mac), go pick up Impromptu, download my cfml library and example from github (patches welcome) and start hacking away.

The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment.  The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.

Competition details are available here.

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.

FDG 2009 was a fantastic conference, filled to the brim with various gaming academic luminaries, fascinating papers and a wide variety of interests. I’m looking forward to 2010, as it’s just down the road in Monterey!

Luis and Gay Tony in GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony

Last week, the second and final installment of the Episodes of Liberty City downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV, The Ballad of Gay Tony, was released. Unlike the more sullen story of Nico Bellic, clawing his way up from nothing, Gay Tony’s Luis begins with a crisp suit, good job, plenty of cash and all sorts of expensive items to wreak havoc throughout Liberty City. What marks out GTA IV’s DLC from a simple mission pack or extra campaign is that it offers the chance to experience Liberty City from a new perspective, reimagining the gameplay, and thus, the game, in the process.

This is something I heartily commend.

Casting our minds back through the mysts of tyme, in ye olden days, expansion packs for PC games were popular stop-gaps between development cycles. Often, the best packs would invite a new experience, for better or worse. Blizzard’s Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft III included some fairly awful squad-based levels, eschewing the base management aspect the original. However, the attempt was there, the price of development was low, and the cost to the consumer was reduced too. Win-win. Now that DLC has become entwined in the fate of games on the current generation of consoles, we see this trend returning.

Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island

While GTA IV asks players to see the city through the eyes of a new protagonist, with new motivations and financial status (equaling new mission, weapons and cars, gameplay-wise), Burnout Paradise’s expansion, Big Surf Island is an unashamed distillation of the core game. Criterion took all the aspects that made the original fun: huge jumps, secret areas, inventing Tony Hawk-esque routes to create the most exhilarating run, and shrunk it down into a tiny area, converting the game from a weak beer to a hard shot of tequila. It’s a wonderful addition to the game. In fact, the only problem is that the island is too much fun. Driving between both areas, linked from a bridge, is now a jarring experience: the jumps, twists and turns of the new island give way to open, flat, straight, roads of the original. Roads that once seemed exciting and fast are now tedious and one-dimensional.

The difference between these expansions and those that the PC cultivated is that while we need to build new content, we can still situate the player in the same environment that they know, playing off their familiarity with surprise and nostalgia. The re-imagining of these games shows just how many play-styles modern games are capable of supporting, if only the developers had the time to do so. There are strong parallels with MMOs here, visiting the old friend of Azeroth after six months away can reveal new secrets and functionality, delighting players for years on end. Revisitating promotes an ownership of virtual worlds that were hitherto transient places, existing for a single game, for a single purpose.

I hope this signals a new style of development, building on solid foundations to support ever more complex and ever more exciting gameplay, refining original ideas over time, rather than creating monolithic pieces that remain the same forever. The intent is the same as the (arguably failed) episodic gaming movement of a few years ago, but the execution different.

And now, back to Gay Tony. I have some skyscrapers to base jump off.

Yo Frankie! An open source platformer created using Blender.

I recently gave a presentation on the landscape of open source software in computer games at the Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, where I am currently visiting the Libresoft research group. My slides are available here.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender.

A disappointment was the state of open content sharing. While some sites, like OpenGameArt and New Grounds provide tagging with a Creative Commons license, far more common are sites like Google’s 3D Warehouse that have site-specific terms of use, and provide no ability for artists to indicate they are willing to share their work via Creative Commons or an open source license.

Koster's "A Theory of Fun for Game Design"

I’m a new member of the lab here, and that means that I’ve got a lot of learning to do. I need to learn about the different projects in the lab, learn about the various systems involved in those projects, and even about programming languages used in those systems. But I also need to learn about the theory that drives those systems, and more broadly, the theory that motivates the work in the lab. So for the past few days, I’ve been reading articles–and even a short book–about the theory of fun in games.

Why is this important to the lab? Here at EIS, we build AI systems that work with games. Many of them are focused on building a particular type of experience, or enabling developers to do something new. And since we’re building game experiences and tools to assist in their creation, we need to be able to talk and think seriously about what makes games good or bad. If you build an AI system that enables some new mode of interaction in a game, it’s often not enough to say that it’s new; you usually want to make a claim that it’s good, and that involves either user testing, or some theory that you can point to to claim that it’s probably good. Additionally, before you even build the system, you want to be able to design it according to principles that will help ensure that the finished product is good. And so we study the theory of fun in games in order to better understand the medium with which we work, and the ways in which we can expand and contribute to that medium.

These are my thoughts about fun in games, distilled from the reading that I’ve been doing. First, fun isn’t something that games are. Fun is something that people have (often while playing games). To put it technically, fun is a property of an experience (which is what occurs during a particular instance of gameplay). When we say that a game is fun, we’re making a generalization about the kinds of experiences it helps us have. The reasons that a game helps us have fun experiences are not always directly under the control of the game creator, so it’s important to recognize this. As game creators, we need to think about what aspects of the game experience we can control, and what aspects we cannot control. When these uncontrolled aspects get in the way of fun, can we adjust the controlled aspects to compensate for this? Can we even detect the uncontrolled aspects? A good example of this is player behavior in multiplayer games. The game creator doesn’t have direct control over player behavior, and player behavior is important for whether or not the game is fun. But the game creator can exercise limited influence over player behavior through psychological cues, and can give players control over their collective behavior to try to ensure a positive experience. Things like the ability to mute other players or vote to kick players in first person shooters are an example of this. The game creator can’t prevent players from behaving in a way that annoys other players, but ey can give the players tools to help mitigate this behavior. So the first step towards an understanding of fun in games is to recognize that the fun isn’t in the game, it’s in the experience of the game, and because of that, game designers should pay attention to all aspects of that experience, including ones that they cannot control directly.

Given this understanding of fun, one might ask: “What makes game experiences fun?” But I think that there’s another question that should be answered (or at least considered) first: “What does it mean to be fun?” To be more precise: is fun a monolithic concept, and we classify experiences as simply fun or not, or is it a group of related concepts, meaning that things can be fun for different reasons or in different ways? My answer to this question is that to some degree, both descriptions are valid. If you ask someone whether something was fun or not, they can often give a simple yes or no answer in the broad sense, and even though a more detailed analysis is possible, this simple, broad, yes-or-no sense of fun is still valid. In fact, I think that sometimes it’s not useful to break down why an experience was fun, because the reasons can be extremely complex and specific. On the other side of things, there are multiple ways in which an experience can be fun. Things can be fun because they’re challenging, or because they’re beautiful, or for many other reasons. There are a few of these reasons that feature prominently in most games, and those reasons are what the literature focuses on. But I believe that it’s important to also acknowledge the role of other, more minor varieties of fun, because each way in which a game can be fun has the potential to become the main variety of fun in a game that targets it. The “observational immersionist” style of games mentioned in the previous post is a good example of this: in many games, part of the fun lies in exploration and appreciation of beauty. But when this kind of fun becomes the focus of the game, the result is a game that feels very different than many mainstream games, which often focus heavily on challenge as a source of fun.

So using this idea of many varieties of fun, we can ask what the sources of fun are. How do we create the different types of fun? This distinction between a kind of fun and a cause of fun is often subtle, and in some cases perhaps unnecessary, but I think that it’s important to keep the two separate. For a simple example, we can identify challenge as a particular kind of fun. A more thorough analysis would perhaps be more specific, but we can say that in general, people have fun through experiencing and overcoming challenges. This is a kind of fun. How do you create it? You create challenges and let the player experience them. So challenging situations create “challenge fun”. Seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s important to note that there are some constraints on the challenging situation: in very broad terms, it can’t be too simple or too difficult (Of course, this means different things for different people, which is a reason for thinking of fun as a property of an experience rather than a property of a game). More subtly, there are any number of situations that could count as challenges, and produce challenge fun. Maybe the game itself is quite easy, but a community of players has taken to playing it without looking at the screen. In this case, the experience may have the property of “challenge fun”, even though the challenge is not a part of the game: it’s a part of the particular game-experience. So the separation of “types of fun” from their causes is useful in order to think clearly about the goal: the creation of fun experiences (of course, other goals are possible, but that’s perhaps a subject for another blog post).

I’ve rambled on a bit about fun and games, and I haven’t really addressed the meat of the problem in detail, but I think I’ve given an overview of one way to think about and look for fun in games. The hard work, which is actually classifying the different types of fun and their causes, is the subject for more than a blog post; in fact, it’s the subject of several books and research papers that I’ve been reading through. But the important points are that fun arises from experiences, not directly from games, and that there are many types and causes of fun, some of which have not been explored much in the context of games.

• “Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story” by Nicole Lazzaro.
• “GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games” by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
• “An Experiment in Automatic Game Design” by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

One other thing that I’ve not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it’s cited by most of what I’ve read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.