EIS at UC Santa Cruz

Last quarter I took a graduate seminar here at UCSC in procedural content generation, taught by Jim Whitehead. I’ve long been intrigued by the possibilities of PCG for interactive storytelling, but my past work hasn’t explored this terrain. The course inspired the short piece I’m posting today, Almost Goodbye, a parserless, browser-based, short-form experiment in procedural content generation for interactive stories. (It’s also science fiction, if none of the rest of that piques your interest.)

PCG has been used in interactive stories in the past, but usually in attempts to generate entire stories, plot points, or lines of dialogue from scratch. Rather than doing something so ambitious, instead I’m trying a sort of experiment: what’s the minimum amount of a generated text that could be inserted into an otherwise hand-authored story to produce something that’s both authorially sound and computationally interesting?

My approach with Goodbye is to generate the “satellite” sentences of a story (as opposed to the “kernel” sentences that move forward the plot) during dialogue scenes. These include all of the little bits controlling pacing between speakers (sentences like “He waited” or “There was a pause”) as well as the ones re-establishing the setting (“The moonlight shone on his face” or “Traffic growled from somewhere nearby”). While these sentences seem inconsequential at first, they can have a surprisingly strong impact on a reader’s perception of a scene. They are also relatively easy to procedurally generate compared to other types of prose sentences, and are amenable to variation based on the current narrative context (time of day, location, current speakers, mood, and the moment-to-moment rhythms of a conversation). The consequences of past player choices (such as changes undergone by the narrator) can also be factored in to the construction of these sentences. The result is (hopefully) a story that is personalized to the way you’ve been interacting with it in subtle yet constant ways, sentence by sentence… a different model than the large but infrequent consequences often seen in interactive narrative (i.e. getting one chunk of content instead of another).

You can play Goodbye at the link above; it takes about ten minutes to read through. The piece is a selection for “Avenues of Access,” an exhibit of new electronic literature that will be part of the Modern Language Association’s next conference, but I’ve received permission to post it online here early. Comments are always welcome. The curious can also read more about the technical details in a paper to be presented at the upcoming Workshop in Procedural Content Generation at the 2012 Foundations of Digital Games conference.

Today Inside Higher Education is running an editorial of mine.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts convened a historic workshop — it was their first jointly funded project. This meeting marked the beginning of a new level of national conversation about how computer science and other STEM disciplines can work productively with arts and design in research, creation, education, and economic development. A number of projects and follow-up workshops resulted in 2011. I was lucky enough to attend three of these events and, in the midst of all the exciting follow-up conversations, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about the digital humanities?

After all, the digital humanities have made it now. A recent visualization from University College London shows more than 100 digital humanities centers spread across the globe. There are dedicated digital humanities funding groups within the National Endowment for the Humanities and Microsoft Research. The University of Minnesota Press published a book of Debates in the Digital Humanities in January.

So why doesn’t the digital humanities have more of a seat at the table? Why is there the stereotype that, while computer scientists and digital artists have much to discuss, digital humanists only want to talk about data mining with the former and data visualization with the latter? I believe it is because the perception has developed, helped along by many in the field itself, that digital humanities is primarily about data.

Read more…

Yesterday I held a paperback of Expressive Processing in my hand for the first time.
(This takes its price down to around $13 at places like Amazon.) I’ve also learned a number of interesting things about the book since it was published — learning more about what others think of it, of course, and also more about how the research and thinking behind the book is influencing my own work as a digital media creator. I wrote about the creation-focused set of lessons last month, in a post called Humanities-Based Game Design.

The set of lessons about how others see the book come mostly from reading reviews. A number have been published since my last post on Expressive Processing reviews. In the rest of this post I’ll post my favorite excerpts from reviews (including those behind paywalls) and then offer some thoughts. Read More »

I gave a lecture yesterday with Jesper Juul and Clara Fernandez-Vara called “Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History.” It was part of the Game Education Summit at GDC and Frank Cifaldi wrote a nice discussion of a couple of the key themes for Gamasutra.

We put our slides together on Jesper’s computer, so I don’t have them all, but here are mine with my presenter’s notes (what I actually said varied, of course).

The nice thing about teaching game history now is that we’re very close to agreeing on the list of essential games, from around the world, that students need to master in an introductory game class

Okay, not so much. How many of you have taken an “introduction to literature” class? You probably remember that the class was not a march through “the essential works of literature” the world has produced. Similarly, introduction to film courses are not a march through “the essential works of film” the world has produced. We need to give up on the idea of identifying the key games that students need to know. We can’t cover even the most minimal list in an introductory class, even if we could agree on how to make it. Our introductory classes should be about method and approach, not about becoming familiar with some list of material. And to teach such classes we need a different approach to game history than focusing on highly-influential games or systems.

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A number of people asked me to post my introductory slides from the “What is a Research Game” session at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Here they are with my presenter notes.

Well, what is the current role of games in universities? Here’s the stereotype: Social scientists still talk with people, but now those people are WoW players, Humanists still think deep thoughts, but now they’re about Passage, Computer Scientists still build systems, and still only far enough to publish papers, Educators still do the same type of instruction, but now they add points and badges, Artists still make and exhibit pieces, but now they reference game culture

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