EIS at UC Santa Cruz

The first reviews of Expressive Processing have begun to appear, and the three I’ve seen come from three distinct perspectives: a game development veteran who has become a professor, an industry computer scientist with an AI background, and a public relations intern with a games-focused website. I think the collection of perspectives is interesting, but it’s hard for others to take a look because two of the three reviews are behind paywalls. This post provides a quick peek at all three, which may be particularly interesting for those curious as to what’s being said in places where their browsers can’t tread, and identifies an area of disagreement that I hope will be addressed further in future reviews. Read More »

John Davison recently claimed that games are “Too Big and Too Hard”. I have addressed this issue by reducing StarCraft to 8 buttons. My system provides the user with a GUI containing 8 buttons and lets the AI take care of the rest of the complexity associated with normally playing StarCraft. In the fully realized system, EISBot, the AI decides which buttons need to be pressed. A higher quality video is available here and the system is available for download here.

On page 141 of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (excellent) Expressive Processing, there’s discussion of a citation of from Jesper Juul:

Unlike most literary fictions, however, the worlds of many games are, in Juul’s terminology, “incoherent” (which is one of the things that limits Juul’s interest in discussing games in terms of narrative, as opposed to fiction). These are worlds in which significant events take place that cannot be explained without discussing the game rules, such as the many games that feature multiple and extra lives without any element of the game fiction that points towards reincarnation.

Reading this got me thinking about whether reincarnation in games is something that makes their worlds incoherent, and whether it is even a part of their worlds at all. Considering in this vein the common criticism that characters in computer RPGs repeat themselves, I saw the beginnings of a productive distinction, or rather, the application of an existing distinction: the distinction between a story and its telling (also known as that between fabula and sjuzhet). It makes more sense to think of reincarnation and dialogue repetition as extra-diegetic events, rather than as diegetic (and therefore incoherent) events, and a few examples illustrate this.