Alice and Kev in Sims 3

Alice and Kev is a story about two homeless characters in Sims 3, played and written about by Robin Burkinshaw. Burkinshaw writes about what happens as he playes the game, each interpretation he makes in the text is based on an event.

The new version of Sims, which I haven’t played yet, seem to be an even better environment for story construction. I made a small story in Sims 2 to try it out. It was impressive then and it seems it has improved in a number of ways. Burkinshaw gives clues to the function in his text without making the text dry. Something new seems to be that characters mood is affected by how they feel about persons that are in geographic proximity. Since this is a feature I have been curios to test in my own prototypes I really wish I could spend time looking at, how it works in Sims. But that will have to happen after the dissertation is written. Only a few weeks left now.

I really recommend reading the story about Alice and Kev – it is a good story. Burkinshaw has made characters that appear, as many of the people commenting on the story says, as real people. Real people as in round characters that can act in a way that clearly distinguish them as characters with personalities, but still behave in interesting and surprising ways.

My favorite chapter is “Selflessness”. The character Alice has after many hardships finally managed to get her first salary. Only to give it away… It’s almost painful to read, knowing how much she needs that little money herself. Burkinshaw expresses in the text how his role as author/player becomes dramatic by the need to make a choice – he doesn’t really want Alice to give the money away, but lets her anyway, letting her act according to her character.
It is also interesting is to read the comments on the chapter, where the first comments are about how real Alice feels as a character, and how beautiful her gift of charity is. Then comes another interpretation by the user Danuab:
“It doesn’t mean anything. Alice has likely internalised her father’s distaste and abuse and developed a negative self-concept. She isn’t giving money away because she’s altruistic, she’s giving it away because she doesn’t think she’s worth it.”

Now we are talking. Not only have we a game that can not only generate emergent story construction that is seen by players as meaningful enough to narrate to others, we also have critical comments and interpretations of the narrative and the characters.

Games as an art form has come a long way. This is a milestone!

http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/

Pataphysic Institute flyer

Demo Session day 4 FDG2009

In the demo session we got the chance to look closer at the applications presented at the conference.
The demo session reminds me of the ACE conference, but here at FDG it was more weaved into the program: It was put late, so that one could go and look closer at those applications that had sparkled an interest during the paper presentations. All conferences in this field should do it like this! As you can see in the picture below, the room was packed.



Here is Ken Hullet from the EIS lab, showing his scenario generation app for emergency rescue training games.



Ken is using a hierarchical task network planner that (I asked) can be used for other systems. (Note to self: don’t forget.)

In the corner next to the show of KODU I saw people with space-like goggles on holding a piece of carton with a pattern on. They were looking totally immersed as they were carefully tilting it in different angels. I asked to try, and lo and behold (as Yasmin Kafai would say), when I was wearing the goggles, and looking at the patterned piece of carton things appeared on it! By tilting the carton piece I could steer a ball that would roll in different directions through a maze.

I remember looking at other applications for augmented games. A group at Fraunhofer made the cross media game Epidemic menace, where the goggles provide an overlay of fictional content on the reality through the goggles – the goggle covered only one eye, and through it one could see how the otherwise invisible viruses where moving around in the environment where one was standing.
Another augmented gaming solution that comes to mind is Sony’s The Eye of Judgment that I saw at TGS 2006.


(1)Fraunhofer, Virus game, me trying on goggles, (2) Poster of the epidemic menace game from Fraunhofer, (3) Sony’s the The Eye of Judgement, (TGS 2006)

There are many other systems, but somehow… well that could be me being ignorant, but somehow they don’t seem to fly out to the world. I see an initial presentation, I get enthusiastic, but then they fade into silence. On the other hand: these are early, brave, expensive projects that are heavy on the tech. They fly by showing what is possible. Paving the way.

Now, the system shown at FDG is called Goblin XNA for Augmented Reality research and Games, is open source and builds upon XNA. This combined with that the goggles are cheap makes it suddenly very accessible to work with! Perhaps this could be one of the applications that start trotting along the pavement laid out by sweat, blood and tears of the earlier projects. We will see. For my part I’m putting Goblin into my “future box” (things I want to play with when I’m done with the dissertation).

Damien Isla on AI aided content creation, FDG2009 day 4

Damian Isla, Founder, Naimad Games, Next-Gen Content Creation for Next-Gen AI

Damian Isla approached the area of content creation aided by AI for games by looking at two possible solutions: (1) Michael Mateas’ standpoint of the need for a new breed of engineering competent designers, and (2) Chris Hecker’s standpoint of the need for better authoring paradigms (“The Photoshop of AI”). Damian showed examples of state of the art applications from three categories:
(1) Causal ”when a happens do B”,
(2)Learning (and behavior capture), and
(3)Planning.

For each of the categories he showed screenshots of interfaces illustrating the approaches, among them Endorphin (NaturalMotion), Havoc Behavior, Autodesk, The Restaurant game (Jeff Orkin), AC Knowledge viewer (TruSoft), Assassins Creed (Ubisoft), Halo 3, The Sims, F.E.A.R (Monolith Productions), Final Fantasy 12 (Square Enix),SPIRPOS AI, Zombie (Steve Marotti, Nihilistic Software), Situation Editor (Brian Schwab, Sony), BT Editor Prototype (Alex Champanard), Façade (Mateas & Stern).

Damian went on quoting Stanislavsky (whereupon I almost fell in love with the speech),






and then showed a mockup of the office assistant helping out with a suicide letter (where I DID fall in love),



and closed his circle of arguments by looking at the two possible solutions. Damian thinks we need both, and I agree. It’s not new saying that AI needs to be done in coop with designers, but what Damian is saying that is it should be done BY designers – either in code, or by using the technical solutions for content creation. (And we need more of those). I might of course be biased given the work I do… but hey, there is a reason for it. Yay for Damian!

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I understood later in the day that I had missed a really good speech in the morning: Tan Le’s presentation about Emotive “The Brain - Revolutionary Interface for Next-Generation Digital Media”. Emotive has developed a helmet that listens to the EEG waves of the brain and managed to make a system that can filter the noise from the signals good enough to enable a player to move 3D objects with pure thought! Still in Orlando after having disembarked the ship I watched a presentation of the system that is out on YouTube. …Would the Marvin, who is up on stage there, be Marvin Minski? I really hope that I can swing some time after I’m done with the dissertation to play around with the system: there is an SDK for it. (Thanks David Gibson for sending me the link and summarizing her whole speech in conversation :))

FDG day 3, afternoon and pirate night

We spent the afternoon ashore, and after returning to the ship it was time for the poster session and a panel about Academic/Industry Collaboration.

Here are the posters that I found most interesting:

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Panel about Academic/Industry Collaboration.
Steve Berman (Founder & CEO, Transformative Media Consortium and COO, IP Pacific/Canada), Mark Overmars (Utrecht University), Magy Seif El-Nasr (Simon Fraser University), Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin) and Bill Swartout (USC/ICT)

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The dinner theme was pirate costumes, and the EISers (joined by Ian and Maggie) went all out on! (i kept wishing i had bought the pirate hat i found in Nassau)

Game Studies Session FDG day 3

Paper Session #5: Game Studies
Session chair: TL Taylor

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Hardcore casual: Game culture return(s) to Ravenhearst, Mia Consalvo



Mia Consalvo has been studying the player base of the casual games produced by Big Fish Games in order to see if players of casual games differ from players of other types of games – but found lots of similarities between these players and players of more ‘hardcore’ games.
I took some notes while listening:



Ian asking:

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Easy to use and incredibly difficult: On the mythical border between Interface and Gameplay, Jesper Juul and Marleigh Norton



Jesper Juul and Maleigh Norton gave some illustrative examples of games juxtaposing easy interface with complicated game play, and games with easy gameplay but with extremely complicated interfaces. They argued that in some cases an inefficient interface can be part of the game – to learn to master it.



Here are the notes I jotted down while listening:

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Characterizing and Understanding Game Reviews, Jose Zagal, Amanda Ladd and Terris Johnson

Jose and his coauthors have been analyzing a large number of game reviews in order to understand their influence and character. According to Jose they are much more than shopping guides, and have the following nine common themes:

FDG 2009 Day 2, Yasmin Kafai on game design “for girls”

Invited Talk: Yasmin Kafai, Ph.D., Professor of Learning Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School at Education
Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Girls and Games





Yasmin Kafai gave an interesting speech on the history of designing games for girls, providing us with three named categories for these design endeavors:
- Games for girls only
- Games for social change
- Games for expression



Kafai conducts her research in a teen virtual worlds where the percentage of female players are higher than that of males (Yes, they exist). She gave a fascinating overview of her work where she had analyzed logs of play from 6 months, and could see patterns in behaviors and very diverse playing styles. I don’t think anyone would believe that all girls play the same way just because they are girls, but if there is anyone out there assuming this Kafai’s work has solid proof of the contrary.