Max Vs. The Internet

That's it. Videogames are over. Everybody go home. We're all done. There's nothing left to do.

Continue reading "Videogames Are Over. Go Home." »

Contemplating doing something other than making games with my new liberty and, oh, would you look at that, Hack a Day has a nice roundup of different multitouch projects. Check 'em out.

But oh crap, they also have a link to a DS Homebrew Guide? It's like their trying to tell me something.

Idle Thought: is "hack a day" the carpe diem version of "hack the planet?"

If this is for real, then we all just got served. Hard.

Continue reading "Fold It!" »

Came across this while trying to find a web-friendly link to a new article on Mathematics and Music Theory published in Science. Couldn't but found this internet gold instead:

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  Scientists, We Need Your Swords! -- Bohannon 320 (5874): 312b -- Science - Annotated

  
  

  On May 9-11, the first scientifc conference will be held in World of Warcraft. Awesome!

  
  

  tags: world of warcraft, science magazine, gonzo scientist, john bohannon, wow, warcraft, science, conference, virtual, games

  
  
  
  
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    Anyone with an Internet connection can take part, from anywhere in the world. All you have to do is install the game, create a character, and join the guild called "Science" on the Earthen Ring US server.
    
    
  
  
  
  

Elit Open Mic/Open Mouse
April 25,2008, 7:30pm
USC, Institute for Multimedia Literacy

Calling All creators (and fans) of Electronic Literature: authors, designers, and programmers. Sign up now to present your new or favorite work of elit in our Open Mic/Open Mouse.

Venue: Outdoors under the stars at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, 746 West Adams Blvd., LA, CA 90089 at the University of Southern California.

Potential Genres:
* Electronic Poetry
* Hypertext
* Interactive Fiction
* Interactive Drama
* Conversational Agents
* Video Mashups
* Serious Games
* Flash Works
* Codeworks

Any work that could be labeled "Electronic Literature" is welcome
Or you may read an excerpt of one of your favorite elit works.

Performance Spots Length: 7 Minutes Max

The performance will be Free and Open to the public.

Contact: To sign up, contact Jeremy Douglass [jeremydouglass [at] gmail]

Organized by Mark Marino, Jeremy Douglass, and Jessica Pressman with support from Holly Willis of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and from the Electronic Literature Organization.

For more information see:
http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2008/04/03/underthestars/

The Errantry Team is pleased to announce the launch of its website, www.errantrythegame.com, and at last join the ranks of its website having brethren, RagnaRøkk and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom.

Precipitated by the short march to the Indiecade submission deadline this Friday, April 11^th, www.errantrythegame.com will host all things Errantry related, including screenshots, movies, an executable, as well as guides on how to use your wiimote to on your PC or Mac, as well as a plethora of links to resources the team has found helpful during the process of developing a game with Wiimote technology.

As we enter the festival season, the Errantry Team would like to solicit the opinions of the IMD community on how to best improve our web-presence and the appearance of our website, either by direct mail or a comment left on our site (which will help stress-test its infrastructure).

Forgive me if this is too conversational: I'm at a bit of an impasse, and so, rather than coming to hard answer of my own volition, so I'm going to bounce an (a set of) idea(s) off of you, if you don't mind. We're beginning the next paper in Writing 340. From it, we're supposed to cull something juicy from the streams of research we've set flowing automatically. A topic is supposed to leap at us like a glittering salmon, and we are to strike it from the apex of its plump springing as would a lumbering grizzly. Were it that easy.

Instead, I've got a problem that's been humming away in the back of my mind, the sort of thing I can't entirely put down all the way, yet can't really pick up and address properly in its own right for lack of time. I think this natural percolation points to something that I've absorbed osmotically, and now need to do something about. It lives in the same place as the Latrunculi project, and all the other stories unwritten and designs unprototyped.

Here's the short of it: I think we need an ethics for artificially intelligent agents in games and virtual worlds. I think we need one now, or at least soon enough that now will be a prudent time to start thinking through the hard problems we are faced with. Right now, let me explain what I mean, the unfounded assumptions and leaps of faith I'm making, and introduce the larger game of what-if that I'm making. I realize this has very little to do with games/how is the web changing games, but I think I might be able to point to how it will be relevant after a few hundred words, bear with me, things are about to get crazier.

I have, for the past four years or so, held a concept of artificial intelligence as one of the hard problems facing game design. I'm not even sure if there's a nice list somewhere of "unresolved problems in games design," like there is for Egyptology, or philosophy (which will come back to haunt us in a little bit). For me, the short list is reconciling emergence with narrative intent, the creation of human-like artificial intelligence, and the creating emotional meaning without playfulness. Game design is a creative field, and so while it contains finite disciplines, I have some reservations as to whether these unresolved problems will ever be answered in a satisfactory fashion. I tend to take real-time photorealism for granted in considering the future of graphics. Whether photorealistic graphics are artistically desirable or necessary is another, more interesting debate than questions over when they'll show up or how they'll change things. But problems like making resonant stories, complex emotion out of play, or characters that don't need to be written may be fundamentally unanswerable.

That doesn't mean they aren't fruitful. I think attempts to chisel out smaller problem spaces from these larger sets are laudable. I think it may even be (almost) manageable to try addressing them this way (you can insert a plug for Errantry here, if you'd like). The exploration of any one of those three areas (or other areas I haven't dared to plumb for ignorance or cowardice) could easily be a comfortable career of sorts. If we must assign a category to "creating an ethics for the creation and employment of AI," we can safely tuck it under "creating human-like AI," but the troublesome thing about these categories is that any development in one has ramifications for the others.

So, on to why and how:
Artificial Intelligence is coming. If you're a particular flavor of futurologist, you believe that someday there will be a technological singularity, and there will be an apocalypse in the old revelatory sense, not necessarily a doomsday, rapture, or new eden. Just that the human condition will change, the rules will be crazy for a little bit, and the whole thing is going to be a surprise one way or the other. It's cool if you want to run around talking about how your brain is going to be rocking faces inside some new-fangled, self-created Newtonian God-machine, or that one very lucky T-800 will travel back in time and stop H. sapiens from fighting back. Awesome. I don't really have the patience to dream that far into the future, and as Keynes said, "in the long run, we'll all be dead." The post-meta-trans-prefixed-humanity of the distant then is, frankly, inconceivable to me, and therefore, in the tradition of grand thinkers everywhere, irrelevant.

But it's a fairly safe bet that along the way, there will be smart machines. And they will be relevant to us. If you give the smart machine a sufficiently robust body, somebody is going to sleep with it. Which is hilarious, icky, inevitable, and an interesting (read: prurient) enough topic that you can make dollars from it if you write it up in a book.(bonus points if you're forethinking enough to write the book on how to break up with your robot lover as well). But it's a fairly safe bet that it's going to happen. So somewhere, traipsing down the yellow brick road towards the singularity, we have a stop where artificial intelligences and robotics become sufficiently advanced that there will be a real-life Pygmalion. I'm betting that artificial intelligence will probably get its act together before the robotics side of the equation (we may wind up with all kinds of Nexus Six-type scenarios), and with that, games have already provided a demonstrable demand for such intelligences, not to mention less "frivolous" uses, or uses that don't offend our current mores.

But therein lies the rub: already the quickest verb for describing the employ of these intelligences was "use," as if they were still a dumb tool, which is, if anything, an antiquated way of thinking about them. What happens when these minds are sufficiently human that we cannot tell the difference between human wetware from meatspace and software running on hardware (I read too much Rucker as a kid) in a virtual environment? If at, some point, they are intelligent, or intelligent "enough," then they aren't they functionally human? If so, are we not obligated to treat them as such?

This particular problem for me starts with Aristotle, in uncomfortably enough in his Politics (book 1, chapters 3-7). There, he defines a slave as a possession:

Now instruments are of various sorts; some are living, others lifeless; in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument; for in the arts the servant is a kind of instrument. Thus, too, a possession is an instrument for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments.

Having arrived at a set of natural conditions for slavery which are immediately complicated by the customary conditions, Aristotle's definition fails to reconcile the two. Much, as I suspect, we will fail to reconcile the difference between a sufficiently advanced semi-intelligent machine created to serve us, and a truly intelligent machine put to human use. At some point, lacking a proper definition, the distinction breaks down, which is why we need a set of ethics. The problem is, this is one of those unresolved philosophical problems.

I'd like to stick in the fairly safe and philosophically minded realm of antique slavery, because frankly, it is safe. A lot of people think that Classics is a field where one studies what dead white men wrote about dead white men, and while that's not strictly true, what racism is present in antique history is at least abstracted away from the current world, invested with customs that aren't familiar or widespread to modern (ca. 1500 CE and forward) notions of slavery, and importantly, not racially based. While it is possible to see a parallel between Aristotle's "natural slave/legal slave" and a chattel slave/indentured servant in the early history of the Americas, it is still possible to divorce the former from questions of race at least on an abstract level, while the latter distinction is driven by race at its very core. That's not an issue that I am equipped to deal with, but then I'm not equipped to deal with the creation of AI or deep-seated philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence. Not yet at least.

Additionally, slavery in the classical world could take forms we are unaccustomed to thinking about when we think of slavery today. A Roman, for instance might own a Greek slave who was better educated than he, who in turn would raise his master's children or run a business for his master. A gladiator could expect to die relatively quickly in his profession, and yet he might be treated like a modern rock star, being feasted and bedded in order to maintain his happiness, and thus ensure the quality of his performance in the arena. These are, of course, gross oversimplifications, but they form the broad outlines of slavery as an everyday condition that we are unfamiliar with.

Further muddying the matter is second half of one of Aristotle's antitheses, that just as some are born slaves, others are born masters; that there is an art and science to the rule of intelligent being. While it would be easy to leap to hysterics and couple the concept "natural" mastery with modern notions of race in order to arrive at the verboten concept of a master race, it is also an entirely too heated (and thoroughly disproven) chain of logic. Of relevance and use to us now is the question of how the perception of mastery alters the "master" class. Just how much does power corrupt, and through what means?

This question is an extension of a familiar one, that of "how are we shaped by the everyday use of our devices?" But again, in anticipation of the shift from "device" to intelligence, how will we be shaped by participating in a culture of use or cooperation with these "things," for lack of a better word.

We already have some experience with non-human intelligences, although to what extent they are intelligent is certainly up for debate. Somewhere back in the stack of unpublished posts for this blog I have an essay on Elephants, and whether or not they can play games. It was prompted by a video similar to this one:
We've already begun the process of exploring how to interact with non-human intelligences, things which think in ways fundamentally different from our own. Whether you or I think in the same way beyond a shared language is certainly open to debate: I'm willing to wager no, given my own relative stupidity and the diversity of "intelligences" they teach you about in grade school, like kinesthetic vs. spatial vs. musical vs. verbal learning and so on. Not to mention neurodiversity. Libraries worth of bad science fiction have been devoted to the topic, while a few shelves worth of books seem to have broached the subject intelligently. We're starting to explore it more in our natural world , as we try to get an empirical grip on what cognition actually is, but all the while we hold ourselves out above animals, and with good reason. Those lines of reasoning, however, cannot begin to prepare us for what happens when we finally through the switch or push the slinky down the first step on its path towards intelligence.

So, succintly, these are the issues I'm curious about exploring: what is an intelligence? When will we know it when we see it? How will we treat it? How should we treat it? How will we be changed by how we treat it? What are some of the precedents for these issues?

Obviously, this is a thought experiment, and more than a little crazy. It will likely be 20 years before any of these issues begin to really thrust up beyond the horizon.

So I'd like to learn more about the issues involved. I was told this could be a book, but I 'm not sure that's the best use of the next two years of my life, even if a publisher were interested. I certainly think it could be a paper, and I could probably get the abstract done in class. In unpacking the problem, there are a few angles I'd like to explore, namely how to anticipate an AI, how a slave society conducted itself (and collapsed) in the Graeco-Roman world, how those paradigms are relevant to us, how the roots of this future problem are taking shape today, and what the proposed ethics of an AI-dependent culture would actually be.

Once we have them, how will it be ethical to use them for entertainment in games? Will we be compelled to ask them nicely to play with us?

From a game design perspective (to ratchet this all back), I often think the answer of "well, story (or problem X) is hard, but someday we'll be able to plug an AI in there, which will solve everything for us" is a lazy one. AI may not be the best thing to design for, and good designs may come from designing around the need for AI. Likewise, a human-like AI may not be the most interesting AI players will want to interact with: perhaps something closer to HAL 9000, or a complex system that seems possess everything but intelligence, like an ecosystem. Imagine building a game around the Gaia hypothesis, only rather than being a complex emergent system, there was some spark of volition behind it all?

Pulling back yet another step, this time towards answering what to make of the web and its impact on games, how do these intelligences change when we move them away from a purely playful space and put them in the context of virtual worlds and networks. We've spent a lot of time in the past playing with solipsism in our fiction as a culture, but are we prepared to anticipate networked solipsism, where liminal bounds break down, and once erased, the context for thought makes it impossible to distinguish the quality of that thought?

I'm not sure where I'm leading with any of this, except that there are a number of exciting areas I'd like to plumb a little more before I pick a direction. So I'd like to ask for recommendations on books, authors, topics, articles, and what-have-you in order to help get my head around the problem, and once there, I'll ask again about actually tackling it.

I already have Weizenbaum's book on Peggy's recommendation for a starting point, but I'd like to get as broad a sampling as possible. I am nothing if not a fan of syncretism.

A quick head's up: there's a 10th anniversary screening of The Big Lebowski 7:30 PM Saturday, March 29th at The Egyptian.

I'd post more details or a link, but The Egyptian's website is pokey at the moment.

As a media scholar, I can only offer the following postulate: whatever cinema started in the early 20th century reached its apotheosis with this film at the end.

Ben Croshaw [wiki] hit the internet like a rabbit punch, swift and ruthlessly. Zero Punctuation, his weekly, ranting comic/animation was quickly absorbed by The Escapist, and in the process, their non-video page views increased 394%. Yahtzee's pithy, rapid-fire (in his own words, "fully ramblomatic") style of narration works, and seems to have an enduring charm beyond the initial novelty of his pace and commonwealth accent: his videos are still putting up good viewer numbers, despite the occasional editorial misstep (his video review of The Witcher included a brief machinima coda which was widely derided as an execrable attempt at the format). In addition to critical and comedic written works, Yahtzee is also a game designer in his own right, having released a number of independent games on his website. When people like Greg Costikyan make a lot of much ballyhooed noise about how games lack a proper tradition of criticism, that there is no actual critique to be found in most of the writing about games, it does a disservice to the work of popular satirists like Yahtzee. We would do well to remember that games are still a popular medium, and that while it is worthwhile to elevate the discussion surrounding their design, production, and consumption, such discourse is likely to arise from the popular vernacular surrounding games at the moment.

This isn't to say that critique is unnecessary, antiquated, or a foolish pursuit. But we need to re-evaluate how such critiques are produced. It's entirely possible that excellent essays regarding games and play are being produced somewhere-- I have yet to see anything written above the level of rigor presented by most popular magazines (The Escapist being a prime example of this). Most openly available writing about games outside of heavy books published by university or vanity presses tends to be material that is related to the field in an ancillary fashion, and as such, not entirely relevant to the actual business of play.

With Yahtzee, and popular critics and journalism at large, the business of writing is grounded in play. It isn't enough to engage in a thought experiment and then neglect the grounding of engaging with their subject matter on its level-- through play. Often, this is the crucial groundwork academics and outsiders ignore. Too often we see pretenders to the title of critic earn their hand-cramps at a keyboard rather than a thumbpad. It is enough to have their sons play through the game for them, after refusing to learn the controls. Any critic, even one outside of his expertise, has an obligation to undertake some professional due diligence when offering his thoughts on a piece of work. With the popular voice, this due diligence (if someone coins "dude diligence" I will burst a blood vessel in my face) is a given. With such solid grounding, Yahtzee has at least earned the right to employ the ethical appeal implicit in his highly subjective, first person reviews.

But that, maybe, is entirely the point. Yahtzee has earned the right to be brutally honest by eschewing the ivory tower. He, like any other good satirist, understands that the honest which underlies his craft, and with it, how to use a raucously foul-mouthed style to deliver it. His cartoons were nothing short of a minor revelation. Every gamer can likely recall a bull session with their friends where disses were dropped and props were offered for the faults and features of the games they were currently playing. Yahtzee does exactly the same thing, but throw in some comedic goblin silhouettes and on-the-nose visualizations and the whole enterprise gets cranked up to 11. His willingness to address not only why a specific game is bad, but why the recurrent tropes of its genre have grown stale and are largely failures.

His willingness engage with game-craft adds an element of fearlessness to all of this. By offering up his own work, Yahtzee proves too things: first, that he can take what he dishes out (even if it's shot back at him in his own style, albeit less ably), and second, that he's willing to put theory into practice. This sort of satirist-creator role isn't new, but it is rare. The only other example that springs readily to mind is Erik Wolpaw who managed to parlay his writing experience from Old Man Murray into a job writing on Psychonauts, and then on to a little game named Portal. Wolpaw as well seems to be willing to take his own medicine, for after unleashing the Start-to-Crate review metric upon the world (where games are judged on how quickly the designers broke down and used crates to provide ammunition and health, rather than design a better solution), one of his more memorable characters is in fact, little more than a crate. If being able to take it, as well as dish it out, is any measure of success in creating interactive entertainments, then Yahtzee is well ahead of the curve.

The willingness to put theory into practice, to criticize and still risk failure, is laudable. Frankly, in a field lacking rigor and often mired in intellectual cowardice, it is refreshing to see someone willing to participate in the very practices they are scrutinizing.

I saw an interview with Alan Moore once (I swear this tangent will bring us back home), where he spoke about he had declared himself a magician on his fortieth birthday. His express purpose was to make his friends think that he had leapt head-first off the deep end, and in his own words, he quite rightly had. At that point in his life, he had realized that words are magic (or I suppose we should spell it "magick"), and that to use them is to use a higher order of power beyond their symbolic coding. I'm fairly sure he was sincere, but the example he gave made me think he was a touch less bonkers: satire. To put a satire on one's enemies, according to Moore, is a fate worse than death. Kill a man and his family, and you end his genetic line. Satirize that same man, and do it well, and he will be remembered and mocked forever, his verbal destruction coded into culture at large, a creative act that preserves the folly of a man in order to skewer him for it endlessly, something capable of turning his own descendants against him. I think it was an excellent, if over stated point. In a cultural context, games hold a similar cultural power. It seems necessary that they be kept in check as well, that their stupidities and petty evils be pruned while it is possible, before the ink on the pages of cultural memory dries, leaving us with an inferior experience.

Satire then, is a key part of that pruning, and the work of Yahtzee points towards a just application of such satire. At least someone is trying.

We've been using Pageflakes in Writing 340 to aggregate our research. Here's mine:
http://www.pageflakes.com/Envarh/.
Come along with me after the jump for a tour of its multifarious and glittering features!

Continue reading "Pageflakes" »