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'Flick-werk zusammengestückelte Arbeit; stümperhafte Arbeit, Pfuscherei; Sy Flickschusterei
(Wahrig - Deutsches Wörterbuch)
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Tuesday, March 31, 2003
Event-Blog
Saturday night, I tried to to live-blog the Nacht der Museen. It didn't quite work out the way I planned as there was no online-access to be had anywhere. (Except the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, but one was not supposed to put the terminals to other than exhibition-related uses.) Results here. In German, though.
07:55 PM
Tuesday, March 31, 2003
Finally ...
TIDSE-photos.
07:50 PM
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Welcome
Jane Joy arrived on Monday. Happy Birthday, Jane Joy! And congratulations, Diane.
11:45 PM
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Review
So this was TIDSE (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) 2003. I was surprised to see that re: storytelling, the computer graphics people are struggling with much the same issues as the hypertext literary people. Or that the ht lit-people used to struggle with (while in the games-world, storytelling or narrative is currently a concept non grata, anyway). Story grammars, story patterns, the automatic generation of stories, plot-lines, virtual narrative are a thing of the 90s. A story is not the sum of Propp's story-elements. And honestly, using the computer's ever-increasing powers to create ever more life-like virtual worlds and choose-your-own-path stories of a scope and complexity that makes them appear endless, giving the reader/ user/ player the illusion of limitless freedom - I don't think this will ever by itself result in satisfactory, fulfilling reading experiences. As Clive Fencott said during his talk on "Agencies of interactive story-telling", sometimes it's the limits that make a story engaging.
Still, TIDSE had quite a few interesting project presentations and demos. Most intersting I found the Augmented Reality projects, notably Bolter's suggestion that not only are the production-costs lower (the background and props don't have to be rendered), but the experience is heightened by the "real" surroundings (of a museum, a historical battlefield, or a graveyard as in "Ghosts of Boston"). Add to this Fencott's suggestion that the player-character should not be the main character in an interactive fiction (because this makes identification with the hero impossible) but that the main character should be an extrovert and friend to the player - one who guides the reader/ user/ player through a story the latter more or less marginally involved in. The environment and the (apparent) free will of the main character should set enough limits to create a plotted story within which the user can walk and interact as if freely.
Had a chance to talk to Chris Crawford who sees Interactive Stories as the next genre besides and after hypertextual fiction and computer games; due in a few years.
I wonder how they'll open the market, though. The academic afficionados who are familiar with and enjoy the genre will not reach critical mass. Digital entertainment usually addresses a youth-market - like computer games. But will young gamers buy the boxes when the discs inside do not offer gameplay? On the other hand, as teenage gamers grow up, they may grow into the appreciation of a more diverse range of digital art forms while the more literary inclined are becoming sufficiently computer-literate to allow form of digital literary art into their shelves.
11:30 PM
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
TIDSE III
Aisling Kelliher, Ali Mazalek, Glorianna Davenport, Documenting Digital Dialogues: Engaging Audience in the Construction of a Collective Documentary Acress Time and Space
Aisling and Ali present a video-blog documentary they made during a Haytack Mountain School Workshop [it *is* weird to blog without the web to help you quick-research half-heard stuff]: short, briefly edited video-clips with commentary.
Aisling and Ali tried to maintened an online-community after the workshop, which, however, faded rather quickly. Some participants/ contributors also obviously had problems with making their posts freely available on the web.
I notice this reluctance to be "available online" in different contexts - which strikes me as weird seeing how people react towards a news-camera rolling in their local highstreet. The 15 mins of fame are fine, the 15kb are still frightening.
10:10 AM
Elisabeth Phillips and Alan Parkes, Building a Bridge between Video Clips and Stories
Phillips uses visual analysis of clips stored and clustered in a database (by state, status, location, personae, direction, length etc.) to generate short video-stories from user-input parameters.
"The generated story is always only as good as the clips you have in the database." says Phillips. The tool sure looks nifty (although I wonder how much of the indexing has to be input manually), but I suspect (we did not get to see a live presentation) that the Ohs and Ahs provoked by the final story will be directed more at the indexing and retrieval capacities of the machine and *not* the aesthetic, mimetic, cathartic or otherwise literary quality of the story.
10:40 AM
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Oh, my
Not only did I have to miss the afternoon-sessions, now this:
Carry gets the bomb. Remember my obsession with Sex and the City Carry Breadshaw's G3 Powerbook? Almost every episode of S/C contains a long and loving camera pan across the shapely lid, slowly revealing a glowing white apple. *sigh*
In this episode, Carry gets the bomb and loses everything on her harddrive as well as her boyfriend. Ah for the appropriateness of this metaphorical conjunction (or disjunction).
But, I ask you, did the crash and breakup follow the script-writerly logics of matching main- and subplots (Miranda, in case you care, loses her mother) -- or did Carry just have to get rid of this guy who tried to replace a G3 with an iBook Blueberry?
Ahh, this is what happens with live-blogging: they made up. They're together again. At least, the G3 is back.
09:45 PM
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
TIDSE II
Elisabeth Figa and Paul Tarau, Story Traces and Projections: Exploring Patterns of Storytelling
Paul Tarau presents "patterns of storytelling" and the WorldNet lexical database. Tarau and Figa define many-to-many and world-to-sense relations within the database that make it possible to process the content-blocks of texts to lay open their semantic relations.
The current use is for NL recognition in chat agents.
09:30 AM
Clive Fencott, Agencies of Interactive Digital Storytelling
Fencott rehearses some of Barthes's theories of the narrative, then goes on to outline anaesthetics of Virtual Environments (VEs):
- agency
- narrative potential
- transformation
- co-presence
- presence
... then states that agency is not a given, has to be designed to accomodate pirpose, genre, tec. and is restricted.
Acc. to Fencott, however, these limitations (the character "tells" the player she doesn't want to take certain actions at a certain point) actually givenarrative pleasure, the reward of agency. Agency and narrative are reconcilable.
10:00 AM
Nicolas Szilas, IDtension: a narrative engine for Interactive Drama
Szilas presents his project IDtension, an interactive narration with 3-4 tasks and goals for the user/ player can follow and choose between.
For this, Szilas, too, has developed a model of narrativity, consisting of three layers, discourse layer (intention, system of values), story layer (character, goals, obstacles, actions, transforamtions etc.), perception layer (cognitive factors, emotion).
11:00 AM
Anindita Basu and David Cavallo, Children as Designers of Full-Contact Poetry
The use of digital media for poetic expression has so far been open mostly to adults. "Full-Contact Poetry" is an authoring and shoring environment for children to produce digital poetry in.
11:30 AM
David Bolter et al., Three Angry Men: An Experiment in Augmented-Reality, Point-of-View Drama
David Boler presents Three Angry Men, an Augmented Reality abridged adaptation of 1950s movie Twelve Angry Men.
For the AR, the conversation of the jurors was recorded three times with the chracters played out differently each time to reflect the assumed pov/ perception of the position eventually taken by the user. The user wears a headset and sits in the chair of one of the juror, sees and hears the other two talk and hears "herself" talk without being able to speak or engange in the course of the discussion. She can, however, change seats while the dicussion is going on.
Bolter believes in the importance of the "real" environment in which the virtual action is played out, e.g. for applications in a museum or on a historic battle-site - or the virtual ghosts of Boston set in an actual Bosten cemetary.
11:45 AM
Peter Hoffmann and Michael Herczeg, Distributed Storytelling for Narrative in Spacious Areas
Peter Hoffmann presents Jeherazade, a networked learning kiosk system to be used in spacious areas like excavation sites or museums. Based on the observation that the average user requires teh greatest possible freedom and the greatest possible amount of information as well as someone or something who/ that guides her through the site, Hoffmann and Herczeg found that
- the State of the Art-solution is a multimedia kiosk, which, however, has not information about the users and
- the conceivably best solution would be a nomadic information system (however, PDAs etc. are still too fragile)
On the kiosk hardware, arranged on a site, a "story" could be installed that is built around the movements of the user/ visitor.
A reference implementation is in progress at Schloss Eutin in Northern Germany.
12:00 PM
Ido A. Iurgel, Automated Emotional Immersion in Interactive Storytelling
Iurgel introduces his project "Geist" (link: www.tourgeist.de, an augmented reality story that plays out in a "real-life" environment.
The main issue to be addresses for emotional immersion, according to Hoffmann, is the problem that in films or books, we identify with the hero, but in interactive fiction we are the hero, so we cannot identify. The solution, then, is to create a protagonist beside the playing character who is compelling and aimable and has a favorable relationship with the user-character. (Bit like The Great Gatsby - ar)
More links: www.art-e-fact.org
12:15 PM
Monday, March 24, 2003
TIDSE
I'll be at TIDSE (Technologies in Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) conference in Darmstadt Mon thru Wed. I'll try some not quite live "live-blogging", uploading stuff at night when I find a conncetion.
TIDSE is a follow-up to DISTL 2000, interdisciplinary workshop on Digital Storytelling. TIDSE starts from a recognition of storytelling in all sorts of digital media and aims at defining different genres of interactive storytelling and see if there are connections to industry and the market.
Nicely, the organizers put a lot of emphasis on the "having fun" and "mingling between sessings" aspects of conferences. They also have printed and laminated cards: 5 mins (yellow) and 2 mins (red) to make sure speakers don't run over.
Contrary to blogging customs, I'll write chronologically down screen within a day and start new permalinks for individual presentations.
09:50 AM
keynote Chris Crawford
Crawford, in what looks like a monk's habit only shorter (well, and jeans), outlines six conceptual obstacles that prevent us from solving the problem of interactive storytelling.
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The Primacy of Interacitity
Interactivity is perceived to be revolutionary and therefore scray. But interactivity is the essence of computing. So put all your eggas into one basket name "interactivity".
-
Dichotomy between things and processes
Mentally, we prefers nouns, because verbs/ processes are much more difficult to grasp. But we're not working with inter-thing-ivity, we're working with inter-act-ivity. Concentrate on the process, not what things are but how they work.
-
Concentrate on verbs
Verbs are the manifestation of processes. Here's Crawford's first rule of interactivity-design: ask "what are the verbs?"
However, it only works when it reaches a certain size. C. estimates that 1000 words are the absolute minimum for storytelling; 2-5000 are more appropriate.
-
Creating the tools, the authoring systems for interactive storytelling is far more important than building the engine.
Think more about the tools than the products themselves.
Two worlds of "science" and "arts"
While computer games are being created by the programmers alone, they will always be awful.
-
Finally, there's a perceivable reluctance to shake hands an work with the business people.
In interactive storytelling, there are 3 cultures, the above + industry. Someone has to assemble and pay very large teams of designers, artists, programmers etc. etc. For this, you need some MBAs.
While in the US, scientists and artists mix less well than in Europe, in Europe, no-one is comfortable working with the business people.
These are personal, emotional issues, not intellectual issues.
C. clearly sees more openness toward overcoming these issues in Europe, mostly due to European cultural history; so acc. to C., Europe may well become to computer games, what the US/ Hollywood are to movies. He closes his keynote "We need you".
IMHO, Europe here may well be France (see Microids et al.), and be to computer games what France is to movies while Hollywood holds the mass market.
11:00 AM
Sachindra Nath, Story, Plot and Character: Narrative Experience as Emotional Braid
Nath claims that top level control is the 'reality' definition in terms of causal laws. This leaves more freedom for the emergence of plot and beahviors. It also limits the cognitive freedom of the user.
12:00 PM
Jeff Rawlings and Joe Andrieu, Player-Protagonist Motivation in First-Person Interactive Drama : A Framework for Aristotelean Interactive Drama
Rawlings and Andrieu identify two central issues in interactive drama: a) that the player is inherently unpredictable and cannot be forced to do anything and b) that the player is at the same time also the audience. Based on R. MvKee's observations that in life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time, in art they are meaningful now, in the instant they happen, R. and A. set as their goal to produce meaningful experiences for teh player based on her actions in real time.
While a traditional story is defined by changes in the protagonist, in interactive drama a story is defined by changes in the player-protagonist.
And as the player's motivation is inherently unknowable, she has to be steered in some way. Usually this a done through assignment of a role or a task or by setting up an environment for relatively free improvisation.
In their company Realtime Drama Inc., R. and A. have developed a framework that addresses this issue via:
- a Personal Narrative Agent (PNA)
- Narrative Forms (NF)
- Multiple Stories
- Evolving Narrative Hypotheses
- Story Transitions and Story Weaving
The PNA uses NF for offering the player different stories to choose from, seamlessly from within the active story, in order to meet their motivation and arrive at at story where the player's motivation and the protagonist's motivation are aligned. No dramatic destiny will be imposed upon the player.
12:30 PM
Sus Lundgren and Staffan Björk, Game Mechanics: Describing Computer Augmented Games in Terms of Interaction
aside: we break up into sessions here, so this blog will not cover the entire conference.
aside two: I blog this into the source-code because the relaunch is still in concept-mode, but I'm taking notes in Tinderbox and both activities play into each other very well. The flow of notes goes into the Tinderbox, digests and conclusions are wrapped up for the blog. I thought this might distract me, but instead I concentrate more.
Lundgren introduces the concept of "Game Desing Patterns" she and Björk are developing togehter with a colleague at the Interactive Institute, Sweden.
The idea is to identify recurrent elements (methods, problems, relations, solutions) in games, basis for specific rules in specific games, that help describe games better and to create games better.
Here are two links to their work:
www.playresearch.com
www.gamedesignpatterns.org
03:00 PM
Marcella Stienstra and Jettie Hoonhout, Is every kid having fun? A gender approach to interactive toy design
Jettie Hoonhout presents a study conducted by the Mads Clausen Institute for Product Innovation and Philips Research about designing fun into interactive toys.
Three interactive, playful input devices were created that required hand-eye coodrination, cooperation and physical activity. Then kids were given the task to navigate a maze with first keyboard and mouse, then with the new divces.
The (to be expected) results were a) that although the new devices were harder to use they were perceived to be more fun because they were challenging and b) that boys and girls appreaciated the physical activity these input devicies required.
03:30 PM
Susana Tosca, The Quest Problem in Computer Games
Susana's talk quite nicely ("audience-friendly" is, I think, the term), does not read her paper from the proceedings but presents examples onscreen that did not make it into the paper.
Nice answer to the question what may go wrong when a game tells a story, why this story is always boring: it's not a story, it's a game, therefor it "fails" as a story. Right on, Susana.
S. picks one crucial element of games, the quest or mission, and ideitifies different sorts of missions from those where semantic and structural causality are very high to those where both are rather low, leaving room for players' improvisation.
Basically, according to Susana, the designer's plan is usuallay more tellable than the player's actualization, so the games that give the player a lot of freedom are less tellable.
04:00 PM
Jiyoung Park, Gichan Kim, Jungwoo Park and Juneho Yi, Realtime Interactive Boxing Game Based on Gesture Recognition
Jiyoung Park presents a "vision interface", an input device that relies on gestures, used, in this instance, to interact with a realtime boxing game.
The system uses "blobs" (fuzzy objects) to represent the hands the point (as action) either left, right, up, down or a combined movement. It uses bounding boxes to determine to position of the player in relation to a starting/ reference position.
The whole thing does not look like much, to a technical dyslectic like myself, but I suspect that the whole contraption is pretty smart. If the realtime translation of the gestures into movements on screen is as immediate both temporally and spatially, as shown in the demo-video, - well, and more versatile than just capuring boxing moves - this tool will push physical interaction/ input. If it isn't, it's not far beyond no-keyboard typing-devices.
04:30 PM
Monday, March 17, 2003
Glashaus
Dieter Müller abhors Blogs. Not only do the online "brainfarts" ("Gehirnfünrze") of everybody and their dog spoil his browsing-experience, he is also convinced that the cyberactivism of bloggers, namely webrings and mail-bombings (sic), is politically impotent.
How I know this? Dieter Müller has a new weekly column on multimedia.de (German webworker-community) where he flaunts his "personal opinions about netlife" (according to the editorial). The title, "Böse Bytes", translates into "Evil Bytes" - although the other possible translation, "Bad Bytes", might be more suited to Müller's unwitty and uninformed nagging.
And apart from some more conceptual differences, what distinguishes Müller's "personal column" from a blog is that while M. does not have to read my blog or follow anybody's trackbacks unless he wants to, his texting gets pushed onto the screens of 8392 unsuspecting readers who've originally subscribed to the multimedia.de-newsletter for serious business-information.
German proverb of the day: Wer im Glashaus sitzt, sollte nicht mit Steinen werfen ....
10:00 PM
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