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| DECEMBER 1990 NUMBER 44 VOLUME 10 NUMBER 10 | |
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| Welcome to ART COM, an online magazine forum dedicated to the | |
| interface of contemporary art and new communication technologies. | |
| You are invited to send information for possible inclusion. We are | |
| especially interested in options that can be acted upon: including | |
| conferences, exhibitions, and publications. Proposals for guest | |
| edited issues are also encouraged. Send submissions to: | |
| well!artcomtv@uunet.uu.net | |
| artcomtv@well.sf.ca.us | |
| Back issues of ART COM can be accessed on the Art Com Electronic | |
| Network (ACEN) on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), | |
| available through the CompuServe Packet Network and PC Pursuit. | |
| To access the Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL, | |
| enter g acen at the Ok: prompt. The Art Com Electronic | |
| Network is also accessible on USENET as alt.artcom. | |
| For access information, send email to: artcomtv@well.sf.ca.us. | |
| *Guest Editor: Abbe Don | |
| *Executive Editor: Carl Eugene Loeffler | |
| *Editor: Anna Couey | |
| *Systems: Fred Truck and Gil MinaMora | |
| ART COM projects include: | |
| ART COM MAGAZINE, an electronic forum dedicated to contemporary art | |
| and new communication technologies. | |
| ART COM ELECTRONIC NETWORK (ACEN), an electronic network dedicated to | |
| contemporary art, featuring publications, online art galleries, art | |
| information database, and bulletin boards. | |
| ART COM SOFTWARE, international distributors of interactive video and | |
| computer art. | |
| ART COM TELEVISION, international distributors of innovative video to | |
| broadcast television and cultural presenters. | |
| CONTEMPORARY ARTS PRESS, publishers and distributors of books on | |
| contemporary art, specializing in postmodernism, video, computer | |
| and performance art. | |
| ART COM, P.O. Box 193123 Rincon Center, San Francisco, CA, 94119-3123, USA. | |
| WELL E-MAIL: artcomtv TEL: 415.431.7524 FAX: 415.431.7841 | |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| GUEST EDITORIAL: INTERACTIVE FICTION PART 2 ABBE DON | |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| Abbe Don, owner of IN CONTEXT, is an interactive multimedia artist and | |
| producer. Her interactive video "We Make Memories," which simulates the way her | |
| great-grandmother told stories, has been exhibited nationwide. She has done | |
| research with Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group on the Guides project | |
| which investigates the use of narrative and storytelling as a means of | |
| structuring and conveying information in large multimedia databases. She was | |
| also a guest artist at the Future Fiction Workshop in 1988 and 1990. | |
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| The December issue of ART COM Magazine further explores the theme of | |
| interactive fiction, presenting authors who have used artificial intelligence, | |
| simulation, and immersion in dramatic narrative theory as the basis for their | |
| research. Below, I give an editorial overview of each author's perspective, | |
| followed by a representative selection from their longer, in-depth essays. The | |
| essays can be read in their entirety via the Art Com Electronic Network on The | |
| WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) by typing "g acen" at any ok prompt, and | |
| entering the "newstand"; or via Usenet in alt.artcom. | |
| John McDaid combines narrative theory and ideas about quantum mechanics to | |
| formulate a strategy for creating "constructive hypertexts" which "do not | |
| proceed from the discovery of hidden content, but rather by symbolic | |
| creation." McDaid's essay style, composed of at least one part hypertextual | |
| rant, one part highbrow literary reference, and one part tongue firmly planted | |
| between brow and cheek, parallels his interactive fiction piece "Uncle | |
| Buddy's Phantom Funhouse." | |
| ...Jay David Bolter, in a talk at last year's Modern Language Association | |
| conference, spoke about the duality of hypertext: the dialectic of node and | |
| link, or as he put it, "looking at" vs. "looking through." The reader | |
| experiencing the text he says, is "aware of oscillation; [and this is an] | |
| explicit measure of interaction." Ultimately, he was arguing, hypertext | |
| wants to be both at the same time. Text which can present itself as | |
| surface, and yet effortlessly yield through to other levels. Hearing this, | |
| I immediately began to suspect this hypermedia duality was the mirror and | |
| analogue of the duality of particle and wave, of energy and matter, in | |
| physics. What we are seeing in hypermedia is the appearance on the | |
| macrolevel (of 2-meter humans and similar Objects) of quantum reality. | |
| In this essay, I'll attempt to explain this perspective (and any lack of | |
| clarity is purely my own, and should not be attributed to Bolter) and try to | |
| link this with a notion of texts as "transformative utterances," occasions | |
| for semiotic recombination which serve the function of conscious dreams. | |
| As Jung said somewhere, "The psyche seeking transformation yields symbols." | |
| It seems to me as if there is a hidden agenda in media evolution which has | |
| guided us into stumbling over just this dichotomy... | |
| --from "Welcome to the Matrix: From Object Oriented Text to | |
| Quantum Indeterminacy," John McDaid (u1475@applelink.apple.com). | |
| Jim Gasperini, author of the political simulation game "Hidden Agenda," traces | |
| the historical development of interactive "texts" within literature and | |
| theatre and then explores early examples of interactive fiction within the | |
| computer domain. From there, he postulates a theory of interactive fiction | |
| based on "open-ended structural ambiguity" in which a "work becomes more | |
| ambiguous, not less the more it is played" suggesting that "through repeated | |
| playings, comparing different plots chosen through the same web of potential | |
| plots the experience becomes meaningful." Gasperini's essay style and | |
| content, as well as his interactive work, differ greatly from McDaid's, yet he | |
| concludes with similar observations about the impact of quantum mechanics on | |
| the way we structure and represent our experience of the world around us. | |
| Though I firmly believe that computer games can be serious works of art, I | |
| will not argue that works produced so far manage to do much more than | |
| point up the possibility. A serious work of art will not only evoke | |
| emotion, it will embody the expression of emotion on the part of its | |
| creators. Just how deeply the interactive medium will be able to probe the | |
| human psyche and the human condition remains to be seen. Are we witnessing | |
| the birth of a new art form, showing promise of accurately expressing the | |
| tenor of our times? Or will it be a new hype, a way to sell us the | |
| illusion of control, packaging a safely neutered rebellion against the | |
| enforced passivity of so much of our current cultural experience? It may | |
| well be both. | |
| Much of our audience remains unprepared to look beyond the immediate | |
| gratification of closed-ended game structures on trivial themes. As the | |
| generations growing up with interactive entertainment mature, however, | |
| the medium will mature along with them. | |
| The medium is very new, and still difficult to work with. For designers it | |
| can be a struggle simply to keep the logical nature of our primary tools | |
| from dominating our thought processes. All computers really know is how to | |
| count to one, after all; everything else is illusion. The challenge is to | |
| build works that pretend to some artistic character in a context set by | |
| the binary thinking of computer programs--to somehow use logical computers | |
| to recreate human fuzziness. | |
| Perhaps it is only natural that this form of narrative developed in the | |
| age of quantum mechanics. Our physicists tell us that what we take to be | |
| the solidity of matter is only a reflection of our limited means of | |
| perception... that time may be bidirectional...that things can be true and | |
| untrue simultaneously...that it is entirely possible for alternate | |
| universes to be created and destroyed. The way the interactive medium | |
| plays with ambiguities in the structure of experience may parallel the way | |
| we have come to view our universe. Perhaps our cultural imagination is | |
| only following, in crude and timid fashion, our vision of the ambiguity of | |
| existence as it molds the structure of our dreams. | |
| --From "If Brecht Were Alive Today, Would He Be Designing Computer Games?" | |
| (Part 3 of a 3 part essay) Jim Gasperini (jimg@well.sf.ca.us). | |
| Joseph Bates, director of the Oz project at Carnegie Mellon University, | |
| consistently combines the disciplines of artificial intelligence and dramatic | |
| theory. Under his leadership, the Oz team is "applying existing artificial | |
| intelligence technology to the problem of building dramatic worlds" which are | |
| "composed of a (simulated) physical environment, intelligent/emotional agents | |
| which live in the world, a user interface and theory of presentation to let | |
| one or more humans interact with the world and its agents, and a | |
| computational theory of drama which plans and controls the overall | |
| flow of events in the world." | |
| Oz worlds are intended not only to be realistic, but to be interesting. | |
| Often this means giving people the feelings that come with good stories, | |
| feelings that arise in part from the structure of plot, such as | |
| complication, climax, and resolution. | |
| We understand how this can be achieved for static text: an author | |
| carefully constructs the text to convey the structure. However, in | |
| interactive fiction we do not write out the whole text in advance, and | |
| we don't know in advance the detailed sequence of events a reader will | |
| experience. Thus, the Oz system must dynamically, and subtly, adjust | |
| the behavior of the world and its characters to provide experiences | |
| with the desired dramatic structure. This means developing and | |
| implementing a computational theory of drama, and using it to guide | |
| the behavior of worlds. | |
| We see several approaches to developing such a theory. The simplest | |
| comes from having the author express a partial order on the significant | |
| events of the story (an "abstract plot graph"), explicitly representing | |
| that partial order in the system, and using it to drive the character | |
| goals and narrative decisions in the rest of the system. This approach | |
| would leave almost all the dramatic theory in the mind of the author, with | |
| the plot graph serving as a kind of partially ordered program to be | |
| executed by the system. | |
| A richer approach is to develop a library of abstract plot units and | |
| then, as the interaction proceeds, rapidly search abstract plot space | |
| for controllable paths that have the desired dramatic structure. We | |
| can view this as a kind of abstract adversary search, where we define | |
| a set of abstract operators, means for mapping operators into concrete | |
| moves, means for recognizing the abstract effects of the users moves, | |
| and an evaluation function on event histories (ie, stories) that lets | |
| us recognize sequences with "good" dramatic structure. | |
| We are working toward implementations of both of these approaches. The | |
| former appears to be a relatively easy way to provide dramatic control | |
| signals for experiments with the rest of Oz; the latter is a self-contained | |
| long term research goal. In both of these efforts, we are drawing on | |
| Brenda Laurel's studies of computational versions of Aristotle's Poetics. | |
| --from "Computational Drama in Oz," Joseph Bates | |
| (joseph.bates@wizard.oz.cs.cmu.edu) | |
| Finally, David Graves presents a theory of interactive fiction that builds on | |
| the work of both Brenda Laurel and Michael Lebowitz. He emphasizes the | |
| importance of creating characters that emulate human emotion through a | |
| system of Artificial Personality. | |
| ...Almost all attempts to generate behavior in computer-controlled | |
| characters have followed a simple stimulus/response model. For each | |
| statement you may make to character, there is one response it may display. | |
| Giving the same stimulus several times in a row, the character will | |
| mindlessly repeat the same response. Clearly, there is room for | |
| improvement in creating lifelike characters, but how can we attack such a | |
| difficult task? To start, we can borrow a number of ideas and methods | |
| from the field of Artificial Intelligence, avoiding the difficult software | |
| problems, to produce the >illusion< of intelligent, emotional, motivated | |
| characters... | |
| --from "Life-Like Characters in Interactive Fiction," David Graves | |
| (dag@hpsemc.cup.hp.com). | |
| As nearly every author has noted, interactive fiction is still in its infancy | |
| as artists and researchers iteratively build on the conceptual and technical | |
| frameworks of their predecessors. I hope the dialogue continues to stay open | |
| and interdisciplinary! | |
| Abbe Don | |
| Guest Editor | |
| abbe@well.sf.ca.us | |
| ------------------------------ MENU OF CONTENTS ------------------------------ | |
| 1. AN ART FORM FOR THE INTERACTIVE AGE (part 1 of 3), Jim Gasperini | |
| 2. STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY: THE EMERGING INTERACTIVE AESTHETIC | |
| (part 2 of 3), Jim Gasperini | |
| 3. IF BRECHT WERE ALIVE TODAY, WOULD HE BE DESIGNING COMPUTER GAMES | |
| (part 3 of 3), Jim Gasperini | |
| 4. COMPUTATIONAL DRAMA IN OZ, Joe Bates | |
| 5. WELCOME TO THE MATRIX: FROM OBJECT ORIENTED TEXT TO QUANTUM | |
| INDETERMINACY, John McDaid | |
| 6. LIFE-LIKE CHARACTERS IN INTERACTIVE FICTION, David Graves | |
| ------------- A R T C O M / DECEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(10) / #44 -------------- | |
| AN ART FORM FOR THE INTERACTIVE AGE | |
| (part 1 of 3) | |
| Jim Gasperini | |
| Jim Gasperini (jimg@well.sf.ca.us) is author, with TRANS Fiction Systems, | |
| of "Hidden Agenda," a narrative simulation of politics in Central America. | |
| Chosen role-playing game of the year in 1989 by MacWorld, "Hidden Agenda" | |
| has also been used to train diplomats by the Foreign Service Institute of the | |
| US State Department. Also with TRANS Jim co-authored the text adventure | |
| "Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy." | |
| In recent decades various literary and dramatic artists have | |
| experimented with ways to make the role of the audience more | |
| active. Now computer technology makes possible the development of | |
| a true interactive aesthetic. But grafting interactivity onto earlier | |
| forms of narrative is like making a movie with a fixed camera: | |
| it fails to take advantage of the essential power of the medium. | |
| INTERACTIVITY IN LITERATURE AND THE THEATER | |
| The first interactive work I remember seeing myself was a French | |
| novel from the 1950's. It originally came in a box, one chapter | |
| per page, with instructions about how to shuffle the chapters up | |
| and read them in any order. Intrigued by the concept, I hunted | |
| down a copy at my college library, only to find the pages firmly | |
| bound together like every other book, victim of the indiscriminate | |
| efficiency of a library binding service. | |
| Since then we have seen such partially interactive works as Julio | |
| Cortazar's "Hopscotch," a novel with a number of 'optional' | |
| chapters, read or skipped at the reader's discretion. More | |
| recently the many short chapters of Milorad Pavic's 'lexicon | |
| novel'. "The Dictionary of the Khazars" may be read in a variety of | |
| sequences. Numerous series of 'reader-active' books, the first | |
| and best known of which is Edward Packard's "Choose Your | |
| Own Adventure," ask children to choose different plotlines at the | |
| end of each chapter. | |
| The theater in this century has seen numerous experiments with | |
| the aesthetic distance between audience and performer. As part | |
| of a play within a play, Luigi Pirandello placed a simulated | |
| audience within the real audience in an attempt to reinforce the | |
| emotional link between audience and actors. In his 'epic theater' | |
| Bertolt Brecht continually fought the notion that the audience | |
| must simply observe an aesthetic object. He searched for ways | |
| to break down the veil of illusion, make the experience of theater | |
| instructive as well as entertaining, and stir the audience | |
| to action in the here and now. Toward the end of his life, | |
| when asked whether the theater was still an adequate means | |
| for representing the modern world, Brecht replied that yes, | |
| the world could be represented on the stage, but only if it | |
| was portrayed as 'veranderbar' (changeable). | |
| Playwrights and directors continue to experiment with ways to | |
| alter the distance between actors and audience. At the theatrical | |
| version of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" the audience is offered | |
| the opportunity to select one of a number of endings (a device | |
| Brecht had used several decades earlier). The Living Theater, | |
| among others, continues the Brechtian anti-tradition into our | |
| times. At several current plays ("Tamara," "Tony 'n Tina's | |
| Wedding") the audience mingles with the actors, choosing | |
| what aspect of the performance to observe at what time. | |
| LIMITATIONS | |
| Interactivity in book form suffers from a severe technological | |
| limitation: the page does not change. The reader's decisions | |
| can have only limited impact on the way the story unfolds. | |
| Though varying the order in which a story's chapters appear | |
| may alter the perceived significance of each chapter, the choice | |
| of a particular chapter does not change the way later chapters | |
| read, and the author therefore has only limited ability to build | |
| contrasting chains of choice and consequence. | |
| Interactivity in the theater suffers from different practical | |
| limitations. The choice of endings in "Drood," coming at the very | |
| end of the play, is more of a gimmick than a true involvement of | |
| the audience in the process. While the audience walking around | |
| the 'set' of "Tamara" undoubtedly experiences more varied | |
| details than it would in a conventional theater, the essential plot | |
| structure continues unaffected by anything audience members | |
| opt to do. Though these works allow an unusual degree of | |
| audience participation, they are not truly interactive. | |
| Actors' improvisational workshops, of course, call for a high | |
| degree of interactivity. So, in a limited way, do the skits of certain | |
| comedians and 'improv' troupes. To give the audience control | |
| over the plot development of a full-length commercial production, | |
| however, would mean advance preparation for a dauntingly | |
| broad combinatorial explosion of possibilities. The enormous | |
| expense involved in preparing for all the directions the audience | |
| might think to take the play, not to mention the extraordinary | |
| demands such a production would make on the actors, works to | |
| ensure that the theater remains dominated by linear plotlines | |
| and audiences that quietly watch the spectacle. | |
| PERFORMANCE IN A COMPUTER GENERATED WORLD | |
| Enter the computer. Computer technology allows authors to | |
| create elaborate simulated worlds, within which players have | |
| considerable freedom of action. The player is given the general | |
| outlines of a character and told to improvise in reaction to a | |
| simulated environment, simulated props and other characters | |
| (simulated or not). It is a performance medium, differing from | |
| other performance media in that the audience is also the | |
| protagonist. | |
| An interactive work must by definition present its player first with | |
| some sort of choice, and then with the consequences of that | |
| choice. It therefore takes place over time, allowing the | |
| construction of a plot. This gives it at least some kinship with | |
| narrative. The work may also present simulated characters to | |
| encounter, which gives it a similarity to drama, although as we | |
| will see later on 'characters' can take unusual forms in an | |
| interactive work. | |
| Analogies to the theater and to literature are useful, but inexact. | |
| By erasing the distinction between audience and performer, | |
| stories told using computer technology have made a radical | |
| break with both traditions. | |
| But what is it about these technologically sophisticated role- | |
| playing exercises that put them closer to the short story than to, | |
| say, charades? One answer may be found in a closer look at | |
| one of the key techniques of narrative: ambiguity. | |
| -------------- A R T C O M / DECEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(10) / #44 -------------- | |
| STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY: THE EMERGING INTERACTIVE AESTHETIC | |
| (Part 2 of 3) | |
| Jim Gasperini | |
| Jim Gasperini (jimg@well.sf.ca.us) is author, with TRANS Fiction Systems, | |
| of "Hidden Agenda," a narrative simulation of politics in Central America. | |
| Chosen role-playing game of the year in 1989 by MacWorld, "Hidden Agenda" | |
| has also been used to train diplomats by the Foreign Service Institute of the | |
| US State Department. Also with TRANS Jim co-authored the text adventure | |
| "Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy." | |
| The depth of a narrative work's ambiguity is a good measure of | |
| its quality. The richer the work, the more it resonates with | |
| ambiguous meanings. Three different 'levels' of ambiguity may be | |
| distinguished, two familiar levels and one that is quite new. | |
| The first level consists of those ambiguities that appear in a | |
| text as it might be read on a printed page or on a screen. A | |
| metaphor is an ambiguity: a word or phrase with a surface | |
| meaning that also points to something else, meaning at least two | |
| things at once. William Empson's celebrated "seven types of | |
| ambiguity" in poetry (as discussed in the 1937 book by that | |
| title) are all variants on this 'textual ambiguity.' By his | |
| definition, ambiguity is 'any verbal nuance, however slight, | |
| which gives room to alternative reactions to the same piece of | |
| language.' In some forms of writing (technical writing, | |
| journalism) the opposite of 'ambiguous' is 'precise.' In creative | |
| writing the opposite of 'ambiguous' is 'dull.' | |
| When words appear as part of a theatrical performance, another | |
| level of ambiguity comes into play: 'interpretive ambiguity.' | |
| The same role may be interpreted in radically different ways--one | |
| actor may portray Hamlet as indecisive introvert, another as | |
| impotently raging victim of Oedipal conflict, a third as suicidal | |
| misanthrope. The contributions of the director, set designer, and | |
| others also influence the way the audience interprets the work. | |
| One way to distinguish a great play from a merely good one is by | |
| the degree to which it lends itself to different interpretations, | |
| so that actors and audience alike will wish to experience the | |
| play again in a different guise. | |
| A truly interactive work offers a third level of ambiguity, | |
| arising from the role the audience plays in the construction of | |
| the plot. This I call 'structural ambiguity.' Rather than | |
| building nuanced experience from the meanings of words and | |
| phrases, or from dramatic interpretation, structural ambiguity | |
| builds meaning from alternate possibilities of choice and | |
| consequence played out over time. | |
| Two types of this structural ambiguity may be distinguished: | |
| 'closed-ended' and 'open-ended.' In the former, certain | |
| *apparent* ambiguities are first raised in the player's mind and | |
| then resolved. The work becomes less and less ambiguous as the | |
| player progresses through it. In the latter, ambiguity grows | |
| deeper as the work unfolds. | |
| The open-ended type has the greatest potential for richness of | |
| meaning, but since most current computer narratives are | |
| essentially closed-ended games let me discuss that type first. | |
| CLOSED-ENDED STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY | |
| Typical 'twitch' games, including most Nintendo and arcade-style | |
| computer games, essentially consist of hand-to-eye coordination | |
| learning. The game presents a series of obstacles, sometimes | |
| stringing them together into a simple story and sometimes not | |
| bothering much with plot at all. The player learns when to zig, | |
| when to zag, where to put the falling trapezoid, how to kill the | |
| bats, how to deal with endlessly sprouting mushrooms. It's | |
| stretching a point to call this process 'resolution of | |
| ambiguity,' so let me quickly pass on to firmer ground. | |
| A better example of closed-ended ambiguity may be seen in the | |
| type of game known as 'adventures' or 'interactive fiction,' | |
| stories that proceed according to what I call a 'resistant plot.' | |
| The player takes on a role within an imaginary world filled with | |
| apparent ambiguities, which it is the player's task to resolve. | |
| By overcoming obstacles or solving puzzles--as players discover | |
| the hidden usefulness of simulated objects, or how the behavior | |
| of a character can be changed--the plot is made to advance. Since | |
| the original "Adventure" was invented by a pair of computer | |
| scientists named Crowther and Woods in the mid 1970's, the genre | |
| has seen considerable refinement in graphical imagery and | |
| application to varied subject matter. | |
| One problem with resistant-plot stories is that they demand a | |
| great leap of faith. The player must spend a considerable amount | |
| of time struggling to make something happen, all the while unsure | |
| if the end result will be particularly interesting. Many people | |
| are understandably reluctant to spend a good chunk of their lives | |
| beating their heads against imaginary walls. As a former writer | |
| and player of 'interactive fiction,' my current feeling about | |
| this part of the computer game genre is best summed up by a line | |
| from Voltaire: "life is too short to learn German." | |
| Even in the best 'interactive fiction,' once all the puzzles have | |
| been solved the plot is revealed in all its naked linearity. A | |
| finished 'closed-ended' work is like a punctured balloon, emptied | |
| of all ambiguity. There is little reason for anyone to go through | |
| it again. | |
| OPEN-ENDED STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY | |
| By contrast, an 'open-ended' work becomes more ambiguous, not | |
| less, the more it is played. It is through repeated playings, | |
| comparing different plots chosen through the same web of | |
| potential plots, that the experience becomes most meaningful. | |
| This can be most clearly seen in the genre known as | |
| 'simulations.' Here we must once again sort out the different | |
| uses for a term. | |
| Classic computer simulations are designed as serious analytical | |
| tools, or as a means for training people in specific tasks. By | |
| setting up a model of some real-world system (a power plant, an | |
| airport control tower, an all-terrain vehicle) players and | |
| designers can examine the workings of that system. Modifications | |
| can be tested out on the model before actually being put into | |
| practice, potential problems can be identified, trainees can | |
| learn their jobs in an environment where mistakes cause no real | |
| damage. | |
| Narrative simulations, however, are designed with more broadly | |
| didactic and expressive goals in mind. By taking on a role within | |
| a simulated system, players may explore that system as the author | |
| has chosen to model it, and experience the underlying conflicts, | |
| powers and constraints peculiar to that role as it is played in | |
| the real world. | |
| Two recent examples are "Sim City," by Will Wright and Maxis | |
| Software, and my own "Hidden Agenda," written with TRANS Fiction | |
| Systems. "Sim City" puts the player in control of a city, which | |
| begins as a bucolic stretch of riverbank seen from the air. As | |
| the player creates residential areas, roads, power plants, and | |
| industrial areas, the city quickly comes alive. Little houses | |
| start to appear once people (the 'sims') move in. Soon the 'sims' | |
| may be seen going back and forth to work in cars and commuter | |
| trains. Opinion polls tell you how they feel about your skill at | |
| managing their city. They complain about taxes, demand that you | |
| spend more on police and fire protection, and plead for emergency | |
| aid in the aftermath of floods and earthquakes. | |
| "Hidden Agenda" also puts the player in a position of power, this | |
| time the President of a fictitious Central American country. | |
| Action takes place in encounters with characters, represented by | |
| photographic images and bits of dialogue about policy choices. | |
| Representing political parties, Army factions, social groups, | |
| professions, economic classes, other nations and international | |
| agencies, each tries to convince you to follow his or her own | |
| policy agenda. If they grow impatient or disillusioned with your | |
| leadership they may take action on their own. | |
| These two games present the world very differently--one through a | |
| graphical representation of a growing metropolis, the other | |
| through changing positions taken by characters as expressed in | |
| words and background graphics. They are alike, however, in | |
| inducing players to feel increasingly responsible and ambiguous | |
| about the effect they can have on a virtual culture. Players | |
| inevitably measure each city they build in "Sim City" against the | |
| variant cities they might have built had they made other choices. | |
| The city itself--*your* city, which you may name for yourself if | |
| you so desire--becomes a kind of character for whose growth, | |
| problems and personality you feel directly responsible. Since you | |
| can save the position of any city at any point, you can build two | |
| or more variant cities and observe the effects of even minor | |
| modifications of policy. | |
| In "Hidden Agenda" the player's choices amount to the incremental | |
| selection of one plot out of an extremely varied number of | |
| potential plots. For example, midway through the game the | |
| Presidente can decide to hold elections. Depending on various | |
| other choices made along the way, various things happen during | |
| the election season. Sometimes events play out like the | |
| Salvadoran elections of 1982 and 1984: terrific violence, | |
| assassination of leftist candidates, strong right-wing army | |
| control of the process, U.S. proclamation of the results as a | |
| triumph for democracy. Sometimes instead they play out more like | |
| the Nicaraguan elections of 1984: minimal violence, withdrawal | |
| of rightist candidates, strong left-wing army control of the | |
| process, U.S. denunciation of the results as a fraud. | |
| As author I am making ironic points in this obvious example, | |
| points that the interactive structure amplifies and sets in | |
| context. Each subsequent time the player enters the election | |
| campaign, comparisons naturally arise between what happens this | |
| time and what happened other times. This serves to deepen the | |
| player's awareness of the range of structural possibilities. | |
| In both simulations, it is up to the player to decide whether | |
| they 'won' or 'lost.' "Sim City" is extremely open-ended: you | |
| can follow the progress of your city on through the centuries if | |
| you wish. In "Hidden Agenda" your term of office is limited to | |
| three years (if you are not overthrown in a coup or voted out of | |
| power). Whichever way your term of office ends, the simulation | |
| concludes with an encyclopedia entry supposedly written far in | |
| the future (the 'Verdict of History'), detailing what you tried | |
| to do and what resulted. It is up to you to interpret this | |
| Verdict, evaluating your successes and failures according to your | |
| own sense of priorities. | |
| -------------- A R T C O M / DECEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(10) / #44 -------------- | |
| IF BRECHT WERE ALIVE TODAY, WOULD HE BE DESIGNING COMPUTER GAMES | |
| (Part 3 of 3) | |
| Jim Gasperini | |
| Jim Gasperini (jimg@well.sf.ca.us) is author, with TRANS Fiction Systems, | |
| of "Hidden Agenda," a narrative simulation of politics in Central America. | |
| Chosen role-playing game of the year in 1989 by MacWorld, "Hidden Agenda" | |
| has also been used to train diplomats by the Foreign Service Institute of the | |
| US State Department. Also with TRANS Jim co-authored the text adventure | |
| "Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy." | |
| The author of a novel or play, of course, does more than string | |
| together sequences of ambiguities. The ambiguous elements must | |
| have at least a surface coherence and be informed by some | |
| encompassing vision. Can the designers of simulation games do | |
| something similar? Can these works be said to be 'authored?' | |
| I believe they can. Though most simulation games offer schematic | |
| renderings of the essential processes of real-world systems, | |
| exactly which processes are incorporated into the model and | |
| exactly how they play out is a matter of artistic choice, | |
| reflecting the author's understanding and passions. The | |
| schematization allows a player to participate in processes | |
| speeded up and rendered comprehensible, and allows the designer | |
| to impose his or her personality on the work as a whole. Though | |
| designers may honestly attempt to model reality with as much | |
| balance and accuracy as possible, they inevitably construct works | |
| that at bottom reflect their own vision of the world. | |
| A term already exists, of course, for imaginative exercises that | |
| ask a player to actively perform a role: game. This word already | |
| covers so many different activities, however, from charades to | |
| baseball to Monopoly, that its use in this context tends to | |
| confuse and trivialize. To many people the term suggests | |
| something slight, entertaining perhaps but certainly not | |
| 'artistic' (unless you wish to consider baseball, say, to be a | |
| form of dance with a set, familiar choreography on the theme of | |
| conflict, within which individual performers have a certain range | |
| of interpretive freedom. I suspect, however, that few ballplayers | |
| think of themselves as 'movement artists.') | |
| The assumption seems to be that since a game requires the player | |
| to take some sort of action it inherently offers less density of | |
| meaning than forms which ask the audience to remain relatively | |
| passive. This assumption arises, quite naturally, from our long | |
| familiarity with many types of games. From earliest childhood we | |
| use games to amuse and instruct ourselves, starting with the | |
| simplest and moving on to ones of increasing complexity. | |
| Whatever the main point of interest--which players win and which | |
| lose, how they play the game, how much fun they have along the | |
| way, how much money they can make by playing it--most games are | |
| designed as elaborately simple sets of procedures for tamed, | |
| managed conflict which can be repeated many times. Game designers | |
| have usually ceded so much control over how the experience plays | |
| out that players can have very little sense of participating in | |
| someone else's artistic vision. | |
| Yet here I am, arguing that new technologies allow such | |
| exceptional authorial control over an interactive experience that | |
| a 'game' may be designed with enough precision and depth to be | |
| considered a form of narrative art. | |
| WANTED: TERM FOR NEW CATEGORY | |
| Part of the difficulty is semantic. Once we manage to find a | |
| distinctive name for this category of experience, it will be | |
| easier to evaluate it on its own merits without having to | |
| endlessly distinguish it from other things. Unfortunately, all | |
| the words used to describe authored interactive works--game, | |
| simulation, interactive fiction, multimedia--are too broad, | |
| pointing in too many directions at once (too ambiguous!) Take | |
| 'simulation,' for example. If defined very broadly: | |
| A simulation of human behavior experienced by watching actors on | |
| a stage is called: | |
| drama, play, theatricals, the stage, histrionics. | |
| A simulation of human behavior experienced by reading words in a | |
| book or periodical is called: | |
| narrative, literature, novel, story, fiction. | |
| A simulation of human behavior experienced by watching patterns | |
| of flashing lights on a screen is called: | |
| cinema, motion picture, movie, television, video. | |
| A simulation of human behavior experienced by interacting with | |
| computer technology is called: | |
| what? | |
| We sorely need a new term or two. Interactive works are not | |
| sub-genres of drama, fiction, or cinema--they are a fourth thing | |
| entirely. | |
| STRENGTHS OF THE MEDIUM | |
| Every medium has its peculiar strengths. This one is so new that | |
| its strengths have only begun to appear. Since we have only begun | |
| to simulate human behavior in interactive works, we have vast | |
| amounts of subject matter yet to address. | |
| One great strength, clearly, is the medium's ability to present | |
| the world from another person's perspective. What does the world | |
| look like to a Latin American? What powers come with the role of | |
| leader of a small country, what limitations and constraints? | |
| Interactive works already enable a player to experience 'a day in | |
| the life of an Israeli,' 'a typical Australian neighborhood | |
| barbecue,' and 'what it was like to be a French gentleman during | |
| the Enlightenment.' | |
| So far most of these works have been designed with instructional | |
| purposes in mind, offering the player insights into sociology, | |
| language, and history. As time goes on, we may begin to see more | |
| personal uses of the interactive medium. One game might explore | |
| what it is like to be a woman on the edge of madness; another | |
| what it is like to be a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis; a | |
| third simply 'what it is like to be me.' We will see | |
| propagandistic uses: interactive Leni Reifinstahls creating | |
| strongly biased simulated worlds. | |
| Some interactive artists may decide to use the new medium to | |
| address subject matter traditional to narrative art. On the other | |
| hand, there may be aspects of human experience that the | |
| interactive medium can better address than can more traditional | |
| forms. Questions of economic theory and political philosophy, for | |
| example, can be more easily woven into a narrative structure in a | |
| medium that places the audience in the role of protagonist. | |
| Novels, plays and films about men and women in public life | |
| usually focus on the tension between the public and the private | |
| person. They do so in part because the form (at least as used | |
| conventionally) works by inducing the audience to identify with | |
| and care about the principal characters. Since the 'audience' of | |
| an interactive work no longer sits to one side judging how the | |
| protagonist meets various challenges, authors can build emotional | |
| resonance on the player's sense of direct responsibility for how | |
| those challenges are met. | |
| That a work is built with structural ambiguity does not preclude | |
| the use of other levels of ambiguity as well. We will soon see | |
| much more poetic use of textual ambiguity within interactive | |
| works than we have seen so far. As for interpretive ambiguity, | |
| this is a natural consequence of the way author and player | |
| collaborate in the final production. The effects of this | |
| collaboration may already be seen in the tendency of complex | |
| simulated systems to behave in ways not explicitly planned by the | |
| designers, a phenomenon known as 'emergent behavior.' For | |
| example, as certain Sim Cities mature slums begin to appear. This | |
| was not planned by the designers, but emerged as the natural | |
| consequence of the way some players act within the simulation. | |
| Simulation games have the potential to accomplish some of the | |
| same purposes Brecht sought to achieve in his experiments with | |
| theatrical form. The interactive medium can inform while | |
| entertaining, make the audience an active and aware participant, | |
| illuminate the political and cultural context within which | |
| audience and performance exist. The way the player can choose to | |
| examine information from many different standpoints during the | |
| course of some games (for example by viewing charts and newspaper | |
| reports) is arguably analogous to the Brechtian technique of | |
| underlining the significance of events on stage with placards | |
| inscribed with statistics. | |
| On the other hand, many of Brecht's theatrical innovations were | |
| designed to create aesthetic distance, not break it down. Brecht | |
| fought against the idea that theater-goers should lose themselves | |
| in the characters on the stage, but the appeal of many computer | |
| games is precisely that they induce players to lose themselves in | |
| a character (or, worse, in a sequence of pointlessly aggressive | |
| actions). What Brecht would have thought of the interactive | |
| medium is idle speculation. I suspect, in fact, that he would | |
| have hated most current computer games. | |
| INTERACTING WITH THE FUTURE | |
| Though I firmly believe that computer games can be serious works | |
| of art, I will not argue that works produced so far manage to do | |
| much more than point up the possibility. A serious work of art | |
| will not only evoke emotion, it will embody the expression of | |
| emotion on the part of its creators. Just how deeply the | |
| interactive medium will be able to probe the human psyche and the | |
| human condition remains to be seen. Are we witnessing the birth | |
| of a new art form, showing promise of accurately expressing the | |
| tenor of our times? Or will it be a new hype, a way to sell us | |
| the illusion of control, packaging a safely neutered rebellion | |
| against the enforced passivity of so much of our current cultural | |
| experience? It may well be both. | |
| Much of our audience remains unprepared to look beyond the | |
| immediate gratification of closed-ended game structures on | |
| trivial themes. As the generations growing up with interactive | |
| entertainment mature, however, the medium will mature along with | |
| them. | |
| The medium is very new, and still difficult to work with. For | |
| designers it can be a struggle simply to keep the logical nature | |
| of our primary tools from dominating our thought processes. All | |
| computers really know is how to count to one, after all; | |
| everything else is illusion. The challenge is to build works that | |
| pretend to some artistic character in a context set by the binary | |
| thinking of computer programs--to somehow use logical computers | |
| to recreate human fuzziness. | |
| Perhaps it is only natural that this form of narrative developed | |
| in the age of quantum mechanics. Our physicists tell us that what | |
| we take to be the solidity of matter is only a reflection of our | |
| limited means of perception... that time may be bidirectional... | |
| that things can be true and untrue simultaneously... that it is | |
| entirely possible for alternate universes to be created and | |
| destroyed. The way the interactive medium plays with ambiguities | |
| in the structure of experience may parallel the way we have come | |
| to view our universe. Perhaps our cultural imagination is only | |
| following, in crude and timid fashion, our vision of the | |
| ambiguity of existence as it molds the structure of our dreams. | |
| -------------- A R T C O M / DECEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(10) / #44 -------------- | |
| COMPUTATIONAL DRAMA IN OZ | |
| Joseph Bates | |
| Dr. Joseph Bates (joseph.bates@wizard.oz.cs.cmu.edu) is director of the Oz | |
| project at School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He was co- | |
| host of the Workshop on Interactive Fiction and Synthetic Realities at the | |
| AAAI-90 conference. (Abbe Don) | |
| >From working notes of AAAI-90 Workshop on Interactive Fiction and Synthetic | |
| Realities, Boston, July 1990. These are informal notes prepared as background | |
| material for a lecture given at the AAAI workshop. | |
| The Oz project at the CMU School of Computer Science is developing | |
| technology for high quality interactive fiction. Our goal is to | |
| provide users with the experience of living in a dramatically | |
| interesting simulated world that includes simulated people. | |
| A variety of researchers on human interfaces are studying virtual or | |
| artificial realities. These are computer simulated interactive visual | |
| environments that people experience as real. Most existing research | |
| concerns issues close to the interface, that is, how to take an | |
| underlying simulated world and present it in a convincing fashion. | |
| The Oz group plans to use this interface technology as it develops, | |
| but our work is on creating rich, deeply modeled underlying worlds. | |
| Thus, we study the simulations behind the interface, which we call the | |
| deep structure of virtual reality. | |
| Our work applies existing artificial intelligence technology to the | |
| problem of building dramatic worlds. These worlds are composed of a | |
| (simulated) physical environment, intelligent/emotional agents which | |
| live in the world, a user interface and theory of presentation to let | |
| one or more humans interact with the world and its agents, and a | |
| computational theory of drama which plans and controls the overall | |
| flow of events in the world. There are clear applications of such | |
| simulations to entertainment (interactive fantasy experiences) and to | |
| training (e.g., improving interpersonal skills in business). Also, | |
| since we think art develops as new media develop, we hope our work | |
| will be the basis for one of the first sophisticated knowledge based | |
| art forms, using computers as the underlying medium. | |
| We believe these simulations, which today require engineering | |
| workstations, will run on future consumer electronics products that | |
| integrate video and audio with RISC engines, large DRAMs, and digital | |
| signal processors. Interactive fiction was the most popular home | |
| software in the U.S. in the early 1980's, despite an extremely low | |
| level of technical sophistication. We suspect that by taking | |
| advantage of known technologies, interactive fiction can develop into | |
| a popular and long lasting art form. We think it can serve as a | |
| primary motivation for people to own the personal digital systems of | |
| the middle 1990's. | |
| AN OVERVIEW OF OZ | |
| As preparation for the workshop lecture, this document presents an | |
| overview of the Oz Project. Our efforts can be partitioned into six | |
| areas: physical world simulation, the minds of simulated characters, | |
| the user interface with its theory of presentation, theories of | |
| drama, the world building environment, and the artistic use of the | |
| system, each of which is described below. | |
| Oz is built in Common Lisp, with substantial use of the Common Lisp | |
| Object System. The system incorporates large amounts of code from other | |
| Lisp based AI projects. We develop Oz on Mach/Unix workstations, but do | |
| not presently rely on anything beyond Lisp. | |
| The Oz group at CMU includes Bates, five Computer Science graduate | |
| students, an undergraduate, and a gradually growing collection of | |
| users from the English and Drama departments and elsewhere in the CMU | |
| community. We are assisted, especially on dramatic theory, by Brenda | |
| Laurel. | |
| With Brenda and with Margaret Kelso, of the CMU Drama department, we | |
| have started studying real life interactive improvisations. These can | |
| be viewed as simulations of Oz, and can tell us both about the | |
| inherent nature of this art form and about how to build computer based | |
| IF (interactive fiction) systems. | |
| PHYSICAL WORLD SIMULATION | |
| The Oz physical world simulator provides a commonsense model of the | |
| physical world. It is an abstract model, thus many aspects of the | |
| real world are omitted. Unlike existing interactive fiction systems, | |
| our emphasis in not on manipulating objects in the world, but on | |
| character and plot. Thus, while we are applying object oriented | |
| techniques to flexibly model the world, and while these models could | |
| ultimately become quite rich, our requirement is only to provide | |
| enough of a physical reality to let authors construct interesting | |
| characters and stories. | |
| THE MINDS OF CHARACTERS | |
| These are the minds of the (non-human) agents that populate worlds. | |
| One of the claims of the Oz project is that the mental architectures | |
| and real world knowledge bases that have been developed in AI over the | |
| last 15 years, while perhaps still too weak for real robots, are well | |
| suited to the demands of interactive fiction. Our goal is to draw on | |
| the best of these existing systems, such as work from Yale, CMU, and | |
| Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), and | |
| interface them to Oz as frameworks for the minds of agents. | |
| Once these frameworks have been established, the builders of worlds | |
| will use them to construct individual characters. | |
| We are currently working on two frameworks: a goal driven reactive | |
| planner called HAP and the Prodigy planner. We are developing HAP | |
| within the Oz group based on work at MIT by Agre and Chapman and on | |
| work at Yale by Firby. Prodigy is a planner/learner being developed | |
| at CMU by Jaime Carbonell's machine learning group. We expect to | |
| extend both systems using ideas of Wilensky, Dyer, Carbonell, and | |
| others to provide some level of social awareness and emotion, in | |
| addition to rudimentary intelligence. | |
| In addition, we are interested in exploring other systems. The | |
| developers of Soar (particularly Allen Newell at CMU and John Laird at | |
| University of Michigan) and CYC (Doug Lenat at MCC) have expressed | |
| interest in connecting their systems to Oz. We are hopeful that this | |
| will occur during the next few years. | |
| USER INTERFACE AND THEORY OF PRESENTATION | |
| The user interface connects human agents to the simulated world. For | |
| the immediate future, we expect this connection will be via natural | |
| language text. We have been using software from the CMU Center for | |
| Machine Translation to generate text, producing both the narrative | |
| description of the world and the textual "speech" of computer | |
| modeled agents. We are now developing Glinda, our own generator, with | |
| careful attention to the PENMAN work at ISI. | |
| In our application, parsing is easier than generation. At present we | |
| use a general purpose bottom up parser with a simple grammar and ad hoc | |
| semantic and pragmatic analysis. We are considering using | |
| instead a word based parser, such as the DYPAR parser originally | |
| developed by Roger Schank's group at Yale. These parsers seem | |
| appropriate for processing short, syntactically limited, possibly | |
| ill-formed input, which is typical in interactive fiction. | |
| We have started studying ways to "tune" the natural language | |
| generation to provide subtle emotional influence on the human player. | |
| In theatre and cinema, extra-semantic influences such as music, | |
| lighting, point of view, zooms, and film editing play a significant | |
| role in determining viewer reaction. The artistic technique developed | |
| in these areas is crucial to their respective media. Our report | |
| "Towards a Theory of Narrative for Interactive Fiction" describes | |
| results of our initial efforts to find analogous technique for | |
| interactive fiction. We are pursuing this research, with the goal of | |
| having Oz adjust its style of output to suit the varying dramatic | |
| content of the story. Hovy's work on PAULINE is directly relevant to | |
| our efforts. | |
| As individual character architectures develop, they may well bring | |
| their own mechanisms for natural language processing. Where these | |
| mechanisms improve the quality of characters, we will probably use | |
| them in place of Glinda. | |
| Oz presently uses a text interface for two reasons. First, an | |
| argument can be made that text based IF is a valid form in its own | |
| right, allowing certain kinds of artistic technique, such as | |
| narrative, that cannot easily be applied in a VR setting. Second, we | |
| feel that our research effort and computing capacity is best spent now | |
| on characters, natural language, and dramatic theory. However, as | |
| virtual reality interface technology matures and as we develop | |
| efficient implementations for inhabited dramatic worlds, we plan to | |
| investigate ways of replacing the text interface with facilities for | |
| speech, animation, and gestures. We hope this work will be in | |
| collaboration with researchers studying each of these areas. | |
| We have discussed, but not taken, such steps with Andy Witkin's | |
| animation research group. | |
| COMPUTATIONAL DRAMA | |
| Oz worlds are intended not only to be realistic, but to be | |
| interesting. Often this means giving people the feelings that come | |
| with good stories, feelings that arise in part from the structure of | |
| plot, such as complication, climax, and resolution. | |
| We understand how this can be achieved for static text: an author | |
| carefully constructs the text to convey the structure. However, in | |
| interactive fiction we do not write out the whole text in advance, and | |
| we don't know in advance the detailed sequence of events a reader will | |
| experience. Thus, the Oz system must dynamically, and subtly, adjust | |
| the behavior of the world and its characters to provide experiences | |
| with the desired dramatic structure. This means developing and | |
| implementing a computational theory of drama, and using it to guide | |
| the behavior of worlds. | |
| We see several approaches to developing such a theory. The simplest | |
| comes from having the author express a partial order on the | |
| significant events of the story (an "abstract plot graph"), | |
| explicitly representing that partial order in the system, and using it | |
| to drive the character goals and narrative decisions in the rest of | |
| the system. This approach would leave almost all the dramatic theory | |
| in the mind of the author, with the plot graph serving as a kind of | |
| partially ordered program to be executed by the system. | |
| A richer approach is to develop a library of abstract plot units and | |
| then, as the interaction proceeds, rapidly search abstract plot space | |
| for controllable paths that have the desired dramatic structure. We | |
| can view this as a kind of abstract adversary search, where we define | |
| a set of abstract operators, means for mapping operators into concrete | |
| moves, means for recognizing the abstract effects of the users moves, | |
| and an evaluation function on event histories (ie, stories) that lets | |
| us recognize sequences with "good" dramatic structure. | |
| We are working toward implementations of both of these approaches. | |
| The former appears to be a relatively easy way to provide dramatic | |
| control signals for experiments with the rest of Oz; the latter is a | |
| self-contained long term research goal. In both of these efforts, we | |
| are drawing on Brenda Laurel's studies of computational versions of | |
| Aristotle's Poetics. | |
| (editor's note: the workshop lecture discussed these matters in greater | |
| detail). | |
| WORLD BUILDING ENVIRONMENT | |
| Once we gather and integrate available AI technologies, thus making | |
| dramatic worlds possible, we need to provide some means for "normal | |
| people" to construct such worlds. For interactive fiction to develop | |
| as an art, many artists must explore it, because their feedback is | |
| crucial to guide the technology toward artistically desirable goals. | |
| While these artists may be computationally inclined, they do not need | |
| to be experienced Lisp/AI programmers. | |
| Designing the right tools for a general purpose Oz authoring | |
| environment can only come after we have some experience building | |
| individual Oz worlds. However, we know that building Oz worlds will | |
| be a kind of programming. It will involve creating, accumulating, and | |
| reusing large numbers of world parts, such as physical objects and | |
| settings, parts of minds (planners, plans, kinds of social knowledge), | |
| sets of linguistic rules, and components of narrative and dramatic | |
| theories. | |
| The Oz "parts" libraries, similar perhaps to the backlots of | |
| Hollywood studios, will be large and varied. The libraries will | |
| contain mechanisms for modifying and building objects (meta-knowledge) | |
| as well as individual objects of special value. We believe that the | |
| overall library structure and the processes for building it may be | |
| similar to those of the NuPrl system. NuPrl is an interactive | |
| environment for mathematicians and programmers to use in | |
| semi-automatically creating large bodies of explanations and | |
| procedures. It is one of the first and most successful systems of its | |
| kind, and has spawned related research in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. | |
| Bates was one of the leaders of the PRL project, and based on that | |
| experience has designed a successor system, called MetaPrl, which is | |
| planned as the basis for the Oz authoring environment. | |
| USE OF THE SYSTEM | |
| It is very important that the technical efforts of building Oz be | |
| guided by the needs of artists building worlds. We have already | |
| involved several people from the CMU English, Drama, and other departments | |
| in this process. We intend to have the population of Oz users grow as | |
| the system develops, by teaching courses to the full CMU community and | |
| by making Oz available to the research communities outside of CMU. | |
| This widespread use is necessary in practice, since it will require | |
| great effort to construct a substantial library of world parts and | |
| the effort must be distributed over a large base of developers. But | |
| we believe it is even more necessary in principle, to learn the | |
| potential of interactive fiction as a new art form and to guide the | |
| development of Oz toward reaching that potential. | |
| -------------- A R T C O M / DECEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(10) / #44 -------------- | |
| WELCOME TO THE MATRIX: | |
| FROM OBJECT ORIENTED TEXT TO QUANTUM INDETERMINACY | |
| John G. McDaid | |
| John G. McDaid (u1475@applelink.apple.com) is an instructor in the English | |
| Dept. of the New York Institute of Technology. He is currently completing | |
| his doctoral dissertation on hypermedia composition at NYU, and is also | |
| working on an interactive fiction, "Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse." He | |
| is a co-founder of the TINAC collective, a group of writers and teachers | |
| investigating hypertext and narrative. | |
| "Down among the dancing quanta, | |
| Everything exists at once. | |
| Up above in Transverse City, | |
| Every weekend lasts for months..." | |
| -Warren Zevon, | |
| "Transverse City" | |
| Jay David Bolter, in a talk at last year's Modern Language | |
| Association conference, spoke about the duality of hypertext: | |
| the dialectic of node and link, or as he put it, "looking at" | |
| vs. "looking through." The reader experiencing the text he | |
| says, is "aware of oscillation; [and this is an] explicit | |
| measure of interaction." Ultimately, he was arguing, | |
| hypertext wants to be both at the same time. Text which can | |
| present itself as surface, and yet effortlessly yield through | |
| to other levels. Hearing this, I immediately began to suspect | |
| this hypermedia duality was the mirror and analogue of the | |
| duality of particle and wave, of energy and matter, in | |
| physics. What we are seeing in hypermedia is the appearance | |
| on the macrolevel (of 2-meter humans and similar Objects) of | |
| quantum reality. | |
| In this essay, I'll attempt to explain this perspective | |
| (and any lack of clarity is purely my own, and should not be | |
| attributed to Bolter) and try to link this with a notion of | |
| texts as "transformative utterances," occasions for semiotic | |
| recombination which serve the function of conscious dreams. | |
| As Jung said somewhere, "The psyche seeking transformation | |
| yields symbols." It seems to me as if there is a hidden | |
| agenda in media evolution which has guided us into stumbling | |
| over just this dichotomy... | |
| The ideal for texts that Bolter describes seems already to | |
| exist in our minds. Each idea, embedded in an interconnected | |
| holographic space, can serve as both the Node, and then, | |
| vanishing into itself and passing on to the Other, as the | |
| Link. In physics, we understand that all "particles" are | |
| really energy, that "energy" is in fact a "particle" with a | |
| different 'spin.' The search for the Grand Unified Theory | |
| (GUT) is a search for the invariances, the symmetry which, | |
| when shattered, gives rise to the duality of fermions and | |
| bosons-- things and force-bearers. Our idea of Idea is in | |
| fact such a symmetry-breaking operation, cutting out of the | |
| quantum flux of mental process this "thing," which we proceed | |
| to label an idea, and which then surprises us when it | |
| vanishes into its interconnections. | |
| Ideas, in the mind, are active symbols in a Hofstadterian | |
| sense. Not "signals," or arbitrary strings of characters to | |
| be decoded Chinese-Box-wise, but living entities, each with | |
| its own propensities, capable of acting. Each "word" in the | |
| mind is a nexus of activity. If you will, the mind is | |
| Indeterminate Text in its richest sense. Our mind is this | |
| constant being and yielding, the entiteification and | |
| recombination, the process of being created and sustained | |
| above quantum flux, interfacing back down into web-woven | |
| synthesis. But this is the ideal of Indeterminate Text; the | |
| actualization of this, in current hypertext schemes, can only | |
| be Object Oriented. | |
| "It is rather a question of | |
| substituting signs of the real for | |
| the real itself, that is, an | |
| operation to deter every real | |
| process by its operational double, a | |
| metastable, programmatic, perfect | |
| descriptive machine which provides | |
| all the signs of the real and short- | |
| circuits all its vicissitudes." | |
| -Jean Baudrillard, | |
| "Simulations" | |
| Michael Joyce has created a taxonomy for hypertexts: those | |
| which are exploratory, and those which are constructive. An | |
| exploratory hypertext, says Joyce, is one which fundamentally | |
| recapitulates the models of interaction with previous media, | |
| like, say, books. You can poke around in an information | |
| space, perhaps making a few notes or building trails, but | |
| there is a hidden geometry to the space to which you stand in | |
| the relation of discoverer, or interpreter. Hypermedia | |
| dictionaries, pre-scripted virtual realities, parser-driven | |
| interactive fictions are the paradigms of the exploratory. | |
| These texts are object-oriented in a deep sense. Like object- | |
| oriented computer languages, they comprise a domain of | |
| demons, each awaiting its invocation. But they also deeply | |
| replicate the phenomenology of objects in our everyday world: | |
| they recapitulate what we know about our world. | |
| Well, so what? We return, for a moment, to the world of | |
| the quantum, a world where Objects can both "exist" and "not | |
| exist," where location is a probability, and where, with | |
| sufficient energy and time, improbabilities become manifest. | |
| Clearly, our presumptive world, the world of our human-size | |
| epistemology extruded into exploratory hypertexts, is not | |
| isomorphic with the quantum. However, Joyce's other category, | |
| the constructive hypertext, provides an indication of the | |
| right direction: | |
| Constructive hypertexts...require a | |
| capability to act: to create, to | |
| change, and to recover particular | |
| encounters within the developing | |
| body of knowledge....These en- | |
| counters, like those in exploratory | |
| hypertexts, are maintained as | |
| versions, i.e. trails, paths, webs, | |
| notebooks, etc.; but THEY ARE | |
| VERSIONS OF WHAT THEY ARE BECOMING, | |
| A STRUCTURE FOR WHAT DOES NOT YET | |
| EXIST. | |
| [CAPS mine] | |
| The constructive hypertext is the embodiment of | |
| Schrodinger's Cat. Constructive hypertexts do not proceed | |
| from discovery of hidden content, but rather by symbolic | |
| creation. A constructive hypertext (and it must be admitted, | |
| there are few examples) is necessarily elliptical, open, and | |
| metaphoric. For this reason, we are more likely to find them | |
| in the province of interactive fiction or 'narrative' than in | |
| the commercial world, for reasons that Elizabeth Eisenstein | |
| and Marshall McLuhan would explain by pointing to the | |
| linkages between literacy, social control, and capitalism... | |
| Pragmatism again. But if we are to look for the leading | |
| edges of true hypermedia, we must look beyond the pragmatic. | |
| When the protomammals internalized their media ecology, | |
| putting a symbolic representation of the world into their | |
| brain, they leaped immediately ahead of the presymbolic, | |
| associative idea-space of the reptiles. But this technology | |
| (and its technological progeny) have at their heart this | |
| implicit pragmatism, a pragmatism engendered by the world of | |
| sensory experience. If we are to catch glimpses of the future | |
| of 'text,' we must look for metapragmatic characteristics: | |
| 1) It will not be visual. At least not in the same way that | |
| we currently think. As McLuhan said, "[Euclidian] visual | |
| space...has the basic character of linearity, | |
| connectedness, homogeneity, and stasis." Instead, think | |
| about virtual realities in 4-D worlds, or Reimannian | |
| geometries. Or fractals. And what of the Hilbert Space | |
| which had been spoken of... | |
| 2) It will not be linguistic. As Roger Penrose maintains in | |
| his book "The Emperor's New Mind," language, localized as | |
| it is in the left hemisphere areas of Broca and Wernicke, | |
| is inconsistent with whole brain knowing or symbolic | |
| cognition. He takes issue with the common assumption that | |
| without language, thought is impossible. | |
| 3) It will be a reflection of the active constitutory action | |
| of mind. William Gibson's book "Neuromancer" highlights | |
| this distinction. In "Neuromancer," there are two varieties | |
| of digital experience: simstim and cyberspace. Simstim (or | |
| sensory stimulation) is the digital equivalent of | |
| television: neural implants in the "actor" transmit sensory | |
| experience which you "tune in" for the experience of "being | |
| there." But the cyberspace cowgirls and cowboys dismiss | |
| this as a "meat toy." The real action exists in the Matrix, | |
| or cyberspace, which is a "Consensual hallucination...a | |
| graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of | |
| every computer in the human system." Not everyone can jack | |
| into cyberspace and project their consciousness into the | |
| matrix. Like reading and writing, or tv viewing and | |
| production, there could be another broken symmetry here, if | |
| we allow certain models of hypermedia development to | |
| dominate... | |
| "The sect...would hide in the | |
| latrines with some metal disks in a | |
| forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic | |
| the divine disorder." | |
| -Jorge Luis Borges, | |
| "The Library of Babel" | |
| Evolutionarily, we are phenomenological pragmatists. Our | |
| ideation, our "minding," our language, our Texts, all reflect | |
| such habits of mind, and the technologies we externally | |
| create to instantiate these ways of minding are all | |
| rigorously subject to the contraints of the practical. We are | |
| all naive realists and tacit essentialists. "Reality is the | |
| shattering of the highest law of motion taught us by | |
| experience," says Ernst Cassirer. Quantum mechanics is the | |
| shattering of pretty much the REST of the truths we learned | |
| poking around in our world of Object-Oriented Childhood. | |
| Roger Penrose argues that thought is non-algorithmic and | |
| strongly dependent on quantum effects. According to Penrose, | |
| "having" a thought is the result of virtual quantum | |
| computation, a collapse of superposed thought-functions, and | |
| which particular thought we have is a non-local solution to | |
| the presenting problem (non-local in the quantum mechanical | |
| sense). In the face of this, algorithmic representations | |
| (which are the pragmatic progeny of natural language) become | |
| sterile replications of received pattern, as unable to | |
| produce artificial intelligence as cookie cutters are to | |
| produce gingerbread humans. What Penrose's argument implies | |
| for hypermedia design is a deep challenge on its most basic | |
| assumptions. | |
| It seems likely, then (he said, falling into the | |
| teleological snare), that the function of consciousness is to | |
| become aware of its limitations--factors latent in the | |
| anthropotropic media with supply it--and to bootstrap itself | |
| through technological augmentation into modes of | |
| awareness/consciousness which are enactments, on this layer | |
| or level of reality, of the fundamental indeterminacy of the | |
| universe and our brains. | |
| Our dreams of the Matrix then, are dreams of a TIKKUN, a | |
| re-integration of the microlevel and macrolevel. Is it | |
| accidental to have choosen such a metaphor as the Matrix, the | |
| mother? Is the coincidence in the rise of patriarchy and | |
| phonetic alphabets happenstance or a smoking gun? As the | |
| ekstasis of intuition was paved over by the tarmac of | |
| pragmatic text, so went the model of self and the symmetry of | |
| gender. Object-Oriented Artificial Intelligence is nothing | |
| more than the latest attempt by the patriarchy to reproduce | |
| itself, AB NIHILO, by uttering the Word. | |
| It remains to be seen if truly Indeterminate Text can be | |
| instantiated macroscopically. Perhaps not by digital systems. | |
| They are either/or systems, and while they can model, or | |
| approximate indeterminacy, they do not, at bottom, embody it, | |
| and therefore seem essentially incapable of manifesting it. | |
| Mind, however, seems to have this capability. Perhaps, as | |
| Penrose suggests, understanding mind will give us insights | |
| into the pathways of the probabilistic. Were we to construct | |
| a fictiverse whose laws were those of quantum mechanics, a | |
| fictiverse we could inhabit as a metapragmatic consciousness, | |
| would we would be capable, in principle, of constructing | |
| indeterminate texts about our experiences? | |
| Maybe. | |
| Perhaps the immobility of the things | |
| that surround us is forced upon | |
| them...by the immobility of our | |
| conceptions of them. | |
| -Marcel Proust, | |
| "Swann's Way" | |
| -------------- A R T C O M / DECEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(10) / #44 -------------- | |
| LIFE-LIKE CHARACTERS IN INTERACTIVE FICTION | |
| David Graves | |
| David Graves (dag@hpsemc.cup.hp.com) has been doing research and development | |
| in Interactive Fiction for the last six years. He is currently collaborating | |
| with writers on several IF projects, using a software platform of his own. | |
| A common failing of interactive fiction today is that the player is totally | |
| responsible for the progress of the plot. Whenever the player cannot solve a | |
| given puzzle, progress grinds to a halt. Most interactive fiction works are | |
| entrenched in this obstructionist model. There is no plot continuity, and too | |
| little dramatic interaction. Our characters are not pulling their own weight. | |
| The first step is to take the player out of the role of being responsible for | |
| the flow of the plot. In her PhD dissertation, Brenda Laurel explains: "The | |
| user of an interactive system may indeed make contributions on the level of | |
| plot; however, the responsibility for integrating such contributions into the | |
| whole and creating other plot elements that maintain the necessary dramatic | |
| qualities in the whole belongs to the system. When that responsibility | |
| devolves to the user, first-personness is destroyed, as in the classroom | |
| improvisation where the actor must divide his attention between acting and | |
| playwriting tasks. By assuming formal control of the action, the system | |
| frees the user from playwriting concerns and allows him to immerse himself in | |
| the experience of his character." | |
| Furthermore, the characters found in most computer games are cardboard cut- | |
| outs, without any personality. In her PhD dissertation, Mary Ann Buckles | |
| points out this failing in the original Adventure game, which still applies to | |
| most games today: "The characters the reader encounters in the fictional | |
| underworld have no significance other than to pose a puzzle for the reader. | |
| The reader has little emotional involvement with the characters because they, | |
| in turn, do not represent any emotional or spiritual facets of human | |
| existence." Artificial Personality addresses this need for simulating | |
| personality in our characters. | |
| Almost all attempts to generate behavior in computer-controlled characters | |
| have followed a simple stimulus/response model. For each statement you may | |
| make to character, there is one response it may display. Giving the same | |
| stimulus several times in a row, the character will mindlessly repeat the same | |
| response. Clearly, there is room for improvement in creating lifelike | |
| characters, but how can we attack such a difficult task? To start, we can | |
| borrow a number of ideas and methods from the field of Artificial | |
| Intelligence, avoiding the difficult software problems, to produce the | |
| >illusion< of intelligent, emotional, motivated characters. | |
| In order for characters to act intelligently they must be able to interpret | |
| the state of their environment and apply appropriate behaviors. While | |
| applying a problem solving procedure to achieve some goal, however, | |
| complications may arise. In traditional interactive fiction, we pass all | |
| these problems to the player. Instead of troubling the player character with | |
| minor complications, the game software could automatically resolve them. For | |
| example, given the command "Drink the beer," rather than having a character | |
| complain "The beer isn't open," it could recognize "Open the beer" as an | |
| implied subgoal. Any given goal could give rise to a number of subgoals, | |
| which may create subgoals of their own. When a character is able to handle | |
| low level logistics without being given explicit instructions, he appears much | |
| more intelligent. This technique also provides a mechanism for handling | |
| tedious logistical details on behalf of the player, who is then free to think | |
| at higher levels. | |
| No organism's behavior is ever unmotivated. Thus, in order for characters to | |
| display behaviors that appear reasonable and believable, they must have their | |
| own motivations. These motivations help stimulate the generation of plot. | |
| However, without guidance for the plot, chaos is a likely result. To ensure | |
| that the generated plot is interesting, the system could have some concept of | |
| drama and apply it to the currently unfolding story. Laurel's dissertation | |
| gives an outline of an expert system to do just that. "Understanding a story | |
| in its totality is a task that integrates natural language understanding and | |
| the understanding of characters' goals, plans, traits, and emotions, and | |
| utilizes still other techniques for identifying larger patterns of action." | |
| This computerized playwright would recognize opportunities for new plot twists | |
| and act on them. Clearly, this is a lofty vision, requiring vast resources to | |
| implement. | |
| Several projects have been successful in creating small expert systems that | |
| focus on character behavior and interaction, rather than attempting to | |
| recognize and generate plot units. This requires a representation (in | |
| software) for the emotional state and goals of each fictional character. | |
| Using this model, each character's emotional state and current goals drive the | |
| selection of a specific behavior from a large set of possible behaviors. The | |
| intensity of the appropriate emotion values is then used to determine the | |
| intensity of the expression of the behavior. Even when performing simple | |
| actions, a character's hidden emotional state may "leak out." Thus, the way | |
| in which a character attempts to accomplish his goals may be influenced by his | |
| emotions and those of the other characters. Due to the complexity of the | |
| emotional state of the characters, the sub-plot twists are unpredictable, and | |
| due to the goals inserted at plot-critical times, the author can control | |
| the overall plot coherence and pace. | |
| In creating a model of personality and relationships, one must select a | |
| manageable set of emotion variables. The magnitude of these variables will | |
| define how each character relates to the others. Each of these emotion values | |
| tells how one character feels about another. John may love Mary, but Mary may | |
| not love John. Conflicting emotions and goals between characters help keep | |
| the action lively, giving rise to new goals all the time. In addition to | |
| these two dimensional emotions (directed towards other characters), some one | |
| dimensional emotion variables may be created, which indicate a character's | |
| internal emotional state or mood, or personality attributes that remain | |
| constant. Michael Lebowitz, creator of a program that writes soap opera | |
| stories, uses one-dimensional attributes such as niceness, guile, physical | |
| appearance, and promiscuity. | |
| In most interactive fiction products, characters are treated as objects. Most | |
| interactions with other characters are limited to making imperative statements | |
| to them (giving commands). True interaction with characters is impossible in | |
| these worlds because the representation of the world is void of any | |
| "interactive media." You cannot talk with them because there is nothing to | |
| talk about. In worlds containing only objects, the only topic of discourse is | |
| the "object economy" (physical objects that may be manipulated). In order to | |
| produce interaction on more human terms, a system must have (1) a rich | |
| representation for emotions, knowledge, and beliefs, (2) a rich set of | |
| behaviors that are driven by those items, and (3) a rich grammar for | |
| communication of knowledge, events, beliefs, and emotions. These subsystems | |
| must be fully integrated with each other. One would not want to design-in | |
| emotions that cannot influence behavior, or that cannot be talked about using | |
| the input grammar. | |
| At the center of any Artificial Personality system is an emulation of human | |
| emotions. Besides providing new motivation for believable behavior, emotions | |
| give the characters a new domain for discourse. They may interact on the | |
| levels of physical state, information state, and emotional state. In | |
| designing an interactive story, the designer must keep in mind the | |
| interlocking dimensions of physical state, emotions, character beliefs, | |
| behavior, and communication. One must also keep sight of the vision: | |
| characters displaying believable original behavior and engaging in | |
| interesting, dramatic interaction. | |
| NOTES | |
| Brenda Laurel: "Towards the Design of a Computer-based Interactive Fantasy | |
| System" (1986). Defines the vision and the technologies required to implement | |
| it. | |
| Mary Ann Buckles, "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure'" | |
| (1985). | |
| Michael Lebowitz, "Creating Characters in a Story-Telling Universe" Poetics, | |
| 13, 171-194. (1984) | |
| -------------------------------- END OF FILE --------------------------------- | |
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