#icids

Alle links henvist til version 1 er derfor blevet rettet til den nyeste version, og du kan nu nyde Benjamins rejse ind i de mange verdener, han finder bag spejlene med alle de færdige, digitale tegninger – og det er selvfølgelig stadig ganske gratis!

Lidt om spillet:

Spil som Benjamin, der lige er flyttet til en ny by sammen med sin familie for at starte et nyt liv. Der er nemlig det mystiske ved Benjamin, at han ikke har noget spejlbillede. En dag opdager han, at han kan gå gennem spejlene til andre verdener – skal han tage chancen og gå hele vejen igennem til en fremmed verden? Du bestemmer!

Tag del i Benjamins kamp for at passe ind, og vær med i hans rejse til andre verdener i spillet No Reflection, der er baseret på novellen Uden Spejlbillede.

Vil du læse mere om No Reflection The Game? Klik her!

Eller er du allerede hooked og vil have det lille spil? Klik her! Spillet er gratis og kan spilles på windows. OBS: Spillet foregår på engelsk.

  Dagbog – Uden Spejlbillede

Benjamins verden – Uden Spejlbillede

Verdener – Uden Spejlbillede

Lene – Uden Spejlbillede

I’m giving a talk next month at ICIDS about transmedia storytelling, including some of the reasons why its been difficult to form consensus around what the term means. And I thought it would be fun to assemble some specific reactions to the term. 

So if you have a few moments, please fill out this (short) survey all about the T-word.  

Come check us out at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies

I think I need to do something less linear than I’ve been doing for these - instead of talking about the various talks (all of which were super interesting, don’t get me wrong!) I want to focus on on the themes and the ideas that ran through the talks and my head as I listened to them. All of these are pulled from tweets I made during various thoughts; I want to try to 

Another trend I'm noticing: the pleasure of works with seams; seeing the underlying machinery and the patchwork nature of the experience 

A theme that came through both yesterday and today was the notion of seams, and being able to see the seams. I forget which speaker used this metaphor, but it’s the equivalent of buying a super expensive watch with a glass facing, such that you can see the underlying gears, and appreciate not only the watch as an artifact, but also the process underneath that allows it to run.

This is a super interesting theme, especially as related to Kate Compton’s notion of Opulant AI - AI systems that fully display that they are AI, and that openly celebrate the fact that there’s an AI system running underneath them. In this way, the seams/gears are not only fully on display, but get to be as pretty and polished as the rest of the experience. Especially in the realm of Interactive Narrative, this notion of seamful experience crafting is super important, since even with all of the amazing advances that people shared, computers still aren’t super good at creating or displaying narratives on their own.

Game narrative as an ellipsis, a space where the audience can fill in the gaps to build meaning and feel a richer experience

This kind of ties into the previous idea, but it also serves as a bit of counterpoint. Humans are, by nature, storyful creatures. It’s really easy to set up situations that we recognize as a story, even if all of the details aren’t there. We see this all the time in story prompts, or in games like Fiasco where the game gives the briefest scaffolding for the players to build up their characters from just a few simple relations and the barest number of additional details.

This is the piece that really allows the simulationist approaches to thrive - by giving the players just enough of an interesting world, and a few ways to hook their own experiences into the space, 

The notion of the use of a character as an interface to a space; characters offer their own views, but maybe can be influenced

This is a technique that came up in few papers not only yesterday, where at least one talk was centered around doing just this, but also today, in how Bad News embodies every single character as the primary interface of how the paper learns about the generated town and its inhabitants.

It allows the author several important tools - the ability to control the set of information that the player as access to at any given point, the ability to provide an additional layer of commentary on the virtual world through the eyes of the particular characters and it provides a playful way of learning about the world. 

Interesting notion throughout this talk about "Narrative Corridors" - the path that a player can wander down as they explore

This point ties into the talk from Kevin Bruner, and it takes kind of the opposite approach from the simulationist approaches of designing the space of the story such that a player is constrained by the space and affordances in such a way that no matter what they do, they can never actually leave the garden path, even if it feels like they’re going off an exploring things. Being able to offer these constraints allows you to build the Telltale-like experience, where players feel that they have way more choices and agency than they actually do.

Time for yet-another conference write-up.

This week, I’m at ICIDS (The International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling), and like any good conference (well, at least, “like most conferences I’ve attended”) it opened up with a dazzling array of workshops.

Of those, I spent my entire day at TINT - The 1st Workshop on Tutorials in Intelligent Narrative Technologies. And, in a nutshell, it was super cool. The workshop consisted of four different talks on four different technologies, all of which were given to us to play around with, as well as walk thoughts of both the design considerations and the primary use cases from the mouth of the designers themselves.

For more information, you can check out the workshop’s webpage here

First, we had Stephen Ware’s planning system, Sabre. The talk was super fascinating - it started off with a description of what narrative planners look like and how the operate to construct narratives that don’t just short-circuit the interesting paths that stories often take. Since, in general, planners are trying to find the easiest way to string actions together to met a particular set of goals, the easiest thing to do is to create a non-character entity within the system (often represented as the “author”) who has goals related to making the story more interesting, as well as the goals that would conclude the story. The other important feature within a narrative planner is explanability - it’s super important that whenever a character takes an action, we should be able to backtrace through the state to explain what caused them to take said action. Sabre itself is an neat little environment, though I stepped out briefly and when I came back, I had missed most of the explanation of how to operate the demo. Documentation of the commands that you can enter would have been invaluable.

Next up was Chris Marten’s Ceptre system, which strives to be somewhere inbetween the hardcore AI planning side of interactive narrative and the easy-to-author side. It uses a formal logic system of making statements about the world, and any actions one takes make changes to the state by immediately replacing all of the preconditions of an action with the postconditions. So, if my character is in Room A, there can be a rule that replaces that with the character being in Room B, symbolizing that the character moved from one room to the other. This tutorial did also open up with my favorite example domain of all time - the OTP generator, which just given a list of characters, pairs them up.

After lunch, we had back-to-back talks from UCSC peeps. First was Kate Compton’s Tracery, which honestly? I don’t think I’m going to be able to do Tracery justice here. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a light-weight javascript library for context-free grammars, and there’s a Twitter Bot service (Cheap Bots Done Quick) powered by it. It’s really expressive, really easy to use and if you want to know more, I highly recommend poking around at http://tracery.io/ for more information.

Finally, we had James Ryan’s Talk of the Town engine, a system that currently simulates a small town in middle America from the mid-1800′s all the way up to 1979. It’s a fantastic piece of technology, firstly, and it’s the backbone behind Bad News, as well as several of James’ other projects. But where it really shines is what you get when you can poke at a simulation that exists on your machine - James has baked in SO many functions for getting at the exact specific kind of thing you’d want to see out of this sort of sim. Once we all got it up and running on our machines, we spent most of the rest of the session exploring the life and times of one particular character in the town on the main computer, Yvette. It was a super fun session, and I really look forward to poking around at this system in my (obviously infinite as a grad student) free time.