Okay, so here comes an idea that I have been working through a great deal recently: “Everything is a system.” That’s not too unusual of a claim. I am sure that there are many sources who would support such a proposition. Using that umbrella, though, we can focus in on a specific subset of everything: narrative. By narrative I’m thinking more or less of traditional style narratives, ones that can be read in a more or less traditional manner. Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake may not fall under that limitation of narrative, but the vast majority of literature does. Okay, so the idea is this: narratives are systematic, they contain elements such as value systems, character motives, and external events. These are recorded and the result is a narrative. That is a more specific claim. It would require a little more defense, but it is a little more interesting. (more…)

So, I’ve been continuing to work on Painter, in spite of everything else that is urgently awaiting my attention. The project is coming along, especially the module for the custom function language that is working as a Netbeans plugin. Very cool.

Anyway, I am at the point of building an actual procedural painting program for Painter to interact with in building its work, and I have been looking around for source material to base the code on. Maybe this is just my gradual corruption as a budding humanities scholar, but I have suddenly been feeling this strange compulsion to base things that I do or create in the context of existing work, rather than creating it all by scratch. It’s very odd. Something clearly must be wrong with me.

I have spent a little while digging though the source for The GIMP. I still fondly appreciate C/C++ as my “native” programming language, but reading through it is reminding me why I migrated to Java. Unfortunately, there are very very few good Java painting and graphics applications out there. In fact I haven’t seen one yet. I want something on the level of GIMP or Photoshop, or, ideally, Corel Painter. The hunt continues.

Well, I’ve got my first qualifying exam scheduled. Very scary. Unfortunately, this means that I need to review a whole bunch of authors who I either haven’t read yet, or have read a long time ago and subsequently cleared from mind.

Names spring to mind: Barthes, Greenberg, Jameson, Kittler, Lyotard, Manovich, McLuhan, Mitchell, Ryan, Benjamin, and Latour. Gee whiz, better get cracking.

As a side note, for the phantoms reading, I am going to try to write more. This is motivated primarily by my need to get more comfortable with writing for the coming apocalypse. I mean qualifying exam.

Warning, long rambly post up ahead: I Have been thinking a fair bit on where the research directions could go, and here is a run through of a couple of ideas which are in my head at the moment.

There are a couple of things to consider in terms of research or technical goals to accomplish.

Research goals are intended to answer a broad research question, and understand a larger picture by looking at various examples, and maybe developing a theory or process or method for doing something. The method in this case would be one for adaptation of certain types of narrative forms.

Adaptation is an extremely broad subject, and so it would be important to narrow the field down significantly. From the perspective of advancing the medium of games, we can look at narratives that are not traditionally adapted into games and enumerate those: dramas, comedy, social narratives, romances, etc. Even still, this is very broad, and we could do with something that is finer. Maybe not by limiting ourselves to a genre, but by limiting ourselves to a type of story or type of framing of a problem.

So, looking into a method for adapting certain kinds of social dramas is very potent. However, the examples would necessarily be very limited. They might be various, but they would need to be small in scale. Questions arise over how the method or approach would be technically shaped. I could see it as a software library, but a library would need to be focused in its scope.

A larger perspective look at the project would leverage knowledge from the Statics project, and exploring how people use models, and build and run simulations to understand things (physical things, social things, any abstract concepts). That would be a supercedent of the adaptation problem.

Still, it would also be possible to look deeper and more specifically, and try to accomplish some technical goals, say, “Build a Pride and Prejudice game,” but this is dangerous. While it would be important, innovative, and necessarily new, it’s dangerous in the sense that developing a method for this specific setting would not necessarily be generalizable and would introduce very challenging specific technical details that might not fit nicely with other components.

An example of a technical solution is Facade,  which is very successful at being something new, but has posed many problems in attempts to extend the character behavior language, ABL, to other projects and domains.

Clearly, there is a degree of freedom here, there’s no real unique solution. We can do something very theoretical with limited technical accomplishments, or something very technical with limited theoretical accomplishments. It seems like a compromise is necessary here, but the question becomes what is optimal, and where does it fit in this larger picture?

I updated the design a little bit. It was getting rather tricky to read text in some of the research pages, so I figured I’d lighten the background and use a serif font for <p/> tags. Much shame for illegibility. Oh well. Hopefully the current design will be alright for people. It looks like it may need a bit more color or something. Who knows. Additional research stuff to come later.

Continuing to the third part in this series, I want to introduce a system for handling morality that makes sense for complex situations. My goal is to come up with something procedural, intuitive enough to design for, and something that can handle even the most perverse of moral situations. Because every domain is different and has different moral and value systems, it makes sense that each game or story world will have a different set of statistics and parameters.

The reward for this is an analysis (keeping up with contemporary film and theatre) of Sweeney Todd, to be covered in the next post. The analysis will break down the cast into a spectrum of dimensions that demonstrates quite clearly that, far from being poles, good and evil are spread and intermingle in a complex swamp and neither is really possible to achieve without a helping of the other. Special thanks to Audrey , the domain expert, who helped me get this system and the analysis worked out. (more…)

Holy cow, it’s up again.

After a huge struggle with my previous hosting, I managed to get the site working again on a new hosting service. It took nearly a week of downtime, but we seem to be back in business now. There will probably still be some things getting tripped up for a while, but otherwise it looks like we’re in good shape.

Cheers!

So, in an earlier post I described some of the morality systems that games have when they present the player with choices of a supposedly moral nature. The primary issue that I am criticizing is the “karmic” system where choices serve to advance the player on some Cartesian axis or grid where each point represents a moral position. Here I’ll make an overview of a variety of systems, and hopefully describe a few ways to get around this quandary and have meaningful choices that are still playable. (more…)

I am re-writing GeneticImage.

GeneticImage was enormously successful as a project, but it is time to move on, pushing it in new and exciting and convoluted directions. GeneticImage is turning into a new project, Painter. Instead of having the evaluative model that GeneticImage has (wherein every point is evaluated with functions), Painter has a procedural, process oriented approach. Painter will actually draw to the canvas, doing brush strokes, and employing interesting procedural mechanics to make images. Painter is online as a Google code project: http://code.google.com/p/painter/

Painter is still far from being available or released, but I figured I’d make a post to say that I was working on something new.

This has always been something of a pet peeve for me. Many computer roleplaying games have developed a desire recently to employ the computer’s power of logic towards more than just fancy graphics and combat systems to create moral universes in which players make seemingly relevant moral choices in the game world. I got thinking of this when Evan was recently playing Mass Effect, Bioware’s newest extremely high budget sci-fi RPG shooter.

I have not actually played the game, and my gripes with it are not indicative of its quality in gameplay, but rather the disturbing trend in moral choices in a long line of games of which it is merely an example. The issue I have is of the moral systems developed in games stemming from Dungeons and Dragons to Neverwinter Nights, to its many successors, to Bioshock, to Fable, to Mass Effect, and doubtless to many more to come.

The issue I have is with the “Good” to “Evil” alignment system. Moral choices are made on a karmic scale. You start off as “neutral” and doing various “good” things pushes you toward the good side of the spectrum, where doing various “bad” things pushes you toward the evil side of the spectrum. Generally, I really hate karma systems, since they ultimately resolve into nonsensical unrealistic duals and feeble conceptions of the opposing choices. Karma systems generally fail except when they are done well, presenting choices that actually have moral quandaries, where neither choice is good nor evil.

The reason why karmic systems tend to fail (as complex systems) is because of the fact that there is no such thing as an essentially good action or an essentially evil one. This is illustrated in an example Audrey has excellently described as the “eat the baby” versus “don’t eat the baby” moral decision. The essence of this is that at some point, the intrepid player comes across a baby in a basket in his or her travels. The player is faced with the daunting moral dilemma: take the baby to the nearest lost baby depot, or eat said baby. Dilemmas like these simply do not exist in any interesting or realistic moral universe.

The idea of a good/evil scale treats good and evil as concrete absolutes. When was the last time you were faced with a decision in which you were weighing your choices in terms of objective good versus evil? Real moral choices relate to value systems or selfish versus altruistic behavior. These choices are not absolutes, but also are different depending on cultural or social context. No one (realistically) ever sees themselves as intentionally “being evil” but rather everyone operates according to highly rationalized decision making systems. Interesting villains often are sympathetic because their moral systems may resemble our own in all but a few key aspects. Their choices and our choices are informed by similar forces of what is the good or correct or morally just course of action.

Games do have the potential to express deeper quandaries, but they must move beyond karmic axis systems in order for these to express deep  and challenging moral questions.