Opening poses agents as a trend in software design, to lend computer applications a human face. This was seen early in Macintosh file finding programs, as well as in a variety of other places. Foner’s goal is to outline what “true” agents are, to identify how they are made up and what they have the potential to do.

The agent Foner spends most of his time examining is Julia, which was developed by Michael Loren (“Fuzzy“) Mauldin. Julia is a MUD chatterbot, which acts like any other player of a MUD and can talk and interact with other players.

The interesting thing with Julia is that because MUDs are textual online worlds, players interact with each other at a level through textual commands. Julia is essentially in the same position as any other player, having a character to interact in this world. As a result, other players interact with Julia just as though she were another player. The interface of the MUD creates an ambiguity between players and agents, because there is no clear or immediate way of distinguishing one from the other.

Julia is often used by other players as a helpful guide in the online world, like a knowledgeable friend who is always around and can always spare the time to give help, directions, or advice. Much of Julia’s function is giving help to others, and she can answer many questions about the world, that are not easily answered any other way.

At this level, it is possible to compare Julia to a documentation system, but instead of being faced with extensive documentation, Julia can give immediate and quick responses. The MUD environment is also constantly changing, so an agent who can explore the space like any other player is a potentially very useful resource. Her encyclopedic knowledge is part of what makes her ordinarily human behaviors give way to her robotic nature.

For her human-like qualities, Julia contains several subtle and very particular variations in her behavior in the world. For instance, she moves waits a second or two before moving from one room to another, she varies her responses, and she usually has somewhat coy responses when asked whether she is really human or really female. Foner explains that these human like characteristics make her functional behavior even more useful for other players. Foner gives an anecdote where another player, herself a programmer who knew that Julia is a bot, remarked on how she missed Julia when whe was offline. This is an interesting emotional reaction to something that the speaker knew was artificial. However, it is hardly unusual. People anthropomorphize things that are not human, often that are not even animate and develop attachments to them.

I would argue that an interesting reason for some of this success is the way in which she is adapted to and situated in the MUD. She is not emobided, but then again, no in-MUD character is really embodied. She has the same sort of virtual body that everyone else does.

Toward the end of the paper, Foner gives a series of bullets that characterize agents. These definitions describe agents as primarily functional things, that exist within some computational format, and are there to carry out tasks on the behalf of users. It is important to note that this is relevant from the perspective of developing agents as software tools, but for the purposes of simulations and of games (such as The Sims), Foner’s definition breaks down somewhat. The characteristics are as follows:

• Autonomy: The agent performs actions on its own, and takes initiative.
• Personizability: The agent adapts and learns to different users, adapting itself to them.
• Discourse: The agent talks back and communication is two way, unlike other tools.
• Risk and trust: The user can delegate a task to the agent and trust that the agent will do the task correctly. The risk of the agent failing must be balanced with the user’s trust.
• Domain: The degree of specialization and risk is dependent on the domain being explored.
  Graceful degradation: Failure at a task or improper understanding of the task should exhibit graceful degradation, revealing that there might be a problem without, for instance, producing an error message.
• Cooperation: The relationship between the user and agent is cooperative, and conversational, as opposed to commanding.
• Anthropomorphism: Foner argues that agents are often anthropomorphized, but that they do not need to be. Similarly, many anthropomorphizied programs (such as Eliza) are not agents.
• Expectations: The agent should be able to respond reasonably to most users’ expectations.

It should be noted that this hasn’t been published yet. The following notes were taken on a draft which Janet Murray has distributed to her students. Thus, when it finally is published, my page number references are likely to be very wrong. We are also not supposed to cite from this, but there are a few short definitions which I went ahead and cited anyway because they seemed very valuable.

My notes here are also a little cruder than usual, since I took them directly rather than through my normal 2-step method, so apologies for this in advance.

Chapter 1: The Goals of Design

Design is a historical phenomenon, ancient in its origin. It reflects cultural biases and values. Murray proposes inclusion in design as a way to achieve the best designs.

Design crosses media, as well as existing within media. Murray uses the analogy of building blocks. Digital media is new, and therefore has cruder building blocks, or more homogeneous ones. A new medium has undifferentiated pieces with potential, but everything must be built from scratch. An established medium has more specialized and varied pieces. Digital media also inherits many building blocks from legacy media. This raises a problem over whether to use the old ones or build new ones for the medium.

Chapter 4: Inscription and Transmission

Media are everywhere, and we are surrounded by not only the media, but the discourse about media. This omnipresence makes it difficult to identify and define what a medium actually is, as it exists at cultural and cognitive levels. Murray asks how design takes place and what occurs in the process of inventing a medium. This is given by three purposes: inscription, transmission, and representation. These are systems of meaning making.

Inscription is process of learning and use of the medium. Writing takes a long time to learn, but once learned becomes transparent. In immature media, the inscription does not seem transparent, but confusing and cumbersome. Inscription is the dimension of the human interaction with the medium on the surface.

Transmission is also transparent in a mature medium. Transmission is about how the medium works underneath the surface. The example given is with a telephone line, which has developed to be an invisible but pervasive part of infrastructure. The alphabet is too a means of transmission, because it is a method by which written information may be stored until retrieved. With media that are not yet mature, the flaws and inconsistencies in transmission rise to the surface and become painfully visible, for instance incompatible formats of computer files.

The last dimension is representation, which is about how people can make sense of the content transmitted by the medium. This is characterized by cultural codes, and also genres. This is the dimension that is most closely associated with cognition, and meaning making. It ties into the dimensions of practice and use. At this level, the difference between a mature and immature medium are quite clear. The mature medium is one which has a long practice and history of usage and interpretation, which the immature medium lacks. Artifacts in immature media are confusing and require more attention because we do not know how to interpret them as we know how to interpret other things.

Argues that cognition is tightly related to the development of media, and that cultural development works in synchronization with media. Media works because of schemas, or cognitive patterns of meaning. “Inscription is the intentional shaping of a receptive physical material with an appropriate technology so that produces a perceptible pattern.” (p. 62; draft) This thus requires an intentional agent, a markable material, an appropriate technology, and a perceptible result.

In discussing transmission, Murray uses the transmission model of communication, where communication occurs along channels, and is encoded as to reproduce with the most clarity the original “meaning”. This is an interesting model because it assumes a certain literal sense of the content that goes through the medium. In many cases, this is exactly what is intended and needed, but for some practices, most notably artistic ones, purpose of the artifact is not to reproduce data, but to encourage active meaning making on the part of the audience.

Chapter 5: Language, Sign, Genre

Chapter introduces language as a model for media conventions. This denotes what is the content of a medium, and this can range from spoken to written words to the visual language of film, described in shots. Language is intrinsically arbitrary and dependent on social agreement of meaning. I would actually argue that the arbitrariness of language is actually contestable. Several of the dimensions of language, especially visual and other languages, are dependent on other factors, which may be either cultural or cognitive.

To understand language, Murray suggests the use of substitution rules. However, with substitution rules, the connection between written language and other media becomes difficult, as substitution rules may be used to analyze other media, but these rules are usually not sufficient to as generative syntax. The example she gives is of filmic language. This is a distinction that I argue is a differentiation between descriptive and generative models. It is important to note that a single medium may be analyzed using many different forms of language (or models) which describe and account for different aspects of the medium.

Languages and models may be understood as the interchange of signs, and thus the content or the representations enabled by media consist of signs, which depend on social agreement to suitably designate meaning. It is at this point where the expressive variability of a medium becomes significant. Murry explains that signs may have meanings shared by an interpretive community. Different communities may endow the same sign with varying meanings. Signs thus contain some inherent ambiguity that is different from noise. Murray argues that context is necessary to make sense and absolve this ambiguity, but may also make the ultimate meaning deeper.

Genre is about conventions. These conventions may be determined by ritualized codes, practices, physical constraints, among others. Under this definition, genre would be seen to be greatly determined by the shape and structure of the medium. Murray does acknowledge a difference between media-specific genres and media-independent genres. Genre is basically a meaning making system, based on patterns of interpretation according to conventions. “We can think of a media genre as a powerful substitution system based on a flexible set of conventions that allow for the right mixture of predictability and variety to allow us to focus on the meaningful elements.” (p. 99; draft) In this sense, a genre is a model in the purest sense. It is a system for meaningfully interpreting structures in a specific and internally consistent way.

This understanding of genre also includes as genres many things which may often be described as media. In this distinction, the medium is the system of encoding, communication, and channels, while the genre is the system of conventions. It is important to note that media also depend on conventions, for the use and understanding of content transmitted through the medium, but the importance of media is tied into the channel itself. This is rather unconventional in terms of some conventional uses and definitions. Thus, telephone communication is a medium, but a buisness call is a genre. Physical gesture and enunciation is a medium, a theatrical performance is a genre. At this point, the relationship between media and genre becomes convoluted, though, because a play exists in written form, as something crafted through direction, and finally as a performance.

In examining the genre of a theatrical play, Murray looks at several of the conventions that are used to compose it. Social conventions prescribe how the audience and actors are arranged and separated. Physical staging conventions give specialized meaning to the changes of lighting, as well as the transformation of scenery, and the vocabulary of gestures and props used by the actors. Plays are subject to conventions of temporal segmentation, establishing a special understanding of the passage of time within the performance. Finally theatre makes use of conventions of plot, the variations of which are what are colloquially referred to as theatrical genres.

Chapter 8: Abstracting Complex Behaviors

This chapter is admittedly the one most relevant for my work. The focus of the chapter is on abstraction, and this ranges from a conceptual understanding of abstraction, to procedural to simulation focused.

Murray introduces the chapter by citing the Oxford Dictionary of Computing definition of abstraction, which focuses on what is ignored in the subject being abstracted. The process of abstraction is necessarily one of simplification, and thus it requires ignoring some things, but also emphasizing others. Abstraction can be seen to work at levels, where something (either data or procedures) are successively “abstracted away.”

The focus of this chapter remains on design, and how abstraction may be used as a tool for design, and as a design strategy. This knowledge is generally significant by thinking about designed content in a form that is modular and extensible, that is, it can be made to work with other things, and can be put toward other goals, and especially be made useful for other users.

Abstraction been woven integrally into the fields of programming and system design, and is a necessary requirement and component of any medium. Using Murray’s definition, media are communication systems, which depend on data encoding and transmission, and these require means for abstracting that data.

Abstraction exists in distilling systems, which are means of analyzing some data to produce a simplified statistical model of that data. Examples of this are used frequently in economics, to model groups of consumers, but are also frequently used in silly quiz websites that attempt to define what type of person the user is by getting them to ask several questions. Abstraction also exists in substitution systems, which are means of collecting a large collection of possible options under one heading. Any of those options could be employed in the substitutions.

The core principles of abstraction are things that I would call models. My understanding of a model is principally about abstraction, it is a way of interpreting some system into another, simpler internally consistent system. Under this view, I think that both media and genres are essentially models, where a genre is defined by the interpretation of its conventions and a medium is defined by the interpretation of its encoding.

Murray discusses simulation. She gives a definition of a system: “A system is a set of processes and actors that work together in an integrated manner.” (p. 215; draft) This definition is general, but can be applied in interesting ways to different subjects. This definition of system also hinges on a temporal nature, seemingly excluding static structures.

Abstraction in simulation is about defining the boundaries of the simulated world, which are both physical and conceptual. Simulations must also be designed at a certain level of granularity, which is the “depth” to which the simulation may be understood. Giving the example of Sim City, she explains that its level of granularity does not include individual citizens. Simulations do not need to model the real world, they may in fact do nothing of the sort; but in order to be believable, the simulations must be consistent.

In presenting a particular abstraction of the world, a simulation includes with it its own system of values. The rhetoric of simulations often is through its implicit and unstated assumptions. Murray discusses the persuasive games Darfur Is Dying, and Gonzalo Frasca’s games Kabul Kaboom!, September 12th, and Madrid. These games are systems that encode the designer’s values into the very rules of the simulated world.

Murray compares these and some others with Papert’s concept of the microworld. Papert’s original concept was oriented around learning mathematical and scientific concepts, but political games introduce a dimension of social and political science into the mix. These communicate effectively by explaining their assumptions, their model, and how the consequences of the game relates to the real world. Not all games do this, and I would argue that games can be dangerous when they fail to communicate or miscommunicate their assumptions. Civilization is a great example of this.

My interest in Diamond comes not from an anthropological perspective, but from a systemic one. Diamond is important because he gives an account of human history that focuses on the systems that give rise to current situations. This is presented as a gradual change from ultimate factors to proximal factors. The question Diamond seeks to answer in the book is why Western Europe came to dominate so much of the globe. Why didn’t the Incas sail to Europe and lay waste to the Spanish instead of the other way around? The arguments that are usually employed to explain and justify European expansion tend to involve such racist themes of inherent superiority of people. While these arguments are false and usually acknowledged to be so, they are often accepted subconsciously as folk explanations for history. Diamond first presses to look first at the direct causes for the domination (technology, ships, diseases, steel, horses, etc), but shows that these are not enough. Why did Europe develop guns and steel weaponry and not Polynesia? The ultimate causes for these can be traced back to environmental factors.

Diamond is relevant for three reasons. The first is that he presents a view of the world that is system focused, that views human history as an emergent system that is the product of rules and circumstances. The second is that the system perspective can be employed pedagogically, as a theory which can be used to empower students by offering an alternative to conventional theories. The third is that it can be used as an alternative model in other historical simulations, most notably it can be compared with the system of history presented in Sid Meier’s Civilization. Much of what I am interested in is using this to compare against Civilization, and to show how the models used in Civilization encourage the classic racist interpretations of history.

I am not alone in my interest in these comparisons. Ian Bogost makes an analysis of Jared Diamond as a procedural representation of history (both here and in his book Persuasive Games). There is also a now defunct group that has been interested in using Guns, Germs, and Steel as a model for Civilization IV, the most recent installment in the series, which offers an extensive modding platform. It is arguable, though, that such a model would not be successful as a game because of how inequality is a natural consequence of Diamond’s model. Ironically, in attempt to make the game fun and even, where all societies have an even chance, the game makes them assume the history of the colonizers.

A Natural Experiment of History

Diamond gives a small test of a larger hypothesis. He looks at a particular conflict within Polynesia, specifically between the Maori and Moriori in New Zealand. The latter lived in a constrained environment that prevented excessive growth, while the Maori grew, developed a population beyond what was needed for support, and fought internally. In the same pattern as other colonizing and expansionist forces throughout history, the Maori eventually found the Moriori and destroyed and enslaved them. This small encounter reveals a microcosm of patterns that emerged across the world.

On the whole, Polynesia is interesting because it contains an intense diversity of cultural groups, and an equal diversity of environments in which these groups reside. To examine the issue of Polynesian cultural diversity, Diamond looks at environmental differences, specifically the variables of climate, geological type, marine resources, area, terrain fragmentation, and isolation. An interesting detail about this is that these types of variables are things that are receptive to simulation. These are also variables that occur within the game Civilization, although the model of the game is constructed to give every player a roughly equally “valuable” exchange of these variables.

These environmental factors give way to first issues of sustinence, which can be expressed in what types and volumes of food are available, ranging from hunting and gathering, to domestication of animals and agriculture. This then leads directly to population density and size. The size of a population is dependent on the size of the political unit, which may be a single island, a part of a large island, or a cluster of islands. The political unit size is dependent on the isolation of the mass. The population size affects the number of potential non-producers. Non-producers are people who do not spend their time on sustenance, but can be chiefs and bureaucrats, craftsmen, artists, and so on. The number of these  non-producers and the population size tends to lead to greater social complexity. Again, several of these factors are available in Civilization. The game has a model of producers versus non-producers, but this dimension is included in the model anyway. The important distinction is that Civilization takes size and complexity as assumptions, as inevitabilities.

Further factors emerge in the types of tools that are developed and used, which is dependent on the number of specialists, as well as the available materials. With large numbers of these, there can be ever greater production sizes, leading to the massive monuments at Easter, among others. These are dependent on the centrality of the political organization. The interesting dimension is that these types of monuments seem very reminiscent of other sorts of monuments in other cultures, notably the Egyptian pyramids. Diamond suggests that the size of the monuments is directly related to the scale of labor that the political leaders could draw from the population.

Collision at Cajamarca

Diamond in this section looks at the Spanish destruction of the Incas at Cajamarca, and the capture and ransom of Atahuallpa. He discusses the differences between the sides coming from their history. These differences are presented step by step through a series of questions. Why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa? How did Atahuallpa come to be at Cajamarca? How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca? Why didn’t Atahuallpa instead try to conquer Spain? Why did Atahuallpa walk into the trap? These each depend on some particular difference between the forces. The Spanish captured Atahuallpa because of their guns, horses, and steel weapons and armor. The Incas were vulnerable because of civil conflicts and the smallpox epidemics spread by other Europeans. The Spanish invaded the Incas because of the massive political and economic infrastructure that enabled expansion. Writing and the literate tradition enabled Europeans to communicate their experiences with the Native Americans and make use of successful strategies in their bloody conquest.

What is remarkable about this is that each step is defined by an environmental difference, where the Inca civilization took one route and the Spanish took another. In Civilization the game, these steps are not assumed to yield differences. Instead, the course of history that the Spanish followed is the course that everyone must take in Civilization. Essentially, it assumes that all societies must inevitably develop the kind of power that colonizers have used to oppress others. In Civilization’s model of history where these steps are natural and inevitable, it would appear that the destruction of the Inca’s was their own fault, for not developing the technology and production that came so naturally to the Spanish. Civilization’s model is thus racist because it disregards the existence of other options in cultural development.

Farmer Power

The last thing I want to include is a handy picture of the transition from ultimate factors to proximate factors.

Ultimate to Proximate factors

It’s been a while since I’ve put up photos of food or anything else, so I figured I would upload a few.

Delicious Polenta	More Polenta
Taken a couple of weeks ago while it was snowing...	Who's the kitty? It's you it's you!

Finite and Infinite Games is ultimately a philosophical work, reverberating with a kind of immanent philosophy that might be found in the Tao te Ching. Content of work is really two ways of looking at the world, juxtaposed. These are the finite and infinite games. One can view the world in a finite sense or an infinite sense. In Carse’s view, finite and infinite are literal according to their etymology. Meaning literally with or without end. His aim in the book is to explore these as apply to political, social, sexual, philosophical, and religious lives. My own interest comes from application to games of the digital variety, but also in finding ways to apply Carse’s concepts to a theory of models.

Finite games are played to be won, whereas infinite games are played for the sake of continuing play. Finite games are also distinguished by the role of opposition, where there must be at least one opponent. There may only be one winner of a finite game. Rules in finite games are fixed, but in an infinite game, the rules may and must be changed over the course of play.

There is a complex relationship between past and future in these games. These are discussed as depending on the role of surprise, which is an unexpected occurrence or situation. Surprise is a victory of the future over the past within an infinite game. Surprises are positive things in infinite games, as they reveal new beginnings. In an infinite game the present is not predetermined by the past. In finite games, surprise is usually feared or undesirable. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained, whereas to prepare for surprise is to be educated. Training is the means of removing the possibility for surprises to occur, while education reveals the inherent uncertainty of the past.

At stake in finite games are titles, indicators that one has won a finite game. These titles manifest in power over others, and the goal of a finite game is to obtain that power. Infinite players play to gain freedom and is enabling of others rather than constraining or forcing them.

Carse describes society and culture in opposition, where society is a more finite game and culture is more infinitely oriented. Society is about enabling deviations from the script, whereas society is about sanctioning them. This view is very different from anthropological senses of culture.

Another dimension is between drama and theatricality. The former is an infinite concept, where the latter is a finite one. The essence of drama is something that Carse calls “genius” but is a term that relates more to its etymological root rather than its conventional usage. Genius in Carse’s view means more of the generator or originator of something, and is tied into the concept of spontaneity. To speak as a genius is to speak to somebody. To speak not as a genius is to recite to an audience. Dramatic action is totally original, becoming gone forever once over.

This perspective is interesting in relation to Goffman, who attests that interaction is inherently theatrical, and involves reciting of existing ideas rather than original actions. Goffman’s view can be seen as in the spectrum towards Baudrillard, who argues that due to simulation, there are no spontaneous gestures, only reflections of others, ad nauseam. Carse’s view is also interesting from the perspective of cognition and AI, because his idea of the infinite player asserts a self that is more than its parts. “A robot can say words but cannot say them to you.” (p. 5 in summary)

The infinite perspective reveals that our understanding of the world is ireperably incomplete. Essentially, to see that one’s own view is incomplete is to see at all. This is an extremely important concept and is a cornerstone upon which a theory of models must be built.

Carse compares the idea of the “Master Player” to the eternality of nature. The master player is a finite player who masters all the rules, and the future of a finite game. “It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning. A true Master Player plays as though the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.” (Chapter 16) The Master Player concept is woven into the concepts and assumptions of AI. To some extent, this is necessary, but it reflects a philosophical problem. Games (of the electronic variety) that can be mastered teach the players to be Master Players, to embrace the finite nature of the game.

McFarlane prefaces his book with noting that there is a prevalence of adaptations from novel to film. His stated aim is not to devise an elaborate analysis, but to understand how the novel is related to film in adaptations. What kinds of content may be transferred and what may not (these are narrative and enunciation respectively). The focus of adaptation is on realist novels. McFarlane is light on issues of authorship, and acknowledges this as a potential area of study.

In mainstream games, the role of adaptation is extremely important. Frequently there is a process of adaptation from a text (often in comic form) to film, and then into game. With many titles, the sequence is synergetic and sustained. For instance, the film and game are released simultaneously, and later, both have sequels, which in turn influence each other. It is important to look at the process of conventions and transformations as pertains to the respective media. This is similar to McFarlane’s exploration of the relationship between novel and film, and something may be gained from that analysis.

The book is organized into two parts. The first is relatively short and discusses the general theory that is used, and the latter is an analysis of case studies. I am focusing my analysis exclusively on the former.

Background, Issues, and a New Agenda

The affinity of novel to film adaptation can be supported by trends in the novel as a form, which emerged as a result of the realist movement. One of the first points of emphasis comes from Conrad’s famously stated intention of making the reader “see,” and this image oriented desire is continued in James. This desire makes the image a focus of fiction, and supports the idea that the image is used to understand, something that was picked up by Griffith. In the novel, the prevalence of the realist image denotes a different relationship between the author and the text than occurred previously. This was a shift from telling to showing, which was analyzed in detail by Booth.

Approaches to adaptation seem to exist midway between the poles of artistic reverence and capitalism. Film makers express a range of views of reverence, but nonetheless, both still tend to make conservative and literal transformations of the original novels. Very few film makers create transformative and bold takes on the adapted texts. Adaptations can be seen as concretizing the world of the novel visually.

McFarlane discusses elements of fidelity criticism, at some distance, without endorsing it. He discusses Beja, who asks what the relationship betwen the two works should be, and asks if fidelity is even possible. This question seems to be the crux of McFarlane’s investigation. The Beja quote cited is: “In asking whether there are ‘guiding principles for film-makers adapting literature, he asks: ‘What relationship should a film have to the original source? Should it be “faithful”? can it be? To what?'” (p. 9; Beja, Film and Literature, 80) Also relevant is McFarlane’s encapsulation of what fidelity criticism is about: “Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film-maker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with. There will often be a distinction between being faithful to the ‘letter’, an approach which the more sophisticated writer may suggest is no way to ensure a ‘successful’ adaptation, and tot he ‘spirit’ or ‘essence’ of the work.” Essentially, fidelity criticism depends on the existence and homogeneity of interpretations of a work’s meaning. McFarlane suggests that fidelity is a distraction, while the real goal should be intertextuality, where the original is used as a resource.

McFarlane makes a distinction between adaptation proper and transference. Transference is where elements from one medium can be carried over non-problematically into another. Adaptation proper requires finding different renditions of the work that might be equivalent in the new form. To address this problem, McFarlane invokes Barthes, looking at how a text is composed of narrative functions. There are two kinds of these: distributional and integrational, also known as functions proper and indices. The former are actions and events, and are horizontal in the sense of narrative time. The latter are the density of description and the discourse, which are vertical. The difference is between doing versus being. Indices are clearly more important in terms of adaptation for film, because they involve visual presentation, which is the entire content of film. However, functions proper are operational. As presented, functions proper are used to designate narrative events, but these could also be integrated into a perspective of the systematicity of the story world, and would be ideal for looking at for game adaptations.

Functions poper are divided into two categories: cardinal and catalysers (which Chatman calls satellites). Cardinal functions are the “risky” parts of narrative, where the outcome of the event could potentially be different. This is where there is room for discrete decision points in an interactive rendition of the story. The catalysers are extra details that support the reality of the world, and can be used to contextualize the cardinal functions. Indices may be divided into indices proper and informants. Indices proper are the atmospheric dimensions of a narrative, the characters and moods. Informants are the “facts” about the story world: names and places, ages and professions, and so on.

McFarlane gives a differentiation between narrative and enunciation, which roughly corresponds to story and discourse in Chatman’s terms. It is the narrative which can be transferred into film, whereas it is the enunciation that must be adapted. These are distinguished by the following definitions: (p. 20)

1. those elements of the original novel which are transferrable because not tied to one or other semiotic system–that is, essentially, narrative, and
2. those which invovle intricate processes of adaptation because their effects are closely tied to the semiotic system in which they are manifested–that is, enunciation.

It is the enunciation which must be adapted. However, for the systemic world of games, which are not narrative in the pure sense (games lack an authorial control over the sequence and linearity of the narrative), the narrative must be adapted as well! Because modern mainstream games share many of the features used by the visual semiotic language of cinema, much of the enunciation may be simply transferred into the game. This is a striking turn of structure. The adaptation process from novel to film is in essence the opposite of the process from film to game. Of course, this is not completely true, as it assumes a purely systemic and simulation oriented approach to the game and a straightforwardness of the visual language, but this is a point worth noting, nonetheless.

In the space of novel to film adaptation, the work of transference focuses on communicating the functions of the original. A surface level of “fidelity” could be taken as the extent to which the cardinal functions have been transferred. The transference requires making use of the mythic and psychological patterns found in the work. Adaptation proper in notvel to film requires working in between two isnifying systems. Moving textual cues into visual and iconic ones. This also requiers using codes, which must be interpreted by the viewer. This requires presenting instead of representing, and making operable the representation. The idea of making the work operable again is true and of importance in adaptation to games.

I am having a dilemma regarding the whole conversation minigame thing. This is a problem I am not under pressure to figure out immediately, but the sooner I can come up with a solution, the happier I’ll be.

The conversation simulation is intended to be a high level look at how conversations might be modeled. My goal is to experiment and look for a way that communication within the situation can be rendered as simulation and as gameplay. I firmly believe that conversation is best modeled in this way. However, it is necessary to account for both internal variables as well as contexts. Context and situation are of utmost importance, because a change in situation can lead to dramatically different notions of what is appropriate in a conversation. However, attempting to include too much can lead to a disasterous path of modeling and simulating cognition, which is something I know well enough to avoid. So, the question is how much simplicity is acceptable: what is the minimum of context and variables that are needed to get by.

Below are some notes regarding how to understand how a spoken utterance (which I call discourse action, or simply DA; I should really follow Goffman and call them “moves”) is understood and responded to by the listener. There are 6 main pathways where interpretation or transformation between state, context, and DA parameters takes place. State exists in three major locations: the parameters of the DA, the state of the characters (moods and attitudes), and the state of the conversation itself (status, registered etiquette of the characters). Even distilled to these three spaces, the interdependence of the parameters is dramatic.

What I need to figure out is how to either implement the six processes (five really, because the first is done), or how to simplify the overall model so that this level of complexity is not necessary.

Conversations and Responses

As unusual as my Pride and Prejudice plans seem, stranger still is the Ivanhoe Game. It’s not actually a game about Ivanhoe proper, it’s an education oriented project that seems to be about collaborative interpretation. It looks like people can create a “game” around a text, and then navigate, annotate, change, and discuss the text. This is interesting to me because of my belief in the interrelation of models and interpretation. This is not really about developing a model of the underlying text, but about visualizing and connecting interpretations.

The project is also quite neat because it uses Java and JNLP. The actual UI for the thing is nice and pretty and looks like the developer has read the Filthy Rich Clients book.

The outset frames the book as a largely experimental work. The subject is talk in a general sense, and the content poses models of a few particular types of talk. His goal is not for these to be seen as definitive and final, but rather as possibilities. I would venture to call the models that Goffman puts forth prototypes. The general aim is to think about how to understand the dense layers of meaning in talk. Talk in person is laden with many forms of communication beyond language, including glances, posture, intonation, and so on. The idea is to understand what these are, but also to understand how people can understand and decipher all these signals in the first place. There are three matters that are important: ritualization, a participation framework, and the fact that words are frequently not our own. These dimensions are characteristics of dramaturgy. The essence of this is that talk contains the requirements of theatricality.

Replies and Responses

The subject of this chapter is the schema of reply and response. This is initially very simple, but begins to complex on realizing the layers of context and embeddings that take place within replies. Responses are dependent on the frame of the question, and are significantly dependent on them for the purposes of understanding their meaning. Goffman is at first using examples of questions and answers, of particular interest are layered responses. Where the person asked the question must pose another question in order to give the response. Alternately, some implicit contexts might be assumed and simply done away with. An example of this is a simple diner script: (p. 8, but coems from Marilyn Merritt)

A: “Have you got coffee to go?”
B: “Milk and sugar?”
A: “Just milk.”

In this brief example, B’s response not only implicitly answers A in the affirmative, but also suggests a state change. A is not asking a question for information, but rather is asking for service. On the request, B moves to fulfill it.

Goffman explains that there are three types of listeners in conversation: those that overhear; those that are ratified participants, but who are not specifically addressed; and those ratified participants who are specifically addressed. The system of particpants is again suggestive of theatrical models. The assumption with talk, though, is that the central goal of it is to communicate, and for the listeners to correctly understand what the speaker means, whether or not they agree with what was said. Speech uses many cues to provide feedback to confirm understanding. This is interesting in relation to games, where, when the player communicates with non-player characters, comprehension is treated as a given (not necessarily rightly so).

Talk is presented, initially, as a communication system, in terms of transmitting and receiving messages. Feedback occurs on a “back channel.” In this system, the two-part exchange of question and response is a natural form. The example of the communication based model is a case in which the theory shapes the interpretation of communications. Later on, Goffman explores examples which are very challenging to the communication model. Goffman suggests an approach to this model that formats exchanges as statements and replies, rather than questions and answers.

For the speaker, the communication model suggests a protocol of gestures and pauses. The general effect of these is a way of bracketing the talk, so that it is clear what each statement means, and what its frame and context are. The full channels model  is beyond my needs, but is remarkably thorough. Goffman suggests several requirements for talk in this model: (p. 14-15)

1. A two-way capability for transceiving acoustically adequate and readily interpretable messages.
2. Back-channel feedback capabilities for informing on reception while it is occurring.
3. Contact signals: means of announcing the seeking of a channeled connection, means of ratifying that the sought-for channel is now open, means of closing off a theretofore open channel. Included here, identification-authentication signs.
4. Turnover signals: means to indicate ending of a message and the taking over of the sending role by the next speaker. (In the case of talk with more than two persons, next-speaker selection signals, whether “speaker selects” or “self-select” types.)
5. Preemption signals: means of including a rerun, holding off channel requests, interrupting a talker in progress.
6. Framing capabilities: cues distinguishing special readings to apply across strips of bracketed communication, recasting otherwise conventional sense, as in making ironic asides, quoting another, joking, and so forth; and hearer signals that the resulting transformation has been followed.
7. Norms obliging respondents to reply honestly with whatever they know that is relevant and no more.
8. Nonparticipant constraints regarding eavesdropping, competing noise, and the blocking of pathways for eye-to-eye signals.

Talk is not all about pure and raw communication. Talk is heavily dependent on social codes and other conventions around politeness, etiquette, privacy, and so on. Communication may contain layers of subtext, for instance, a greeting that is meant to be inviting to further conversation or closed to it. Necessary for the inclusion of these subtexts is to see talk as having a ritual form, or be composed of ritualized interchanges. The system of ritual concerns works by imposing a set of constraints on allowable actions and behaviors. Goffman gives three primary points for ritual communication (p. 21), summarized here.

1. The speech act makes implications about the character of the speaker and his relationship to the listeners.
2. Offensive or potentially offensive actions may be ameliorated by apologies, but these must be acknowledged as acceptable to the listener.
3. Offended parties must give a sign that offense has been made, otherwise they are enabling a lapse of the ritual code.

Addressing the problem of dialogic analysis, Goffman turns to the question of units. What are the units of conversation? Classical linguistics looks at sentences, but a more general term is needed (not least because many utterances are not sentences). Goffman suggests the idea of a “turn,” which means an entire period of speech. Instead, he settles on the idea of a “move.” Both of these terms are associated with games, and lend a certain game-like quality to the model of talk, something which is encouraged in the text.

Goffman is critical of the noncontextual approach to conversation, which is normally introduced in looking at replies and responses. The noncontextual approach is reminiscent of the classical models of linguistics and cognition, where the person is a frontend for a database of known facts. Goffman emphasizes the primacy of context in the comprehension of interactions. The model of statement and reply does not adequately account for the process of communication, only its content. So, Goffman suggests a system where conversation is rather a system of responses, where each statement is a response in reaction to the context which has been induced by the last move. Goffman gives four bullets describing the properties of responses: (p. 35) Note that these are extremely worth considering in the conversation simulation projects.

1. They are seen as originating from an individual and as inspired by a prior speaker.
2. They tell us something about the individual’s position or alignment in what is occurring.
3. They delimit and articulate just what the “is occurring” is, establishing what it is the response refers to.
4. They are meant to be given attention by others now, that is, to be assessed, appreciated, understood at the current moment.

Goffman begins to challenge the primacy of the statement, and then the entire communication-based model. Switches to the idea that talk is simply a sequence of response moves in reference to each other. He emphasizes the idea of context and social setting as fundamental: “So, too, we would be prepared to appreciate that the social setting of talk not only can provide something we call “context” but also can penetrate into and determine the very structure of the interaction.” (p. 53)

Finally, Goffman explores an interactional view of talk: “What, then, is talk viewed interactionally? It is an example of the arrangement by which individuals come together and sustain matters having a ratified, joint, current, and running claim upon attention, a claim which lodges them together in some sort of intersubjective mental world.” (p. 71) Tellingly, he uses the analogy of games. The difference is that the moves of conversation are not composed of tokens and positions, but utterances and other nonverbal cues. Statements and responses may be seen as deriving from moves, not the other way around.

Response Cries

The subject of this chapter is “response cries,” which are exclamations that one might give in response to oneself. Examples are things such as “hmm,” “ow!,” “ooh,” and so on. These are analyzed in detail. These kinds of expressions are not merely situated, they are situational. They are indicators of one’s own mental and physical state, partly aimed at others, to serve as indicators regarding potential interactions. These are thus theatric in nature.

Footing

The focus of this paper is the concept of “footing,” how the mode and frame of conversation is determined and how that is controlled (or not) by participants. Goffman’s first example is a transcript of president Nixon teasing and embarrassing a female news reporter, shifting the ground from a serious and official mode to a sexual one where the reporter is disempowered. Footing is important for the general understanding of reference (bracketing), and also for the role of power, which strongly relates to Johnstone’s status.

Instances of footing changes are conversational shifts. Examples of shifts are given here: (p. 127)

1. direct or reported speech
2. selection of the recipient
3. interjections
4. repetitions
5. personal directness or involvement
6. emphasis
7. separation of topic and subject
8. discourse type, e.g., lecture and discussion

Footing is important in fiction, as with social interaction, it is represented by various cues. In fiction and text it cannot be communicated subtextually through signs of gaze and posture. These signals exist, but they must be explained and raised to the level of the surface text. However, fiction has authorial shifts in terms of voice and focus, especially in the practices of different forms of speech (free indirect speech, for example), are closer indicators of footing changes. Footing changes are emphasized in film, and often are accompanied with special cuts to draw attention to the shift. The medium that probably would be most adept at communicating footing to games (in an interactional sense) would be comics, which are able to represent content with both text and images, with a great deal of simplification.

Goffman lists several qualities of footing in attempt to give a definition: (p. 128)

1. Participant’s alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self is somehow at issue.
2. The projection can be held across a strip of behavior that is less long than a grammatical sentence, or longer, so sentence grammar won’t help us all that much, although it seems clear that a cognitive unit of some kind is involved, minimally, perhaps, a “phonemic clause.” Prosodic, not syntactic, segments are implied.
3. A continuum must be considered, from gross changes in stance to the most subtle shifts in tone that can be perceived.
4. For speakers, code switching is usually involved and if not this then at least the sound markers that linguists study: pitch, volume, rhythm, stress, tonal quality.
5. The bracketing of a “higher level” phase or episode of interaction is commonly involved, the new footing having a liminal role, serving as a buffer between two more substantially sustained episodes.

Normal language (channels) to denote speaker and hearer misses the other cues, and the other types of relationships: proximity, touch, gaze, and so on, that occur between particpants. These sorts of elements are crucial in footing, and are incidentally a substantial part of filmic language.

The first dimension is elaborating the relationship between the speaker, the addressed recipient, and the bystanders. This framing reveals the complexities of these interactions, especially as bystanders may talk and communicate amongst themselves, or there may be various levels of interaction between each level. Goffman explains these types of itneractions as byplay, crossplay, sideplay, and collusion. The act of speaking invovles more than just the speaker and receiver: “The point of all this, of course, is that an utterance does not carve up the world beyond the speaker into precisely two parts, recipients and non-recipients, but rather opens up an array of structurally differentiated possibilities, establishing a participation framework in which the speaker will be guiding his delivery.” (p. 137)

Goffman looks at the different modes of the speaker as: the animator, the author, and the principal. These roles each entail a different relationship between the speaker and the actual activity and content of speech. The animator is the dynamic dimension of the speaker in action, with the emphasis on the delivery and performance of speaking. The author links the speaker as the originator of the words that are encoded. The point of the principal is to stand, not as merely the speaker of words, but rather as the authority or the one whose position is established and identified by the words. The principal is not necessarily an authority figure, but rather someone who is committed to the words and who makes a connection between himself or herself and the words spoken. Together, these form the “production format” of the utterance.

Changing footing is not so easy as simply and mechanically dropping one context and assuming another, but rather, holding the old context in abeyance with the potential to be reengaged.

Principally, this book is about emergence and decentralization. Resnick is heavily influenced by Papert (who both was an adviser and writes the foreword). Thinking in terms of autonomous agents suggests a new paradigm of AI and pedagogy. The central foundation and observation is that things tend to organize themselves, and they are not organized by some centralized controller. Resnick explores how things organize themselves, and how to think about them.

Foundations

The focus of this is decentralized systems and models. Many systems, flocks of birds, immune systems, ant colonies, market economies, and many others are decentralized. However, centralized models are pervasive, and tightly woven into our thinking. Most theories of how natural systems came to exist originated with the idea of some central control. These models are have been problematic and have often been demonstrably incorrect. Decentralized theories suggest that organized systems made of agents are composed such that the agents each have small and relatively simple rules, which when played out, tends toward organization.

Resnick suggests three points for studying these models: (p. 5)

1. Probing people’s thinking: Investigating how people think about self-organizing behavior, and what sorts of models that people use to think about systems.
2. Developing new conceptual tools: Coming up with heuristics and quantitative tools for thinking about decentralized systems without resorting to centralized models.
3. Developing new computational tools: Study and test systems by building and playing with them. The substance of this is Resnick’s StarLogo.

Decentralization exists in many areas, and Resnick gives a listing of situations where decentralized systems exist and are important: organizations, technologies, scientific models, theories of self and mind, and theories of knowledge.

Construction

Resnick discusses StarLogo, a variant of Logo specifically oriented toward developing decentralized systems. StarLogo has lots of differences from Logo: there are dramatically more turtles, the turtles have senses, the space is organized in cells, these have local attributes, there are daemon processes, and means for describing rules on a general level. StarLogo includes built in commands and structures for interacting with a distributed system of agents using relatively simple instructions. The idea is to develop a pedagogically oriented approach to looking at decentralized systems. StarLogo visualizes and helps map from rules to emergent systems.

The use of construction is particularly relevant in the context of Papert’s constructionist influences. Constructionism is especially important in decentralized systems because these systems are both everywhere and tremendously misunderstood. The commonality of centralized approaches is problematic, but the reason for this is that centralized approaches are easy to understand, and we have a great deal of linguistic and conceptual tools for thinking about them. Decentralized systems are, on the contrary, unintuitive, and require simulation in order to observe and test.

Explorations

Pedagogically, Resnick is interested in changing the emphasis from simulation to stimulation. He stresses thinking from the perspective of the agents within the system. He also stresses the concept of the microworld, as an experimental arena for testing ideas, rather than simulations, which are generally taken to be things based on reality. By de-emphasizing the realism, Resnick is able to open the microworlds to more freedom, openness, and experimentation. Resnick gives several examples of systems modeled by StarLogo: slime molds, ant colonies, traffic jams, and termites. The actual decentralized rules are startlingly simple. The listings of code are very short, but easily produce elegant behavior. These nonetheless suggest a significant cognitive leap from the intended system to the rules to generate that system.

Much like how Papert shows us that Logo and procedural knowledge tend to suggest an approach to mathematics that resembles calculus much more strongly than the types of math traditionally exposed to children, Resnick shows that distributed and decentralized models too lead to different models of mathematical concepts. This approach to math and geometry resembles the effects of fields and fluids, which are traditionally subjects first introduced to students in college (fluids usually late in undergraduate). That they should be so straightforward to represent using a Logo variant is nothing short of remarkable.

Reflections

The centralized method of thinking is pervasive, and quickly invoked in guessing models of phenomena. It is integrated into other metaphors, language, and culture, especially in terms of leadership. This is also woven into goal and planning based models of behavior. Planning is integrally about centralized organization. In his conclusion, Resnick gives five bullets that describe characteristics of centralized models: (p. 134)

• Positive feedback isn’t always negative. Positive feedback often plays an important role in creating and extending patterns and structures.
• Randomness can help create order. Most people view randomness as destructive, but in some cases it actually helps make systems more orderly.
• A flock isn’t a big bird. It is important not to confuse levels. Often people confused the behaviors of individuals and the behaviors of groups.
• A traffic jam isn’t just a collection of cars. It is important to realize that some objects (“emergent objects”) have ever-changing composition.
• The hills are alive. People often focus on the behaviors of individual objects, overlooking the environment that surrounds the objects.

This last point is especially noteworthy, especially in terms of cognitive models. Situation and environment are crucially important, and the emphasis on simple rules implies that cognition and decision making can effectively be pushed into the environment.