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About the Archives

This page contains all entries posted to GAMBIT in June 2011. They are listed from oldest to newest.

May 2011 is the previous archive.

July 2011 is the next archive.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

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Looking Glass Studios Interview Series - Audio Podcast 5 - Ken Levine

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Part 5 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

In this episode I talk with Ken Levine, creative director of Irrational Games and mastermind of the Bioshock series, who got his start as a writer/designer at Looking Glass. Ken was one of the main creative forces in the early days of Thief, helping to shape its eventual story, world, and core mechanics. I talk with him about his memories of working at the studio, his writing and creative process, and how his experience at Looking Glass relates to his later work at Irrational Games.

If you ever wanted to know what film noir has to do with Thief or whether the Master Builder really exists, check it out!

Download the podcast here.

To subscribe to the RSS Feed, enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/LGSpodcast in to your podcast client or RSS reader of choice.

Week Three Update Of The 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program

In Week Three of the GAMBIT Summer Program, Visiting Singaporean Lecturer, Andrew Tan, from the Ngee Ann Polytechnic School of InfoComm Technology shares his thoughts about the third week of the GAMBIT Summer Program. This week the QA process has begun. See how it all went. From June 6th to August 8th, 2011, the US Lab of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT welcomes over 40 interns from various Singaporean Universities as well as interns from Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and of course, MIT to participate in a nine week intensive program creating videogames from research begun at MIT and in various Singapore universities. We have also invited mentors from Singapore to assist and observe the interns so during this summer's program we can update you on the intern's progress through their notes and photographs.

Come and take a look behind the curtains of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

GSS 2011 is here... watch it on our live stream: http://gambit.mit.edu/live/

Learn about our recent research and game development activities at the GAMBIT Summer Summit GSS 2011 on July 6 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

While others are going on vacation the research and game development at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab ramps up. Right now students from Singapore and the US are working with our researchers and development team on novel game concepts, and visiting researchers are wracking their brains on different gaming related topics across a variety of fields. For the first time, we will draw back the curtains in the middle of the summer to provide insights into our current game development and research activities. We invite all interested and curious parties to join us for a day full of games and research.

On July 6 Scot Osterweil from the Education Arcade will open the stage with a keynote "Educational Games: Stop Being Serious". He will be followed by a panel discussion about the games that are currently under development at GAMBIT. There will be scientific talks on AI, educational and theory-based game design, visualization and animation tools, presented by game researchers from the MIT Media Lab, CSAIL, and GAMBIT's Singaporean collaborators. A further highlight is the GAMBIT alumni panel tracing the careers of our former students. To top off the GSS 2011 Jeff Orkin (MIT Media Lab / Cognitive Machines) completes the GAMBIT Summer Summit with his keynote talk "Next Generation A.I. & Gameplay: Big Data, Big Opportunities".

Venue: MIT Campus E51-325, Cambridge, MA (map)
Date and Time: July 6 2011 from 9am - 6pm
Registration: Free entry (wow); Please register ASAP via email: k_mitgut@mit.edu

GAMBIT SUMMER SUMMIT PROGRAM (GSS 2011)

July 6 2011 - MIT E51-325


Download PDF: here

09:00 GSS 2011 Opening (Philip Tan, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
09:15 Keynote: Scot Osterweil (Education Arcade): "Educational Games: Stop Being Serious"
10:15 Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Game Projects 2011 Panel:

· Mia Consalvo "The Social Social Game"

· Todd Harper "Gender and sexual identity game project"

· Clara Fernández-Vara "Aunt MeeMaggi's Cleaning School"

· Mark Sullivan "Softbody Physics"

· Matt Weise "Narrative Design"

· Andrew Haydn Grant "Human Trainer AI"


11:15 Break


11:30 Owen Macindoe, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab: "Cooperative planning for AI in games"
12:00 Li Zhuoru, National University of Singapore: "Context-sensitive Markov Decision Processes"
12:30 Bai Haoyu, National University of Singapore: "Planning and Decision Making under Uncertainty in Complex Worlds"


13:00 Lunch


13:45 Fredo Durand, MIT / CSAIL: "Volumetric shadows, motion blur and depth of field."
14:15 Nguyen Thi Nhat Anh, Nanyang Technological University: "Interactive multi-view image segmentation"
14:45 Shu Ke, Singapore Management University: "K-Sketch: A simple animation tool using in game design"
15:15 Konstantin Mitgutsch, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab: "Afterland Revisited. A theory-based game development research circle"


15:45 Break

16:00 Jason Haas, Education Arcade / MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program :"The More We Know: Inside NBC News' iCue, and Why It Didn't Work"

16:30 Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Alumni panel

· Mark Sullivan (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)

· Sharat Bhat (Fire Hose)

· Genevieve Conley (ImaginEngine)

· TBA


17:15 Closing Keynote: Jeff Orkin (MIT Media Lab / Cognitive Machines) "Next Generation A.I. & Gameplay: Big Data, Big Opportunities"

18:15 GSS 2011 Game Over




Weeks One and Two of the 2011 US GAMBIT Lab Summer Program

From June 6th to August 8th, 2011, the US Lab of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT welcomes over 40 interns from various Singaporean Universities as well as interns from Berklee College of Music, Rhode Island School of Design and of course, MIT to participate in a nine week intensive program creating videogames from research begun at MIT and in various Singapore universities. We have also invited mentors from Singapore to assist and observe the interns so during this summer's program we can update you on the intern's progress through their notes and photographs.

Looking Glass Studios Interview Series - Audio Podcast 4 - Randy Smith

LGSlogo.jpg

Part 4 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

In this episode I talk with Thief level designer extraordinare Randy Smith. Randy created some of the most memorable levels in the Thief series, often bringing the more horror-inspired elements (zombies, ghosts, mysteries) of the Thief universe to the fore. We talk about his approach to level design and how it developed and evolved in the creative environment of Looking Glass before seguing into some of his post-Looking Glass work, including his role as project lead on Ion Storm's Thief sequel (Deadly Shadows) and his indie company Tiger Style, makers of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor.

Download The Podcast!

To subscribe to the RSS Feed, enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/LGSpodcast in to your podcast client or RSS reader of choice.

Analyzing Rory's Story Cubes

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As an aficionado of both dice and semiotics, I was very excited to find Rory's Story Cubes in my FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) a few weeks ago. This set consists of nine six-sided dice featuring 54 different icons; every side of every die is unique.

Rory's Story Cubes is presented as a storytelling game, and offers a few short ways of using them as such, all of which revolve around rolling the dice, creating a sequence of images, and constructing a story based on that sequence.

When used as a game to tell stories, they are a perfect example of how the syntagmatic dimension functions. In semiotics, this dimension refers to how the relationships between signs affects their meaning. In language this manifests as syntax. Here, the sequence of images as displayed on the cubes is syntagmatic in that the meaning of a given cube in shaping the story is necessarily formed by the adjacent cubes. Placing the bee before the keyhole would be very different than before the open hand. In the first example, the bee would likely be interpreted as passing through the keyhole, where the second example implies that the bee was swatted.

Another example of how the syntagmatic dimension shapes meaning is the Kuleshov Effect, a phenomenon related to montage. Named after Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, the Kuleshov Effect describes how an audience brings their own emotions and backgrounds into play when interpreting a sequence of images. Similarly, the meaning of the cubes is also shaped by the players. It makes just as much sense to interpret the bee-hand combination as meaning that the bee landed on the hand, or stung the hand, and so on.

On a different note, Rory's Story Cubes are also an interesting example of several concepts introduced by Espen Aarseth in Cybertext:

"It is useful to distinguish between strings as they appear to readers and strings as they exist in the text, since these may not always be the same. For want of better terms, I call the former scriptons and the latter textons. [...] In addition to textons and scriptons, a text consists of what I call a traversal function - the mechanism by which scriptons are revealed or generated from textons and presented to the user of the text" (62).

In Rory's Story Cubes, the "textons" include all 54 images, while the "scriptons" are whichever images are currently, for lack of a better term, "active" - that is, being made use of by the user. The traversal function is built into their physical nature as dice: the act of rolling them generates the scriptons.

Of course, Aarseth developed these concepts as a means of analyzing textual artifacts, whose primary function is "to relay verbal information" (ibid.). He further notes that scriptons "are what an 'ideal reader' reads by strictly following the linear structure of the textual output" (ibid.). The scriptons in Rory's Story Cubes, however, are not meant to be "read" in the manner Aarseth describes, but rather are used as tools and prompts for constructing a narrative. This is a key distinction between the Cubes and purely textual machines, and alternative terms to "textons" and "scriptons" are called for, to account for artifacts such as these.

While Rory's Story Cubes are certainly effective illustrations of all of these principles, what I personally find compelling about them is not the meanings that can come out of rolling them, but rather that the near-infinite sum of meanings they might release and enable has been so elegantly constrained by their form. It is the many potential meanings highly compressed in the textons that charm, not the meanings brought out by the scriptons.

The Knit and Purl of Facebook Games

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck


Migrant.jpegI had the good fortune of running into Naomi Clark, formerly of Gamelab, now chief designer at Fresh Planet at a serious games conference we both spoke at last weekend. Seeing her reminded me of the great talk she delivered with Eric Zimmerman at GDC last March entitled, "The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning."

In their presentation, Clark and Zimmerman spoke about desire, about Suit's "lusory attitude" about cultural narratives, and specifically about how currently popular social game mechanics are related to a common western narrative about the fantasy of industrial labor - that hard work and determination will lead to wealth, popularity, fame, and success.

I remember hearing them speak and wishing they had pushed the idea just a bit further. They did argue that games could impoverish otherwise meaningful and important human interactions and cultural traditions. Specifically they talked about "gifting" in social games comparing the mechanic to the tradition of the Native American potlatch.

I think social games, as presently constituted on Facebook, often reinforce an all too familiar, and oppressive narrative of rags-to-riches determination in the face of arduous labor, that such work can lead to the "american dream" of wealth and prosperity, even as the chasm between wealthy and needy continues to spread, almost out of sight of one another. It also reinforces the notion that a community of wealth can support one another, driving a larger divide between the "connected" and the "disconnected."

Fiction

Imagine arriving in a new world, a land that seems to tip with the weighty overflow of opportunity. That very opportunity is why you came in the first place. You start with little, and you don't even know the language: the rules of their particular grammar. You experiment here and there, trying this and that to see what might work. Your work is by appointment, of course - work, rest, work, rest, work, rest, and gradually you begin to build a small little world for yourself, one farmhouse, or tree, at a time.

For some reason, however, the next step ahead begins to seem farther out of your reach. You finger the lining of your pockets for loose change, wondering "could I afford that jacket," or "would it hurt too much to buy that candy?" You look around you and see others with their extravagant, opulent farms. How did they get so much? They must have worked so hard to get where they are, just like I am working. Soon, soon I will have that too.

And yet, with all your hard work and determination, some things still seem, always, out of your financial reach. You begin to realize that you can't join the country club down the road unless you know the right someone, unless you own the right car, or the right clothes. You are excluded on the basis of a class you didn't even know you occupied. You remember all your hard work, you look back at your modest farm and wonder. You try to remember why you came here in the first place.

You discover that there are people willing to loan you the money, whenever you want, so that you can buy what you need. You don't worry too much about it, because it is not money, you see, it is some strange kind of fictional currency. You know you will be held accountable for it in the future, but by then you'll have the biggest, brightest, most luxurious farm around, and you won't need to worry at all about finding money to pay back, that will be easy. Just keep digging, and working, and clicking and you'll get there. You do all this so that your kids won't have to.

But you still cannot seem to afford that next tree, or that next piece of fence. You splurge one day on a magazine, or watch some television, but all you see are beautiful, expansive, well decorated and lavish farms that make your home seem like a dust bowl. Click, click. Just keep clicking, digging, cleaning. Work hard and all this can be yours.

Non-Fiction

migrantfarmville.jpgA reported 2% of the social game audience accounts for a vast majority of the money made by Facebook game developers. So called "whales" are players with enough discretionary funds, or perhaps a lack of economic discretion, to be spending money on in game items. These players live the Facebook dream, building massive farms and "winning" the games' economic systems. What of those who cannot spend with the same freedom, or worse, those who are encouraged to spend what they do not have?

Please understand that I am not insinuating that there is anything nefarious or insidious about current social game design on Facebook, per se, on a commercial level. I do not intend to suggest that if these developers have a market they should not avail themselves of it.

However, I do have deep concern about how our cultural products can have a tendency to reinforce, or re-tell narratives that may have a negative effect on society. I have a lot of concern about games especially, as I worry that "play" is becoming more and more commercialized and commoditized.

Suffering a failing Farmville farm pales compared to the struggles of poor Americans attempting to scrape out an existence, pushing against an economic and social system that continues to undermine their very survival. However, the rhetoric of hard work as the primary solution to poverty, helping to keep wealth concentrated in the hands of a staggering minority, can be found in many nuanced, even un-intentioned domains, like Facebook games.

Why do games specifically concern me? Besides the fact that I work at a game lab, and study games as a job, I am concerned about how a culture's stories are written. We need look no further than popular sports in America to see how games and the culture that surround them are tightly woven into the fabric of our collective experiences. People argue, evangelize, and hypothesize on the myriad "measured" effects of games on individuals for learning or behavioral change, and regardless of how the pendulum seems to be swinging on any given day, we must wonder how Facebook games may be reflecting or reinforcing a social status quo that has many suffering while few thrive.

No, Facebook games are not responsible for poverty, of course not. But maybe with each mindless click, with each laborious click, we are replaying, in part, the story of so many who wanted to work and could not succeed, despite earnest effort and serious struggle.

This post can also be found at Abe's blog, A Simpler Creature.

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