Computational Narrative and Games T-CIAIG Issue

IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG)

Call for papers: Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games

Special issue editors: Ian Horswill, Nick Montfort and R. Michael Young

Stories in both their telling and their hearing are central to human experience, playing an important role in how humans understand the world around them. Entertainment media and other cultural artifacts are often designed around the presentation and experience of narrative. Even in video games, which need not be narrative, the vast majority of blockbuster titles are organized around some kind of quest narrative and many have elaborate stories with significant character development. Games, interactive fiction, and other computational media allow the dynamic generation of stories through the use of planning techniques, simulation (emergent narrative), or repair techniques. These provide new opportunities, both to make the artist’s hand less evident through the use of aleatory and/or automated methods and for the audience/player to more actively participate in the creation of the narrative.

Stories have also been deeply involved in the history of artificial intelligence, with story understanding and generation being important early tasks for natural language and knowledge representation systems. And many researchers, particularly Roger Schank, have argued that stories play a central organizing role in human intelligence. This viewpoint has also seen a significant resurgence in recent years.

The T-CIAIG Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games solicits papers on all topics related to narrative in computational media and of relevance to games, including but not limited to:

– Storytelling systems
– Story generation
– Drama management
– Interactive fiction
– Story presentation, including performance, lighting, staging, music and camera control
– Dialog generation
– Authoring tools
– Human-subject evaluations of systems

Papers should be written to address the broader T-CIAIG readership, with clear and substantial technical discussion and relevance to those working on AI techniques for games. Papers must make sufficient contact with the AI for narrative literature to provide useful insights or directions for future work in AI, but they need not be limited to the documentation and analysis of algorithmic techniques. Other genres of papers that could be submitted include:

– Documentation of complete implemented systems
– Aesthetic critique of existing technologies
– Interdisciplinary studies linking computational models or approaches to relevant fields such as narratology, cognitive science, literary theory, art theory, creative writing, theater, etc.
– Reports from artists and game designers on successes and challenges of authoring using existing technologies

Authors should follow normal T-CIAIG guidelines for their submissions, but clearly identify their papers for this special issue during the submission process. T-CIAIG accepts letters, short papers and full papers. See the IEEE T-CIAIG page for author information. Extended versions of previously published conference/workshop papers are welcome, but must be accompanied by a covering letter that explains the novel and significant contribution of the extended work.

Deadline for submissions: **September 21, 2012**

Notification of Acceptance: December 21, 2012

Final copy due: April 19, 2013

Expected publication date: June or September 2013

Codings

Codings shows the computer as an aesthetic, programmed device that computes on characters. The works in the show continue and divert the traditions of concrete poetry and short-form recreational programming; they eschew elaborate multimedia combinations and the use of network resources and instead operate on encoded letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols that are on the computer itself.

////////////////////////// Giselle Biguelman
///////////////////////// Commodore Business Machines, Inc.
//////////////////////// Adam Parrish
/////////////////////// Jörg Piringer
////////////////////// Casey Reas
///////////////////// Páll Thayer

Curated by Nick Montfort
Pace Digital Gallery

Feb 28th – March 30th, 2012 (with regular gallery hours Mon-Thu 12-5pm).

Panel with artists Adam Parrish and Páll Thayer and the curator, and opening reception, Feb 28th, 5-7pm.

The Codings catalog is available as a PDF for download (6MB).

The Pace Digital Gallery is directed by Frank T. Marchese and Jillian Mcdonald and is located at 163 William St, New York, NY. More information on the works exhibited, and directions to the gallery, can be found at the Pace Digital Gallery site.

Word Palindomes Dog Me. Dawg, Palindromes! Word!

Mark J. Nelson has posted a very nice note about word-unit palindromes, mentioning that I have been tweeting palindromes-by-word as “@nickmofo” recently.

Nelson points out the paucity of such palindromes in the printed (and digital) record, and the lack of discussion about these. There are a few famous palindromes of this sort, including one that he mentions, “You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?” Another fairly well-known one is “King, are you glad you are king?” and another is “So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so.”

Without trying to add too much to this helpful discussion, I’ll note here that some of my tweets are meant to be amusing references to and reworkings of these more famous (for certain values of “famous”) word-unit palindromes:

You can mind a fashion, can’t you, but you can’t fashion a mind, can you?
(Oct 28, 2011)

You can touch my bear, can’t you, but you can’t bear my touch, can you?
(Oct 25, 2011)

Mister President, are you glad you are president, mister?
(Nov 28, 2011)

So stiff a doctor to doctor a stiff so.
(Nov 27, 2011)

In case some of my palindromes seem more inscrutable than others, I’ll also note that my output includes tweets that pertain to things I saw (a VCR chained to a fence near MIT) and events that I attended (a poetry reading by Doug Nufer).

CCS IMR IRQ BBQ

I’ve participated in three conferences on digital and literary and poetic topics recently – and haven’t participated, unfortunately, in a barbecue.

The Critical Code Studies (CCS) Working Group 2012 is an online discussion – or, I suppose, several discussions – that started on January 30 and runs until February 20. It’s organized by Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino.

At In Media Res, a project of MediaCommons, I was part of the digital literature discussion last week. This was organized by Eric LeMay.

And in meatspace (to be precise, at Brown University), I took part in Interrupt 2, a sort of semi-un-conference with performances from JODI, Vanessa Place, and my collaborator Stephanie Strickland. This one was put on by John “CPU” Cayley and many students.

It’s Time: Overthrow Elsevier.

The Boston Globe calls it the scientific community’s Arab Spring. Perhaps the comparison is bombastic, but this issue actually goes beyond science. It’s a question of whether the results of our research, scholarship, and critical writing as academics will be held hostage from our own universities and completely locked away from the public view, or whether we can put aside the artificial scarcity of information that commercial publishers have created and foster better, open communications.

Our colleagues in the sciences are the main ones who are taking a stand in this particular case – a boycott of commercial, closed-access publisher Elsevier – but others can stand with them.

If you haven’t, please read about the issue with Elsevier specifically, for instance in the Chronicle and the Guardian. These are good old news stories in which one side says it’s right and then the other side says it’s right, and so on.

I wrote about open access in the digital media field back in 2007, and at that point drew some ire (along with a good bit of agreement and praise) for simply refusing to review for a closed-access journal. That discussion may be interesting to those interested in this issue, too.

And there is plenty to read about open access more generally, such as John Willinsky’s book The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. (Registration is required, but the full text of the book is available for free download.)

I hope that these links help to inform, and that, if you’re an academic, you’ll choose to

visit The Cost of Knowledge

and join the protest against Elsevier.

There are 5000 of us now.

A New Paper on the Dreamcast

I’m very pleased to see the article Mia Consalvo and I wrote published in Loading…,
the journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA). There’s an intriguing lineup of articles in Loading… Vol 6, No 9; ours is:

Montfort, Nick and Mia Consalvo. “The Dreamcast, Console of the Avant-Garde.” Loading… 6: 9, 2012. http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/104/116

We look at the connections between the Dreamcast platform, five games in particular (Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez, Seaman, and SGGG) and avant-garde movements and work in art, literature, and other areas in the 20th century. By seriously considering and applying the idea of the avant-garde and looking into these fives games closely (in terms of gameplay, in interpretive ways, and with regard to players’ online discourses about them), we show some ways in which videogames, within gaming, have done the work of the historical avant-garde; the business situations and factors in platform technology that relate to this innovation; and what opportunities for radical exploration in console gaming remain.