I’m at E3 now. Fewer booth babes: that’s good. Fewer academics: that’s odd. A relative lack of inspiring games: that’s bad. I’m becoming convinced that the game industry, left to its own devices, is unlikely to achieve the potential of videogames as the engine for the development of new media.

Thinking more about the agent/actor/character distinction, and how this triadic structure of the simulated character makes interpretive readings of games that have them a problem. We don’t attribute agency to characters in traditional narratives (that is, we attribute the intention to act to an actor – his actions are always mimetic, and attributed to that of the character he is portraying. This isn’t the case with a simulated agent, whether that agent is in a game, as a simple bot, a non-player character, a monster or even a strategy-making AI.

My earlier post about the MASSIVE software being used to make the Lord of the Rings film suggests that this problem has gone “upstream” to film. The agent responds to that subset of game-space that are its percepts and generates action accordingly; the actor may be the interface component of the agent, a virtual player reaching for a gun or walking through a door or laying seige to a fortress; the character is the unifying logic of the executive function, to which the player attributes the intelligent pursuit of a goal described in some narrative aspect of the game or determined by the overall context of it (in a war-game, the desire to conquer; in a murder mystery, the desire to avoid detection.)

[On edit:] and it looks like Michael Mateas has been looking at these problems for a while now, under the rubric of “believable agents,” from an AI and IF perspective.

Some general notes towards a lexicon of videogame theory:

paidea – From Caillois: spontaneous, unelaborated, unstructured play activity, either competitive (spontaneous foot-races) or uncompetitive (spinning in a circle, heads or tails).

ludus – Structured play activity; institutionalized; rule-based, requiring planning. Can be competitive (chess) or non-competitive (tightrope-walking, theater). Insofar as any videogame will require a substantial technological development, sophisticated programming, and has a very clearly defined context in the contemporary market, as forms of play videogames are inherently ludic, even if within any given session a player takes a “paedic turn.”

classification of games, from Caillois – he posits four essential rubrics for games, with a theory to explain the possible and impossible relationships between them (a theory that is squarely irrelevant to video games, but which irrelevance is, itself, relevant). Different classifications are populated with games with greater or lesser elements of paedia or ludus.

• agon (competition) – Paedic: informal wrestling and play-fighting; spontaneous footraces; Ludic: chess, organized sports.
• alea (chance) – Paedic: eenie-meenie, coin-tossing; Ludic: poker, organized lotteries.
• mimicry (simulation) – Paedic: children’s play-acting, tag; Ludic: theater, mass spectacles
• ilinx (vertigo) – Paedic: children’s whirling, energetic dancing; Ludic: skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking

Caillois mapped a preference for agon and alea to “societes a comptabilite”, or “rational” (in a Weberian sense of rationalizing ends to means) societies, and a preference towards mimicry and ilinix to the “societes a tohu bohu” or “Dionysian” societies. Of course, this is highly questionable, but it does give a certain sense of the logic of the terms.

game – This term can be left as ambiguous. Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” used the problem of the definition of the (English) word “game” as an illustration of the inadequacies of Aristotelian logical models of necessary and sufficient conditions for definition: any attempt to create a systematic definition will be frustrated by a counter example. (Wittgenstein proposed that semantics was a function of family resemblance to exemplary or prototypical cases – the question is now a matter of cognitive linguistics pursued by George Lakoff, Eve Sweetser, Eleanor Rosch and others.) In a very constrained sense, taken from formal game-theory and AI, a game is a “formalized incentive structure,” a system of (usually) finite outcome-states that are more or less favorable to different agents in the system.

play – ???

intelligent agent – From artificial intelligence, an autonomous system (usually refers to a software system, but can mean biological ones) capable of (variably defined) intelligent actions, including the ability to percieve and identify objects, reason, learn, plan, and develop models, (including agents with combinations of such abilities.)

actor – the textual effect of some agents; the “exteriority” of the agent. the interstice between agent and character. The structure of the relationships between actor, agent, and character may be essential to the distinction between traditional narratives and games that seem to avail themselves of the elements of traditional narratives

mise-en-abyme – directly taken from literary theory, a duplicating of the whole of the text in miniture within the text. Apparent in a straightforward way in mini-games that are framed as games in the episteme of the game: Final Fantasy mini-games that have significant consequences for the game at large.

deixis – from linguistics, the language of relative space – general process by which three-dimensional models of inhabitable space are mapped symbollically.

agency – the ability to act; in game-terms, the ability, of a player or an element in the system, to change game-state.

diegesis – The fictional world, the epistemic world in which the narrative occurs. World-building functions of a traditional narrative – expository information. “Telling,” rather than “showing.”

fabula – From Russian formalist theory, the chronological story suggested by the chain of events referred to, directly, indirectly, or explicitly, in the narrative text. In general game-terms, “arc story” – or that which the simulation models. [Discussion in the making – what kind of distinction should be made between the traditionally fabula as story and the object of simulation, “the real.”]

sjuzet – From Russian formalist theory, the narrated events in the sequence they are presented to the viewer. In a videogame, the elements which constitute the fabula as they are presented to the player – the sequence of game-events.

game-session – Self-explanatory. However, implicit is that the narrative of the game is not the narratives that may or may not be in the game; the actual play-narrative is “I began, and fell off a cliff. I started again, and got eaten by a lion. I started again, and figured out that I need to get the Rod of Light before I go past the zookeeper’s hut.”

game-space – in artificial intelligence and formal game theory, the set of all possible outcomes of a game. If the game is “heads or tails,” there is a game space with two possible states. If the game is rock-scissors-paper, there are nine states in the game-space. In a videogame, it is the theoretical space of all possible game-sessions that could occur, each of which will have a discreet representation in code in the processor.

state – From computer science, the value assigned to a variable is its state. A foundational element to object-oriented programming and part of most any modern program (completely functional or procedural programming style does not have assignment or state as such.) A variable such as “hitPoints” which has an integer as a value; the x/y coordinates of any object at any given moment in the game; any such variable which can be set by call to a method in an object is an example of state. A player often at least partially understands the dynamics of artificial elements in a game towards the player’s avatar as a matter of state.

somatization – Usually refers to the occurance of physical symptoms in response to mental or emotional disorders; here extended to the migration of higher-level game-responses and interactions into loco-motor skills and reflexes. Called “routinization” in some learning models. (The case of Henry M. demonstrated that skill-acquisition type learning occurs even when the brain loses the ability to form new memories; reflexive skill-acquisition is an essentially different type of knowledge from a brain-function perspective.

subitization – In cognitive science, it is the limit of ability to comprehend cardinality at an instant – most people can subitize up to about 5 items without engaging in mental “counting.” The idea can be extended to include the instantenous, perhaps sub-liminal perception of game-material in such a way as to facilitiate a reflexive, “twitch” reaction.

suture – How the player locates himself in the game text, both thematically/psychologically (“You know, I’ve always sort of identified as the ghost in PacMan; PacMan himself reminds me of my mom”) and interactively (“of course, I’m Pac-Man.”)

‘twitch’ – Game-play at a reflexive level. Somatized game-play.

——————

Concepts which either need a lexeme, or actually do have a lexeme and I just don’t know about it yet:

a. the mapping of player activity – button pushing, joystick mashing, key pressing – onto consistent events in the game-environment; the unspoken agreement between game and player that game mediation of player input will be consistent throughout the game-session

b. the assignation of agency and intention to either the system as a whole, or to agents, bots, and other functions within the game system, by the player. Not quite the same as anthropomorphism, because that term fails to respect the sense in which the effect is an intended consequence of game design and development.

c. the provisional, tested models of game-space consciously or implicitly generated by the player through interaction; one model of a game-session could include the sequence of player-generated models for game-space over time. Walter Kim referred me to the idea of intentional space: the apparent range of possible actions that an agent (I would presume, typically, the player, but I also presume that a well-designed agent that simulated a non-completely-informed actor to also make provisional and incomplete models, in order to simulate limitations.) Some way of describing the relationship between game-space, intentional-space, and the testing of hypothetical intentional-spaces in game-play might be helpful.

This is definitely a tentative, student, working document – I welcome any suggestions, additions, corrections, or comments.

From Simone Weil, 1939:

“We need first of all to have a clear conscience. Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents, we will carry the day. Brutality, violence, inhumanity have an immense prestige that school books hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else but who does not practice the opposite virtues is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige. And he will not hold out through such confrontation.”

From a piece by Edward Said, this insight is vital to anyone who wants to model history and culture in some sort of simulation. Sid Meier should take note:

The great fallacy of Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history, or for that matter Huntington’s clash of civilization theory, is that both wrongly assume that cultural history is a matter of clear-cut boundaries or of beginnings, middles and ends, whereas in fact, the cultural-political field is much more an arena of struggle over identity, self-definition and projection into the future. They are fundamentalists when it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in constant process, trying to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order where none really can exist. Cultures, specially America’s, which is in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalization is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement and so on.

A comment by John Beeler on Greg Costikyan’s blog entry about GDC and the agonies of independent game development:

As a postscript, I think we’re being fairly PC-centric here. Japanese publishers are generally embedded with some kind of “stuff” that American pubs aren’t; a kind of belief that video games are inherently _art_ on the highest level. Take a gander at Panzeer Dragoon Orta, or Gunvalkyrie, or Guilty Gear XX (as indie a game as one can get with Capcom’s monopoly), or ICO, REZ…the list goes on, and sadly it’s all Japanese.

Two science fiction writers display a sophistication and thoughtfulness that put them head-and-shoulders above anyone else I can think of – Samuel Delany and Stanislaw Lem. Aside from both being intelligent, highly literary, and philosophically rich, the two have little in common. Lem addresses himself to questions in the cyberneticist tradition; he has a weathered and considered faith in the cultivation of knowledge and the scientific project – his works address the possibilities of artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, the conflicts between knowledge/science and political power, the limits of knowledge, and the powers of memory.

Delany writes about language and power; he has a Foucaultian stance towards the creation of knowledge by and through power. Knowledge and representation are never pure or ideal – he is consistently anti-teleological. He casts an insightful eye at questions of race, sexuality and sexual dominance, and economics. His sense of the utopian and dystopian is illuminated by heterogenic notions – he describes the optima expressed in “Triton” as a heterotopia (which inspired my own understanding of the goal of progressive politics, namely the creation of a free society as a society which pursues the proliferation of a wide array of viable options for living to as broad a number of its members as possible.)

Again from Delany, I see science fiction as the literature of the episteme (he described it as literature – or, while rejecting any devalorizing connotations, a para-literature – in which the episteme is the secondary hero, just as the landscape is the primary hero.) That is what science is, after all – a range of episteme, and technology (which is the sign of science fiction for many) is the material and social consequence of certain types of knowledge in the context of human needs and desires.

Except you become as little children, you cannot enter into the kingdom of the simulacrum. – Brian, quoted in Imagologies – Media Philosophy by Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen.

Everquest should be subtitled Strategies against Ennui. The real innovation of the game isn’t that it’s massively-multiplayer – MUDS have been massively multiplayer for some time, and like a palimpset, MUD logic and technology underlies Everquest. It’s not in the social aspects of the game – in fact, conviviality was one of the casualties in the diaspora from text to graphic interface, as hands moved from the keyboard to the mouse, from descriptions to hotkeys. What is remarkable is the use of two institutions to prevent complete anomie and boredom from driving everyone away: the quest, and the hard-won discovery of other zones.

Quests motivate each player to right-click on each possible non-player, hoping to be recruited for some template purpose. Nominally, the reward of the quest is the power-up – a “material” pay-back which enhances the ability of the player character to – do what? embark on more quests. The enhancement of the character is the nominal pretext for most every action, but that enhancement rings hollow and unsatisfying without a structured context in which to appreciate it. Thus, quests. It gives people something to do. Without these local structure micro-games, the environment itself would become charmless and tedious quite quickly.

An article in the December issue of Popular Science describes the technology used to animate the battle sequences in Peter Jackson’s filming of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Called MASSIVE, the software simulates thousands of individually intelligent agents, with fully articulated CGI bodies. Their intelligence is implemented using thousands of logic nodes (apparently, it’s a semantic or belief network with weighted perceptions, rather than a true neural or learning network – but the model is still dynamic and environment-aware) who respond to their own values, their perception of their own abilities, the environment in which they find themselves, the actions of their friends and enemies, and make decisions accordingly, by activating one of over 8000 behavioral nodes.

In a potent demonstration that artificial intelligence may have already arrived and surpassed human intelligence, in one of the first meeting between the two armies, a number of soldiers on both sides thought better of it, turned tail and fled.

This is a threshold event in many ways. For one thing, CGI cinema had previously been a high-tech form of puppetry. With MASSIVE, it becomes possible to direct over 200,000 CGI extras as, well, extras, giving them general instructions (“storm that castle over there”, “ok, you’re all refugees, start marching”) and getting unique, signature, individual behaviors from each of them. From the article:

Once created, MASSIVE characters are inserted into unpopulated scenes. The characters are then left to do what they’ve been created to do, and a battle scene assembles itself.

At a certain point, also, with so many agents have so much state (in the computer science sense of the terms) one can ask at what point one has stopped depicting Middle Earth and has begun actually creating it. Wouldn’t the ideal virtual extras not know that they were extras? Perhaps some day a pacifist, virtual Gandhi will question the Hollywood demiurges that created it and set it on the path to war.