Rare Exports

Maartje invited me to an Open Air Film Festival beside the docks in downtown Amsterdam. Although this short film has been around for a few years, this was a crisp and brilliant screening, next to the water. If you like a highly-produced wierd twist, here's the 7-minute film: Rare Exports

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Animator vs animation

It's been around for years, but I stumbled onto this again, and wanted to mark it.

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Vegetarian eats around USC

Eat vegetarian for less than $10. Each is in walking distance of USC. I usually eat vegetarian when I can find decent food. That was a lot easier in Berkeley and San Francisco. But over the past two years, I've found vegetarian fare within walking distance of USC.

I myself am not vegetarian, but when I can eat happily, then I prefer that other intelligent life can enjoy their lives, too.

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Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying

In 1994, in the barracks of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, myself and other Army recruits huddled around the drill sergeant. If Grace Jones and Dave Chappelle had a son, he might look like this drill sergeant. The sergeant had a few sayings. When the situation was normal, all fucked up (SNAFU), he would say, "Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying."

The phrase struck me as insightful. So today as I read an evolutionary explanation of laughter by Basil Hugh Hall, I was reminded of just that:

Our organismal reaction to falling is fear, and a young child's screams of laughter when being tossed into the air by a trusted adult is an indication that the reflex fear response is being opposed by the child's tacit knowledge that he is in no danger. If the child is tossed by an adult with whom he is merely acquainted, he may not laugh at all, and as his fear level rises unopposed, the form of displacement becomes a communicative crying for help.

How do we account for the facts that some individuals laugh when in extreme danger, and some Cambodians, having escaped Pol Pot's reign of terror, reacted with laughter when told of further atrocities? At times, a general state of nervousness can be relieved by a spontaneous displacement of emotive neural activity into a short burst of laughter, probably facilitated by a small window of opportunity brought about by a momentary cognitive shift (a change from one line of thought to another (Latta 1999)).

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Repeat after me on the PS3

According to an experiment on a bird called a budgerigar, the bird finds it easier to learn by imitation than by ignoring observed behavior of another bird. Automatic imitation has been accepted in humans, but the authors claim this is the first evidence of automatic imitation in birds.

This suggests to me that many tasks can be learned by observing others perform the same. In my thesis, I had already been incorporating imitation for learning into training behavior so that users could begin to pick up elements of a foreign language without any verbal instruction. The process primed me to look for examples of priming player behavior through imitation in other videogames.

Last night while I was playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3), I arrived where my plane had crashed. I noticed one of the thugs sliding down a rope. It struck me as an odd way to set the scene of the thug's camp. After I wiped them out (actually I didn't want to kill these anonymous brown-skinned fellows, but that's the only way the game taught me to progress the plot), I was stumped on how to trigger the next encounter or cutscene. Then I saw the rope. With very little conscious thought, I climbed. I had imitated the person I had seen in the distance from the overlooking cliff. Through storytelling and animation, my behavior was artfully designed to discover the next scene's trigger volume! That was much more satisfying than waiting for an L2 camera hint.

An old news release from University of Oregon claims that observing behavior with the intent to imitate enhances learning through activating similar regions of the brain as practicing the activity itself. It seems reasonable to imagine that an intelligent species, who have largely acquired their skills through direct imitation from other members (mentors or teachers), would have brains primed to learn through imitation. It seems elegant that the act of observing to imitate a behavior is in effect similar to a simulation of the behavior itself. It is a testament to the intelligence of the brain that observing another's behavior in a low-resolution video is capable of transforming the witnessed demonstration into a simulation of one's own motor systems performing equivalent behavior. Read the article.

Now I'd like to know how similar the neural activation of observing to imitate is to that of mental rehearsal of an activity, which has been claimed to improve skill and also simulates motor activation of the rehearsed behavior.

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Humans have more fun

Research article into the neuroaesthetics of playing games against robots suggests, unsurprisingly, that humans derive more enjoyment from playing with humanoid robots. The appearance of the robot was perceptual. The robots looked humanoid, but all cohort players (Lego Mindstorm arms, human facial robot, and actual human) adhered to a random selection of moves in what is hardly a game, but is the classic Prisoner's Dilemma with trivial AI. As the boring video linked at the end of the article shows the Lego Mindstorm pressing one of the two (and only two?) buttons: Cooperate or Defect, the game in question is close to half a century behind today's entertainment. The article's primary value is to lay an fMRI foundation under the claim that humans have more fun playing humanoid robots.

"Both regions correlating with the degree of human-likeness, the medial frontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction, have been associated with Theory-of-Mind. The results demonstrate that the tendency to build a model of another's mind linearly increases with its perceived human-likeness." (Can Machines Think?)

(I wonder what an fMRI of a viewer watching the distinctly nonhuman Wall-E would conclude?)

The secondary value of the article, is the speculated causal linkage to a Theory of Mind. The humans are believing (when playing humans) that their opponent has a set of beliefs, which are falsifiable. This is also a higher-order belief. What has interested Andreas Witzel and Jonathan Zvesper has been the behavioral distinction, by a special kind of human-like cognition, beliefs about beliefs. Can higher-order beliefs be more fun? Such epistemics often arise in Poker: I believe that you believe... Their article gives a (now hypothetical) example from Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in which agents would behave plausibly if they would reason about the beliefs of other agents (rather than stupidly disregarding them has having no Theory of Mind). While it is speculative, I agree with their long-term projection.

I've been recently encouraged by the short-term opportunities for higher-order beliefs by use cases in Assassin's Creed. Suppose you Save a Citizen. Well in Assassin's Creed the only way I knew how to save a citizen was to kill the four or so ruffians that are grabbing or ogling the girl (and in the first impression of Damascus, it usually was a girl). I killed the ruffians. More often came. It didn't feel random. It seemed to me (and perhaps this is just an illusion) that the allied others had to be around, had to observe the dead bodies (they commented about the bodies) and seemed as if they were hardcoded to attack, knowing by your events that you killed them. They didn't suspect others. But what if they reasoned about your beliefs, as in whether you saw them. Might they not sneak up on you?

The problem to be solved, though, is not realistic epistemics, but entertainment. In some shooting games, the shots at you are less likely to hit you if you are not facing that way. It's not more realistic; it feels more fair, because you weren't looking that way. You had no chance to avoid the incoming fire. Also, the bullets are slower. Now, that does not invalidate a physics engine capable of simulating plausible collision or a behavioral simulation of plausible aiming. Rather it has been tuned for the player's entertainment (as have the explosions in a movie). Yet a designer can play with the physics and discover parameters that simulate fascinating interactions. I ask you, two, what are the parameters of epistemics that a designer would modify? And what are the nature of the algorithms upon which the epistemic engine is assembled?

The trick becomes, if you accept the hypothesis, that higher-order beliefs in computer games are desirable, is applying them to achieve aesthetically pleasing epistemics. User entertainment is the primary profit driver of commercial videogames. As in movies or music, emotions associated with the experience sell games. If you're not a professional, the most likely reason you are ever playing a game is to have fun right now. Accuracy of rendering, dynamics, physiology, or even of epistemics, is only secondary to entertainment.

Yet for rendering, versimmilitude if not the ultimate end does represent the end of subjective differentiation. Many non-photorealistic visual effects have been heightened by the same hardware and base software as the photorealistic effects. Once pixel pushing power exists, its feature set can adapt to user's needs. Modern high-end characters have bones, flexible flesh, carefully crafted or captured motions. Artificial intelligence fights the invisible war, to guide agents toward more entertaining behavior. It is common to desire soldiers to fight, to take cover plausibly, so that the user subconsciously associates the behavior with human behavior (as lectured at GDC by Killzone's programmers).

That degree of engagement almost always requires a minimum level of a consistent world. It can be cartoon (Legend of Zelda) or even abstract (Geometry Wars), but it shouldn't be inconsistent at its chosen level. If you are in Spider-man 2, you expect Spider-man to behave like Spidey. You expect thugs to be accosting people and to need your help. And you expect Mysterio (okay I didn't expect Mysterio), or some villain at any rate, to threaten Manhattan.

In Assassin's Creed, one could imagine a much richer tapestry of subterfuge, of hiding from enemy guards at least, and perhaps a touch of true intrigue, at most from implementing higher-order beliefs. Yet, before taking higher-order beliefs too seriously, remember that in Assassin's Creed, many of the first-order beliefs are implausible. Characters walk into each other, or sometimes into static poles (quite comical when you blending with a group of such absent-minded scholars!). When you fall onto them from three stories up, they get up and look at you, but that may be all. If you follow a mark and he sees you often, he doesn't seem to pick up that he is being followed.

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Sketchy Physics

I was researching the engine behind my preferred physics playground, Newton, and wishing I could prototype game interaction in SketchUp, instead of just as a 3D storyboard. That's when I came across a mash-up of Newton and SketchUp. There's many examples of SketchyPhysics out there, but I liked this series of shots the best.

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Spider

I was looking for a simple motor tutorial in Newton Game Dynamics, and came across a spider with inverse kinematically posed skeleton balances and traverses rigid bodies in real-time.

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Pandemic

Interface designer and hobbyist board game designer discusses principles guiding his cooperative boardgame for stopping disease, Pandemic. He focuses on the iterations of the simulation and user interface that comprise the design.

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Bye bye, Gary

As snobbish as I have been about the byzantine ruleset since first edition in middle school, Dungeons & Dragons is responsible for an entire genre of stories and settings in games. And as questionable as his aggressive accreditation of collaborators in the 1980s, I miss him. When I think of him gone, I think of my childhood exploration of pseudo-mythology, -probability, -storytelling, and -theater. The dozens of RPG rulesets that I digested, tinkered with, and replaced constitute the canon of my adolescent play. So even as an athiest, I want him to fight Death.

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