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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Thursday, July 31, 2008
 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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Friday, July 11, 2008Research 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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Monday, July 07, 2008
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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Friday, July 04, 2008I 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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Saturday, May 03, 2008
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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Friday, March 07, 2008As 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. /entertainment - permalink - comments Thursday, December 13, 2007
Slow mo implies bullet time is a narrative device Recent news from Baylor College of Medicine, suggests that an experience of slow-motion during a physical crisis only occurs after the memories of the event have been made, and that the person's perception is not actually resolving events at shorter intervals, as when an overcranked camera records for slow motion. In the experiment, subjects were dropped for a few seconds into a net far, far below. Subjects reported time for freefall, which seemed to be a third longer than actual time. Subjects were equipped with watches with digits that flickered slightly too fast to see. It was presumed that subject would be able to see the digit if actually overcranking vision. The experimental setup is suspect. Just because vision is not overcranked does not mean that the motor-control apparatus of the brain could not be overcranking. Also, the subjects might have sufficiently useful subconscious survival mechanisms that prevent them from faithfully paying attention to non-life threatening digits while the body feels it is in peril. But if the experiment is valid and its conclusion too, then the experience of slow-motion in a movie or a videogame represents the memory of an experience and not a simulation (or even romantic expression) of an experience. It does not change how cool it is to go into slow-mo and defeat a flaming-chain-mace warrior in God of War II, but does suggest that the experience corresponds to a memory rather than a direct experience, which means, technically in this cinematic medium, wouldn't slow-motion qualify as a narrative device of recall? And so the experience of cinema or a videogame with such devices of recall is not exactly the eternal present (whose tense screenplays are wisely written in), but a once-removed memory of the present, as the narrator of Sands of Time is wont to remind us. /entertainment - permalink - comments Tuesday, November 27, 2007Lance Gentile, passed this on for the improvement of writing notes:
/entertainment - permalink - comments Thursday, October 11, 2007
Elements of the Psyche: Does Myers-Briggs trump Bartle? In September 2004, I posted to the MUD-Dev list on Bartle Types. This week, I see a rash of posts on USC's Interactive blog using Bartle Types to analyze game design (Andrew Corpuz, Mike Stein, Katrina Johnson). So I thought I'd throw a Joker into the deck to mix it up. Here's the original post, converted to HTML: I have had a curiosity with Bartle types that led to an arcane opinion on player psychology. I failed overcome the laziness, so have not disproven my faulty opinion. Certainly not enough to study psychology. Instead, maybe I can just find a psychologist to beat it out of my head with much less work. My curiosity began with the title: "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs". These, of course, are four suits of cards. These four suits of playing cards were derived from the four suits of the Tarot deck. Correspondences being:
The Tarot deck was, among many things, a lexicon of medieval alchemy. These alchemists studied how to transform a leaden personality into a golden personality. That is, how to adjust the four elements in the persona, or the three alchemical essences of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury, in order to change their motivation and improve character. Turn lead into gold, or as Foucault might call it, the technologies of the self. Some alchemy included a theory of personal relationships, in which the ancient four elements were ascribed correspondences to personality types. These alchemical elementary personalities are:
There is also a correspondence from the elements to the Greek Gods, which the Greeks believed were origins of mortal personality. A Greek might say Apollo speaks through me, etc.
Which gives the correspondence to personality as:
Much of their utility comes in seeing how various elements interact, as tendencies for social and/or sexual chemistry. These were encoded into the Tarot deck, which gives us three columns of correspondences:
Carl Jung studied alchemy. From them he refined some proposals of personality attitudes and functions. From Jung, Myers-Briggs based the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which retains some correspondences from alchemical elements:
Keirsey designated four temperaments of the sixteen in MBTI. These corresponsences continue:
By knowing the origin and the original meaning of the tarot to the suit of a playing card, one may further correspond the tarot to the MBTI:
Rearranging suits to alchemical personality thus:
This then is not a far cry from a correspondence between Bartle types and personalities:
So, this would imply the following correspondences:
A few years ago, I asked Erwin Andreasen about this correspondence (MUD-Dev-L/2001Q3/msg00794). He tabulated several results from an informal quiz on a Bartle Quotient, which he kindly posted. Aggregating these four temperaments and doing correspondences yields:
Normalizing from the total in each Myers-Briggs Type, we see the modal correspondences are:
The correspondence suggests isomorphism, except for the NT temperament, Rationals. All but one match, and the one that does not is the least statistically significant, it is a difference of 1%. This shows bias in my opinion, the self-selected respondents, or the mapping of the questions. Probably my opinion. A couple other interesting third conjecture comes to mind. That is that being online, which is dominated by NT in this test (46% !), which has a tendency for intellectual domination, could express this through cleverness online, which the test might detect any form of domination as killer tendency. Another is that some players may have a tendency to embody a separate online personality than offline. And another conjecture is that killers have more fun (Amy Jo Kim). The conclusion of this weird belief, is my tendency to substitute (NT, SJ, NF, SP) instead of (E, A, S, K), since I'm more familiar with its use, history, and the relationships between MBTI personalities. Of course, any stone, with enough stock, can be turned into soup. I'm just pitching one more pebble in. All that was a long-winding road to get to an answer of the question "wherefor in-game artists?": Therefore, a player could create art to entertain, dominate, trade, or provoke. That's all in theory. In practice, I'm not sure what the distribution of artist personalities are in a computer-mediated community. I haven't encountered evidence to disprove the opinion, but haven't encountered evidence to prove it either. In my limited personal experience as editor of a library of player art and literature, I felt that various artists were doing it for different reasons and that their art, or literature, was intended to have these different effects: entertainment, domination, trade, provoke.
-- Ethan, September 2004 |
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