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Jason Rohrer came to Georgia Tech last Wednesday and I was able to record his talk.
Jason asks the question where the line that separates games from other media art forms is located. He presents a number of examples trying to find the artistic properties that make games enjoyable and allow them to produce impressionable experiences. Are games art? Jason says not yet but you can decide for yourself.
Maxis dropped their new Spore API this week making my research brighter. Developers get unrestricted access to all of the information on player user generated content (assets). This includes pictures of their creations (creaters, spaceships, buildings) and all of the meta-data that goes with them. Maxis is also sponsoring an API contest that is looking for innovated uses of their API. I’m interested in working on something so if anyone out there would like to team up send me a line.
Since data collection and analysis is part of my thesis I’m very interested in what Maxis is doing. I wanted to talk about the useful ways that this data can be used by developers. I break these up into three sections related to data: data visualization, data mining, and data mutation.
Data Visualization
Maxis already has examples of how to use their API online. Actually it’s one of the most clearest presentation of how to use an API that I have seen. Some data visualization examples exist on the Flash and Python pages. Considering you can grab user and asset information I can defiantly see data viz applications that show the entire user connection graph, complete with each user’s assets. Also a ‘date of creation’ variable comes with every asset so a visual timeline of creation would be another great visualization.
Data Mining
Having access to this much data can tell a lot about a user community. I would like to see mining approaches that look for trends between users and the assets they created. For instance Maxis put up one sample program that display all of the Mario Brothers themed assets. Figuring out which assets were created first and how they evolved can show how both the assets permeated into the community and how each iteration of the assets shifted from one user to the next. One could also begin to use this data to make assumptions about users. For instance, finding the differences between users that create a lot of assets, users that gather a lot of assets, and users that rarely interact with asset creation entirely, can be an interesting look into the types of players that exist in Spore.
Data Mutation
Data Mutation is my word that is the “the act of using unrelated data to alter an information system.” It’s a cross between ambient visualization and communication noise. Ambient visualization or displays often pull together a lot of information sources and displays them in such as way to make them more coherent to a user. This means they sometimes alter the information to make it more relevant, such as displaying the weather by showing a sunny landscape instead of a sun icon with a temperature. However, Data Mutation goes beyond just re-skinning data by actually using external data in unintended ways or as noise within another information system (or a game).
One example I give a lot is Trendio, which is a fake stock market game that tracks trends. Trendio collects news reports and blog posts, lumping the ones that talk about the same subjects into trends (like a celebrity or brand name). People then bet on how popular trends will be on a day to day basis. The actual content of the news reports and blog posts are abstracted out and repurposed by Trendio, thus the data is not being used as it was created to be used.
The Spore Creature Battle game is an example of a Data Mutation game. They take creature asset pictures from the Spore API and ask the player questions that relate to the creatures’ attributes. Each question shows two creatures, asks a question like “which creature is taller,” and then the player makes a choice between the two and gets points if they are correct. The battle game itself did not create those spore assets nor is it using them to inform the user about Spore itself. It’s just a guessing game. These asset pictures could be used as filler art in other games that have nothing to do with spore at all.
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I’ve been exploring using API data to alter information in games. So for instance instead of using random variables or an algorithm to determine a start value in a game, just ping an API database for some information and use that to determine a variable’s value. Take NPC behavior in a game, why not link a NPC’s attitude to how many assets have been created in Spore this week. If the number is really high then the NPC is happy, if low then sad. This can be described as a round-about way of using collective intelligence but it may be interesting to have games that depend on sources of non-related information.
High noon across the cityscape. The sounds of the city below echo among the rooftops. The wind blows and birds rest on a building’s ledge. Suddenly footsteps are heard, swift and quick. A blurred figure runs past and birds take flight. Jumping from building to building the figure blazes forward as shouts can be heard in the distance. Finding safety is the only objective at this point but getting there will not be easy.
Now is that a description of Assassin’s Creed or Mirror’s Edge?
Saw this over at the information aesthetics blog: wordle. It’s a website that takes a text document or a users del.icio.us tags and creates a tag cloud. These clouds are customizable: you can remove common words, choose different fonts (~20 available), change the color scheme, and set the layout of the words (the Any Which Way options is sweet). What is really neat is that another word can fill any open space within another word. I made my picture from my del.icio.us tags, which I have not used in a long time but apparently I was very into social networks (the SN tag), Web 2.0, and conferences. The creator Jonathan Feinberg cannot release the code because IBM owns it, which kinda stinks. One thing I would like to see is an RSS option so I could take my blog and output a picture of my most common words.
This also reminded me of Chris Harrison’s work on word visualization. He has a lot of great projects over at his website.
A couple of months back I made two mosaic tables based on WoW horde symbols. Here is just a quick recap of how I made them.
