Author: emshortif

GDC AI summit talk et al

So, this has been in the works for a bit, but got officially confirmed today: I’m going to be speaking at the AI summit at GDC, in a panel with Michael Mateas and Dan Kline, on artificial intelligence and storytelling. (Unsurprisingly, I’m talking about conversation; the panel as a whole will also look at things like drama management, narrative pacing, etc.)

Scheduling information isn’t up at the GDC site yet, but is presumably forthcoming; the panel will be sometime March 9-10, 2010, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, CA.

I’m excited to be talking alongside people whose work I’ve admired for a long time, and really looking forward to this event.

Meanwhile, PAX East plans are moving forward, with lots of IF stuff projected; there’s now an ifwiki page, if you want to check out who else is going to be there and what social plans are in the works. And Jeremy Freese and I are going to be making a speaking appearance at MIT the following Monday, as well.

Yes, it will be a full and busy March.

PAX East update

Panel acceptances for PAX East are coming out now, and there will definitely be IF content:

Congratulations, your PAX East panel submission of “Storytelling in the
world of interactive fiction” has been accepted. We tentatively have
you scheduled for Friday, March 26th from 5:30pm – 6:30pm in our Wyvern
Theatre…

We have the following title and description for your panel:

Storytelling in the world of interactive fiction

Text adventures have been quietly experimenting with narrative gaming
for thirty years. Five authors from the amateur interactive fiction
community discuss the design ideas in their games — reordered
storylines, unreliable narrators, deeply responsive NPCs — and how they
apply to other kinds of games. (Rob Wheeler (mod.), Robb Sherwin, Aaron
Reed, Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin)

Get Lamp is going to be screened later that same Friday evening — 9:30 PM, it looks like..

Computers extension, v2

“Computers” is an extension I wrote some time ago, but the hiatus of the extension website meant that it wasn’t posted, so I didn’t announce it. However, it’s available now, and may interest some people.

The extension provides kinds for generic computers, as well as more specific implementations for desktops and laptops; some generic support for removable storage devices such as USB drives, CDs, and disks; and several kinds of software, including email and search engine programs, menus and operating systems, and password locks. (The behavior of the email and search portions are similar to those of the computers in Floatpoint.)

So, for example, we could set up a laptop with a password lockdown and an email delivery system thus:

Include Computers by Emily Short.

Conference room is a room. The conference table is a thing in the Conference Room. The small laptop is a laptop on the conference table.

The small laptop runs a password lock program called laptop security. Laptop security is privately-named. The password of laptop security is “mulderxox”.

The small laptop runs an email program called laptop email. Laptop email is privately-named.

The message table of laptop email is Table of Laptop Messages.

Table of Laptop Messages
topic message arrival time read answered description
“memo” “Memo” 9:00 AM false false “Your boss would like to see you in his office right away.”
“SPAM” “SPAM” — false false “Money for you from Nigeria!”
with 10 blank rows.

At 9:10 AM:
deliver “SPAM” to laptop email.

Test me with “turn on laptop / x laptop / x screen / type mulderxox / read memo / read spam / z / z / z / z / z / x screen / read spam / reply to spam”.

Version 2 fixes a couple of stupid little bugs and also introduces two new examples, one simple one demonstrating a computer with a removable drive, where the drive’s presence adjusts what can be found with the search engine, and a more complex one demonstrating the implementation of an ATM that must be accessed using both a debit card and a PIN, and has several different input modes.

Version 2 is available here.