PowerPoint Presentation Lecture

1
games -- video and otherwise fdm 20c
introduction to digital media lecture
24.04.2003
warren sack / film digital media department /
university of california, santa cruz
2
last time

• a short history of artificial intelligence in
  software
• planning as a technical problem
• GPS as a solution The General Problem Solver
  by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and Clifford
• demo of GPS
• story generation as a planning problem
• TALESPIN as a solution
• demo of micro-talespin
• story understanding as a plan recognition problem
• human-computer communication as a problem
• ELIZA as a solution
• demo of ELIZA

3
outline

• story generation a non-ai view
• a short introduction to ethnomethodology
• latour and suchman as ethnomethodologists
• using ethnomethodology to re-examine eliza
• computers as evocative objects
• identification and computer holding power
• comparing old video games with new

4
story generation a non-ai view
5
johnstones algorithm

• I say to an actress, Make up a story.
• She looks desperate, and says, I cant think of
  one.Any story, I say. Make up a silly one.
  I cant, she despairs.
• Suppose I think of one and you guess what it
  is.
• At once she relaxes, and its obvious how very
  tense she was.
• Ive thought of one, I say, but Ill only
  answer Yes, No, or Maybe.
• She likes this idea and agrees, having no idea
  that Im planning to say Yes to any question
  that ends in a vowel, No to any question that
  ends in a consonant, and Maybe to any question
  that ends with the letter Y.
• For example, should she ask me Is it about a
  horse? Ill answer Yes since horse ends in
  an E.
• Does the horse have a bad leg?
• No.
• Does it run away?
• Maybe
• She can now invent a story easily, but she
  doesnt feel obliged to be creative, or
  sensitive or whatever, because she believes the
  story is my invention. She no longer feels wary,
  and open to hostile criticism, as of course we
  all are in this culture whenever we do anything
  spontaneously.
• Keith Johnstone, Impro Improvisation and the
  Theatre (Methuen, 1989)

6
johnstones algorithm

• If the last two answers were No, then answer
  Yes.
• Else, if more than 30 total answers, then answer
  Yes.
• Else, if the question ends in vowel, then answer
  No.
• Else, if question ends in Y, then answer
  Maybe.
• Else, answer Yes.

7
ethnomethodology a definition

• Ethnomethodology simply means the study of the
  ways in which people make sense of their social
  world.
• Ethnomethodology is a fairly recent sociological
  perspective, founded by the American sociologist
  Harold Garfinkel in the early 1960s. The main
  ideas behind it are set out in his book "Studies
  in Ethnomethodology" (1967).
• (Simon Poore, http//www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/cu
  rric/soc/ethno/intro.htm)

8
ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology differs from other sociological
  perspectives in one very important respect
• Ethnomethodologists assume that social order is
  illusory. They believe that social life merely
  appears to be orderly in reality it is
  potentially chaotic. For them social order is
  constructed in the minds of social actors as
  society confronts the individual as a series of
  sense impressions and experiences which she or he
  must somehow organise into a coherent pattern.
• Simon Poore, http//www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/curr
  ic/soc/ethno/intro.htm

9
ethnomethodology

• Q How do people make sense of the world?
• A They/we use the documentary method
• Karl Mannheim, the documentary method
• Garfinkel on Mannheim The method consists of
  treating an actual appearance as the document
  of, as pointing to, as standing on behalf of
  a presupposed underlying pattern. The method is
  recognizable for the everyday necessities of
  recognizing what a person is talking about
  given that he does not say exactly what he means,
  or in recognizing such common occurrences and
  objects as mailmen, friendly gestures, and
  promises.

10
questioning the document

• stories from Garfinkels students

11
ethnomethodology practitioners

• Is Lucy Suchman and ethnomethodologist?
• Is Bruno Latour an ethnomethodologist?

12
latour and suchman as ethnomethodologists

• a different way (compared to artificial
  intelligence) of thinking about human-machine
  interaction (and differences or similarities
  between humans and machines)
• bruno latour
• An actor in ANT is a semiotic definition an
  actant that is, something that acts or to which
  activity is granted by others. It implies no
  special motivation of human individual actors, or
  of humans in general. An actant can literally be
  anything provided it is granted to be the source
  of an action.

13
latour and suchman as ethnomethodologists

• a different way (compared to artificial
  intelligence) of thinking about human-machine
  interaction (and differences or similarities
  between humans and machines)
• lucy suchman
• The design of the DOCTOR program exploited the
  natural inclination of people to deploy what Karl
  Mannheim first termed the documentary method of
  interpretation to find the sense of actions that
  are assumed to be purposeful or
  meaningful...computer-generated responses that
  might otherwise seem odd were rationalized by
  users on the grounds that there must be some
  psychiatric intent behind them, not immediately
  obvious to the user as patient, but sensible
  nonetheless...

14
bobrows story about eliza
15
software as evocative object

• suchman on turkle
• In the Second Self (1984), Sherry Turkle
  describes the computer as an evocative object,
  one that raises new questions regarding our
  common sense of the distinction between artifacts
  and intelligent others. Her studies include and
  examination of the impact computer-based
  artifacts on childrens conceptions of the
  difference between categories such as alive
  versus not alive, and machine versus person.

16
video games as ...

• video games as metaphysical machines
• ...as perfect mirrors
• ...as drugs
• ...as contests
• from Sherry Turkle, Video Games and Computer
  Holding Power

17
more than identification

• When you play a video game you enter into the
  world of the programmers who made it. You have
  to do more than identify with a character on the
  screen. You must act for it. Identification
  through action has a special kind of hold. Like
  playing a sport, it puts people into a highly
  focused, and highly charged state of mind. For
  many people, what is being pursued in the video
  game is not just a score, but an altered state.
• from Sherry Turkle, Video Games and Computer
  Holding Power

18
identification

• Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the
  earliest expression of an emotional tie with
  another person. It plays a part in the early
  history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will
  exhibit a special interest in his father he
  would like to grow like him and be like him, and
  take his place everywhere. We may say simply that
  he takes his father as his ideal.
• from Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the
  Analysis of the Ego
• Cf., Jacques Lacan on The Mirror Stage, and
  writings about identification in film theory by
  Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Christian Metz,
  Stephen Heath, and others

19
evocative objects

• What is Sherry Turkle referring to when she
  writes about evocative objects?
• Melanie Klein, along with Sigmund Freud and
  W.R.D. Fairbairn, contributed ideas to make up
  what we now know as object relations. First Freud
  introduced the idea of object choice, which
  referred to a child's earliest relationships with
  his caretakers. Such people were objects of his
  needs and desires. The relationship with them
  became internalized mental representations.
  Subsequently Melanie Klein coined the term part
  objects, for example the mother's breast, which
  played an important role in early development and
  later in psychic disturbances, such as excessive
  preoccupation with certain body parts or aspects
  of a person as opposed to the whole person.
  Finally, Fairbairn and others developed the
  so-called object relations theory. According to
  it, the child who did not receive good enough
  mothering increasingly retreated into an inner
  world of fantasy objects with whom he tried to
  satisfy his need for real objects, that was for
  relationships.
• Linda M. Woolf, http//www.webster.edu/woolflm/kl
  ein.html

20
video games discussed by turkle

• space war
• pong
• asteroids
• pac man
• joust
• adventure
• working versions web.utanet.at/nkehrer/jae.html
• history of video games high score the
  illustrated history of electronic games by rusel
  demaria johnny wilson (mcgraw-hill, 2002)

21
how did we get from here...
22
...to here?
23
hot and cool media

• Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low
  definition, because the ear is given a meager
  amount of information. And speech is a cool
  medium of low definition, because so little is
  given and so much has to be filled in by the
  listener. On the other hand, hot media do not
  leave so much to be filled in or completed by the
  audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in
  participation, and cool media are high in
  participation or completion by the audience. 
  Naturally, therefore, a hot medium ... has very
  different effects on the user from a cool
  medium...
• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 22-23

24
hot or cool?

• so, are video games hot or cool media?

25
next time

• medium as prosthesis
• marshall mcluhan
• norbert wiener