virtual world

"Prom Week" is an innovative new social simulation game from the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. Unlike other social games like The Sims, Prom Week's goal (as with its spiritual and technological predecessor, Façade) is to merge rich character specificity with a highly dynamic story space: a playable system with a coherent narrative. When I was brought on board as the lead author a year before release, I had no idea the scale of work I was getting myself into: overseeing a team of (at times) eight writers to create over eight hundred hand-authored scenes tightly integrated with pre- and post-conditions, inline variation, and animation choreography. Each scene had to be specific enough to be narratively satisfying but broad enough to cover as wide a possibility space as possible, putting severe limitations on how dialogue could be written. As the project progressed, we developed a number of survival strategies for sharing authorship with algorithms, managing complexity (and coherency) in process-intensive fiction, and working with programmers to produce and refine the tools we needed to do this "quantum authoring." The result was a huge win for interactive storytelling: emergent character behavior and reactive stories from our cast of characters. In this talk I'll share key insights along with demonstrations of our custom authoring tool and unique gameplay moments.

Each Prom Week scene narrates a specific change in the underlying social simulation, which recreates (in painful accuracy) the last week before senior prom for a cast of eighteen high school students. Each type of social change--such as two characters breaking off a relationship, or one impressing another with his coolness--needs a pool of hand-authored scenes that instantiate this change dramatically. The most specific scene for a given situation is chosen, so in addition to a generic break-up conversation, authors could create more specific scenes (a break-up between two shy characters, or for a jilted boyfriend). Scenes are often dynamically personalized further through character-specific vocabulary and references to recent events. Characters are not authored directly, but instead given a set of permanent traits (clumsy, sex magnet), temporary statuses (popular, sad), and starting relationships with and feelings towards other characters. This bundle of definitions helps the system select an appropriate scene for each character to perform in a given situation. As writers, it was tremendously exciting to see the system start performing our characters correctly, without having to hand-tag scenes as being appropriate for specific characters. I'll show some examples of this happening in my presentation.

At ELO 2010 in Providence, we presented our initial thoughts on what authoring for Prom Week might be like ("Authoring Game-based Interactive Narrative using Social Games and Comme il Faut," Mike Treanor). We're excited to come full circle and share our post-mortem results with the electronic literature community.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

In John Muir's first published article, "Yosemite's Glacier," the eminent nature writer compares Yosemite Valley to a worn book, suggesting that to understand the physical geography of the valley a visitor must employ a reading practice similar to the study of literature. Over the century since, nature writers and ecocritics have continued to call for a more critical engagement with our natural world through literature and other media. However, as 21st century readers who are perhaps more likely to experience Yosemite Valley via Google Earth than in Muir's prose--much less as a physical space--we must begin to ask how or in what ways can we continue to "read" natural spaces as that are increasingly mediated through digital tools such as Google Earth and Second Life. To address this question I argue that we must learn to apply the same ecocritical reading practices that give subjectivity to the natural world to the digitally mediated geographies that increasingly define the spaces we inhabit.

To demonstrate these reading practices, I take as a model Muir's writings and contend that his meticulous description of distance, height, and geological features forms a prototypical "virtual space" for his reader to inhabit as he walks them through the natural spaces of Yosemite Valley. This process of virtualization has evolved over time and been adopted by other media such as photography and film. Yosemite Valley's most current form of virtualization is that of Google Earth where a viewer can not only view the valley rendered in three dimensions, but also "fly through" it as if in an airplane. Google Earth also hypermediates Yosemite by allowing visitors to view and upload images and videos of the valley. I will argue that the digital mediation of natural spaces such as Yosemite give 21st century readers a case study of sorts in how to continue reading natural spaces in a digital world.

While Muir helps us understand the need to read critically the physical world in all its mediations, the question remains if the same reading practices can be applied to "virtual geographies" that do not attempt to remediate the natural world. In using the term "virtual geographies" I am drawing on and extending McKenzie Wark's 1994 usage and applying the term to the earth, sea, sky, walls and objects that surround us in digital 3D environments. I contend and will demonstrate in my presentation that virtual geographies offer rich sites of reading in their own right through my reading of "Immersiva" and "Two Fish," both of which are sims in Second Life.

Implicit in the question "where is electronic literature?" is the importance of spaces of reading. Through first extending the critical reading practices of ecocritics to digitized natural spaces and then applying those reading practices of the virtual geographies of Second Life, I hope to foreground the ways in which spaces have been, and can continue to be, rich texts in and of themselves.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

This panel will deal with the relationship between extreme affect and electronic literature: How are pain, sex, and death _embodied_ in E-lit, virtual worlds, and textuality so that the abstract, for the reader, performer, or user, becomes empathetically embodied within hir? In other words, how can the skipping/skimming, which characterize the Net, be delayed, so that an actuality of politics and the body emerges? This panel will explore this and related issues. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)