Claire Hosking

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Posts posted by Claire Hosking

  2. Posted

    dusted off my old account to talk ex machina

     

    The message that jumped out at me was that women "deceive" some men because those men condition and require women to (it seems Ava tricks Caleb because Nathan programmed her to be tricky, which says something about his perceptions of women). Haven't many of us been there, humouring an ordinary peep we're light-years ahead of, because money/power/connections/culture/circumstance made him gatekeeper of something important? Or just because they've cornered you at a party and you wanna get away? I've never been cold enough to be like "I only feigned interest in you b/c you kinda forced my hand there and I resent you using your power to do that" because most dudes don't realise that they do that, only subconciously that a certain pattern of behaviour seems to work, and they never question what's going on in the other person's head.

    I think the movie is clear that by typical standards, Caleb is a good person, but it also draws attention to how low those standards are, particularly in tech/business culture. He tries to save Ava because of a personal bond, but ignores kyoko, even after he realises she gets upset when Nathan yells at her, realises she's an android and that there's more going on with her than meets the eye, because he doesn't value her. (I don't really fault Ava for not fixing Kyoko tho, it's clear that building these robots is a hugely specialised task.)
     

    Nathan's fetishising of Kyoko and asian women reminds me of like, programmers who are really into waifus and anime figurines and that kind of thing, those fetishes just kinda percolate in the culture and maybe this is how a very rich and older dude expresses them. I love how terrible Nathan is at reading Caleb's state of mind.


    Something that was noticable to me was that Ava gets Caleb's permission to lock him away. She asks him "Will you stay here?" and he says "Yes". So maybe that token consent is enough for her? It's also possible that because she's told that Caleb is a "good" person, and Caleb suggested locking away Nathan, ergo she can lock Caleb away and still be "good". Also, she doesn't technically trap him - his own code does. Of course, he will starve, but Ava was also going to die - how come I, as a viewer, feel so much more sympathy for Caleb getting locked away to die than I did for Ava?
     

    Though, I don't fully need to figure out Ava's motivation. To me, the reason that neither Nathan, Caleb or the viewer know what Ava really feels is because that's kinda what oppression does - stops us from having honest relationships with equals, stops us from ever knowing what the people we oppress really think and feel. I don't think Ava is going to murder everyone though. I think the kind of freedom she seeks is more experiential, to see what her senses can feel and abilities can do. I tend to feel like her own desire for self-actualization will go above any impulse she has towards making the world a more just place.


    Also, the stabbing ending reminds me of Tess of the D'urbervilles. I kinda want to write a comparative essay on stories about men making ideal women/capturing their perfect women and keeping them, and stories of women escaping that kind of thing, because it seems to be a genre that isn't really gender-reversed very much, even in sci-fi or fantasy.

     

  3. Posted

    Just on why Over-the-top Columbia seems so much less offensive than the Over-the-top of Baz Lurhmann films. I agree that the free camera makes a huge difference, since certain cinematography seems to presume certain reactions and that's insulting. I think it's also that the over-the-topness (glowing letters etc) is in character for Columbia whereas in a Baz Luhrmann film over-the-top is a function of Baz's manipulativeness, not his characters'. 

    Two, I think it's also the style. Columbia's art direction, even when it was laying it on most thickly, had a kind of fineness about it, a delicacy. Baz's chunkiness to it, an aggressive flashiness.

     

    Maybe it's the interactivity of video games that make it this way, it might also be the way that art directors have a more direct hand in the construction of assets than in film. 

  4. Posted

    I think it's a pity we settled on Video-games as a term, because otherwise I'd just suggest we drop the games part and call them all videos. It's as if we'd started out calling movies 'film-comedies' (in an alternate reality where just the techniques and tropes of comedy were developed first), then gotten into the habit of just calling them comedies. Then we get stuck without a generic term, meanwhile comedy still holds it more specific & historic meaning, so we end up arguing about how comedy is difficult to define because there are dramatic elements in a lot of comedy etc etc.

    It's weird to me to have this discussion because in architecture we would regularly make little virtual environments to show tutors/clients or just to express ourselves, and we would call them architectural communications or interactive art. I bet a lot of architects would be insulted if people called their designs 'games'.

    And that's sort of at the heart of this, no? Some people want to eject TFoL/Proteus from game-land because they want to demote it, insult it. And people are fighting back, saying 'It's a game' in part because they feel it's equally worthy in experience to existing games, and also because they are aware of the negative stereotypes around games & want another arrow in their quiver to shoot down accusations that all games are bad art. (Obviously, not everyone has these motivations, but this feels like the core of the debate to me)

    I don't think we'd have debates about this if there weren't the two stereotypes; that games are more interesting than mere interaction, or that experiential interaction is more worthy than games.

    In that respect, I feel like calling Proteus/TFoL games is battle-winning, war-losing. In the long run, we should be spending more time sticking up for the worthiness of pure interaction, rather than this, which buys into the idea that being a 'game' is a mark of prestige.

    Just some draft thoughts, I could be swayed.

  7. Posted

    I finally listened to the podcast and I was just thinking about your discussion on Meyer Wolfsheim, and how the kind of stereotype he was written in just wouldn't be acceptable today. It reminded me of a section in Maus, where the author felt guilty writing about his father because his father acted just like a Jewish stereotype. I think that's interesting, because a lot of times in film and novels you'll see characters whom you just straight-up say I know that person (Nick Breckon even mentioned that he "knows some Daisies"), and, in the case of Meyer Wolfsheim, he was a man that he knew, Arnold Rothstein. It's just interesting to me that sometimes that guy you know is something totally different and uncomfortable when it's also a racial stereotype. Most decent people consciously tread lightly around that sort of thing, even feel guilty for noticing it. Personally I do the same, but it does make me wonder if Meyer Wolfsheim is an invalid character just because he's also a stereotype.

    It's the difference between attributing that stereotypical behaviour to their race or attributing it to societal pressures, maybe? Fitzgerald doesn't give Wolfsheim any of the explanations that Gatsby gets for his behaviour - Gatsby takes on shadiness for a sympathetic motivation, Wolfsheim is portrayed as inherently shady. I think you could have written a character that did exactly what Wolfsheim did and came across the same way, but less racistly. (Mad Men is kinda classic at this - portraying people acting out stereotypes but showing how that was often the best of bad options available to them because of the roles their group was allowed). Then again, Nick is portrayed as being kinda a hypocrite in his belief he doesn't judge, maybe the racism is just part of that.

  8. Posted

    You want game this reminds me a bit of? Home, but with dialogue options. I got a little lost trying to find the tackle shop the girl mentions and found

    a museum that seemed abandoned, I kinda broke into a room but couldn't do anything with it, I wonder if take effect in the next act of the game?

    There's a little more to it, let me know if you want more hints

  9. Posted

    I don't think switching perspectives in game is necessarily so important, though it is certainly a legitimate technique to convey that different people will have capacities in how they interact with the world. The Walking Dead did an excellent job of conveying subtle racial biases that you experience through the lens of Lee. Just stuff like that is valuable I think, and is completely missing in games where the protagonist just tends to be this blank slate.

    Or even, if you compare supposed blank slate characters, like Journey's red hoods to say, master chief, there's more diversity between them than between a lot of characters supposedly given a unique personality.

  10. Posted

    So crazy that Rob Liefeld was mentioned, I was seriously revisiting this gem of a list the other day: http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings Regarding the conversation about video games not doing a good enough job of portraying different life experiences than that of an able bodied white male, I think the argument is mostly correct about market forces and all of that. However, it doesn't explain it all entirely. Its true that the barrier to entry to publishing a novel or whatever is much lower compared to making a big budget game. Yet I would also argue that movies (and not just of the indie/arthouse cinema variety) tend to do a better job overall of portraying different life experiences than games do. I think the difference is that the movie industry has a much more diverse workforce than the typical video game company does. Although it is not the only way to solve the problem, I think a more diverse workforce would be the simplest, most direct way, and most likely way to successfully remedy the problem.

    That's true, & I think there's also been a trend towards ensemble casts in movies and TV, deliberately contrasting the many and varied people/roles/experiences possible. It's harder to do in Video games if you're in the mindset that players should play one character from start to finish, since you don't switch around perspectives a lot like in say, Mad Men. Makes me really interested for Double Fine Action Adventure since that seems to be one of the things they're setting out to explore. There's a tiny bit of it in Kentucky Route Zero, and I think once games/players get more accustomed to it, it'll actually solve a lot of the problem of diverse representation. If you make a game where switching perspectives is part of the play, you wouldn't want those perspectives to be identical, it's an incentive to diversify for the sake of making your game as interesting as it can be.

  11. Posted

    Hah, all the articles and books I read shy away from the computational model of the human mind. Could be just my field. AFAIK even Chomsky backed away from it and he's the most culpable for bringing it to linguistics. I'll do my very best not to comment on it further :P

    Yeah I'm a bit iffy about it myself, but I think my argument works even without suggesting that the whole mind is a computer. It only requires that a sufficiently complex system can fake it, in one area, well enough for the purposes, on account of the resemblance between creative processes and emergent systems. (which I think is reasonable. Creative processes and emergent systems do seem to have a lot in common.)

    It doesn't have to be perfectly like the mind, only seem like the mind seems, and only enough to make a satisfying game.

  12. Posted

    You're right (Akrasian, not Mington) but at the same time, just because it's not "procedural generation" as you've defined it that's the problem, maybe you would agree that "procedural generation" as it refers to computer programs trying to craft a narrative is indeed the problem when it comes to, for i n stance, human interactions, right? Sure, it's not the fact that it's procedural that trips us up, and really it's a fact about the nature of the narrative more than anything, but computers are bad at something humans are good at and a good way to describe this distinction when it comes to video games is procedural generation vs. a crafted narrative, because we're talking about what the game is doing. Just because you can say "oh, but the humans are also procedurally generating the story" doesn't mean that procedural generation isn't the issue, because it is: games can't do it (for certain kinds of narratives).

    It's like saying that paper Pong is no different from normal Pong because they're doing the same thing (moving the ball and paddles and so on), just in one case the human does it manually by turning the pages and in the other case the computer does it. In one sense you're right, but the point of paper Pong is that humans are very bad at moving paddles and balls at a speed that is fast and accurate enough to make a fun game, whereas computers are really good at that, so when we play Pong we want to play it on a computer. And computers are bad at crafting human narratives with dialog and interactions and stuff, so when we do that we want the human to have done it.

    I find "a computer doing it" an odd way to put it, since someone still has to write the software with intentions about how the social interactions will go down - the author of the software puts the same kind of thought into how they'd like their stories to go down as the author of a book. But I totally agree with your point it's horses for courses - procedural generation vs hand authorship have different advantages and disadvantages, you'd use them in different situations.

    Akrasian: I agree with much of what you say, and very interesting comparison to architecture.

    I think one of the problems with procedural narrative that we haven't commented on, but that your post made me think of, is not so much person vs. computer but one author vs. multiple. That is to say, procedural narrative is not hard because a computer is doing it, but because it's trying to create a narrative that responds to the actions of chaotic players, which is bound to create incoherency. It's hard whether it's a computer or a person: in tabletop RPGs, for example, DMs running sandbox games face a similar problem. In such games, the narrative necessarily exhibits many features that would commonly be considered to be failures in computer-run systems but that in that context everyone just accepts as a fact of the game and works to overcome.

    While obviously authored stories rely on all sorts of structures and rules and theories, those stories that are solely or largely the product of those rules (e.g. airport novels) often feel hollow and rote; we recognize them as mechanical and repetitive: everything proceeds according to plan, and we can sense it. I think the reason for this, though, is not the use of rules per se, but rather that the rules in use were created with a specific goal in mind: that is, an author has a specific story they want to tell (e.g. "I want to write a Stephen King-esque horror novel") and they work backwards from that goal. If the rules were designed to create a specific story, then that's the story that results, and none other, which while sometimes desirable, is ultimately rather boring.

    When games and procedural narrative comes up, there's often a conceptualization of this as a game using these sorts of rules--systemizing the rules of plot and such, to create a proper pacing and twists and Checkov's guns and whatever. And games can succeed at that, but I think the result is mostly not very good; even when it works, you just end up with the same kind of story every time, with meaningless differences, like those bad mad lib-style plot generators you find on the Internet sometime (or tabletop procedural storygames like Apocalypse World).

    In games like CK2, rather--and this goes to Badfinger's reply as well--the goal is less to work backwards from the desired story (although that is certainly still present to a significant degree) and more to create a number of low-level interconnected systems that produce results not even the developers can predict. I think this sort of narrative-out-of-simulation works better than a simulation of narrative, and I think that good authored stories work in the same way: when authors talk about characters leading them in unexpected directions, etc., this is, I think, the video game equivalent. Emergence.

    This is also really interesting, I think, in light of the idea that we recognize stories as stories due to anthropomorphization. Because if we think in terms of unpredictable emergence rather than adherence to what we already know and expect, then really, we should not be thinking of CK2 as procedural narrative because it applies a fictional context of human beings to its mechanical processes, but because the mechanical processes consist of real agents (in Jesper Juul's half-real framing of games) interacting with each other in a real system that is producing real emergent results even if we don't recognize them in human terms. CK2, in that sense, isn't producing stories about fictional human beings, but rather real digital agents that we can tell stories about.

    ...okay, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. something something object-oriented ontology something something proceduralism something something Ian Bogost (in the shell).

    I don't think we're really arguing. I think my idea of procedural narrative can avoid all the pitfalls you outline, though they're possible outcomes. Emergence is exactly what I'm talking about, exactly what I'm hoping for. Emergence is a property of rule-based systems.

    Yes, very simple rule systems produce unsatisfactory results. But even "don't plot things like an airport novel" is a rule, it's a rule that a lot of great authors have. Every great author has millions of opinions about different things about good prose and character and plot, and they emerge across their body-of-work as their 'style', the unique 'character' of their works. Every author has concerns, preferences, instincts, some kind of internal logic driving their decision making. That's what I mean. Get a program with as complex a set of "low-level interconnected systems" (ie rules) as Hermann Hesse, and you'll get a story worth playing.

    I sense a little bit that you think that emergence is unpredictable or the outcomes in CK2 are unique. True, Emergence is often unpredictable to us, but every outcome is already present in the possibilities of the system at the outset. Emergent systems can't generate anything that wasn't latently present in the "low-level interconnected systems" to start with. An author can only write a book based on what her brain is capable of.

    Finally, "the notion that we can reduce human beings to mathematical systems is a dangerous one" only if you think a mathematical system is a demotion! There's nothing wrong with being a system. We already are. All life is the emergent outcome from the low-level rules of DNA. It's only a problem if you believe that being a system somehow precludes one from having humanity, complexity, nuance, personality etc, which we have proof that it doesn't.

    TL;DR: If your problem with simple systems is they're too simplistic, maybe try complex systems instead?

  13. Posted

    "Rich people problems" seems like a really odd attitude to this book, since it's a book to me that seems to be satirising rich people problems by contrasting them with real problems.

    Daisy and Tom's problems are portrayed as melodrama (problems they create for themselves for entertainment and self-pity), & contrasted with the real problems, like Gatsby's inescapable poverty (even when he's rich, he's still tarred, because the only way to get rich was to get a reputation), the tenuousness of Wilson's existence, etc. Fitzgerald does something similar in the short story The Cut-Glass Bowl (rich vain woman makes little melodramas to entertain herself, then has to deal with real problems in the fallout), and I have vague memories of it popping up in his other short stories.

    Daisy and Tom are the only two characters portrayed as truly rich, (I think I mean this the same way Chris was talking about class) ie rich beyond having to sell-out. Jordan cheats, so does Gatsby, Nick settles for less money because he likes the moral high-ground. The difference between the classes is in one you can either be rich or pure, but in the one Daisy & Tom inhabit you get to be rich and pure.

    I don't think you're mean to feel sorry for Tom and Daisy for any of their problems or screwed up-ness, in the end. I kinda think that's the point?

    "Don't feel sorry for these rich people and their problems, even if their lives & problems are glamourised and romanticised by our society. They just killed three people out of fealty to their class, to maintaining it, to defending it, to perpetuating it, even though they know it screws people's lives up. They're not victims, they're evil."

    Maybe?

  14. Posted

    If narratives are about human relations, and proceduralism is about turning things into quantifiable systems, then procedural narrative requires turning human relations into numbers. I think we can all understand how this is inherently a dangerous thing to do--especially given (the idea that) most players optimize numeric systems at the expense of their own entertainment--and thus it's not surprising--maybe even inevitable--that the only successful procedural narratives are tragedies, and specifically tragedies of the failure of quantification: that is, Crusader Kings II, for example, is (in some ways) a game about being unable to see human beings as anything other than tools for conquering more territory, and the ultimate emptiness of that reality. Tropico is about accumulating wealth for yourself that you can never use: create an oppressive society for a high score.

    They're like BioShock or Spec Ops, in a (much less direct) way: self-hating, mechanics trying to show you how evil the mechanics are. (Postmodernism, I suppose.) Is there a way for proceduralism to be positive? (I mean, outside of shit like Bioware relationships.)

    I just don't think proceduralism is a problem, b/c I don't think it's different to what we've already been instinctively doing. We have the same discussions around authored buildings vs procedurally generated buildings in architecture too. I'll try and adapt the thinking from that realm to here. I could be very wrong but I’ll give it a whirl.

    It feels a lot like a false dichotomy. Every architect or author has a set of internal beliefs about what constitutes a good windowsill or plot twists in a particular given situation. Their design/story instincts are rules. Very, very complex rules that are built by decades of observing the world & practice at their own craft. Give an author or an architect a scenario, and they’ll tell you what feels right. That logic is what I mean by rules.

    So every person is a procedural narrative/architecture/art generator. The only difference between them and a program is our programs just aren't nearly as complex. They don't account for as many things about a character, or track as many variables. Authors account for many more things about characters than are typically tracked by variables, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. I don’t think there’s a real difference between a person making decision about something (for instance, there’s lots of sun so we’ll make the window small) and coding that in a program that can then extrapolate that rule to other scenarios (There’s less sun so make the windows bigger).

    Getting a generator to replace a good author would be super hard. eg. We know that particular architectural choices generate certain moods* but we don't know which, b/c it's extremely, extremely complex number of interactions between all the different elements. You could spend a lifetime writing a program, playtesting people's reactions to thousands of buildings, accounting for the variables and differences between them and the demographics of the people you're studying etc just to get the program to the point that a first year student is at, where it can look at its own drawing and say 'That looks solemn'.**

    To me it looks like: Game mechanics are already procedural narrative generators. Just very, very simple ones.

    Even the simplest game mechanics, say, Chess, creates a situation where each system in the game (pieces) has events happen to it. For us to call it a story, all that has to happen is certain systems become anthropomorphised. At this stage, it’s probably not a great story, at least in regards to the issues you’ve mentioned above - character motivation, character insight, prose etc. You can totally build and add those systems in. You can tie them to player actions.

    But if you’re just trying to write one story, or even just a handful of story branches, it’s easier just to outsource that to pre-made set of complex rules in someone’s head and say “here, Author, you be the mechanic that overlays motivation and insight and prose and dialogue onto the possible outcomes of players interacting with our game mechanics, so we don’t have to spend the next 10 years writing a system complex enough to do it”. (we can do that b/c we limit system outcomes to the ones we want to write - within a certain range or you’re dead.)

    If the game has just tons and tons of possible scenarios (or if say, you want to build an entire neighbourhood of houses, but you want each subtly adapted to its site) you might just want to write a procedurally generated narration and character dialogue program.

    But here’s the thing, whether one outcome, or three, or millions, hand-written or procedurally generated, every game has a finite number of possible stories. Which is why it doesn’t feel that different from traditional game narrative to me. More part of a continuum than an opposite. Either in code or story design, someone has preset the outcomes for every possible player behaviour. Procedural stories are almost more like squishing a thousand games together.

    Finally, I don’t think you need to worry about soullessness, at least, not more than with having an author. A thousand stories created by the same rules, if they’re good rules, like a thousand stories from the same head, if it’s a good head, will have a certain character to them. I think it’s a bit silly to worry that procedural narrative reduces characters to numbers, or turns a writer into ‘mere rules’. It’s like saying the universal is more meaningful if you don’t understand the rules that govern planetary movements, b/c it all seems like a beautiful mystery.

    Only if you’re more in love with the feeling of mystery than the feeling of comprehending a complex, nuanced system.

    My tutors feel that the city is beyond modelling, that the city is beyond the sum of its parts, & to create a digital model of the city is reductive, yet b/c games don’t hold the city sacred, SimCity just went ahead and did it. Like drawings or writing it is reductive, but acceptable for the purposes. Procedural narrative is the same. Devs can have the same attitude to the author’s mind: A glorious thing, but it’s not profane to model some of its systems.

    * to an extent, while there's nothing that's universally felt the same way by everyone, it's fair to say that buildings tend to have similar effects on similar people, and while there's great diversity in humans, there's also a lot in common.

    **If that seems like a lot of effort, remember how many failed architects and authors we train in the hopes we can find/train one that's good.

  16. Posted

    Dialogue options in games are so strange. Usually, I have no desire to replay a game for the conversations options I didn't choose the first time, because usually I can guess more or less how those other options will play out in the game's narrative. Games like this one, and I think the Walking Dead as well, do such a great job at making legitimately divergent story lines that they more than justify going back and reexamining everything.

    In that way it's like Walking Dead, it's true. But it's interesting how non-obvious it was. The Walking Dead is very "THIS IS A CHOICE! LOOK! IMPORTANT CHOICE HERE!". Which suits it because it wants you to feel like your choices are stressful, critical. The first time I played through KRZ, it seemed like the dialogue options I picked had no effect on the story anyway, so I assumed they didn't. Whatever question you asked, it seemed like you got info about the other two options anyway, so I felt like it was almost more of a stylistic thing: What attitude do you want to give this character? Are they interested in other characters or on-mission?

    But replaying though, I realised not just how different the dialogue was, but how many other 'choices' I'd missed. It seems like almost the opposite of The Walking Dead - only a couple of the choices that affect the scenes you see are direct dialogue options, or obvious choices in any way. I think I missed more than half the content of the game the first time just by choosing to do minimum the game has suggested you do, (just going where it tells you, being slightly afraid that diverging from instructions would lead to some bad end), rather than be a bit more curious. So I just missed whole scenes that could have been part of my narrative, missed seeing things that could be seen in other ways.

    It's great in that it's not a game that's all "AHA! Gotcha!" for trusting the game, but at the same time, it rewards you a lot for being curious (suspicious?) about exactly where you are and what's going on.

    When I realised that the game was so quiet about choice and opportunity costs etc, it gave me a little whoa moment when I wondered about all the choices in my life that seemed so inconsequential but might have made things go very very differently. I think that maybe explains why I liked Walking Dead's fairly constrained story - I like to think that there are too many over-arching forces on my life for any one little choice to have thrown the overall outcome too much.

    Yeah, can't wait for the next one.

  17. Posted

    Yes! So what happens if you pick the option to wait there? Do you just sit still for a few moments and then the scene ends?

    Basically. You can examine a few things in the cart and get some more vague Conway back story, but then after a while the exit option appears and the game doesn't proceed until you click it.

    Just wanna add to that:

    After you've examined the cart and go outside there's a shack there that wasn't there before, that has some diaries in it - they're records by Shannon's aunt and uncle (the academics, Weaver's Parents). If you pick the Shannon option and go see the helmets, the shack isn't there when you come out of the mine.