Student Area

The Face

I’ve never thought about the reason why facial expressions could be recognized across the globe. It’s not that easy to create facial expressions that we can see everyday in games, because humans are complicated. Sometimes one seems to be happy, but you can see that slightly disappointment from his/her expression.

Using the player-character’s face to inspire the player is effective only if the player gets connected to the character. To build the connection, the player-character should let the player feel empathy or inspired first.

Waiting for Godot

Godot is not just a person, it’s everything that we’re waiting for, and it’s waiting itself. We find the meaning of existing when we are waiting,  just like how we live our lives.

Here is a link to my project for assignment 1: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/elazrus/Assignment%201/games/tutorial.en.html

It is not complete yet; I think I made the scope a little bit bit that what the assignment entails but it has the backbones of what the final project will have.  The story is about a “typical” unit family (2 parents, 2 kids, and a dog) and follows a day of their life.  It starts at the end of the day, where the whole family realizes what a wreck their living room is.  The branching narrative then allows you to follow a character through their day and anytime they intersect with another character, you can switch.  At the beginning of the story, the story itself also informs you that the vowels have gone missing and asks you to find them while you follow the story.  The vowels have actually been misplaced by the family members as objects in their everyday lives and you can click on their links to bring them back to the story.  What you realize as you go through the story is that the family members are completely obvious to each other and their surroundings and that throughout the day each of them contributes to the mess in the living room and takes a vowel.

Most of the text that is in the project right now is sort of “place-holder” text to remind me what I want to happened where but the passages where you can find vowels are more indicative of what the language will actually be like.

As of right now I have the vowel-stuff working but the code to actually remove the vowels from the text is commented out because I realized I need to be more selective about word choice to make sure the text is still comprehensible and I haven’t had time to add this in yet.  I currently have it so that when a vowel is removed it is replaced by an underscore but even that makes the text a little hard to read if a word is very vowel-heavy.

I also added in the feature that once you’ve chosen to follow a certain character at a particular interaction between two or three characters, you can’t ever use that one again, so you’re forced to follow a different character if you get to that intersection again.  There are some choices that affect one character but not the others and I plan to add in the feature that if you make one of these choices and you come to that passage again you are forced to make that same choice.  These choices shape the characters personalities in a way and I don’t want the reader to be able to change those mid-story.

I had a couple of suggestions from Paolo about integrating the vowels better into the story by either relating the vowel to the first letter of the object is it replacing or having the letters themselves appear in the scene instead of being mistaken for objects.  I am definitely open to these ideas and would like to know what you all think.  As it is, I had tried to come up with objects that can be drawn like the letter they are replaced with and I had planned to include drawing of the vowel on the page they can be found.  Also, I related each vowel to the character in the story that interacts with the object they replace by making the names contain only that vowel.  Again, open to suggestions about what would work best.

Eliza Effect

This program reminded me of Siri on the iPhone.  The only difference really is that Siri has a hole search engine behind her that she can access and provide a possible answer to a question.  I caught on right away to the programs style of rephrasing questions and I was surprised that it could fool individuals for a significant amount of time.  I was also surprised that the creator of Eliza was not as pleased that he had fooled people into thinking it was an actual artificial intelligence.  He seemed to think that human capacity for interaction would always exceed computers, which I would agree with.  But interestingly humans are able to create technology that can “think” and computer greater than the human mind.  Could humanity and computational ability be combined to create a supper force that was capable of reason and theorizing greater than any individual human or computer.

Waiting for Godot

I was nto so impressed by the plot but there were a few moments in the dialoge that got me thinking.  To start the two characters epitomize my view of theater ignorance.  I feel there is a tendency to have two characters reacting to different situations and avoiding natural human interaction in order to create a more unusual situation.  Estragon needed help with his shoe, Vladimir would not focus on his friend.  Instead he discussed the bible and other philosophical nonsense.  This would not happen in real life but makes for an interesting interaction.  Also the rest of the play could have been condensed into about 10 lines of dialoge if it were written for modern times.  I was not a fan on this play but I attempted to understand the situation and these characters, to no avail.  The one line I liked in the whole thing was Pozzo’s talking about how there is only a set amount of tears and laughter in the world and that our population had increased.  Does this mean there are more tears and laughter in the world or more people without any serious emotional reactions to life.  I would suspect the latter.  Can someone hog either of these emotions?  That could make for an interesting story.

I loved the interviews with hideous men reading. It was a lot of fun to be given complete freedom to imagine these people. The images I get are composites of people I’ve run into and met. Greasy, swanky guys who love to talk. I especially liked how concentrating on one of their fixations gives you a great idea of what these guys look like, walk like, and think about most things. I was really interested in the bathroom stall one because of the wonderfully character-driven responses, and the bashful guy who doesn’t understand that when he is yelling Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom he is probably not referring to the democratic party.

The Eliza Effect
Very interesting, especially the study with the randomized counselors and the students. The fact that Eliza only answers with questions or just repetitions of what the user enters had me wondering if it was possible for Eliza to give responses that would expand the conversation or give advice. This lead me to think about smarterchild and other such chatbots and how they learn from each conversation to get better and better at emulating a human. I wonder if this can be placed into games without completely breaking gameplay? Something like a game A.I. that would slowly learn your play style and thus get more difficult as you got more used to the game. (I think flower did something like this but I’m not entirely sure.)

Hills like White Elephants
The avoidance of the actual subject of abortion was incredibly interesting and engaging to read. It directly reminded me of The Garden of Forking Paths where the character had stated the way to bring attention to the word time is to omit it.

Face

I loved this article. I hadn’t realized that game designers thought about and implemented these small psychological additions (beyond happy, sad, or angry) nor did i realize how much of an impact it left with the viewer. I was aware that people do mirror the facial expressions of the person they are speaking with either purposefully or subconsciously but I wasn’t aware that doing so affected the emotions of that person. When I’m aware that my facial expressions are mimics that of the person I’m speaking with, I know my state of emotions don’t change, but if it’s subconscious I believe I am more empathetic to the situation. I wonder if this is the same for everyone.
I haven’t played The legend of zelda, windwaker but i have played super monkey ball and in recalling my own emotions while playing the game, i do get incredibly excited and even dance along with my monkey avatar when I win.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

The Dialog in this is great. You don’t need a single visual to visualize who the character is, what background he or she has, or the environment in the character(s) is in. The dialog also seems to be dual purpose, it not only reflects the character but also serves as a narrator of sorts – we know what the world in this story is like because the character mentions the spilling coffee cup, etc.
The story that I loved was B.I. #3 Trenton, NJ because the story consistently stayed with the trend of the story in language (referring to the woman not by name, but as the woman with the great “tits”), and in character: The whole story revolved around how this horrible guy lied and misused the woman who loved him but at the very end, the man who is telling this story speaking about how his heart goes out to her, etc. does a complete 180 and you find out at the end that he misused her two.

Hills like White Elephants
I admired Hemmingway’s ability to imply a lot about the characters, their circumstances and their lopsided relationship almost entirely from dialogue. Lines such as “Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine” (Hemmingway 231) give a strong sense of the girl’s sense of inferiority to the American and shows how she is disgusted with herself. The situation in question seems to be an abortion (I wasn’t sure, so I googled it). If this is the case, then the “hills” may be there to suggest the purity of the baby. What makes the dialogue so potent is that there is little description or action, thus forcing us to concentrate solely on the interactions between the two characters. Using similar techniques, such as hesitation, commands and avoidance of the subject should help give life to the next project. I could try using a minimalist interface and/or color palette in order to achieve the same effect Hemmingway did with the lack of description.

Chapter 3: Face
What I was most interested in this chapter was the way that we use expressions as visual clues to learn about the world. I wonder what would happen in a society in which no one could make expressions, and to what degree it would make learning things more difficult. In Sequential Narrative, I presented designs of birds, and someone mentioned the unsettling effect that animals are given some human characteristics (such as speech, sentience) but not given others (such as facial features). I was also interested in the way that games like Windwaker create positive feelings in the player by repeating positive facial expressions and minimizing negative ones.

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Face reading: Huh, this has some stuff in common with the research I did this summer. Would also be interested in seeing someone do research on the possibility that simplified/animated faces are easier to read than real ones for some people (obvious hypothesis is that simplified faces are more exaggerated, but pretty sure there is more to it than that.) Reading up on stuff about reading faces is always weird because I’m lousy at actually reading faces.

Eliza effect: I vaguely recall messing around with the Eliza program a while back. Impression of the character was that either it was just not a very well-humanized program, or else she was most like someone who was deliberately being annoying via acting like a robot. Never got the feeling of actually talking to someone like the article describes, but did eventually get annoyed in the way you’d get annoyed at someone. Was an interesting contrast.

Hills Like White Elephants: Familiar, think I might have read it before. About as cheerful as anything Hemingway ever wrote. Appreciate the sort of minimalism in the dialogue, but the specific way he does it feels tired and depressed all the time.

1) Face

I found this idea really interesting:

“As with expression, patterns of gaze can vary depending upon culture or subculture. For example, lack of sustained mutual gaze might be interpreted as indifference or rudeness by an American person and as politeness by a Japanese person.”

This suggests that interpretations of facial expressions are not necessary universal and will to a certain extent be influenced by the culture that you grow up in.  This is similar to the theory in linguistics of Universal Grammar which explains that all humans are born with the ability to pronounce the sounds of every world language, but those not used in one’s native language will quickly be forgotten as they will not be needed.  However, I was always under the impression that body movements, including facial expressions, were a way to transcend a language barrier because it is a “language” that is universally understood.  Given that this may not be the case, target audience should have influence over the design of character mannerisms.  This then begs the question, what is unique to those characters that are part of games that transcend cultural boundaries (if there are any that really do so)?

2) Eliza Effect

This article discusses the precursor to the now very dominant component of computer science: artificial intelligence.  Reading about the Eliza Effect and the “yes-no therapy” experiment, I immediately thought to myself, “why are we so ready to except AI as human interaction?”  Yes it is true, as the author mentioned, that eventually the facade breaks down and reveals its limitations but up until that point, most humans are willing to temporarily accept these simulations as reality.  This is especially apparent in video games across the board, and in particular, “The Sims” series comes to mind.  I will admit I have played they games to death and have found all of their limitations but I still play on.  And it seems that the more and more realistic they get, the more popular they become.  Why are we so desperate to make the virtual world a mirror of our own?

3) Hills Like White Elephants

It is amazing how much Hemingway is able to convey about the characters (and their relationship) through very simple descriptions and lots of dialogue.  I was especially intrigued with the dichotomy of describing the two characters as “man” and “girl”, and the adult situation they are in.  That brief description in the context of the dialogue was enough to discern that the relationship they share is an inappropriate one – he may be a good deal older than she is, they are constantly moving from place to place to be together, he clearly has a power over her that makes her feel like she would do anything to make him happy.  However, it is also clear that the man feels remorse about having this dominance in their relationship and clearly doesn’t want to lose her by forcing her to do something she would regret.  Hemingway does a really good job of revealing information discretely without explaining the circumstance explicitly but describing enough for the reader to understand what is going on.