Video games are “post-Turing”: My latest Wired News video-game column

Last week, Wired News published my latest video-game column — and this one’s about the peculiar relationships we strike up with AI characters inside games.

It’s online free at the Wired site, and a copy is archived below!

Going Gunning With My Imaginary Friends
by Clive Thompson

Can a machine think?

That’s the question that mathematician Alan Turing posed in 1950, when he posited his famous Turing Test. He argued that artificial intelligence could be thought of as intelligent if it passes a social test — if it can fool a human into believing it’s real.

Alas, critics agree that no machine has passed the Turing Test. We’re never fooled by chatbots for very long, as the annual Loebner Prize contest proves. The thing is, we humans are awfully good at decoding social cues and detecting humanness; we can instantly tell when a preprogrammed “conversation tree” is repeating itself. That’s why many philosophers say machines will never pass the Turing Test.

”

(via collision detection.)

[tags][/tags]

“Ultimately, I think Sagmeister’s work, while remarkable as high-grade graphic design, amounts…”: “‘Ultimately, I think Sagmeister’s work, while remarkable as high-grade graphic design, amounts to only a low-grade of contemporary art. The works are obvious, not particularly dimensional, and somewhat juvenile. He himself has admitted that the premises upon which many of his self-driven designs are based are quite banal, and I wouldn’t argue the point.’

– Subtraction: The Sagmeister Phenomenon“

(Via DatDatDat.)

GAM3R 7H30RY

Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called The Cave™. It offers, for an hourly fee, access to game consoles in a darkened room. Suppose it is part of a chain. The consoles form a local area network, and also link to other such networks elsewhere in the chain. Suppose you are a gamer in The Cave™. You test your skills against other gamers. You have played in The Cave™ since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands clutch only the controller with which you blast away at the digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: “Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere.” The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave™ provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Yours is the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours.

McKenzie Wark
posted: 5/20/2006

You would not believe how many times i rewrote this opening section, but i know from previous experience that there’s probably some really dumb-ass mistakes here still. So feel free to leave comments over here, about form or content!

Comments on Version 1.1 are now closed.
The discussion continues at Version 2.0.

(Via if:books.)

Trigger Happy

Trigger Happy, le livre de Steven Poole est actuellement disponible en téléchargement sur le site de l’auteur. Publié une première fois en 2000, il n’a jamais été traduit en français.
“Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.“
A télécharger de toute urgence pour ce plonger dans ce document qui éclaire (aprés compréhension de l’anglais bien sûr) le jeu vidéo de plusieurs facettes tout à fait essentielles.
La disponibilité du téléchargement est limité dans le temps, alors vite!

(via WMMNA)

(Via ECRITURE-VIDÉOLUDIQUE.)

Du monde et du mouvement des images

Au fond, ce que je comprends d’un film se dispose par segments ou par traits, comme un alphabet morse. C’est par montage de tel segments que je recompose un film et, peut-être, pas tout à fait à mon gré. Je pose ceci : ces traits, ces segments ne sont pas exactement faits d’images ou de signes de certification du réel ; ce sont des points de contact entre des univers de courbures différentes. Les courbures délimitent des espaces et des temps.
La coexistence de ces univers, du mien ou des miens (mais ces derniers n’ont pas de figure, ils font hémorragie, ils attendent simplement des formes, de la pensée, des modulations) et des mondes de fiction, est impossible dans la préservation de leur totalité : ils ont entre eux des points de contacts discontinus. De ces mondes de fiction, j’arrache ou prélève à la fois des traits (des bouts de choses) et des épaisseurs, des hypothèses de sens, des probabilités de signification que je veux un instant contenir, dans lesquels je peux mettre quelque chose en dérivation : une quantité momentanée de plaisir ou d’irresponsabilité qui anime, habille, fait parler des illusions de ressemblance (ressemblances d’hommes, de choses, d’histoires).
Je teste donc quelque chose comme des points de fusion de ma malléabilité à la fiction.

Du monde et du mouvement des images, 1997, Jean Louis Schefer

(Via memes instantanés.)

[tags]representation, fiction, story telling, theory[/tags]

Was it lunch, or was it “relational design”?

I’m a huge admirer of this subtle, elliptical, eclectic, quiet, conceptual, community-minded design group.

(Via Click opera.)

[tags] abake, design, relationnal, theory, process [/tags]

DOT DOT DOT

Issue 12

With contributions from David Reinfurt, Ian Svenonius, Katherine Gillieson, Alex Waterman, Ryan Gander, Alice Fisher, Louis Lüthi, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, John Morgan, Steve Rushton, Ryan Holmberg, Mark Owens, Seth Price, Dieter Roelstraete, Chris Evans, Rob Giampietro, Dmitri Siegel, Radim Pesko, Will Holder and Stuart Bailey.

[tags]graphic design, theory, process, magazine, design, articles[/tags]

O’Reilly Radar > Database War Stories #6: O’Reilly Research

In building our Research data mart, which includes data on book sales trends, job postings), blog postings, and other data sources, Roger Magoulas has had to deal with a lot of very messy textual data, transforming it into something with enough structure to put it into a database. In this entry, he describes some of the problems, solutions, and the skills that are needed for dealing with unstructured data.

[tags]database, theory, methodology, archive, process, design[/tags]

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: The Semantic Web — A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities

The entertainment system was belting out the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” when the phone rang. When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the other local devices that had a volume control. His sister, Lucy, was on the line from the doctor’s office: “Mom needs to see a specialist and then has to have a series of physical therapy sessions. Biweekly or something. I’m going to have my agent set up the appointments.” Pete immediately agreed to share the chauffeuring.

[tags]semantic, web, online, software, theory, process, knowledge[/tags]

Ambiguity as a Resource for Design

Gaver, B., Beaver, J. and Benford, S. Ambiguity as a resource for design (links to alternate locarion). in Bellotti, V., Erickson, T., et al. eds. Proceedings of CHI 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, ACM Press, New York, NY, 2003.

The authors distinguish three principal kinds of ambiguity: ambiguity of information, of context and of relationship. Ambiguity of information is of prior interest with my focus on spatial uncertainty. Gaver et al. provide an example of Bystander, a mixed reality game in which mobile player’s location is tracked using GPS data, which is prone to errors

(Via 7.5th Floor.)

[tags]GUI, theory, design, process, methodology, emotion, interpretation[/tags]