dave's blog of art and programming

missing acceptable use policy

Following on from the VIDA win, we need to work hard on Naked on Pluto's gallery installation presence. Although we now have the news website style front page, we need to take the game externalisation to another level, and one of the things required is a realtime projection of the game world. This represents the unfiltered behind-the-scenes view of the game as seen by the bots as they attempt to keep track of what is going on. Technically we decided to do this work using HTML5 canvas, in keeping with the web based themes of the game it needs to work on a browser, which has the added bonus of making gallery setup quite simple.

My first approach was to write a scheme bricks representation for Javascript objects, and see how bits of the game looked if rendered in this way.

This is part of the ArrivalLobby, and all the internal information is present with no explanations, which is great, but it results in very large images. The next thing was to try filtering the objects to remove most of this information:

function node_filter()
{
    this.filter=function(obj)
    {
        return {objects:obj.objects.map(function(object) {
            return object.name;
        })};
    }
}

This code provides a single method for filtering locations in the game - it simply returns an object consisting of a list of names of things found at that location. These filters can be easily changed over time, to include different information or process it in different ways. Rendered with the same code as before, this makes the location diagrams much smaller:

Add a few more locations, put them together in a circular formation (the projection will be onto the floor space in the gallery), add some bezier curves to indicate paths between locations and it looks like this:

There is also some relatively complex jiggery-pokery to detect when bots have moved from one location to another and animate them. The moving bots display more detail including what they are wearing and who has 'liked' them. In this image you can see the AdverBot004 moving to the HelpDesk, and the HyperClock and GreenwichClock on the upper right as they move from the Palace Garden.

Some secret plans for a possible future Naked on Pluto art installation.

Next week I'm presenting Naked on Pluto at Pixelache's Pixelversity on Wednesday evening (9th November) at the Cable Factory. Owen Kelly will also be there to talk about Pixelversity's ‘Social Identity, Augmented Reality & Virtuality’ Study Group' which will take place next year.

On Saturday afternoon (12th November), Till Bovermann and I will be demoing Supercollider, Fluxus, Scheme Bricks and Betablocker DS and talking about what it means to be a livecoder at the Hacklab Helsinki.

It's been busy in Elastic Versailles lately, last week it was announced that Naked on Pluto won the VIDA award, and the game was selected to appear at a series of Robots and Avatars shows next year. The VIDA award concerns art and artificial life:

The projects may be based on systems which emulate, imitate or speculate on the notion of life through current research and technology. These systems may involve attributes of agency and autonomy which display specific behaviour, are dynamic, react to their surroundings and evolve, and which question the frontiers between what is alive and what is not, between synthetic and organic life.

The game attempts to minimise differences between bots and players, while the bots also form a dynamic whole, cleaning and bringing the game world back to it's original state while players attempt to disrupt the system. The game world of Elastic Versailles is also connected with the very real world of human relationships - it's this connection that makes otherwise very simple games engaging, and the main reason for the rise of "social games". In our case we are attempting to use this powerful medium in order to question strong assumptions about privacy that have arisen due to the homogeneous culture these systems have sprung from.

It will be interesting to see how much this publicity will increase the player assault on Elastic Versailles - we've seen a rise in visitor numbers but the game is challenging and requires a lot of collaboration by players. At the time of writing, only a few brave users have broken through to the outer reaches - the final quests have yet to be beaten.

We now have the challenge of presenting Naked on Pluto at a larger scale in various exhibition settings. The spaces we will create will need to be linked with the live game world in multiple ways, we have some ideas sketched out but there is much work to be done.

THE SERVICE IS GOOD, HAPPINESS WILL LAST FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS

I was honored with an invitation to present some thoughts on open source/free software at this year's manSEDANse festival in Tampere. It was nice to talk about the connections between Germination X, Naked on Pluto and Betablocker DS with some quick live demos, and catch up on the developments of open hardware projects such as OHANDA from Tuomo Tammenpää and Cheap Fat and Open from Jacob Sikker Remin.

Naked on Pluto is a text adventure game, it's world is comprised of descriptions, populated by bits and pieces of text from your facebook profile while the space is largely left to your interpretation and imagination. There are some ways of visualising it though.

We have been archiving versions of the game world every hour for the last year in a git repo. In these files the only facebook profile information we have stored are names, which are considered public information in the agreement with facebook. We are interested in using this data to see how we built the game and potentially how people have been playing it (although one snapshot per hour isn't really enough for that).

I started out experimenting with GraphViz and Gephi but I ended up switching to fluxus and adapting the exquisite code visualiser to read through thousands of dot files to make a dynamically changing graph. This animation shows the process from us building the world to the introduction of the first playtesters over the course of a few months:

Once the low level code for a Naked on Pluto bot is written in Scheme, it's added by the game using secret commands which program the game inside itself, while it's running. This means the game can be changed while people are playing it - which makes it much easier to add new things without worrying about the disruption caused by restarting the server. We can also work on the game collaboratively, at the same time this way.

(Programming a spybot with it's behaviour)

Eventually the plan is to be able to program the bots fully within the game client - this is still a long term goal, but there are of course some fairly complex security problems with this idea.

(dressing a AudienceBot with another object)

Not all players have the ability to use these secret commands right now, in order to access them a player has to be carrying a special object (also known as a "Golden Medallion"). This allows you access to all areas of the game, including an "administration room" and various other secret powers.