At the recent 2010 Computational Intelligence in Games conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, there were competitions for making race car controllers, human-like FPS bots, and Ms. Pac Man players, among others. The competition that drew my interest, however, was the Mario level design competition, which challenged entrants to create procedural level generators that could generate fun and interesting levels based on information about a particular player’s style. The restrictions on entries use only fixed numbers of gaps, coin blocks, and Koopas meant that the winner would have to be cunning: it wouldn’t be easy to just estimate player skill and make ... [Link] [Cache]

My university set me up with a trial Mobile Me account, and on the set-up day when I created my iTunes account, I was told to type in the Mobile Me address, so I did. I never used the service, though my receipts for iTunes purchases showed up there. A year later when the service expired, I changed my Apple ID so that my default e-mail is now my university address, but the iTunes purchases are still going to the now-expired account. I was told that I could create a brand new iTunes account, but if I did I would ... [Link] [Cache]

My university set me up with a trial Mobile Me account, and on the set-up day when I created my iTunes account, I was told to type in the Mobile Me address, so I did. I never used the service, though my receipts for iTunes purchases showed up there. A year later when the service expired, I changed my Apple ID so that my default e-mail is now my university address, but the iTunes purchases are still going to the now-expired account.I was told that I could create a brand new iTunes account, but if I did I would have ... [Link] [Cache]

I'm about to start the Rick Moranis #LittleShop movie. My 8yo has never seen it, but she's gotten interested in musicals. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for iPad Wife is unwrapping the #LittleShop DVD now. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for iPad First, put away the #Cats DVD. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for iPad Daughter is worried #LittleShop will be too scary. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for iPad Steve Martin is credited for a "special appearance" #LittleShop about 3 hours ago via Twitter for iPad Great set... Chorus girls dancing in the rain. I'd ... [Link] [Cache]

Mary Flanagan’s collaborator at Tiltfactor in the rather hush-hush Book of Jing manga project, Jonathan Jay Lee, has had a solo show in Hong Kong and been featured in Penninsula magazine as a “rising star” in the comics world. Go Jonathan! And… a sneak peak — Book One! [Link] [Cache]

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Let my students tell you. [Link] [Cache]

I recently participated in the CIG 2010 Mario level generation competition. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of being added to the level. The result is a computationally efficient approach to generating a large space of randomized levels. A level created by the probabilistic multi-pass generator The generation process consists of several phases, which place additional object types in the level. The following ... [Link] [Cache]

…on Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, a hidden object game based on a romance novel. It has its flaws, though interestingly I thought they were the opposite set of flaws from the ones in Love and Death: Bitten. Clearly, though, there’s a bit of a trend in the hidden-object-romance-novel direction right now. One I haven’t played or reviewed, but whose title consistently cracks me up, is Harlequin’s Hidden Object of Desire, which presumably means that Fabio is hiding under the bed. [Link] [Cache]

I’m serving now as the president of the Electronic Literature Organization. We’ve been working to move the site to a new server, which has unfortunately left most of eliterature.org down for a while. We did make a point of getting the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1 back up as soon as possible at the new site, so that teachers, students, and other readers would have access to it. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. My thanks go to the ELO directors who worked on this and to our new system administrator, Ward Vandewege, for managing the transition. Our new host and ... [Link] [Cache]

Signed up for the Tuesday and Wednesday of GDC Online Austin GDC that was , mostly for the Game Narrative summit. Any other IFfers going this year? [Link] [Cache]

Beware... Salty language. In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit? [Link] [Cache]

Awful, awful Apple TV ads. [Link] [Cache]

Why would an upright young citizen of Salem, with a new wife and a proud family tradition behind him, risk the good opinion of his neighbors, all for a romp in the woods with the wicked? If society is rotten to the core, and your minister, your Sunday school teacher, even the spirit of your pious old father, are all secretly in league with - well, your Sunday school teacher calls him the "devil." If everyone you looked up to has already given way to evil, and you've already promised to meet - you know, that guy - in the ... [Link] [Cache]

Sometimes we're tempted to think that people who lived "back in the day" were simpler and less sophisticated than we are, and perhaps because Rip Van Winkle celebrates a simple soul, we might think that the author himself was also simple. Irving, born in New York City in the late 1700s, wrote early biographies of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and thus was a prominent part of the process of forming our own national legends about those figures. Irving served as U.S. minister to Spain, and was one of a small handful of American figures who actually managed to make a ... [Link] [Cache]

Anytime you post online, you publish. Anything you say or do that might be posted by someone else reflects upon that brand that you'll be working so hard to build. Don't undercut your hard work with moments of Facebook foolishness. Nor should you stop reporting when you surf for fun online. Stories can emerge from anywhere. Soak in all the information you touch, and when you read, watch or listen think always "Would others find this interesting?" That's how you find the material you'll need to fill your blog, Twitter feed or whatever else you publish online. --Robert Niles, Online ... [Link] [Cache]

It wasn't just the blog, but the fact that the student was entrepreneurial and dedicated.In the end, the blog honed a lot of my online skills and was an excellent precursor to the professional world. Additionally, because I was covering the very school I was attending, the blog served as a bridge from my academic life to the outside world. I found that as a student, I had access to a lot of information a regular beat reporter/blogger never would -- campus events, internal e-mails, and good old word of mouth. UMass Journalism Professor's Blog [Link] [Cache]

Eden, by Pablo Holmberg, Drawn & Quarterly, 2010 Yes, these comics sometimes veer into the extremely sappy, but they’re metafictional and wonderfully fabular throughout. Eden collects more than 100 simple four-panel strips featuring a diminutive, somewhat rabbit-like king, or at least, someone who wears a crown, in a magical land. An extremely insightful naïvite, of the sort that one hears in the occasional oracular pronunciation of a child, comes through at times. But these comics do not overlook death or other serious subjects. Holmberg, who writes and draws in Buenos Aires, has Eden and more available on his website, in ... [Link] [Cache]

This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt. [Link] [Cache]

Submission for the StarCraft AI Competition is now open. Complete details are provided at the submission site. [Link] [Cache]

Scratch is a kid-friendly programming sandbox, designed by MIT in order to introduce kids to computer science concepts. I've been using it with my own children for a couple years, and am currently using it as a gentle introduction to development, for an upper-level class designed for the "New Media Journalism" program.This chart showing the age of Scratch users suggests MIT is having great success in its target age group.http://stats.scratch.mit.edu/commu~ [Link] [Cache]

Scratch is a kid-friendly programming sandbox, designed by MIT in order to introduce kids to computer science concepts. I've been using it with my own children for a couple years, and am currently using it as a gentle introduction to development, for an upper-level class designed for the "New Media Journalism" program.http://stats.scratch.mit.edu/com~ [Link] [Cache]

I'm teaching a "New Media Projects" course, which aims to explore the connections between communication with words linear, narrative and communication with programming interactive, procedural . Out in the wider world, The Poynter Institute hosted this session this week. I'm glad to see the profession moving beyond digital cameras and blogging. Programming for Journalists / Journalism for Programmers N432-10 Never before have programmers offered so much promise to those who pursue journalism. Unfortunately, the partnership often fails because the two groups just don't know how to work with one another. This new Poynter seminar can change that. Journalists will learn ... [Link] [Cache]

Two recent hit songs on the Web are the tribute “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” by Rachel Bloom and the non-tribute “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo. Perhaps after me and you – us, them, him, her, and it will be next? The typographical treatment of “Fuck You” in the video is much more straightforward than in the well-linked “Say What Again” video by Jarratt Moody, which sets dialogue from Pulp Fiction to animated type. The words and letters in “Say What Again” aren’t demanding to be read as insistently, and they’re doing so much that it’s a joy to see them in ... [Link] [Cache]

Dr. Cordelia Fine, with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, notes in her summary of many gender studies in her book, Delusions of Gender, about gender and the brain a several studies have found no difference in hemispheric size in neonates; b the allegedly bigger female corpus callosum is in dispute and c size vs function has not been proven: as Dr. Fine notes, “getting from brain to behavior has proved a challenge.” There may be biological difference in brain, but what do they show us about our thinking? [Link] [Cache]