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procedural feminism
- 1. PROCEDURAL FEMINISM playing with gender and generative systems gillian smith northeastern university @gillianmsmith
- 7. michael cook amanda phillips tanya short
- 8. authorship and aesthetics Design Control Game Content and Games!
- 9. methods for asserting control flickr: Amarand Agas
- 11. formal theory of content
- 12. what is a platformer level?
- 13. what is a person? “Females of the Realms can excel in any area they wish, and are asily the equal of their male counterparts in every skill or respect.
- 14. formal theory of design Joris Dormans
- 15. Design Control Game Content and Games! inserting cultural context?
- 16. Design Control Game Content and Games! inserting cultural context?
- 19. feminist computational modeling? Courtney Toder, work-in-progre
- 20. ai and empathy Star Trek: The Next Generatio
- 23. acknowledge your choices CYOA, a visualization of choose your own adventure novels, sam
- 25. no
- 26. but…
- 27. we should be gillian smith @gillianmsmith http://www.sokath.com
Editor's Notes
- let’s start with a bit of scoping for this talk…
- a game is a lot of things, it means different things to different people, and all of these definitions are probably valid for different kinds of games.
- for this talk in particular, I’m going to be focusing on games as being made up of procedures and rules. I know this limits us away from some kinds of games, and some of what I’m talking about may well apply to those as well — but let’s live in this space for now.
- importantly, these games can be analog or digital (or both!) — procedurality is not limited to the computer, it is inherent in any set of rules that are followed; it’s just that when humans follow rules, there is more flexibility in their interpretation and scope
- one topic I’m increasingly interested in, as a creator of procedural generation systems, is whether it’s possible for a computer to be a feminist
- and I should give credit here to some people I sat on a panel with at different games a couple weekends ago, who have helped form some of these thoughts a little more
- when we make generative systems, we often care about controlling the content that they will be able to make: fitting in to the aesthetic goals of the overall system. we spend a lot of time trying to boil down design theory into some formal generative model…
- …and then we worry about how we’re going to assert control over those algorithms as designers ourselves, using the generative system. how do I make guarantees about playability or challenge or frustration? how do I tell the generator to create content appropriate to this particular game?
- and there are a few ways of doing this: by fiddling with the bits of knowledge that make up the overall piece of content or by fiddling with the algorithm we use to make the content or somewhere in between
- when we do this, we are creating formal theories of design. two different kinds: first, for the artifact being made (what is a level? what is a quest? what is a weapon? what is a story? what is a character?)…
- Lost Winds, Sonic the Hedgehog, Small Worlds, Metroid — these all are very different. How would we write a generator for them, to help understand their underlying structure and aesthetics?
- what about people? right now we build very simple formal models of what a human is: male or female is a binary, and often a meaningless choice during play.
- …second, for the process that should be followed to make it (is design an iterative process? a reflective one? or as in this image, one in which there is no iteration or reflection, but many possibilities that can be chained and explored?)
- but game design theory does not sit in a cultural vacuum. as human designers of games, we spend a lot of time building games that are inspired by our own interests and biases….
- what would it look like if, in addition to this theory of game design, we also were inspired by Judith Butler, or Bell Hooks…?
- and this is important, because the meaning that emerges from a game comes, in part, from how the player interacts with these underlying procedural systems, which in turn is controlled by the aspects of player behavior that are surfaced to the system and the ways in which the system can respond
- so when we work to create generative systems, we are actually embedding meaning. like this character generator, which is loosely generative, by putting together bits of humans without regard for how they fit together. or the dwarf fortress map generator, which follows a simulated history.
- and when we make these systems, we can build them on more complex theories than what we are already thinking about (like this prototype interface for character creation that respects gender and sexuality on a spectrum). and doing this is hard, it requires a lot of iteration with a lot of people, to figure out how to formalize some theories that are really hard to formalize, and there will always be gaps between the human-understood theory and the machine-understood formalization.
- really, what we’re doing when we build generative and/or procedural systems, is we’re creating little psychopaths. our AI systems lack empathy, they lack intent, beyond what we give them ourselves. we teach our generative systems how to fake empathy to be able to create content that makes sense to the players. humans interpret intent and meaning.
- right now, we’re hearing a lot about learning from “big data” and “the cloud”, leaning on building systems that “learn” generative models from lots of data (such as Mike’s system)… but these can never intentionally embed meaning, because the computer does not have any semantic information to be able to present and reason about it. but they still convey meaning, in the way that the human interprets and plays with the information being presented to them.
- and our role is to create simultaneously the most effective and the least harmful little psychopaths we possibly can. we need our systems to be effective at faking empathy so that we can create the experiences we want to create, with systems that are responsive to players, that create meaningful and interesting content (though it is interesting to ponder what happens if we stop having that as a goal). and we have a social responsibility to do it in the least harmful way possible, to be inclusive for players, and to project the meaning we want to be projected.
- I want all people who create these systems to realize that they are making choices. That the theories that are implicitly embedded in their systems, via their biases and experiences, do not need to be embedded there. That we cannot shrug our shoulders when the computer does something bad and blame it — it’s a psychopath, it doesn’t know any better, and it never will. But we know better.
- a computer cannot act with the intent of a feminist
- but in a generative system, the actions taken by the “designer” will be interpreted by players as though the system is a human, so…
- it’s on us. we need to be feminists, we need to think about how to embed feminism and inclusivity into our systems, our data, our games, so that players will see it as well.