Gamer Grandma (and her Grandkids)

I was reading a paper about elderly gaming when I remembered a 60second documentary I saw once about an old lady who was a huge fan on Skyrim. You might have seen it too, as it went viral about an year ago, but if you haven't, here what I'm talking about:

I went in the comments section (if there's a video that can't attract haters is this one, right?) and I found this:

I immediately wondered: “Wait, are you telling me that she's a meme?”. I googled her and, BAM, I stumbled upon the best fanbase of the Internet. I was immediately in love.

Shirley Curry, a.k.a. Gamer Grandma, has a YouTube channel where she streams her Skyrim games (1 million views!) and, sometimes,  her treadmill strolls, some pretty good fan art and even a Steam group (that I immediately joined): GradmaShirley'sGrandkids (2631 members). The media also noticed her and wrote several pieces about her (e.g. here, here and here).

Gamer Grandma is also quite active on Twitter, and seem to bring out the best from people.

As every Grandma she's always an advice for her grandkids in distress .

By the way, she also have some rather good piece advice on how to deal with online bullying: “Older gamers leave me comments on my channel saying that they don’t even record because they’re afraid of getting nasty comments. Well, it isn’t anything to be afraid of — either ignore them or delete them! You have the power. ”

Dissertation & Co
It has been a while that I was not able to write anything, here, but it was for a good reason: I had to put up on paper my dissertation. I did my best, in the past year, to keep my research coherent, so to have a good map of the areas I wanted to touch in the final step of my PhD, but nonetheless it was an overwhelming work. It probably does not make much sense when someone else says it - many colleagues warned me, and I though I got it - but it is certainly the hardest piece of work I have done so far. Writing it in English wasn't much of a problem (even if here in Italy is still rather rare), what I struggled with the most was coherence.

I had several moment of wondering, where I was just trying to remember exactly what I wrote 150 pages before on a related topic. Thankfully technology is very helpful from this perspective: being able to search the whole text, to copy paste paragraphs in new positions, too look for keyword or systematically change some terminology are life savers. And with a good backup system you do not fear to lose all your writing if your PC breaks down (I know, it's 2017, but I still have colleagues that suffered this atrocious fate).

Anyway, my dissertation now is close to completion: I'm implementing the final changes thanks to the observations of several, wonderfully helpful, colleagues to whom I owe my gratitude. I will soon publish an abstract and the table of contents on these pages for anyone interested.

In the meantime, I linked in the video section my last lecture at Turin University (for Italian speakers only, I'm afraid) in which I bore the audience with an etymological map of aspectuality (am I the only one that find etymologies great?) and some considerations on the aspectual features of play. I also analyse some comics for one of the best strips ever: Calvin & Hobbes. I'll try to write a few lines on this on the blog one day.

By the way, this year Meeting on Meaning are particularly interesting: you can check all the full conference videos in HD on Lexia.

 Other than that, I updated the "papers" section with a few more articles available online. You will find my most complete overview on Lotman's semiotic of culture applied to games, a framework to analyse the implementation of history in digital games (written with Vincenzo Idone Cassone), some notes on narratology and board games, a paper on the semiotics of toys and an article dedicated to post-digital graphic regimes.

 It's all, for now, but I'll be back soon!

Sunspring: can AI write screenplays?

In the last couple of days many are talking about Sunspring, a short film whose screenplay has been written by a neural network (for more details see arstechnica). This means that someone fed an AI with the scripts of may sci-fi films, gave some fundamental instructions and let the AI create an imitative text. The result was a quite surreal screenplay, that was turned into this short film:

After watching the film, take some time to read carefully the script, shown at the beginning of the video. After all, that is the only part actually created by the neural network (together with the lyrics of the song).
It is immediately evident that the AI is not the author of the short film. This is generally true for the scriptwriter of any film - the latter are always texts with multiple authors (cast, director etc.) - but even more in this case. The cast and the crew of Sunspring made a huge work of interpretation to make the screenplay work. They've drawn isotopies, changed wrong pronouns and tried to give a visual existence to sentences like "taking his eyes from his mouth". It is these interpretations and the acting (that charged emotionally random sentences and transformed them into a dialogue) that make the film (kind of) meaningful. In other words, the people who worked at the film provided to the film what Eco called intentio auctoris, the author's intention.The director himself stated that thank to the work of the cast "somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world".

The result is still an open text, that requires the audience to put together the loosely connected parts of the film and make sense of it (it is the so called intentio lectoris). This is also what gives the feeling of being confronted with an "artistic" film: it is open to many different interpretations and therefore it is able to generate new meaning (which is, roughly, Juri Lotman's definition of artistic text).

Finally, there is the intentio operis, the meaning that rises from the text itself. If we focus on the screenplay itself this may be particularly interesting. The text was built upon recurrent paths found by the AI (that calls itself Benjamin) in similar texts. 
We could argue that what neural networks do is to try to find out what is that makes an "architext" (Genette's word for a genre). In particular, Benjamin had to find out what are the features of a screenplay (1st architext) and what are the characteristics of science fiction (2nd architext).

On the one hand Benjamin's screenplay follows the structure of other screenplays: action, dialogues, indication of who is saying/doing what and so on. Apparently the rules of this stylistic architext were easy to reconstruct for the neural network, which followed them strictly and with success.

On the other hand, the AI also had to recognise what features are typical of sci-fi. As Oscar Sharp, the director of the film, points out "There's an interesting recurring pattern in Sunspring where characters say, 'No I don’t know what that is. I’m not sure,' (...) They're questioning the environment, questioning what’s in front of them. There's a pattern in sci-fi films of characters trying to understand the environment". 
Additionally there is the use of a certain keywords such as "spaceship" and "stars" even if it happens always out of context. There is also a certain measure of conflict and romance - that becomes more evident in the film because is recognised and stressed by the authors. Despair is also featured, when the character named H points a shotgun in his mouth and when he cries looking at his backpack (?).

Much of the meaning stored in the text, therefore, is the result of the imitation of the rules of these two architexs. This brings us to the last question: in what measure Benjamin is an author?

For Sharp and Goodwin (the AI specialist that built the network), Benjamin is something in between. It is not a "real" author because it would have to be able to create something original, while Benjamin only remixes statistically relevant elements of what others have written. We could argue, however, that that's what every author does, exploiting elements from its own encyclopaedia (for semioticians it's the sum of all its previous knowledge) and combining them through linguistic and stylistic rules that he or she reconstructed from the use made by other authors. Where is the difference, then?
The difference is that Benjamin - despite its human name and the ease with which we tend to consider it an individual - is something automatic, which means, it doesn't know what it is doing. Meaning-creation is also a matter of interpretation, operated primarily by the author itself. 
Benjamin however is not able to make sense of what it reads and even less of what it writes. That's why its text lacks so much in coherence, and that's why it is the film-makers and the audience that have to draw their own isotopies in order to give a meaningful axis of the process (the chronological, cause/effect development of the text) to the statistically selected elements of the system (the parts of the text that the AI retrieved from other screenplays).

Benjamin is not an author, then, even if it can be used as one. It could, however, be an extremely interesting tool for semiotic analysis and, in particular, a way to point out structural commonalities between huge amount of texts. It could be a valid help to semioticians that would like to support they qualitative analysis with quantitative data.

Schiaffi&Fagioli: a Spaghetti western videogame tribute to Bud Spencer and Terence Hill.

I just finished to play the brief & funny demo of Spaghetti & Fagioli (Slaps and beans), created in only a month (!) as an entry of IndieVault Spaghetti Western Jam.
The game is inspired by the Italian s-w film They call me trinity, a true masterpiece and cult film (you can hear it's theme song form Franco Micalizzi at the end of Tarantino's Jango Unchained), one of the best of the couple Bud Spancer / Terence Hill.

I vividly advice you to download the demo, or to watch it's video: it is an amazing mix of good pixel art, inspiration and very hard (and quick!) work.

 However, They call me Trinity is not the only film quoted in the demo... maybe it is the 21st October 2015, but I think I spotted something... anachronistic in the beautifully pixelated western city of Schiaffi & Fagioli...

Media Mutations 7 Videos
 
The videos of all the papers and keyword speeches of MM7 are available here.
You can see many presentations, among which Geoffrey Long's, Tanya Krzywinska's, Ivan Veturi's and, of course, mine ;) .
The registration confers to all of us a very funny "s", which may be distracting 'cause it's kind of funny. The contents are really interesting thought.
 

Conspiracy Theories and Semiotics of the Web.

This year's "Meetings on Meaning", the semiotic conferences organized by the CIRCe (Interdepartmental Center of Research on Communication) and held at the University of Turin, are dedicated to conspiracy theories.

The meaning of #Conspiracy. Plot and Mystery in Communication.

 [Click here for the program]

The record of all the meetings already held are available (in HD!) on the Lexia (International Journal of Semiotics) channel on youtube. Most of them are in Italian, but there is some in English too, so it's worth to check...

In any case, here you can find my lecture, dedicated to conspiracy theories in the periphery of the semiosphere of the web (i.e. all those sites like 4chan and 8chan) and a case study on the GamerGate controversy. I hope you enjoy it!

The Video of "Toward a Semiotic Analysis of Toys" now on Youtube.

Here the video of the presentation I gave in Sofia last Septmeber, official beginning of my work on semiotics of toys...

Next step: a semiotic analysis of the substance of expression of the toy-language that I'll present in Teramo at the annual congress of the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies (AISS).

Brickfilms: Cinema, Space and Lego.

Since the beginning cinema has been fascinate by space: it is known that the first movie ever has been Le voyage dans la Lune by Geroge Méliès.

Less known is that also the first brickfilm (you know, Lego stop-motion videos) treats of the same topic. For an exceptional coincidence 1973's En rejse til månen has the very same title, just in Danish. Twelve years old Lars Hassing and his brother Henrik realized it for their grandparents golden wedding anniversary and were influenced by the Apollo program. Apparently they even went up to and showed it to Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, who, in sign of appreciation, rewarded the lucky kids with large Lego sets.

Coincidences, however, aren't over. The second ever birckfilm is Lego Wars by Fernando Escovar. It was inspired by a trendy movie of the time: Star Wars. The displayed minifigures hold medieval weapons and the spaceship is truly a Red Cross helicopter: Star Wars Lego sets weren't available at the time. 

That's the thing, though, Fernando would maybe have been surprised to know that nineteen years later Star Wars would become the first ever licensed theme featured in Lego.

Benny approves! 

... and so does Vader!

Real Life Assassin's Creed.

The events of Assassin's Creed: Unity will take place in Paris, center of the French Revolution, but, today, also capital of Parkour. In the video below a team of traceurs show us how the game would look like in real life.

ibb and obb

Few days ago I bought on Steam the quite new indie game. Created by Sparpweed Games, it is a puzzle platform game strongly oriented to co-op. The graphics are simple and cute and the game is quite relaxing even if sometimes quite hard. The most interesting feature of this game is that it presents a world with a bidirectional gravity: the two players walk on the two sides of the same platform but upside down.

It is more simple to show that to explain, so here the trailer of the game:

This twofold gravitational environment is the basis for pulling together the two players. Cooperation in games is not always so simple to achieve and many co-op games doesn't involve a lot of real cooperation between players. Ibb and obb is different for two reasons.

The first one is that you can play ibb and obb in two with the same keyboard. On-line gaming has the weird feature of making more simple to play with someone far away that with someone near. When you play ibb and obb you are literally sitting aside your friend, and this create a different kind of relationship with the other player.

The second one is that the whole game has been conceived in a way that forces the players to collaborate, to think and care about each other. Even the system of points has been added in a second stage as an additional spur to cooperation.

I've played ibb and obb with my wife and we both loved the way in which it is a awesome metaphor for marriage. I know for sure that this wasn't the idea of the creators (the initial title of the game should have been “brothers”), but nevertheless it's true. While you play at ibb and obb you should always try to see the world from both points of view (e.g. some portals are accessible only for one of the players and not for the other), you have to be ready to help your partner even when it could seem humiliating (e.g. make the other player climb on your head to reach an high step) and most of all you have to trust him of her completely.

Ibb and obb is not an edugame and is frankly fun, but it proves how video-games, so often criticised, can be a valuable human experience and an occasion for personal growth.

Why do we play Games?

Back to semionerdy stuff after a long pause... I would like to share with you a video form V-Sauce on Games. V-Sauce is a YouTube channel that answer to every kind of questions, serious and “not so serious” always using science. The video on games, alas, it's not the better, but it's still interesting and entertaining.

PS in the video it speaks also about the word “nerd” so it definitively fits with this blog!

PPS if you like this kind of stuff look also for Minutephysics! ;)

Factories of Nothing.

Yesterday night I was very tired working on my Russian test. I needed to rest a little, so I went in the kitchen, looking for a beer. I found the beer and my flatmate too. After a few chatter he showed me this:

Such beauty! Oh, marvelous factory of nothing made out of Lego, I would stare at you for all the night (instead that studying Russian)! I started to imagine an u/dis-topic future in which Lego will become the fundamental resource of humanity. Houses, cars, computers, all made of Lego. All integrable, upgradeable and mixable! Maybe the Lego shoes can be problematic (not to mention the Lego underwear), but who cares this would be an incredible technological breakthrough! There would be no garbage, because the package of your food can become the upgrade of your car or, if you eat a lot, a new floor for your house. Old Lego could be melted and forged into new Lego in an happy circle of wealth and economic growth! After the American dream we could live the Legoland dream. So let's sing it all together: <Everything is awesome!>...