The computational therapeutic: exploring Weizenbaum's ELIZA as a history of the present

This paper explores the history of ELIZA, a computer programme approximating a Rogerian therapist, developed by Jospeh Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1970s, as an early AI experiment. ELIZA’s reception provoked Weizenbaum to re-appraise the relationship between ‘computer power and human reason’ and to attack the ‘powerful delusional thinking’ about computers and their intelligence that he understood to be widespread in the general public and also amongst experts. The root issue for Weizenbaum was whether human thought could be ‘entirely computable’ (reducible to logical formalism). This also provoked him to re-consider the nature of machine intelligence and to question the instantiation of its logics in the social world, which would come to operate, he said, as a ‘slow acting poison’. Exploring Weizenbaum’s 20th Century apostasy, in the light of ELIZA, illustrates ways in which contemporary anxieties and debates over machine smartness connect to earlier formations. In particular, this article argues that it is in its designation as a computational therapist that ELIZA is most significant today. ELIZA points towards a form of human–machine relationship now pervasive, a precursor of the ‘machinic therapeutic’ condition we find ourselves in, and thus speaks very directly to questions concerning modulation, autonomy, and the new behaviorism that are currently arising

Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences

Refining operational logics

This paper expands on and refines the theoretical framework of operational logics, which simultaneously addresses how games operate at a procedural level and how games communicate these operations to players. In the years since their introduction, operational logics have been applied in domains ranging from game studies to game generation and game modeling languages. To support these uses and to enable new ones, we resolve some standing ambiguities and provide a catalog of key, fundamental operational logics. Concretely, we provide an explicit and detailed definition of operational logics; specify a set of logics which seems fundamental and suffices to interpret a broad variety of games across several genres; give the first detailed explanation of how exactly operational logics combine; and suggest application domains for which operational logics-based analysis and knowledge representation are especially appropriate

Combat in Games

While the game design and game studies communities have analyzed combat both in specific games and game genres, and while combat is clearly central to many types of games, there is no general account of combat that is portable across diverse games. We provide such an account in the form of criteria which are satisfied by games that players inter- pret as “having combat.” These requirements are eventually fulfilled via operational logics, which tie the game’s observ- able behavior (including its instantial assets) to play expe- riences and cultural knowledge, creating what we refer to as a “combat model.” In addition to establishing a com- prehensive model of combat, making it possible to discuss combat across game genres, this work is the first to describe how complex playable models are constructed from composi- tions of operational logics working in concert; we also define two families of logics which are novel in the literature. This broad model of combat has already proved useful in practice, yielding insights in the analysis of the art game Unmanned; it also promises exciting computational applications in areas such as game design support tools and general game playing

Is Your Game Generator Working? Evaluating Gemini, an Intentional Generator

Determining whether a game generator is working properly is challenging, since it entails conducting potentially many evaluations of generated games and synthesizing these into a net evaluation of the system. The problem is compounded when the generator has a human-centered goal: for example, that the generated games should be interpreted as having certain mechanics or as being about particular ideas. In this paper, we examine the Gemini game generator and develop an evaluation instrument that tests the interpretability of its generated games’ mechanics and higher-order proceduralist arguments. In the process we build empirical evidence for the claim that some amount of non-systems-based framing is required in order for arguments made by procedural rhetorics to be sensible to players. The tools we have assembled for this evaluation can be applied to game generators more broadly; game generators should be allowed to invent games which go beyond merely formally “good” or subjectively “fun.