Category: Uncategorized

Today I was reading a chapter of Remediation: understanding new media (Bolter and Grusin 2000), as the title suggest it’s about Remediation referring to adaption and transforming one medium into another (Kohn and Weissbrod 2020). Specifically, the book is talking about how new media constantly borrows techniques from old media or simply takes current media that exists but changes its appearance to seem different and keep up with the times.

The book starts off by talking about a film called Strange Days (1995, Bigelow) where a device called ‘the wire’ has thrown all other technology to the wayside, especially technology use in media. He uses the wire as an example of how new technology and the media that comes with it will shape our culture (Bolter and Grusin 2000).

Interestingly, though this book was published in 2000 it is still relevant, cultures that have smart phones and network connections have different ways of communicating now. Research has shown that people are using social media to talk about everything from new friends to break ups, even to talk about a family or friend’s funeral. There have also been recorded cases of people de-friending old friends due them seeing what’s on their friend’s social media account (Acar 2014).

The book continues to talk more about the wire and it’s ability to record people’s memory, allowing other people to experience those memories down to every detail in all the 5 senses. They later comment about how current (referring to 2000) Virtual Reality (VR) headsets are uncomfortable and don’t have the same graphical quality as the wire does (Bolter and Grusin 2000). This is also something I found interesting as though VR has gone through much development over the years VR headsets still have the user wear a screen on their face and can cause motion sickness, an example of modern VR headsets is show below in fig1 (Lee et al. 2020). In addition, they can’t recreate any senses besides seeing and hearing.

That being said, you can experience different senses if you’re wearing a Nosulus Rift, a VR headset that lets you smell farts when playing South Park: The Fractures But Whole (Ubisoft 2016, PC), a video of the head set is show in fig 2. A more practically way to experience a different sense that isn’t sight or sound is for a player to put on a Tesla Suit, a full body suit with a haptic feedback system that allows users to experience touching a virtual object on any part of their body a picture is shown in fig 3 (Mikhalchuk, 2019).

Though I may have talked about VR too much, I do find it very interesting how a book published 21 years ago about VR technology and how new technology and media will affect cultures, is still relevant.

The final section I was reading continues with media and advancements in technology but talks about how immediacy relies on hypermediacy especially when used in media. This is explained further by talking about how old media like news will try to use hypermediacy to stay relevant by creating flashy news websites that mimic the same style as how they present news on the TV(Bolter and Grusin 2000).

Looking into hypermediacy it seems to refer to when adapting from old media to create new and improve media, the creatures won’t try to appear transparent as a means to hide connections between the new media and the old media they build on top of. In addition, companies or people that use hypermediacy will tend to embrace and use old, new and different types of media to create their new medium (Kohn and Weissbrod 2020).

Immediacy is when people make a new media transparent to hide remediation and at times the medium itself so that no one noticing that it’s even there (Bolter 2000). This definition makes it sound like the opposite to hypermediacy however, reflecting on Remediation and what it means, it does feel that immediacy does rely on hypermediacy in order to create a new and popular medium or media.

Conclusion

Reading this chapter of Remediation: understanding new media has defiantly widen my gase on remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy and its impact on media and other mediums. After doing research into the different subjects I find it interesting how old media will try to continue to exist while new media that is completely different from old media still uses the rules and techniques of said old media as a starting ground. In addition, I still found it interesting how the book is relevant about media changing to stay with the times and the talking about the state of VR that exist today. However, looking into research about VR headsets and their potential, it does suggest that they are more comfortable now and the chances of getting motion sickness are unlikely.

I don’t know if there’s much of remediation that I can use when it come to programming, however I am curious if I could use it in game design.

In the future if I do decide to look into Remediation further, I will spent a day researching it to try and understand it properly. From it I would get 10 references and begin to plan and prototype at least 2 ideas. This in turn could help me improve my skills in game design.

Bibliography

ACAR, Adam. 2014. Culture and Social Media : An Elementary Textbook. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

BOLTER, Jay David. 2000. ‘Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy’. Convergence (London, England), 6(1), 62-71.

BOLTER, Jay David and Richard GRUSIN. 2000. Remediation : Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass. ;: MIT.

KOHN, Ayelet and Rachel WEISSBROD. 2020. ‘Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point’. Visual Communication (London, England), 19(2), 199-229.

LEE, Doyeon, Byeng-hee CHANG and Jiseob PARK. 2020. ‘Evaluating the Comfort Experience of a Head-Mounted Display with the Delphi Methodology’. Inteonet Jeongbo Hakoe Nonmunji = Journal of Korean Society for Internet Information; 인터넷정보학회논문지, 21(6), 81-94.

MIKHALCHUK, Dimitri. 2019. TESLASUIT is the Red Dot Award Winner in Product Design. Teslasuit.

Bigelow, Kathryn. 1995. Strange Days [Film].

South Park: The Fractures But Whole. 2016. Ubisoft, Ubisoft.

Figure list

Figure 1. Pocket lint. 2021. No title. [picture]. V&A [online]. Available at: https://www.pocket-lint.com/ar-vr/reviews/158289-pimax-vision-8k-x-vr-headset-review [accessed 22 September 2021]

Figure 2. Game Stop. 2016. South Park Makes Us Sick: Hands On With The Nosulus Rift. . V&A [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNkgHFrJD9w [accessed 22 September 2021]

Figure 3. Tesla suit. 2021. No title. [picture]. V&A [online]. Available at: https://teslasuit.io/the-suit/ [accessed 22 September 2021]

Continuing from my last post, I’m starting my MSc AI for games to improve my knowledge in AI development. In this post I will be talking about the skills and themes that I think I will need to focus on during the masters.

What I want?

I want to really learn machine learning as it is at the frontier of the AI research and is used in business everywhere and as a programmer I want to understand how they work and how I could apply it to my own games and project. In addition, I believe it will help me get a job in both the games and software industry.

Over the masters I wish to focus on my communication skills as I struggled with Social Anxiety which occasionally makes talking to people difficult.

I also aim to focus on my planning skills specifically for programming projects as the way I designed systems and components has a times been very lacking causing me to have to revisit parts of my work to ensure that the project as a whole works properly.

Finally, the other skill I should focus on, is my patience as I have tendency to be very eager to start a project straight away which in turn has lead to a lack of system design and planning at times.

So what?

As mentioned earlier I want to improve my knowledge and skills with machine learning in order to appear more employable. As of my current knowledge and skill base, I believe that I don’t have enough and that by studying machine learning it would improve on them and add more interesting projects to my portfolio.

Struggling to communicate has made it difficult to get across my ideas or opinion about an idea to other people both in and outside of a team. This is likely due to self doubt and worrying that other around me are going to judge me for what I say.

Through experiences working in a team I have learned that it is good to have your voice heard – even if it does go against the goals of the project and makes you feel disruptive – when working in a team as it can ensure that you are not burning out.

After reading the second chapter about a book on social anxiety, though it’s in some ways sad to know Social Anxiety is the third most command psychiatric disorder at the same time it has given me some Solis knowing that it’s more common in than first thought (Hope et al. 2006).

Planning is a skill that I certainly have as I do need to plan out how the component will however, I believe that I don’t plan enough to the point where I can revisit the plan /design I have set out for myself and consider what potential tools I’ll need. Reflecting on the cause of this is partly due to my lack of patience and eagerness to start work on the project.

Reflecting on my patience when doing work, it likely stems from worrying about not having enough time to get everything done. This results in me rushing and avoiding planning causing me to make mistakes and perpetually continuing the cycle of worrying and rushing.

How will this change my work?

Looking into the future if I could improve these skills I believe that I would be much better as a programmer specialising in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Gameplay. As I mentioned earlier I wanted to merge machine learning with games as I believe it could allow for more interesting and challenging enemy AI by changing their behaviors and through processes or machine learning could be used for procedural generation from the level design to weapon and item creation.

Looking at a book about leading teams and the confidence required for it, though it was about leading a sports team I believe that being confident around people would encourage me to work harder. In addition, if I could express that confidence to team members it could encourage others to work harder as well and give them a sense of security (Guenzi et al. 2013). Reading more of Hope’s book on Social Anxiety, potential ways to avoid triggering Social Anxiety is to identify automatic thoughts that come into your head and then challenge those thoughts to see that they are just worries that have much logic to them (Hope et al. 2006).

By planning out my work and being patience I would be a much better programmer as it would allow me to: anticipate bugs, see the scope of the project, avoid overlapping components and understand how components will interact with one another. Reading thought an article about planning programming projects I using flow charts and pseudocode is very good to use for planning it’s also suggested that I should have schedule and give myself deadline for features to be complete (Thelin 2020). An example of a flow chart is shown below in fig 1 .Using these techniques in my work would allow me to make more efficient components while ensuring the they are completed in a reasonable period of time.

As for being more patience this could improve my work by allowing me moments to calm down and reflect on what might be the problem with the code or other parts of the project. In addition, being patient would allow me to give myself time to try out the techniques for my social anxiety thus improving my communication and patience all at once.

Conclusion

Reflecting on the skills I need to focus in order to better my work for masters has introduced me to interesting techniques to fight my anxiety and to improve myself with my planning and patience.

When using the techniques for my anxiety, I could begin by learning and recognising the signs of of it happening and then proceed to challenge the thoughts. When doing so I could give myself 5 minutes and if possible move to quite area to deals with them. I could try this once a day for a week and see if anything has improved when communicating. Ideally the goal would be able to deal with my anxiety on the fly while talking to people, incase it creeps up when talking or in a situation where leaving the room is out of the question.

As for my planning and concentration, when creating a flow chart for a game mechanic I should take 10 – 20 minuets to come up with the design showing how the system works. In addition, I should take breaks every hour where I walk away from the computer to relax for 5 minutes.

Hopefully by the end of my masters these skills will be improved.

Bibliography

GUENZI, Paolo, Dino RUTA, Paolo GUENZI and Dino RUTA. 2013. Leading Teams: Tools and Techniques for Successful Team Leadership from the Sports World. Somerset, UNITED KINGDOM: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

HOPE, Debra A., Richard G. HEIMBERG and Cynthia L. TURK. 2006. Managing Social Anxiety: A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Approach Therapist Guide. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.

THELIN, Ryan. 2020. ‘How to Plan a Coding Project in 8 Easy Steps’. Available at: https://www.educative.io/blog/how-to-plan-a-coding-project. [Accessed Sep 22,].

Figure list

Figure 1. BreezeTree. 2021. No title. [diagram]. V&A [online]. Available at: https://www.breezetree.com/articles/what-is-a-flow-chart. [Accessed Sep 22,].

To start off my blog I’ve decided to talk about what was discussed in today’s lecture. We were discussing computational creativity (CC), a process where an AI displays behaviors that humans could recognise as being creative. Generally this would be generates novel pieces of art, music, poetry and etc (Mántaras. 2020). An example of Computational creativity is a portrait created by an AI that was trained with multiple paintings created by humans, this is show in fig 1(Graham 2018). Another example, is Artbreeder a website that uses AI to blend images together or use sliders to change parts of a picture this is show below in fig2. You can find Artbreeder via this link: https://www.artbreeder.com/browse

This is a type of AI that I am interested in as CC could be used as a game mechanic similar to procedural generation algorithms which are used to generate levels or items in video games (Short 2017). In addition, it could be used to create tools for making game development easier, making my dream of solo game development possible as tools like Procedural generation have been used in games like Skyrim (Bethesda 2011, PS3 ) to help artists build models of the world’s landscapes. However, one of the problems with letting an AI build you content is that they’re difficult to control and can easy give the user the type of content they don’t desire, this could partly be due to the element of randomness used in the content generation (Short 2017).

To achieve creating my own CC artefact I would need to develop my skills in AI programming, as though I have created AI artefacts in the past, they were created using classical AI techniques such as Finite State Machines or Behavior Tress, while the AI for CC can be trained with data, making it more advanced. A project like this would require patience, research, and planning to ensure that I fully understand how it works and so that I don’t get distraught if it takes longer to make and doesn’t work the first time.

Conclusion

At the end of the project I would have hopefully improved my hard skills in programming as well as my soft skills in patience and planning which in turn should make me a better programmer overall.

When researching creative computing, I had to be specific about what I was looking for and occasionally had to use terms like AI art or music and not use creative computing at all to find what I was looking for. In the future I will try to be specific about exactly what I’m looking for when researching topics.

If I tried to use computational creativity to creamy own artwork if would probably be discussed as to who has the rights to the artwork as thought I created the algorithm it was the thing that created the art work. In the future it is possible that law may need to be revisited to include AI as the sole owner of the art it makes.

To research this further I would spend 3 hours researching CC further and as mentioned earlier I would specific about the type of AI I was trying to make to ensure that there isn’t any misinformation. within those 3 hours I should have at least 10 reference to use in order to have a good understanding of how the systems to work and hot much data is required to train the AI.

Bibliography

GRAHAM, Thomas. 2018. ‘Art made by AI is Selling for Thousands – is it any Good?’. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20181210-art-made-by-ai-is-selling-for-thousands-is-it-any-good. [Accessed Sep 21,].

MÁNTARAS, Ramón López de. 2020. Artificial Intelligence and the Arts: Toward Computational Creativity.

SHORT, Tanya X. 2017. Procedural Generation in Game Design. CRC Press.

Skyrim. 2011. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks LLC

Figure List

Figure 1: Pierre Fautrel. 2018. Edmond de Belamie. [canvas print]. V&A [online]. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20181210-art-made-by-ai-is-selling-for-thousands-is-it-any-good. [Accessed Sep 21,].

Figure 2: Artbreeder. 2021.gansbreeder. [digital picture]. V&A [online]. Available at: https://www.artbreeder.com/browse. [Accessed Sep 21,].