One of the crucial developments has been the parallel growth of Software Studies. Without speaking to the academic hierarchy of Critical Code Studies and, um, Software Studies, I would say that what’s good for Software Studies is good for Critical Code Studies. In San Diego last year, Lev Manovich, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and WRT’s own Jeremy Douglass put on quite the tech studies smorgasbord, complete with Kate Hayles, some more GTxA-ers, Ian Bogost, and other notables.

Leaving that session, I was convinced Software Studies was materializing, and Matt Kirschenbaum’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education sealed the deal.

More Developments:

1. The Blog
Critical Code Studies is the blog dedicated to the practice. Although at this point it has 2 primary contributors, Mez and myself, the list of authors is quite long. Newest to the blog are Stephen Ramsay and Patsy Baudoin; however, you’ll see quite a few familiar names from Wendy Chun to Rita Raley. (BTW, take a look at Steve’s post about Beautiful Code on his own blog!)

The purpose of the blog is great a testbed and sounding board for all things Critical Code Studies. Recently, I’ve embarked on a series of posts dedicated to establishing some of the fundamentals of the field, currently, by examining edge cases between math (algebra), algorithms, and source code.

If you head over to the blog, you’ll notice a significant up-tick in the quantity and frequency of posts. Get ready!

2. Presentations
My presentations on Critical Code Studies have covered the following:
1. Introducing Critical Code Studies to MLA
2. Offering a case study in Critical Code Studies at SLSA
3. Wondering why there aren’t more good readings on code at Softwhere Studies (see my talk from that conference here.)
4. Offering a development of the first case study at Digital Humanities

In the last conference, we had quite the Twitter dust-up about whether CCS required one to be a programmer. After all that time, I’ve come to the opinion that learning about programming is essential to CCS work. (Of course, I think I always held that position — not that you could tell that from my answer. Here’s a reference to that discussion. )

Up next:
SLSA 09 & DAC 09: Offering yet another case study.

3. Writing
This will be a big writing year for Critical Code Studies. Among other projects, I plan to conduct a literature review on recent and past studies, building on the bibliography already in the ebr essay.

I also plan to develop a few of the case studies into full-length essays.

4. More Code to Study
I continue to find new extremely interesting examples of code. If you have source code that you think might make a good reading, please let me know.

Well, that’s just the start. But I do want to send the call out, an open invitation, to all those who are interested in (morbidly or otherwise) the project of critically interpreting computer source code. Come over to CCS and join the action. Or follow WRT and CCS for some exciting crossovers like this one or where Jeremy battles Wolverine.

One of the crucial developments has been the parallel growth of Software Studies. Without speaking to the academic hierarchy of Critical Code Studies and, um, Software Studies, I would say that what’s good for Software Studies is good for Critical Code Studies. In San Diego last year, Lev Manovich, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and WRT’s own Jeremy Douglass put on quite the tech studies smorgasbord, complete with Kate Hayles, some more GTxA-ers, Ian Bogost, and other notables.

Leaving that session, I was convinced Software Studies was materializing, and Matt Kirschenbaum’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education sealed the deal.

More Developments:

1. The Blog
Critical Code Studies is the blog dedicated to the practice. Although at this point it has 2 primary contributors, Mez and myself, the list of authors is quite long. Newest to the blog are Stephen Ramsay and Patsy Baudoin; however, you’ll see quite a few familiar names from Wendy Chun to Rita Raley. (BTW, take a look at Steve’s post about Beautiful Code on his own blog!)

The purpose of the blog is great a testbed and sounding board for all things Critical Code Studies. Recently, I’ve embarked on a series of posts dedicated to establishing some of the fundamentals of the field, currently, by examining edge cases between math (algebra), algorithms, and source code.

If you head over to the blog, you’ll notice a significant up-tick in the quantity and frequency of posts. Get ready!

2. Presentations
My presentations on Critical Code Studies have covered the following:
1. Introducing Critical Code Studies to MLA
2. Offering a case study in Critical Code Studies at SLSA
3. Wondering why there aren’t more good readings on code at Softwhere Studies (see my talk from that conference here.)
4. Offering a development of the first case study at Digital Humanities

In the last conference, we had quite the Twitter dust-up about whether CCS required one to be a programmer. After all that time, I’ve come to the opinion that learning about programming is essential to CCS work. (Of course, I think I always held that position — not that you could tell that from my answer. Here’s a reference to that discussion. )

Up next:
SLSA 09 & DAC 09: Offering yet another case study.

3. Writing
This will be a big writing year for Critical Code Studies. Among other projects, I plan to conduct a literature review on recent and past studies, building on the bibliography already in the ebr essay.

I also plan to develop a few of the case studies into full-length essays.

4. More Code to Study
I continue to find new extremely interesting examples of code. If you have source code that you think might make a good reading, please let me know.

Well, that’s just the start. But I do want to send the call out, an open invitation, to all those who are interested in (morbidly or otherwise) the project of critically interpreting computer source code. Come over to CCS and join the action. Or follow WRT and CCS for some exciting crossovers like this one or where Jeremy battles Wolverine.

Revving Up Your RSS Feeds with David Parry

Once again, Dr. David Parry has agreed to share his tech wisdom with Adjunct Advice. Rather than going for a broad sense of technology, this interview focuses exclusively on the effective and efficient use of RSS feeds. As this interview demonstrates, RSS is much easier to use and more powerful when you organize your feeds. In addition to this interview, I suggest you read David’s own article about RSS feeds here.

Dr. David Parry is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas in Dallas.

RSS feeds seem like a great tool, but I find myself never having enough time to read them. I suspect I have sloppy RSS habits. Can you offer any secrets to effective RSS feed management (just like file management)?

I think we should probably distinguish between two things here for the sake of understanding how I use feeds: one is the practice of collecting and organizing feeds; the second is the process of reading these feeds. Now clearly the first is always with an eye towards the later, that is I organize them in such a way as to facilitate reading practices, but for the sake of answering these questions it is probably useful to keep them separate.

I currently subscribe to about 230 feeds, plus or minus depending on what you count and don’t count, but regardless it is crucial for me to keep them organized in a way that allows me to later process them. I have two primary grouping strategies. The first is to group feeds by category, and I place similar feeds in a folder which distinguishes the content of those feeds. So, for example, I have a folder labeled “News.” In this folder I have the feed from CNN (headline), The New York Times (headline), BBC (world), Newsvine, OhmyNews, and the Dallas Morning News (I live in Dallas). This gets me all of the feeds that are “news” related grouped together. Below that is a folder titled “Politics;” here I subscribe to Crooks and Liars, ThinkProgress, The Daily Kos, Red State, and a few others. Notice the editorials are not here; that is, I also subscribe to Salon and the NYTimes Editorial section. These are in a third folder (more on that in a moment). I also have folders for “Sports,” “Apple (computer not fruit),” “Education,” “Education Tech,” . . . you get the idea.

Now I crudely sort them by their time importance. This is why news is at the top: everyday I want to check these feeds; I consider it my reading the morning paper. If I don’t get to the feeds on “Running” for a particular day no big deal the information will keep, but the news I want to make sure to pay attention to. These are also the feeds, generally speaking, which receive the highest number of updates. This is also the reason that news editorials are in a different folder: they often require a different attention span and are not as timely as the news, so if I don’t get to them on a given day I can look at them the next day. They also tend to be updated less frequently so they don’t build up.

This sorting technique allows me to read feeds from one given subject area at a time, rather than having one giant miscellaneous pile of information, and I can read what is relevant to what I am doing at that moment, or my frame of mind. Or, conversely if I need a break, I can read just the feeds that I subscribe to for entertainment, like Digg Videos or running Web sites.

There is also a folder for student blogs, so I can read them all at once, and a folder for blogs I am trying out. When I run across a blog that looks like I might be interested in, I subscribe and give it a “trial period,” deciding if I want to move it to a more permanent folder. This helps me to keep the signal to noise ratio in favor of signal.

One other thing you can do rather than subscribe to a host of sites that have information that interests you, is find one site that collects in one place all of the best posts from various sites. For example rather than subscribe to four or five tech sites, you can just subscribe to Techme, or instead of subscribing to ten different news organizations, just try Newsvine.

How do you use RSS feeds to help you in your professional development (in terms of publications and conferences)? General suggestions and/or strategies would be great!

One key way is what I already mentioned above, that is I group feeds into folders that have relevant professional content, and set aside time to read them in the same way I would for trade publications.

You can also subscribe to the feeds of many journals (often through Project Muse). This way when a new issue comes out you get a notice in your RSS reader. Again it helps to have all of these grouped in a folder for easy reading.

Also when I am interested in a particular subject, say I am in the research phase of a particular project, I will do a great deal of research and subscribe to a whole host of blogs that engage in the subject matter. (Right now I have one folder that is dedicated to Wikipedia.) This gives me a sense of what is currently going on. Incidentally, I tell students to adopt this strategy as well. If, for example, they are taking a class on politics and American history, subscribing to a few blogs (getting good ones can be the key here) will give them a deeper understanding of the field and help them to engage better with the material.

Particularly in my field, many of the calls for papers, conference information, grant announcements etc., are published online in a way you can subscribe to the feeds. For example, HASTAC and Grand Text Auto have this type of information for me, so reading these sites frequently can be crucial to keeping up with what is going on, and RSS is key to this regard.

One other note, you can push email through RSS. This becomes another way to keep up to date on relevant information and stay in control instead of getting overwhelmed. Let’s say, for example, you subscribe to the H-Net email lists in your relevant field. Send these to RSS rather than email. I find I am far more likely to deal with them in that context than when they clog up my inbox—I don’t want group emails/notifications in my inbox.

What do you believe is the most under-utilized aspect of RSS feeds?

Because of the format of the information you can get just about anything off RSS. Think of it this way, if there is something you want to be “updated” on there is probably a way to get this via RSS. Weather. Traffic Updates. Community Events. Real Estate. I have been contemplating buying a new car for awhile now, two models in particular, and so I subscribe to those particular feeds through Craigslist. Now anytime someone puts one of these two models on sale via Craigslist I get a notice in my RSS reader. This way I have a sense of what the market value is, and should a great deal come up I get a notice. It is like having your own personal classifieds. RSS is a wonderful tool for sorting information, again managing that signal to noise ratio.

One other really useful feature is using RSS to monitor comments. You can subscribe just to the comment section of a specific post. This way you are updated when someone adds to the conversation rather than having to frequently visit a site to see if someone else has added to the post.

How can low-tech people make the most of RSS feeds in a quick and easy way?

First, if you are still a bit confused about how RSS works, check out this video from the Common Craft Show. Next get a reader, for ease of use you might check out Google Reader (personally I prefer having a separate application for RSS feeds but Google Reader is a good start with an easy to use interface and tutorial videos). Next pick a few areas you constantly read about on the web. Let’s say you are a history professor who likes to read about sports and cooking, make three folders (history, sports, cooking) and subscribe to blogs in each area. Now instead of going to check those sites, go to your reader. You will be surprised how much this will change the way you interact with the network of information.

A few other things to keep in mind:

My feeds are fluid and I treat them this way. A couple of months ago when political unrest was occurring in Burma I added a bunch of feeds to help keep me informed on the situation. If a feed isn’t productive for you (you find yourself deleting the updates all the time) just unsubscribe. But also keep in mind you can subscribe to a feed for that once-a-month important update and delete the other 20 posts for the month.

Don’t stress about reading everything. I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 items I haven’t yet read in my feed reader. No big deal — I get to them when I get to them. When I come back from two or three days away I often wholesale delete certain folders. And in that regard you can really often just scan a whole folder to see if their is anything that interests you rather than carefully looking at each entry.

Finally, use the mark for later feature. This is different for each reader, mine is called flagging, I think Google Reader allows you to star posts. Either way, this feature lets you mark certain posts to go back to at a later time and date and handle in depth.

SOS Classroom

What would it mean to crowdsource education? Send all of LA’s students to New Delhi? (No, that would be outsourcing.) To crowdsource education is to take something very time consuming, like tagging free online educational sites buy viagra buy cialis buy cialis professional buy viagra professional, and to distribute the labor across the playbor factories of Internet users. Nana and Granddad can find sites along with the teacher of room 24 and the average person on the street.

That last term, playbor, came up in a heated IDC discussion that Trebor Scholtz began when he started the thread: The Internet as Playground and Factory.

While Trebor and the IDC-ers debated the various traps and advantages of siphening work from Internet keystrokes, my students and I were contemplating submitting a work order to the Factory/Playground.

The result is the SOS Classroom, the initial version of a site dedicated to serving those in search of free online resources for their K-8 students. Rather than create this list ourselves, we did what any Net-loving Web 2.0 class might do, we put out a call to create an Open Season for all free resources.

Donors had 3 ways to submit resources:

• email us
• Twitter with #sosclassroom
• bookmark the site with the tag “sosclassroom”

That initial tag brings the resources to our attention. Additional tags would help us differentiate subject, grade level, and even quality of the resource.

Of course, it’s bigger than just 1 website.

The secret of SOS Classroom is that anyone can access the tagged resources by checking either the Diigo or Delicious tagged pages for “sosclassroom.” In fact, what we’re really promoting is NOT a website full of resources, but a tagging practice with an eye toward sharing resources in a way that benefits teachers and students.

Imagine if resources neatly tagged with grade level and content.

Of course, they wouldn’t all be perfect resources, but the tag would serve to put them into the stream. Once there, any user could filter results based on their personal needs, popularity of the site, or some other system.

The students are testing the site at a K-5 summer camp run through Champions. So far, the campers seem quite pleased with the resources. They plan to tell their parents about them. Here are educational resources that kids want to go home and tell their parents about. One student wrote on his or her evaluation form (I heart sosclassroom). More than the buzzword of crowdsourcing, such a project of tagging resources according to educational resources could even go viral.

Trailer for Bot Colony

WRT: Bots attract people for lots of different reasons. Can you describe when and how you first became interested in developing conversation bots?

We are working on NLP since 2003, and initially the target application was different (specifying simulations in English).

It is a very large effort to do NLP, and the simulation market is a fairly small outlet for it. I started thinking about other applications, and one day I decided to let my right hemisphere take over. I have always enjoyed writing, and that’s how Bot Colony was born.

WRT: What bots (of the the Loebner world) would you say yours are most similar to? ALICE, JABBERWACKY, ELIZA, (I’m assuming Jabberwacky)

You should not assume anything. We have nothing to do with any of them, and you can add MyCyberTwin to the list.

I think people get tired very quickly of bots that don’t UNDERSTAND what they’re saying, and don’t show they make a real effort to understand. We do.

WRT: Have you looked at Stern and Mateas’ Façade.? If so, how would you compare your project (not in terms of NLP, but in terms of storytelling)?

I did. I still have to compare NLP first, because that holds the key to the experience. Their paper is quoted in my blog.

They do surface language processing, while we have deep-semantic understanding. When you do surface processing, you can get a read of a ‘mood’. Sentiment evaluation from surface language is an area of research, by the way. You can assess a mood, and you can shift the mood in the drama. When you understand language very precisely, you will be much more responsive to what the player is saying. We’re trying to solve a mystery (and have fun with the way bots think and express themselves), while Façade is trying to diffuse a marital conflict with talk which need not be to the point. Very different.

WRT: When I read your materials, I came across this unusual section about e-commerce? I don’t remember seeing discussions of that in “Half Life” ads.

The technology we have in the game is ‘the real thing’. You can make reservations in a real hotel talking to a bot reservation agent using the same software as in the game. You can buy stuff at Home Depot from a bot sales associate. You can order a meal, or a trip, from a bot. He can troubleshoot your cable TV problem. You’ll have to do some of these things in Bot Colony.

2) Story bots:
WRT: In another interview, you say, “Eventually, I reached the conclusion that the best way to put together the game and get a feel for it and for its atmosphere would be to write a book.”
How does Bot Colony serve as that book? What is a conversation agent book?

With the kind of work we do, I practically live in Bot Colony. The other day I was looking at an advert on the neighbouring exercise bike TV, and it was about breastfeeding. My first thought was that just normal ontological semantic features (like Animate, Material, etc.) would not be enough to specify the subject of ‘breastfeeding’, which MUST be a female of the species. It is clear that working on this screws you up in some ways. So a conversational agent book can be a very funny book, especially if you actually work on the conversational agent software and have direct experience with the kind of answers you get. The bots in Bot Colony speak Literal.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“Oh, I see”, the robot said. “You would like fresh mackerel, mushrooms, swordfish and Toro Tataki” she confirmed.

“Well, not in that order”, Suzuki said.

“That is in alphabetical order. In what order would you like them served, please ?” Takako inquired. Her avatar, displayed over the table, showed “puzzled”.

“In the same order as the gentleman in front of me” Suzuki said. “You see, our meals are identical.”

“Your orders are identical if I revert to the temporal order used by Mr. Harada to specify what he wanted to eat” Takako acknowledged. “We cannot guarantee that your meals will be necessarily identical, as there can be small variations in the weight, size, color, shape, arrangement on the plate, and cooking time for the Tataki.”

“I’ll take that risk ! ” Suzuki said. Harada was obviously enjoying himself.

“Risk is the possibility of something bad happening in the future” Takako said. “Can you please explain what negative event you referred to ?”

“Oh, forget it !” Suzuki said.

“Anything to drink ?” DO-112 Takako inquired. Her avatar had gone to neutral.

“What beer do you have ?” Harada asked.

“Asahi Super Dry , Sapporo Super Dry and Kirin”, Takako replied.

“I’ll have a Sapporo” Harada said.
“Make it two. That is, I’ll have a Sapporo as well” Suzuki said quickly. The avatar had changed minutely again after his first sentence. Takako turned gracefully and disappeared.

WRT: Ah, I see what you’re wrestling with here, context for instructions. Important business. It looks like the book was a way for you to explore the issues of AI. (Reminds me that WRT’s Christy Dena wrote a book with a bot tie-in as well). But it’s a very big leap from the closed, control world of fiction dialogue to the world of NLP, is it not? Is the book available somewhere?

I hope it will be, maybe next Christmas. I need to flesh out the characters more, and the atmosphere. The plot and dialogues are done. The problem that I have with publishing the book is that it will give away all the secrets of Bot Colony (but then, these end up on Internet very soon anyway). I hope people won’t use as a user manual: in any case, the game is non-linear, so the experience won’t be the same.

WRT: In what way is fiction writing a useful exercise for bot creators?

It’s a good way to brainstorm what they could become.

WRT: How do you execute a plot by means of a series of bots?

Asimov was a master of the genre, and his plots were driven by the laws of robotics. Plots are not that difficult, you put a bad guy in there, and the robots can be witnesses, unwilling partners, babes in the woods that are manipulated by a cunning spy, etc.

WRT: What are the challenges of writing a story through these automated conversation agents?

Well, you’re not writing ‘through’ the agents, but they abound in the book. The challenge is that you cannot have a lot of character development of a robot. The way a character copes with whatever fate (or the writer) throws at him is at the heart of the human interest and identification in a story, and it’s hard to do with robots. You do it with the other human characters.

WRT: Specifically in the game version of Bot Colony, how do you create a sense of story? How do you propel the plot?

The game is simulation-based, so the plot actually marches forward. If the player wants to engage, he has a chance to alter the outcome. If he doesn’t (let’s say she or he is just happy to sit in the bar and chat with the bot bartender about life), the plot will advance anyway, and it may be too late for the player to win. But the player can still gain experience points and have a good time

WRT: How do you sustain the drama? A Drama Manager?

If you have a good algorithm for a Drama Manager, I’d be interested to look at it. In Bot Colony, this is done the traditional way, though careful storytelling and plot turns. It’s important to have a good story.

WRT: Is there a tension between building a better (more high functioning bot) and telling a better story?

When I think about bots that work well in stories (even Marvin) — sometimes having less responsiveness helps them serve their dramatic function better. What’s your take?

It depends on the story and the role of the bots in the story. I’ve tried to make Bot Colony as realistic as possible (and the book is very carefully researched). At some point in the future, we could probably program the bots of Bot Colony to respond the way they do in the book. I don’t have dumb bots and smart bots, they will probably have the same version of the Human Interface module. One principle in the book is that non-androids (and any bot in Bot Colony) will display the same emotion avatar, to present a familiar and uniform to humans, with the same visible quasi-emotions.

WRT: Clarification: Are you saying the bots will have the same emotion avatar as those used by players/interactors? Or are there non-bot NPCs?

It’s a first person game, so the player is not represented through graphics. We may want the player to provide a description of himself, since he may ask a bot to describe him (and then the bot will describe the player in the same way the player described himself).

All the bots have emotion/cognitive avatars, that cycle through various states:
- understood
- did not understand, puzzled
- looking for information
- found answer, happy
- did not find answer, unhappy (I’ve attached an example of that, Pose F)
- understood compliment, content
- understood critique, sad
and so on. It lets the player know how he feels at any point in the dialogue.

Sample Conversation in Bot Colony

WRT: It sounds like your bots will be more conversational functionaries than characters, per se. They have roles in the plot similar to those interviewed by the cops in “Dragnet” and “Law and Order” or they follow commands. Is that correct?

Most of them, yes. Some of them steal and commit crimes, so they are more then conversational functionaries. They become fugitives.

WRT: But when I read your novel excerpt, I sense you give the bots additional layers of personality to serve the scene. When the bot appears to misunderstand “Make that two” the speaker makes a very accommodating and graceful gesture by re-articulating, sparing the robotic servant an awkward moment. That novelistic interaction is full of a sense of humanity, empathy, which makes it an enjoyable moment. In the game, I can imagine clarification could potentially feel more like trying different buttons on an interface, trying to get a program to compile, or software to do what we want. How do you try to make the interactor want to help the bot understand? Or is it all about getting more info out of a particular bot or triggering some reaction to achieve the next game goal? (Do you see where I’m headed here?)

Not exactly, unfortunately. Clarification in the game is a hugely important issue. There will be a AAAI workshop on Practical Dialogue Systems in Pasadena later this year, and one of the subjects is robustness of dialogue systems. That’s where the money is: what do you do when the machine does not understand the human. I think handling this well is the biggest challenge in Bot Colony. The game can’t say say “I don’t know” too many times. But we cannot invent answers like chatbots, because the moment we do that, we lose credibility. We will work with the player to understand him, and never pretend we do if we don’t.

WRT: You describe your bots:
“Kiosk robots that welcome you at the airport or at the hotel, android robots that work in the restaurant or in the bar and serve you food or drink, manufacturing robots, diving robots, Mech-soldiers, mining robots, personal trainer robots, horti-robots, camera-bots, and so on.”
Have you given any thought to the race, gender, or sexuality of your bots?

Sure, our bots have sex. Takako in the segment quoted above is a female bot. This allows us to sexually stereotype them. Now, I wouldn’t want to pass up on that, would I ?

WRT: Okay, but just to follow up: Have you given any thought to the race/ethnicity, class, or sexuality of the bots? Looks like you’ve got a strong sense of class here. Is there, for example, more than one kind of English used in the game? Or is it all standard English? Are there any hierarchies of bots? Do the avatars have features that suggest one race or another?

I hope that in the future we’ll have bots with different personalities. This is an excerpt from the Game Design Document:

- Aggressive, domineering Bot. He is a policeman. That’s the way you do this, and that’s it. Bot Police.

- Ghetto Bot (What’cha doin’ der, man ? Whatcha’ wan’ man ?) Is this for real, man ?. He works at the pawnbroker in Old Nakagawa.

- Easy going, unspecific bot, peace and flower, yoga, Samsara, etc. He could be yoga instructor at Sports Center.

- A very cerebral, nit-picking, verbatim, nerdish bot, with a penchant for semantics. He is extremely argumentative, and likes to get into arguments. “No, but….” Is his favorite opening. He is at Bot School.

- A religious Bot, that quotes the scriptures all the time. He is a moralist, God fearing, end of the world will come, would require putting in citations from the Bible/ Buddha’s teachings, etc. “God bless !” . He loiters near the temple.

- A salesman bot, super friendly, tuhas lecker, always praises the player, asks about latest trip player took, tells him he’s so good, then tries to sell him something ! General Store.

- A child-like naïve bot, who is very trusting. He asks ‘Why ?” all the time, and makes child like associations. Lost in the park.

- A bad boy, delinquent bot. He could be a bit Mafia-style, hates rules. He talks like a fella in New York ? Mentions his cousin Louie, hints to a closed society, to the boss. “We’ll take care of that.” Harbour.

- A polite, diplomatic, Data-style bot, who is slightly formal, a bit professorial. At the hotel.

- A ‘country’ bot, who uses popular analogies whenever he has a chance. He speaks in a juicy way, and has lots of popular wisdom. He is also a joker ! Bar.

- A touch-feely bot that talks about feelings and emotions all the time. Interested in shrinks, finding inner child. Restaurant bot.

- A bot into sports, really shallow. He keeps quoting sports records, or cars and motorcycles. He’s at the Sports Center, but Mechanic could do.

- A negative, complainer Bot. He complains and finds bad things in everything. He criticizes everything. Mine.

- Arrogant, show-off bot. Mechanic ?

- A bureaucrat, by the book bot. Follow rules while diving, like a German dive instructor. Dive Center.

III. Rude Behavior:

WRT: Wow, that’s quite a cast. So within this storyworld, how does the game deal with bad behavior - people asking the bots if they have Prince Albert in a can?

Detect a deviation from normative World Knowledge which would expect Prince Albert to live in a palace.

WRT: Sexual input, etc.?

Due to popular interest in the topic, we’ll probably have to have a rule saying robots don’t do sex. I don’t want to disappoint certain players, though…:-)
About rude behaviour, it’s enough to show you understand it, but not engage in it (differently from the old Sega Seaman).

WRT: how do you cue or motivate good behavior?

There’s no ‘good’ behaviour. Good behaviour is speaking or typing super clear English, so you can get through to a bot and advance your mission. That’s why there’s huge educational potential - not because we wanted to build an educational game, but because you have to make yourself understood.

For more on Bot Colony, see these interviews in Game Set Watch and Gamasutra.