• Urban Drift • m-Learning with apps • Dennis Dollens

Graphic Analysis: PacMan attributes & forms

Looking to analyze some of PacMan’s features, attributes, space, and structure I have begun to create an icon-based shape grammar in order to have a graphic set of communication and analytical tools to apply some of PacMan’s strategy to the idea of a botanic garden game/guide. The first 17 icons are intended as part of a survey that may be added to with other games (Spore, for example) and used to cross analyze game structure (they could also be used to create generative algorithms but that is beyond my scripting ability). As part of an overall analysis the icons, along with the previous post’s site images (30 Jan), begin to present research information that can be interpreted from one source (PacMan) and projected to another (the garden) for a resulting third project (a game/guide in this case).

If you have ideas to expand the shape grammar, please join in (I’ll draw them or you can if you like).

Barcelona Botanic Garden's fractal pathways & earth cuts

PacMan & Barcelona Botanic Garden

I’ve been attempting to, metaphorically, transfer some of the game play (and types of play) that takes place in PacMan onto a physical site, the Barcelona Botanic Garden. Since the site’s plan is triangulated based on a fractal reading of the topography it has some of the qualities of a maze that creates the potential of circling back on movements in or through it — more complex, but with relationships akin to PacMan. Before getting to deeply involved in a design project, I have begun to do a few analytical studies and graphic comparisons between the garden site and the game interface. I live in Barcelona between three and six months per year and very often visit the garden weekly for work with plant-based generation for design. But I have never analyzed the garden in terms of a game. The pictures attached were take on Saturday 28 January 2011 and were chosen as typical views of sight lines, obscured areas, and potential spaces for individuals and groups to move over the physical playing field. More importantly these same features are considered for their ability to transfer to a digital screen and plan-view of the garden in order to develop game and digital space relating to physical space and then to build biological/botanic game action onto/into the playing field. (If this analogy continues, I will link the architect, Carlos Ferrater’s, original studies and drawings to establish a segment of the game involving fractal generation — including the beautiful way he incises the hillsides with triangular forms continuing the triangulated matrix in 3D).

The next step, begun today is to analyze PacMan in terms of action, reward, movement, penalty. I am doing this, in the beginning, by drawing a shape grammar that attempts to document, in icon form, the attributes, actions, and spaces embedded in PacMan.

Test video of three early eTrees in a sequence of folding growth as the simulated trees are transformed into the first segments of a structural, interlocking building frame (see post below: First Digital Growths — 13 Jan). Part of the reason the branches look so artificial is that they have been programmed without environmental variation that would naturally occur with developmental advantages from sunlight, shaping from wind, nutrition, etc.; this model has been simulated only for symmetrical growth, branch number, and curvature. Embedded in the current model though, are attributes such as branching sequences, secondary branching, leafing, and flowering (not activated yet) phototropism, and basic proportion. More attributes will follow as the schematic structures is further developed.

I’m thinking of this as one of many smooth software growths inhabiting digital screen space with occupancy defined by some of Deleuze & Guattari’s loose criteria of smooth/striated. Do you agree with the analogy potential? A final point is that this structure is composed to two forms (or two elements — eTree trunk & eTree branch — in its shape grammar) each programmed with slightly differing individual variation.

AR BioTower Test #1 24 Jan 11

AR BioTower Test #2 24 Jan 11

I think this is interesting and useful for design e-learning, as well as in a transliteracy sense — students in remote locations may, with free software (SketchUp and AR-Media), present 3D models anywhere. This digital model, generated from plant algorithms in Xfrog, drawn in Rhino and exported to SketchUp & AR-Media now must move toward color and materials. Problem is for SketchUp the files are gigantic (that’s why the B&W testing). Full renderings were posted on 21 & 22 November 2010 and can be found a few pages back.

The idea that a kind of life exists in art and architectural form has repercussions for generative design using natural attributes, possible fusions of hybrid bacteria and mechanics, as well as synthesized life as part of design production. Additionally, philosophical and critical debate has, in developing theories of embedded cognition, created a different link, but one implicating form (thus shape grammars) as a potential carrier of lifelike qualities. While much has been made of Richard Dawkins’s articulation of memes as infectious, especially by Susan Blackmore’s Meme Machine, the idea for life in physical forms tracks back much further. As part of the research for this project I am going over critical and theoretical views to support ideas that learning design is enhanced with knowledge of natural, philosophical, and theoretical positions linking form and design with living systems. As part of the research I’m assembling data in the form of quotes that may or may not appear in the work, but that set inflections and influences for the research. Here are some idea-generating quotes from Henri Focillon’s 1992; 1934. The Life of Forms in Art (La vie des formes). Cambridge. Zone Books.

“Is this prodigy [work of art] merely a simple phenomenon of cultural activity in a chapter of general history? Or is it something added to our universe — an entirely new universe, with its own laws, materials, and development, with its own physics, chemistry, and biology, with its own engendering of a separate humanity?” P.32.

“Form inhabits the shortest wavelengths, no less than those of the lowest frequency. Organic life designs spirals, orbs, meanders, and stars, and if I wish to study this life, I must have recourse to form and to number. But the instant these shapes invade the space and the materials specific to art, they acquire an entirely new value and give rise to entirely new systems.” P.34.

“We are entirely justified in our assumption that such forms constitute and order of existence and that this order has the motion and the breath of life. Plastic forms are subjected to the principle of metamorphoses . . . “ P. 41.

“Models of nature may themselves be regarded as the stem and support of metamorphoses.” P.42. [Link here and above with Goethe, science, and his coining of metamorphoses — then tie into computation and the invention of simulated nature via Lindenmayer recursive maths for L-Systems.]

“The life of forms has absolutely no aim other than itself and its own renewal.” P.44. [Could bridge form with evolution, Darwin, survival.]

“But form is primarily a mobile life in a changing world. Its metamorphoses endlessly begin anew, and it is by the principle of style that they are above all coordinated and stabilized.” P.44.

“They [forms] mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind. But a definite style is not merely a state in the life of forms, nor is it that life itself: it is a homogeneous, coherent, formal environment, in the midst of which man acts and breaths.” P.60. [“Movements of the mind” gives an opportunity to associate with embedded cognition.]

Reading Greenfield reinforced some of the points I was impressed with from Gee. Now, having had PacMan as my traveling companion on a long flight and playing it/him again in public, I come back to the emersion of self I experienced and noted in the last post. With some reflective time since that post, and some additional playing and discovery, I’m beginning to think of my time spent in PacMan as time spent in an alternative space. Clearly this is space within space for me. I’m a reader/player of a game sitting in an airplane or café, a very social situation where I am usually a careful observer, but find myself transposed into game dimensions (a new perspective of ghost in the shell?). I like this. But more, I think it is a tool to redeploy, understand and use with students, in terms of ways of being, ways of observing.

While PacMan is 2D, its implication touch spatial movements; most notably through the use of a maze with the especially interesting two (left/Right) seemingly unbounded corridors that allow game play to move off the screen. This in itself is somewhat amazing (compared to RL)— a game continuing unseen in unknown space — when PacMan chases one of the monsters out of the game’s environment, out of the frame and down one of the corridors, they remerge on the other side. This, if you think about it, and go with the metaphor of the maze, is unheard of — playing in non-space — an ontological position I think philosophers might address and something that, in terms of e-learning for design could be tooled to teach aspects of negative space as part of composition and life, as it meets Cartesian rules embedded in X, Y, Z spatial coordinates. Further, PacMan has implications for 3D extensions that we could expect to see in experimental architecture, except for the most part we don’t.

I don’t see this as trivial marginalia. In this little example, digital play is going on off screen (off world) into uncontrollable, unknown space; the player is set in limbo for microseconds. If we follow Gee that games are embedded with social and physical lessons, we have here a consequence of digital gaming touching on negative space, folding itself (through its code) and emerging back into positive space. This mini-phenomenological experience counters the two dimensionality of the game, inserts a pause in the game being, suggesting the characters have left the arena. Teaching negative space is difficult, this little PacMan example thus has a potential contribution for understanding, even mimicking, in generative space.

Previous PacMan for 15 January (on the MScEL Blog)
Recently I’ve been stopping in cafes to do some of my homework. First just playing PacMan and then reading Gee’s book and playing. I’m mentioning this because I’ve noticed that while I frequently read in public, I have never played games in a social setting before. To my surprise, my concentration is far deeper in PacMan than in Gee (which I like and am interested in) — to the point I forget where I am — this is the opposite of what I was expecting. I figured I would be self-conscious playing in a crowd. But no, it disappears, and disappears far more than when I’m concentrating on a page. Perhaps, in reading complexity and fragility of subject matter and, for example in Gee, learning about learning in games, places more fragile, complex thinking in the way of disruption by folks and conversations around me. Thinking of these differences pointing to paths for learning has interested me — not only for learning but as ways of being in urban, social space. Are there types of information — let’s say fragile/strong informations — that engage differently and could thus be used in e-learning and mobile, m-learning situations.

Not a game; could learning it be gamelike?

As I’m reading Gee and getting excited about his use of “Semiotic Domains,” embedded information (similar to embedded cognition, no?), and pattern (in design pattern language via Christopher Alexander & Chomsky) and I’m playing PacMan anywhere in the city, I’m thinking why not consider technically difficult software (in this jpeg, Xfrog, a plant simulator) as related to the same structure of learning as games?

When I was surveying the game-based learning course I was hoping it would cross-pollinate with development here for INC: Generative Architecture, as well as with ideas for using mobile phones. Even at this early date, I’m finding that IDGBL has good potential for influencing design e-learning. One of the class textbooks, “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” by James Paul Gee, lays out various points for considering computer games as learning devices with high levels of embedded learning (well related to Andy Clark’s theories of embedded cognition). I think Gee’s category of “Semiotic Domains” crosses very easily with digital production and shape grammars. Gee states, “By a semiotic domain I mean any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meaning.” He later discusses pattern, especially in relation to patter of learning. Interesting and useful when remembering K. Hayles frequent use of pattern as a category of information — while Hayles more clearly has patterns of information (as in bits and bytes) and Gee has patters of cognitive association and progression, I think they mutually strengthen thinking about pattern across a process and a product that design entails. I think too, Gee’s semiotic domains can be retrospectively filtered through ideas of transliteracies as we touched on a few months ago in relation to Sue Thomas’s work.

As I tried to develop in IDEL’s final involving TweetDeck and the ability of mobile software to influence the use of screen as class space, and smooth screen spaces as receptive to creativity, playing mobile games is unexpectedly pushing me a bit to mine Gee for ideas that translate across play to generative design. To spend a little effort comparing game play to generative software play — with the hope that the mechanics and psychology of game play also articulates digital design in a way useful for plugging in shape grammars as part of the pattern production and useful as a module in a design e-learning pedagogy.

These studies were made before this segment of the project was begun (in July and August 2010) — but the sketches were made in anticipation of illustrating recursive and related shapes that reduce down to two or three primary “seed” shapes and relate to the previous shape grammar napkin sketch. I use the shapes to draw schematic tower forms that are then, informally used as feedback to digital processes and ideas for linking branches, leaves, seeds, and seedpods.

While these drawings are pen, ink, and watercolors and clearly made by hand, I see them as part of the overall process of biodigital production — the sketch books allow me to work in cafes, parks, and at the beach. I always have a mobile phone with me but as of yet, design apps are not up to generative design at this level. Just as well, I like the connection to paper and pens.

Sketches for manipulating shape grammars