Zoekresultaten

From images to stories: exploring player-driven narratives in games.

This paper presents a method for generating player-driven narratives from visual inputs by exploring the visual analysis capabilities of multimodal large language models. By employing Bartle’s taxonomy of player types—Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers—our method creates stories that are tailored to different player characteristics. We conducted a fourfold experiment using a set of images extracted from a well-known game, generating distinct narratives for each player type that are aligned with the visual elements of the input images and specific player motivations. By adjusting narrative elements to emphasize achievement for Achievers, exploration for Explorers, social connections for Socializers, and competition for Killers, our system produced stories that adhere to established narratology principles while resonating with the characteristics of each player type. This approach can serve as a helping tool for game designers, offering new insights into how players might engage with game worlds through personalized image-driven narratives.

Monuments and Mental Maps

In 1960 Kevin Lynch analysed the ‘city-image’ in The Image of the City; seven years later American artist Robert Smithson surveyed the suburb of Passaic in ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’. Both approaches use narrativity as an instrument to connect urban space with the lived experience of its users. Where Kevin Lynch analyzes the visual perception and mental representation (‘imageability’) of the postwar American metropolis, Robert Smithson explores the temporality of its peripheral terrain vague. Where Kevin Lynch frames his inquiry within then-current conventions of perception and cognition, Robert Smithson rejects these conventions precisely because they do no justice to his experience of the suburb and offer him no method to analyze or describe it. In his analysis, there is no coherent map of the territory, no mental representation to consult. How does Smithson’s practice relate to the paradigm of ‘imageability’? What is being narrated, and how does narrativity operate? By juxtaposing the two approaches this text reflects on some ideas and issues that surround a narrative analysis of urban landscape.

Has the tweet become a meme?

The days where memes were plain image macros (an image that consists out of an imagecombined with text) are long behind us. New meme formats, some more obscure than others,are popping up like weeds. Memetic logics are also moving beyond the image into ‘the realworld’ (whatever that may be), but that’s a story for another time.In January 2022, when I was a participant in the Digital Methods Winter School of theUniversity of Amsterdam, my teammates and I came to an interesting conclusion. Inspired bythe forthcoming paper by Richard Rogers and Giulia Giorgi, called ‘What is a Meme TechnicallySpeaking’, we analyzed various meme collections taken from different software environments.1After a close reading of the dominant types of images, their ontology and epistemology, one ofthe most interesting findings, at least for me, was that our meme datasets were full of tweetscreenshots – which felt rather counterintuitive at first. However, once I started thinking aboutit, I realized that I have been noticing meme admins posting tweet screenshots on their pagesfor months now. One of my meme muses even told me that she did not know what her memepage has become, seeing all the tweets and other content she has been sharing lately. It hadme wondering. When leaving the technical and data driven context aside for a minute, has thetweet in its screenshot form become a viral image? Has the tweet become an actualmeme?

Automatic Tagging Suggestion for Database Enrichment

The huge number of images shared on the Web makes effective cataloguing methods for efficient storage and retrieval procedures specifically tailored on the end-user needs a very demanding and crucial issue. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) for image tagging with a focus on the needs of database expansion for a news broadcasting company. First, we determine the feasibility of using AIA in such a context with the aim of minimizing an extensive retraining whenever a new tag needs to be incorporated in the tag set population. Then, an image annotation tool integrating a Convolutional Neural Network model (AlexNet) for feature extraction and a K-Nearest-Neighbours classifier for tag assignment to images is introduced and tested. The obtained performances are very promising addressing the proposed approach as valuable to tackle the problem of image tagging in the framework of a broadcasting company, whilst not yet optimal for integration in the business process.

Images

Some Native Peoples didn 't want to be photographed because they believed that with every copy of their image, a part of their souls would disappear.By making a copy of an aspect of my existence - a photo, a film, a sound recording, or even a text - my existence goes beyond the immediate here and now. The copy will lead a life of its own. In addition there are young people who process a photo of themselves by smart algorithms in an image-processing app and take this to the plastic surgeon with a request to be operated on this image. Thus we are either lived by producing soulless images, or we strive to become an image of an image. All those soulless images ruin your here and now. Only now I understand that those Native Peoples were right!

Bruce Sterling on the Art of Text-to-Image Generative AI