What I bought, was a game; what I found was a authorware in a game. “The Movies” by Lionhead Studios falls into the grey area between authorware and video game. Players of the game can use it to make and share content. What can we as electronic authors make of this new genre?

This April 22, CHI 2006 hosted the second annual “Abuse” workshop on interaction gone bad. Last year, the theme was “The Darker Side of Human-Computer Interaction.” This year’s theme: “Misuse and Abuse of Interactive Technologies.” The first workshop was chaired by Antonella de Angeli, Sheryl Brahnam, and Peter Wallis, and they were joined in organizing […]

Many readers of this blog would be familiar with the poem generator: Gnoetry. It is, basically, a computer program with which a human collaborates to create new poems out of a pool of texts. It is a form of constrained writing and an experiment in human-computer collaboration. It has been described and labeled in many ways, such as […]

The terms for discussing chatbots are starting to solidify on this site, thanks to the work of Jeremy and Christy. I wanted to take some time to open up the discussion to more people and to try to formalize some of our basic terms, especially as I find myself getting to the point in my writing where I need to define them. The definitions which follow build upon a number of important posts on this site, most notably: Bots, Demons & Dolls. (These definitions represent my current use of these terms and do not reflect official WRT standards).

Conversation Agents: The broad class of agent programs written to simulate conversation through symbolic exchange.

Chatbot: A type of conversation agent that centers on keyword matching often in combination with other strategies; Conversational Reflex Agents (as defined in Russell and Norvig 41); Chat robot. Chat relates to “chat mode” in the Loebner Prize and Internet conversations, known as “chat.”

WRT is searching for films that include chatbots or talking computers beyond the usual 2001 et al.

There are several lists of movies featuring robots or replicants, ala Blade Runner, but this list will be more oriented towards simple-reflex agents without physical bodies. Of course, we may also have to exclude movies with talking computer interfaces (ala Star Trek) in order to keep the list under control. Perhaps a better idea would be films that have a prominent character that is a chatbot–or perhaps where the computer-generated speech is central.

One questionable title is the 2001 release s1m0ne, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. The question remains, is this film about a chatbot or just a 3-D CGI puppet?