Mateas, for his part, had dreamed since childhood of building artificial humans.
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“I had some idea how to do it,” Stern says. Entering this world, you would feel as if you had been thrust into the midst of a soap opera or a reality-TV show. It might engineer dramatic situations, complete with revelations and reversals. It might contain artificial people you could converse with, get to know, and love or hate. “Interactive drama,” the concept is called. In certain rarefied circles of AI academia and video-game design, people sometimes theorize about a computer program that would combine the graphical realism of a modern video game with the emotional impact of great art. It didn’t take long for them to recognize each other as kindred spirits. It was probably inevitable that Stern, presenting his intelligent(ish) virtual pets, would run into Mateas, presenting his intelligent(ish) robot plant. Not long after Petz debuted, Stern began attending some of the same conferences on artificial intelligence that Mateas haunted. He became interested in bigger things, like creating a new art form. It dawned on him that he wanted to work with adult characters in lifelike relationships. As Stern worked on making the virtual creatures emotionally appealing and realistic to play with, he began giving them artificial minds: goals, personalities, memories. First came Dogz, in 1995, then Catz, and eventually Babyz, all adorable animated creatures that lived on your computer’s hard drive. They were called Petz, and for a while they were a hit in the video-game industry. Meanwhile, Andrew Stern, a programmer and designer at a now-defunct video-game studio, was building artificially intelligent(ish) virtual pets. Not long after building Office Plant #1, however, Mateas set it aside. Naturally, it also whistled, sang, moaned, and complained. Office Plant #1, as the creation was called, grew and shrank and blossomed and hibernated and waved its piano-wire fronds as it “fed” off e-mail traffic.
This was in 1998, when Mateas was a doctoral student with some avant-garde ideas. Michael Mateas is the sort of person who once built an artificially intelligent(ish) robot houseplant that monitored your e-mail and changed shape to reflect the mood of what it read-if that sort of person can be said to be a sort.
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