Living Ink Teaches Computers how Kids Draw

Written by Margaret Johnson and Ian Lurie

When we started writing this article it turned into a dry, biographical piece: “Developers Thomas Steinke and Duncan knew they faced a challenge…” blah blah blah.That can’t do Sabi Games’ Living Ink technology justice. Instead, let’s put it this way: If SkyNet becomes self-aware, blame Living Ink. ‘Cause we’ve never seen a computer come this close to the kind of contextual thinking normally reserved for us hairless apes. Living Ink drives Sabi Games’ first drawing – meets – reading game, ItzaBitza. In it, children follow instructions written on the screen. They draw shapes, like this:

Then the game asks questions like “Where’s the door?”, and you answer. That’s all well and good, but what happens if, instead of a house, you draw a banana? “Can you draw a house” OK, we’re not artists – all the better from our perspective – but it’s vaguely banana-shaped.

“Where’s the door?” we draw our best imitation of a door, which ain’t much:

And the game immediately turns our door into a door, and our windows into windows, complete with hinges:

Waitaminute. How the heck did this drawing game know we meant to make a house out of a fruit? And a floppy fruit, at that? That’s the magic of Living Ink. The development team at Sabi Games has cooked up a game engine that actually interprets what you draw in context. So, if the game asks for a house, and you draw a shoe, the game assumes it’s a shoe-shaped house. Many have spent hours trying to fool the game by making the squirrel hole in the wrong part of a tree, or make the wrong part of my drawing turn into the sun. The drawing game even interpreted our sad, sad drawing of a tree, putting apples in the right place:

No joy. Living Ink matched every form of artistic insanity we could come up with. Other games are pretty clever. Crayon Physics is an amazing drawing game, and we’ve put in our share of time making stuff fall, roll, bump and bounce in its unique 2D universe. But it doesn’t actually know that a car is a car. It just knows that the box you drew is on top of two round things, and therefore rolls.

Living Ink goes one better, by actually understanding that a tree drawn with our total lack of artistic ability is nevertheless a tree, and not a toothpick that sneezed too hard!

Ian watched his daughter (six years old) playing ItzaBitza. She’s a good reader but gets bored quickly and often drifts off into some alternate universe reserved for six-year-old girls and their imaginary dogs (named Truffles, in this case). This game keeps her engaged and learning in ways Ian’s never seen before. The game asks for a house. Maybe she draws a house. Maybe she draws a big round thing instead. Then it asks for a door, and she draws a door, which may or may not be door-shaped. But both my daughter and the game ‘get it’ – the real goal is to understand what’s being asked of you, not to draw a house the way 99999 others have drawn it.

In that way, Living Ink and ItzaBitza go where our grammar school teachers never could, by measuring kids’ success not by their ability to faithfully reproduce a typical, generic house, but instead by their ability to interpret direction and think for themselves.

Duncan, Sabi’s Creative Director and Living Ink’s designer, said it best when Ian spoke with him about it: “We experimented with versions where the child could just draw anything and leave it be, but it wasn’t compelling. Children need some goals and rules, but also an opportunity to push back at them.”

This ‘soft’ intelligence means any drawing game driven by Living Ink is doubly compelling. Long after most reading games drive kids away, a Living Ink game keeps their attention. Kids can stretch the rules of the game to the utmost, using their imagination to be silly, creative or both.

If they can get us to stop playing, anyway.