Grand Text Auto

WWW @ 10 is an “interdisciplinary conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade.” WWW @ 10 abstracts are due April 15th. Scheduled speakers include Ted Nelson and Cory Doctorow — Jill and I are on the Program Committee (so send in stuff we’ll like!).

I had a great time at the GDC last week. The positive buzz around Façade led me to consider once again the issue of whether the phrase “game research” makes sense. To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn’t believe in “game research”. You’re either working on a shippable product, or you’re bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can’t be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will? To put a finer point on it, how do I fund the next Façade?

I just came across The Cultural Gutter, “updated Thursday at noon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. The geeky triumvirate of science-fiction, comics and videogames forms the core… they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms.”

Past articles I found interesting include “Is It Possible To Have Too Much Fun?“, “Professor Zork“, “The Romance of Indie Games” and “Too Damn Talky“.

GameCritics.com’s “Caught in the Web” column reviews Gonzalo Frasca’s Kabul Kaboom!, Sept 12 and Gonzalo and Ian Bogost’s Howard Dean for Iowa Game. And Ian is this month’s Ivory Tower columnist with an essay titled “The Muse of the Video Game,” about academia-industry collaboration and why game developers should be as familiar with the humanities as they are with pixel shaders.

I’m at 040404 today, a “Colloquium on New Media and the Unfolding of New Structures in Old Spaces” at UC Berkeley.

Upcoming talks include: Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley — Peer Pressure: Bodygames and Collective Telepresence; Warren Sack and Michael Dale, UC Santa Cruz — Drawing by Derive; and Jane McGonigal — Avant-Game: Flexible Structures through Site-specific Play.

More to come in the “extended” version of this entry.

Those GTxA readers in New York City should consider attending the seminar:

Playdate #1: War Games and Game Wars
Friday 9th April 1-3pm Wolff Conference Room
The New School 65 5th avenue (at 14th st)
Free. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Ed Halter will present War Games: Digital Gaming and Military Culture, and Alex Galloway will present Social Realism in Gaming. Perhaps someone who attends the talks can post something about them here.

Via Rhizome.

Continue reading for more detail about the two talks.

ALT+CTRL is a festival of independent and alternative games coming this fall from the Cal-(IT)² Game Culture & Technology Lab and the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine. The deadline for submissions is June 1, so there’s a bit of time yet. It’s also possible to become a sponsor of the event, if you’re of the right sort of profile. The announcement says:

What an interactive fiction news day! Dan Shiovitz has announced a new interactive fiction development system that is really really easy to use and produces code with a very small footprint – for instance, one byte long. Check out Snap.

In the category of “this is not an April Fools joke”, Quake has been ported to the Inform interactive fiction language. As the IF Quake page describes it:

In IF Quake, you walk through the exact same levels you do in the graphical version of the game, only instead of circle-strafing and firing at your enemies, you type commands like “ATTACK GRUNT WITH SHOTGUN”.

Thanks to Slashdot for announcing this.

Rob Wittig and friends have a new blog — no foolin’!

Rob and I briefly crossed paths by way of Scott’s e-lit dinners in Chicago, before Rob moved to Duluth where he now teaches at the University of Minnesota. But I believe he and Scott and Nick and Noah go way back.

I’ll add robwit.net to our blogroll.