Grand Text Auto

Andrew Stern, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas, and Scott Rettberg raise a toast to Nick Montfort while onboard the ISEA Silja Opera “Interfacing Sound” Cruise in Mariehamn Harbor, Finland. Analysis of said event to follow, later.

Brendan Desilets points to the new home of his valuable and long-standing site on interactive fiction and pedagogy, Teaching and Learning with IF. He writes on that site that he has, “Since 1985 … introduced about five hundred kids, aged eleven through fourteen, to interactive fiction. Most of them like it. In fact, it is the most popular form of literature with most.” Desilets, who teaches middle school in Massachusetts, is author of the article “Interactive Fiction vs. the Pause That Distresses: How Computer-Based Literature Interrupts the Reading Process Without Stopping the Fun.” Among the many resources on his site are suggestions for teachers about how they can help students write IF; an easy-to-run Windows IF kit for teachers, along with instructions on how to do further downloading; and a study showing significant improvement in students’ planning of their writing after interaction with IF.

Fight Club, the video game, is coming from Vivendi for the major platforms. There’s a video trailer promoting the game already online, and the online forums about it are already filling up with comments to the tune of “this is a travesty!” “it’s just supposed to be a game, you’re not supposed to think about it” and “hey, exactly the sort of mindless consumer product that Fight Club is all about.” Via Elastico.

While I plan to do a bit more updating of the notes from day 1 and day 2 (using material I wrote up at the conference), I’ll be making separate posts about the sessions in which I spoke. (As you might imagine, I didn’t take too many notes during these.) I’m writing this from Helsinki, where I’ve found an open wireless connection that will let me web surf, but not email (unfortunately). I’m here for ISEA 2004 — as are Michael, Andrew, and Scott. Hopefully we’ll continue to find access and do some posting about this conference as well.

Back to Hypertext, on Wednesday I was part of the hypertext readings. These kicked off with Rob Kendall, who did a reading/divination with a new (or maybe still in-process) piece called Soothcircuits. His two questions from the audience were “Which of the next sessions should I attend?” and “Is there a path to peace?” — both of which he handled with aplomb. Soothcircuits is on the web somewhere, for those who want to do their own “readings,” but I haven’t been able to find the URL. (If someone has it, could they post it in the comments?)

After mention of the game on ifMUD, I finally got around to playing “The Anti-Bush Video Game,” a.k.a. “Bushgame,” by Starvingeyes. Michael Erard aptly characterized it in The New York Times as mixing “gruesome humor and a grab bag of pop-culture references with a detailed (if pedantic) presentation on tax issues and budget policy.” (This article also discussed Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost’s work; it isn’t still online, but discussion of it can be found at Ludology.org and Water Cooler Games.) The game has a nice look to it and works pretty smoothly. I can’t say it was an enjoyable play experience for me, though, with repetitive, one-track platform action and cut scenes that make the experience about as exciting as the bastard child of Math Blaster and infomercials. But there’s certainly some originality in the dogged storyline of this Flash-based piece. I didn’t guess from the article just how utterly outrageous the game is — as if it were crafted not just to attract attention but to attract lawsuits — so I’ve included a spoiler-filled list of some of the details in the next segment of the post.

At the beginning of the week I finished the report “Discovering Communities through Information Structure and Dynamics,” (pdf) a review of some recent research that provides insight into how the existence of, and structure of, computer-mediated communications can be used to learn about online communities. I gave a presentation on this topic on Monday, finishing my last preliminary exam. With my other requirements done, I now have only my dissertation to complete — of course, I need to begin it first, but if I can manage two years of focused research work, that could earn me a Ph.D.

I presented this morning, and so couldn’t blog — but here’s a start at the afternoon. There will be more filling in, of both pages, I hope, before I fly to Helsinki tomorrow.

“Saving Private Hypertext” by Marshall and Golovchinsky. (Obviously, related to Acid-Free Bits and the ELO PAD project.) Starts with an image of the contents of Uncle Buddy’s — she can’t read the floppies, or even play the audio tapes, so all she can do is read the documentation. Then she saw that the web version of Forward Anywhere had a problem. She went to look at it, had a hard time reading her own code, and then finally discovered that the directory was protected by a password she’d forgotten.

I’m having some trouble getting online at the conference, but will be trying to blog a bit at ACM Hypertext 2004. (Right now I can’t get email, but I’m able to web browse/post.) Anyway, here are some notes from yesterday (which I’ll be updating a couple times after this first posting).

Doug Engelbart’s keynote: “Facilitating the Evolution of our Collective IQ: What Universities and Professional Societies Can Do.” He’s got more slides than he can get through, but Jim Whitehead says the slides can go online. Doug says he’s presenting a challenge to this community. His 1951 lifetime goal: “As much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.” Not office automation, but human augmentation. An example of the kinds of problems that Doug wants to help people solve are the large-scale, urgent ones that the AC/UNU Millennium Project identifies.

J. Robinson Wheeler has written a nice article about creating IF, Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF. The article does a good job of explaining how the convention of a static “room description” has morphed to become a more interesting and fluid part of the narrative discourse in some more recent works of IF. Sure, using the framework of narratology could have made the discussion clearer and taken it a bit farther, but Rob’s awareness of how things fit together at the word, sentence, paragraph, and game level, and his close look at the way scene descriptions work in several important games, results in a very helpful essay. (The main flaw, I think, being Rob’s reliance on his own IF writing to supply “bad” examples; the nitpicking isn’t so helpful and the bits he cites are seldom that bad.) The article describes an aspect of IF authorship that may seem to correspond to bits of game design of other sorts — point-and-click graphical adventures: drawing the backdrops, first-person shooters and platform games: designing the levels. Upon closer inspection, scene description involves a lot of things that has no clear analog in graphical computer games, because the text that describes a scene ends up fitting into an overall, verbal narration, sometimes doing other sorts of narrative, literary, and gaming work at the same time. Update: I thought I’d get away with just plugging Rob’s article, but no — lengthy addendum below, in comments, about narratology and IF.

Unfortunately, the one bit of news I’ve gotten so far regarding the ACM Hypertext conference — which I’m not attending this year; GTxA is well-represented there by Noah, however — is from Andruid Kerne, who works with computing and collage and who I know from when he was doing his PhD at NYU. Andruid, now on the faculty of Texas A&M, describes how he was asked to change the content of a politically charged work that was accepted for presentation as a demo. Specifically, his hypermedia collage, available online, includes a linked photograph, published in The New York Times, of nude Iraqi prisoners being made to simulate fellatio. A linked photograph of President Bush, who seems to be staring right at the act, is juxtaposed.

On August 2nd The Third Place Gallery launched its new Game Art gallery. From August 2nd to September 30th the gallery is open to submission of any piece of art which is inspired by the world of electronic games

The judges will pick out art pieces for exhibitions in their personal galleries; one work in each category will receive a grand prize of €2000.

Gaming Hacks has been announced by O’Reilly: a full descrption of the book is also online. Although the title may suggest it’s all about mods — and it does seem rich in discussion of these, from instructions for doing hardware mods of consoles and controllers to suggestions for twiddling your save game files — it also contains information about building games from scratch, including tips from Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin about how to write text adventures.

I’ll supply a real review if and when I break down and buy the book after it’s out in October … or if O’Reilly sends Grand Text Auto a review copy, of course…

In Dance Voldo Dance, my favorite Soul Caliber character, Voldo, dances to Nelly’s Hot in Heer. Since word of this video has already been circulating around the blogosphere for a couple of weeks, I’ve been resisting posting about it here. But I enjoyed the video so much that I decided a “me too” post was fine. All moves in this video are in-game; no programming or game hacking is involved. While there’s alot of Machinima being produced these days, most of it is narrative; I enjoyed the pure dance performance of this piece of Machinima, a performance enabled by Voldo’s freaky double-jointed moves and enhanced by his S&M attire. While Dance Voldo Dance was carefully choreographed, I can imagine a new fighting game performance form in which two or more players improvise to music in real-time, perhaps done as a competition with the audience serving as judges.

The program for this year’s Software Art and Cultures Conference is now online. The meeting will be August 23-24 at Århus University in Denmark, and is free to the public. Talks include “Code as Performative Speech Act”, “An Exploration of the Visual Mind of the Software Artist”, “Software Art and Political Implications in Algorithms”, “Legos for a Meta-Theory of Meta-Artforms”, as well as an accompanying art exhibition, including “dot_matrix_synth” and “Hardware Orchestra”.

Just after the conference is the 3-day Runme Dorkbot City Camp, including the Read_Me Code Poetry Slam and an Outdoor computing session, and sessions such as “Algorithmic appreciation”, “Conceptual software” and “Appropriation and plagiarism”.

Pat and I have been officially informed by MIT Press that Sizirak Publishing Co. of Seoul (web presence apparently coming soon) will be publishing a Korean edition of First Person. It’s great that the ideas will be getting out into wider circulation!

We’ve also been offered the opportunity to review the translation before publication. Unfortunately, neither of us would be able to do this on our own. Any thoughts on whose command of the language and the subject matter might be up to the task?

The revamped site of Camille Utterback, who collaborated with Noah on Talking Cure, offers video documentation of her new, interactive, and “completely algorithmic” piece — that is, one doesn’t use a preexisting image, as Liquid Time does. This new piece is Untitled 5, which will be at Chelsea Marlborough (211 W. 19th St., New York) through September 10.

Turbulence’s new Networked_Performance blog has only been going in earnest for a couple weeks, and it’s already hopping. Head over to learn, contribute, or help plan the 2006 conference (which will be organized by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.; Emerson College, Boston; and California State University at Monterey Bay). Meanwhile, Matt Kirschenbaum brings word of WriteHere.net — “a wiki community for creative writers and fiction readers.” My Spring 2003 workshop did some WikiWork, and I’ll be interested to see how such things scale up at WriteHere. Finally, there’s a new issue of Intelligent Agent with essays on copyright, free cooperation, and virtual embodiment. The reviews section also has some reflections on Bang the Machine and GDC from GTxA drinking buddy Adam Chapman.

Many people teach with blogs these days, and there are a number of approaches. For example, Liz Lawley’s mt courseware helps one make a cool, faculty-authored blog out of the course website. (A nice example of this in use is Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Computer and Text.)

I used blogs with my students in Spring 2003 (I didn’t teach during 2003-04, instead opting for the carefree life of the “Traveling Scholar”). My approach to teaching with blogs was a bit different, organizing the class blogging around a mini-blogsphere (each student having an independent blog, for which the course might be one of many subjects blogged). I’ve never written it up before, but now have in preparation for the Blogging Tutorial that Matt Webb and I are doing in sunny Santa Cruz, CA next week.

In various news… Via Joah, a Chinese author has sold an SMS novel for a pretty penny (especially when you consider how artificially depressed China’s currency is). Via Michelle, on a less-commercial note, the Long Island City-based Flux Factory is currently showing Cartünnel: a comix fluxture — a physical maze of intersecting paths, lined with comics, and created by a group of authors aiming for a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience. Finally, don’t forget the ACM Hypertext conference next week in Santa Cruz. I’ll be presenting four times — and participants in the Blogging Tutorial will spend a full day hanging out with me and Matt Webb.

Newcomers interesting in creating interactive fiction, take note: The third edition of the Inform Beginner’s Guide (IBG) by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich, edited by Dennis G. Jerz, has just been published. While Graham Nelson’s Inform Designer’s Manual, 4th ed. (DM4) is the essential reference and a good introduction for those with programming experience, the step-by-step, example-based approach of the IBG is sure to be a great help for those less familiar with IF or less experienced as programmers. It’s now been updated for Inform 6.3, a nicely enhanced, bug-fixed, and Glulx-compatible release. The IBG can be downloaded in pdf format; The DM4 is also available in pdf and html.

Yesterday I went to the opening reception for Secrets of ENIAC, photographs by Benjamin Pierce, a professor of computer and information science here at Penn. The photographs are extreme close-ups, details of macros, showing a strange industrial landscape within the vacuum tubes of this early computer. They’re now exhibited in Penn’s Levine Hall, home of the CIS department. They can also be seen online.

A special treat was getting to go into the usually-inaccessible shrine called the ENIAC Museum, look at four of the 40 ENIAC consoles from all sides, and up close, and hear from curator Paul Shaffer. The history of computing, and how to assign credit for general-purpose computing, is complex, but ENIAC was the first machine to be able to do a conditional branch (an if statement). The capability wasn’t there from the start; someone (it’s not clear who, but it almost certainly was one of the women who regularly programmed the machine) figured out that a cable carrying a numerical output could be plugged into a control input, so that the program would only continue running on the next console if the output was nonzero. There’s much more to to say, but I’ll point to Penn Special Collections’s nice site to accompany the 1996 exhibit of ENIAC co-creator John W. Mauchly’s papers. In 1996, incidentally, then-Vice-President Al Gore came by for ENIAC’s 50th birthday celebration and flipped on Penn’s remnant of the ENIAC, which counted from 46 to 96.

As promised, here’s (finally) my trip report for the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI. The report is really a bunch of notes I took about the various talks, lightly edited to make them more readable. I didn’t quite manage to take notes for everyone’s talk, but did for most of them. After the workshop, I spent a week on the West Coast visiting a number of game companies (Will Wright’s group at Walnut Creek, the Sims 2 Maxis folk at EA headquarters, and Sony Electronic Entertainment US R&D where Craig Reynolds works) and going to my 20 year high school reunion (“Go Senators“).

I recently found, read, and had mixed feelings about a 2002 article by Julian Dibbell about Adventure, called “A Marketable Wonder: Spelunking the American Imagination.” (Dibbell is probably best-known online for his 1993 Village Voice article “A Rape in Cyberspace…”) The “marketable wonder” refers to Mammoth Cave as a popular attraction in the time of Stephen Bishop, the slave tour guide whose story takes up the first half of the article — and to Will Crowther’s Adventure, which of course wasn’t originally marketed, but later was. The article is addressed to a general, non-computer-fluent readership, which, dear reader, does not include us.

While my writing sense may be tuned for scholarly contexts, there seem to be some issues. Read on…

Sega and JC Entertainment (in Korea) have announced Shenmue Online, a MMOG for PC to be set in China in the 1980s. There’s just the one-page press release in English at the official site, but Shenmue Dojo has screenshots in their discussion area. Apparently the project, which has been underway for a while, has a US $28 million budget and is set to come out of beta early next year.

It’s a shame that Sega didn’t let the Dreamcast die like a warrior, and refrained from a U.S. release of Shenmue II so that Sony could have an “exclusive.” (They did the same with Rez.) Ah, well. Your region codes have no killing power…

Via Slashdot Games, an article by Michael Labbe with advice for independent / hobbyist game developers on finishing the games they’ve started.

The majority of hobbyist developers imitate big budget development houses. This is an insane undertaking.

[G]ames do not have a successful and vibrant independent underground movement like movies and music. There are no largely successful independents left for beginners to look up to. As a result, the [hobbyist] developers bite off more than they can chew and the work is never completed. … Ultimately, pragmatism is the only thing that matters. If you follow another God, your path may never lead to a finished product.