Grand Text Auto

Those crazy kids at UC Riverside are already hosting a talk about GTA: San Andreas, having made the game available last week for students to play.

I’ve started to get quite annoyed by something I’m thinking of as the “numerist fallacy.” It seems to come up mostly in discussions with humanists and artists who are interested in software but haven’t been involved in much software development.

Its most ridiculous form is the idea that, because digital information is stored as ones and zeros, computers somehow inherently introduce binarism (black and white thinking) into situations where they are used. Luckily, this is somewhat rare. More common is the idea that somehow, if one wants to consider something like the structure of a digital archive deeply — in order to enable more informed critique — one should get down to the numerical nature of the archive and understand how the numbers are being manipulated.

Chris Crawford’s long awaited book on interactive story, in which he finally reveals his secrets and hard-won lessons learned from slaving for years to build the Erasmatron, is now out and available from New Riders. (For more on the Erasmatron, go here and scroll down for essays.)

Chris considers it “the most important book I have ever written”, and describes his goals for the book on the back-cover blurb:

There’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. This section, “Hypertexts and Interactives,” includes essays by:

• hypertext publishers, editors, and researchers Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco (discussing hypertext fiction and describing “two exotic hypertext systems, tools suitable for hypertext narrative but dramatically unlike the tools currently in use”),
• hypertext poet and theorist Stephanie Strickland (who, through the move captured in her title, “intends to install the stenographer, and not her employer, as the crucial creative/receptive presence in digital art”), and

In 2003 I visited the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was amazing. A collection of remarkable writers and editors and students in a beautiful, fascinating environment. While I was there I talked about The New Media Reader, and Robert Coover and I did a reading/presentation of writing for digital media.

Next summer I’ll be back at SLS, this time to offer a workshop. Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollman, and a bunch of other exciting writers will be there, and so will editors from Fence, The New York Review of Books, and Faber & Faber. Read on for my course description, and for information on a contest that awards free airfare, accommodations, and full tuition to SLS.

A reminder that paper abstracts for DiGRA’s June conference in Vancouver are due November 30, as well as indie game entries to the first Slamdance Independent Game Competition, in January in Park City, Utah, due November 29.

The website is now live for the 2005 Game Developers Conference, to be held in early March in San Francisco. The variety and quality of presentations and panels are as superb as ever (see last year’s list, post-conference impressions).

Here are this year’s sessions that should be of particular interest to GTxA folk:

In my effort to avoid doomist thoughts given the week’s events, I attended the nyc acm siggraph (future participants ?) panel presentations at Pratt Manhattan. Amit Pitaru ‘s talk was noteworthy. Trained as a pianist, he never intended to write software, but he does now, spending time between writing his own tools and using them. He demonstrated a beautiful 3D drawing tool, and in general the set of tools he develops is amazing! I highly recommend checking out his work, pretty inspirational. A nice summary and more links can be found here. While he does not argue that his work is political, I can see how his very specific ideas about how tools are created for specific needs could be applied as an activist software design strategy. Its heartening to see someone rethinking the tools they use so clearly and articulately, stripping away commercial concerns and just plain irrelevant interfaces. . .

Hello, world. Check out this map of presidential votes cast by county before you imagine that America is mostly Jesusland. (Red is all Bush, Blue is all Kerry, and purple is in between.) And if someone, such as Dick Cheney, tells you that George W. Bush got the largest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history – which is true – you can tell them that John Kerry got the second largest number of votes in history, and that more people voted against an incumbent president than ever before in our country’s history. Yes, Bush was finally elected – but not by much.

I’m suddenly inspired to make one of those new political video games. In it, you click on young apathetic voters lazing on their couches to get off their butts and vote. You click to dial phone numbers to call friends who normally wouldn’t vote in an election, and manage to get them to vote too. At a cafe and dinner table you are seated in front of family and friends who normally vote for their pocketbook, and you click as fast as you can to express your passion to vote for the larger issues.

The Subtle Technologies Festival will take place May 26-May 29, 2005, in Toronto Canada. Symposium submissions are due January 15th, 2005. This year, in addition to the usual diverse program, there is a special session celebrating the “World Year in Physics”; artists and scientists who investigate physics in their work (for scientists, presumably something different than standard disciplinary physics?), are encouraged to apply.

Recognized internationally as a unique forum that encourages new insights and collaborations between artists and scientists, Subtle Technologies challenges physicists, geneticists, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, architects, dancers, media artists and musicians to contemplate how art and science act upon one another and reshape perspectives.

All eight installments of Implementation are now available to the world. But access to Implementation within the United States is restricted. If you are eligible to vote in the US today, you may download the final installment only after you vote. Enforcement is done using the honor system, although we aren’t kidding about the restriction.

Scott and I have been working on sticker lit for a year and a half. We’ve been disseminating the installments of Implementation since January. We are very glad to have completed the last installment of the first serialized sticker novel. Thanks to the Kelly Writers House for hosting the first reading of our sticker novel. Thanks to Rob Wittig for contributing some texts. And, thanks to everyone who participated by reading, putting up stickers, and sending us photographs, particularly Hanna and Jill.