Grand Text Auto

I spent some time last night over at Gavin Inglis’ Bareword. Scottish writer Inglis is one of the few hypertext authors I’m aware of who has written hypertexts according to the “branching path” model frequently discussed as a structural model but rarely utilized. I was familiar with Inglis’ Same Day Test, which tells the story the day in which its first-person protagonist goes (or doesn’t) for an AIDS test. The reader of SDT is offered choices of the “choose-your-own-adventure” variety. One smart design decision Inglis made with this work was to put all of the links at the bottom of the page rather than in the body of the text, which at the very least encourages the reader to finish one lexia before making a choice and moving on to the next. The story is tightly structured, advancing the reader through the course of the protagonist’s day.

Notes on Defending the Galaxy: The Complete Handbook of VideoGaming
edited by Michael Rubin
written by Michael Rubin, Carl Winefordner, and Sam Welker
illustrations by Rudy Young and Jeff Webber
photographs by Michael Rubin
Gainesville, Florida: Triad Publishing Company
1982
224 pp.

I recently borrowed Defending the Galaxy from Paul Shaffer, who not only is currently the Eniac curator here at Penn, but also happens to have worked for Scott Adams of Adventure International back in the early 1980s as a play-tester.

In a nice list of video game firsts published in the February 1984 issue of Computer Games magazine, Defending the Galaxy is listed as “The first ‘complete’ guide to video gaming (manners, maladies, dress, etc.)” We might take this declaration with a grain of salt, because the list happens to be drawn up by Michael Rubin, the editor of Defending the Galaxy. But it turns out to be an interesting book, for reasons that may not be obvious at a glance.

Hello all, I’m at CHI 2005 and have enjoyed catching up with Georgia Tech, RPI, UWashington, and Oregon colleagues–including GTXTers Michael M and Andrew S!! I’ve found the serious games panel and the social interaction panels to be engaging and relevant. I presented a new paper in the “Social Behaviors” session written with Howe and Nissenbaum on the topic of ‘values in design’– specifically, designing a socially-oriented game while at the same time incorporating and verifying particular values within the game design.

Implementation next to the tower

Originally uploaded by marinella.

The first photos of the Italian translation of Implemenation, from Marinella in Pisa.

A new memorymap group has formed at Flickr. People are annotating satellite maps from Google Maps of places that are important to them. I can see a lot of narrative potential in the form.

Idle Thumbs — a scrappy, well-written games journalism site that I think is getting ever more impressive — has a new piece called Games Beyond ‘Games’, reporting on last February’s Innovation in Games Symposium in the Netherlands. A quote from a struggling indie game developer who presented at the symposium:

[T]here is a market for innovative games, there is a desire to make them, there is a need to do research into them, but the games industry is not the place where this will happen.

And speaking of the Orisinal games, you’ll find a creative review of several of them Idle Thumbs as well.

Mind’s Heart
  by Robert Creeley

Mind’s heart, it must
be that some
truth lies locked
in you.

Or else, lies, all
lies, and no man
true enough to know
the difference.

Poet Robert Creeley died on March 30. Charles Bernstein has recently updated the Creeley page on PennSound and the EPC Creeley page at the University of Buffalo, where this prolific and influential poet taught before recently moving to Brown. The EPC page has links to many obituaries. The main page of Conjunctions is now filled with tributes to Creeley, including one from e-lit writer and Brown student Brian Kim Stefans, who, in his Roger Pellett persona, reworked some of Creeley’s poems.

Maeda Path is a Flash game, with sound, by Jared Tarbell. It’s based on a short online game that John Maeda coded for Shiseido. “This game represents one component of a multipart series studying the astounding work of long time computational artist John Maeda.” Via Elastico.

Matt Kirschenbaum gave a talk today called “‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace:’ Computer Forensics and Electronic Textuality,” at Penn’s History of Material Texts Workshop. (The abstract is online.) He discussed the Department of Defense Clearing and Sanitization Matrix and how the seemingly extreme measures required to destroy digital data contradict the first wave of scholarly writing on the transient, unstable nature of digital text, from “the usual suspects.” He pointed to the luminous spectacle of Tron as one possible inspiration for this early discourse of speed and light.

I somehow just now got word of WRT: Writer Response Theory, a blog o’ blogs, already up and running for a while, that works to foster discussion on ASCII art, blog fiction, chatbots, email fiction, e-poetry, hypertext fiction, and interactive fiction (IF). The site can now be reached from our “Related Blogs” list.

The announcement explains that “WRT is a blogging collective dedicated to the discussion and exploration of digital character art — any art involving electrons and making use of letters, alphanumerics, or other characters in an interesting way. Our primary focus is on active and interactive works, in which users input text and receive textual responses as output.”

Christy Dena, Jeremy Douglass, and Mark Marino (bios below) run this open site. “Everyone who reads this blog is a member and may suggest a thread or a link,” they write. “As long as it pertains to digital letter/character art we will post and pursue it.”

I was recently alerted to Ferry Halim’s Orisinal, which offers pleasant-looking, easy-to-understand Flash games, reminiscient of greeting cards and often featuring happy animals. They’re worth looking at. While I can’t say that I find them very compelling, some people apparently do, from looking at some of the net-wide high scores for these games.

The IF Comp, which takes place in the fall (for those in the Northern Hemisphere), has traditionally been the annual big deal of interactive fiction production and critique. But there’s also a Spring Thing, a competition Adam Cadre ran in 2002 and 2003 and which is back this year, thanks to Greg Boettcher. The games are out for this year’s; you can download them from the IF Archive. The voting period ends May 1.