Grand Text Auto

This month’s conversation on the empyre mailing list will be on the topic “Digital Writing.” The guests will include digital authors and commentators Bill Seaman, Brigid McLeer, Friedrich Block, Giselle Beiguelman, and Sue Thomas. Nick and I were guests on the empyre list in January 2004 and found it a thoughtful and engaged community.

Many thanks to Rinku for pointing out Chris Crawford’s nice commentary on industry studies of video game demographics. Readers who care about this issue at all will want to read his article, but the gist of it is that the industry talk of a closing gender gap and a shift to older gamers has no basis in scientific studies; it is just public relations output from video game companies.

As you all probably know, the Second Life environment created by Linden Labs is an amazing example of social environment, game, meeting place, and cultural phenomena. Linden Labs have been at the forefront of intellectual property debates in online environments, because users own their own content in SL. Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs is giving a talk entitled “Building a World with Digital Atoms” October 7th in NYC at 11:30am, 251 Mercer Street room 109. The talk is open and is sponsored by NYU’s Dept of Computer Science and the Tiltfactor lab at Hunter College. Please join us!

>GET GAMESThe 36 interactive fiction pieces that were entered in the 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp 2005) have been released. Download away! New this year are BitTorrents of the entries and the necessary interpreters.

For newcomers to the Comp: Judging in this competition is done by the public, so while you can wait around and see who the winners are, if you’re interested in IF, you should certainly download the games and take a look. Anyone who plays at least five games may vote, as explained on the page on judging games. Info about past Comps is available at the Comp site and on IF Wiki. Thanks to Stephen Granade of BrassLantern.org for once again organizing the Comp.

Last night at the Slought Foundation I saw two very interesting pieces for computer-controlled human face, by Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha of the IAAA (Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam). The two did a piece involving face interface which opened the 1997 Ars Electronica Festival.