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Thanks to past GTxA hosts: the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
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What does “chu” mean? The answer is not available on the Wikipedia disambiguation page. My fellow Dreamcast owners may particularly be wondering about this. If you’ve played Space Channel 5, you will probably recall that all the cute alien opponetnts say “chu” to indicate you need to press the A button. I’ve heard that our own Mary Flanagan asked Space Channel 5 (and Rez) creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi what “chu” means, and he explained…
You know, chu!
Borut Pfeifer, an experienced programmer-designer-writer-entrepreneur, friend of GTxA and currently working at EA’s Los Angeles studio on Neil Young and Doug Church’s dream team, has stuff to say on his new blog.
Check it out.
This coming Wednesday, Jordan Mechner, Mark Marino, Jeremy Douglass, and yours truly will be at USC for an evening of discussion around “writing and gameplay” — in part as a celebration of the publication of Second Person. As Mark discusses over at WRT, even with four speakers we’re barely able to scratch the surface of the book’s diversity. But I’m very glad to have one of the world’s most respected game designers (and game writers, who also makes films) on stage with interdisciplinary scholar/artists like Mark and Jeremy. It should be a fun evening.
Game/Play in the UK may be winding down, but no fear: as I write, the new Gameworld show is opening today at Laboral in Gijon, Spain. The show is exhibiting many games discussed here on GTxA, including the recently debated canon. There’s a huge selection of interesting machinima and game-oriented films as well.
(Note the final list of pieces being exhibited have yet to be listed on the official site.)
AAAI symposia, held each Fall on the east coast (often in the Boston or DC area) and Spring (often at Stanford), are small, not-too-expensive conferences with just a few tracks, each focused on a specific AI topic. They’re a good place to meet like-minded folks and go deep on a topic over the course of 2-3 days.
10 years ago now, as a young developer-researcher from the game industry, these meetings were a great way for me to dip my feet into the academic waters and gently wade into the research scene. It was at one of these symposia in 1997 at MIT, on socially intelligent agents, that I first met then-grad-student Michael, which later led to our collaboration (borne in a hottub, to continue the water metaphor for a moment). Other past AAAI symposia I attended included meetings on narrative intelligence (resulting in this edited volume), and game AI. The game AI symposium track has since grown into the bigger AIIDE conference, so I haven’t been to symposia in several years.
Good news though: Brian Magerko and Mark Riedl are co-chairing a new symposium on AI-based narrative, for this November.
CFP for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies
http://gel.msu.edu/aaai-fs07-int/Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, November 8-11, 2007
Submissions due: May 1, 2007Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. As the reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and education technology increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. The term “narrative intelligence” was coined to refer to the ability in both humans and computers to organize experience into narrative form. Previous and current work that in this field has produced results in narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling user interface modalities, narrative performance by autonomous embodied agents, cognitive models of narrative, and common-sense reasoning.
I’ve just received my copy of The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media. Editors Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a great table of contents — including contributions from Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Laura Borràs Castanyer, Markku Eskelinen, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Marie-Laure Ryan, Roberto Simanowski, and yours truly. My piece is a revised version of my Playable Media and Textual Instruments essay.
The Rhizome Commissions Program is now accepting proposals – they are due April 2. “In 2007, Rhizome will commission eleven new art works with fees ranging from $1000-3000.” Ten of these are for Internet projects in general, one for a project focused on the Rhizome community specifically. Projects that result will be shown at the New Museum at an event.
Project Hippasus is an MMO planned by Frozen North for the PC and Xbox 360 – a Mathematically Magical Optimization? The virtual world will offer “accidental learning” because, according to the plan they’ve put together in four weeks, you’ll have to solve math problems as you roam about. Apparently you’ll need to decompose your opponents into their frequency components in order to defeat them. Or maybe hurl weapons along their principal eigenvectors. Or something. I don’t know … math is hard. Let’s go shopping on Second Life!
Edward Picot recently posted a lengthy review of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. Picot clearly spent a good deal of time with the collection, and has both positive and negative things to say about it. I think that Picot has attempted to be fair and balanced in his discussion of the collection, and I’m grateful to him for giving the ELC such careful consideration. He is one of the first people to review the ELC intelligently and at length in English, though as usual, the Swedes are ahead of the game.
In the end, Picot finds the ELC “an essential collection,” and encourages “Anyone interested in the field of electronic literature to get it on DVD,” though along the way he finds a few nits to pick. The collection is actually published on the web and CD-ROM (old-school) and along with Picot I encourage you to get your copy of the free, Creative Commons-licensed collection of electronic literature, and then make copies of it for your friends.
I’d like to just briefly address a few of the points Picot makes, in order to clarify my perspective as one of the editors. I hope that Nick, Stephanie, and Kate will also jump in with comments if they’d like. I’ll restrict my comments to Picot’s critique of the curatorial/editorial aspects of the project. Picot also reviews four works in the collection, two (“The Jew’s Daughter” by Judd Morrissey and “Windsound” by John Cayley) positively, and two (“MyBALL” by Shawn Rider and “Carrier” by Melanie Rackham) negatively. There are sixty works in the collection, and I think that everyone is entitled to their opinion of each of those works. None of them were included casually. Each of the four editors thought that each work merited inclusion.
Here are three links (1 2 3) covering a positively cyberpunk-looking Will Wright giving a keynote at this week’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival, a conference traditionally focused on music and film that in recent years has added an interactive media track. Wright wanted to talk about story, perhaps because he’s talking to so many linear media folk, but was billed to talk about Spore, so he tries to mash the two subjects together. Wright points out the problems with status quo approaches to interactive story, and implores game developers to make games that listen to the player more, suggesting Groundhog Day or Truman Show type structures. (btw, Wright’s comments about “story parsing” are identical to the points he made in a July 2002 SIGGRAPH panel on interactive story Noah and I organized.) The first two links here are live (attempted) transcripts, each of which differs a bit, each containing phrases I find it hard to believe Wright would utter, such as “Games inherently are this branching tree” and “movies are far more compelling than interactive drama, because interactive drama is quite flat”. (I think it depends what he means by interactive drama in the context of this speech; as a counterpoint, one transcript has Wright describing Façade as an interesting approach that moves towards generativity.)For me this year’s GDC was different from previous years, because my attention these days is so oriented towards business and funding. As a result I made the tradeoff to skip many potentially interesting design talks, in order to make room for lots of hallway conversations, meetings, business-track lectures, cruising the expo booths for useful middleware, and catching up with friends and colleagues.
I’ll start with the (sadly) long list of talks I missed:
A three-year project by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber has come to fruition. The result is that an important set of early digital poems is available once more; the editors, also, have saved the original bits and made the running work available in several emulated, ported, and recorded ways, setting a powerful example for future preservation and porting of digital art, games, and poetry.
Take a look at the New York Times article on video game preservation, discussing curator Henry Lowood’s list of canonical video games. He picked the ten games with Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector. These “most important video games of all time” are:
If you’re reading Grand Text Auto via Bloglines, you presumably aren’t reading this – the service hasn’t updated our feed since February 25, as a commenter pointed out. We don’t know of any other aggregators that are having problems, and the feeds we’re providing seem to be valid.
Other feeds that Bloglines hasn’t properly digested recently seem to include those of Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) (fixed a few days ago) and IF author Adam Cadre (still doesn’t register updates to the main bloggy part, the calendar). A recent thread at the Bloglines forums suggests that this update problem may be widespread among WordPress-based blogs. Although the title of that post mentions that “newly added feeds aren’t updated,” the problems that bloggers report there are not limited to new feeds.
There’s a fork in the Web up ahead. If you’re part of the angry mob that can’t put up with XHTML, you’ll be pleased, or at least less angry, to know that W3C is relauching activity on HTML. Yes, the HTML Working Group is back. Google finds 95 results for a search on “I hate XHTML” and 14,100 for “I hate HTML,” but I suppose you can’t please all of the document engineers all of the time.
An abecedarian, typographic zoo awaits you online: Bembo’s Zoo. Monkey with that alphabet a bit (that is, click on something) and you’ll discover the animal nature of letters. A classic site, and a book tie-in, from 2000.
The applause-filled, frivolity-filled XYZZY Awards have just concluded. Congratulations to all the interactive fiction authors whose work was nominated. Various characters from IF games (and some of the usual characters from ifMUD) gave the awards, as is traditional. Amid the humor, there was also some time to remember XYZZY award winner Star C. Foster.
The Best Game award this year went to The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve; that game also won the Best Individual NPC award. Emily Short’s Floatpoint took the awards for Best Story and Best NPC. Andrew Plotkin’s Delightful Wallpaper took the Best Individual PC, Best Puzzles, and Best Writing awards. By the way, since these were done in TADS 3 (The Elysium Enigma) and Inform 7 (the two others), that’s a lot of wins for brand-new IF development systems.
And Andrew Plotkin’s reviews of Myst live on, too. See Zarf’s lastest review of Myst Online: Uru Live, the recently re-animated MMO – or perhaps non-MMO. Zarf also provides the definitive Uru FAQ.
Onward to day two, with more fascinating presentations about many aspects of many different sorts of games…
Speaking of prolific Northwestern grad students, recent industry-hire and friend of GTxA, Robin Hunicke, is already a game designer at EA/Maxis and 
leading the finally-announced MySims project for the Wii and DS. You’ll have to try to find additional adjectives for the term “super-cute” to describe its look and animation. Congrats Robin!
Robin’s been blogging over the past few months here and there about the process of being a game designer, gave a presentation last week at Microsoft’s Game Cruise, and will again next week at GDC.
FYI, there will be two back-to-back game festivals in Vancouver, BC, this May: first, the Vancouver International Game Summit, May 3-4, followed by the Northwest Games Festival on May 5, including a game contest with cash prizes!
I’m here at the University of Florida attending the gaming group’s third annual conference, World Building: Space and Community For my own purposes and to highlight what’s being discussed here, I’ve typed up some notes. Conference speakers are particularly welcome to comment, particularly if my notes didn’t accurately record what you said — I’ll fix my notes, in that case. These notes are meant to point you to the authors’ own abstracts; please go there to read up on the research and to cite. Updated to include evening keynote.
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