Grand Text Auto

At UC Santa Cruz we’re looking for someone to help us conceptualize, launch, and run a new “Center for Games and Playable Media.” We’re seeking someone who would be interested in representing Santa Cruz at events, working with the new center’s affiliates (in industry, government, etc), imagining how new game research technologies could be made into experimental games, and working with students and faculty to bring the game-related activities at Santa Cruz to the next level.

Excerpts from the official information are below. People can apply by going to http://jobs.ucsc.edu and searching for job number 1002822. Also, feel free to leave comments with questions.

Check out the interview by our director on Resonance FM, UK from October 2010: Mary Flanagan discusses art, games, and activism.

NextSpace in Santa Cruz is ending its 2010 What’s Next lectures with a talk titled “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Future of Gaming and Social Media” — 7 p.m. Thursday, December 2, on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Our own Michael Mateas will be one of the panelists, along with CBS Interactive’s Simon Whitcombe and Sol Lipman of AOL / Rally Up.

The journal IEEE Software will be running a special issue on the topic of “Engineering Fun” for its September/October 2011 issue. The call for papers is out now, with a deadline of February 1, 2011. Guest editors for the issue are Clark Verbrugge of McGill University and Paul Kruszewski of GRIP Entertainment. IEEE Software has a magazine format and publishes academic research aimed at a software practitioner audience. It has a circulation of over 10,000.

Audio podcasts of the events at the Boston Book Festival are now online – along with some videos. Whether you were one of the 25,000 attendees or not, you can catch some of the 2010 festival via the Web. The panel that I was on, “The Novel: A Prognosis,” can be heard right here.

I’ve recently returned from a great trip to Mexico City. I was at the 5th Mexican International Colloquium on Computational Creativity presenting alongside two other foreign guests, Graeme Ritchie and Dan Ventura, and two local researchers, Rafael Pérez y Pérez and Eduardo Peñaloza. There was a productive and lively roundtable on interdisciplinary work and collaboration the day before the talk, too. Rafael Pérez y Pérez, a collaborator of mine, arranged the colloquium and was a very gracious host, making sure that we got to and from the airport, to all of the colloquium events, and to several excellent meals.

For our (possibly) sizable Belarusian readership, Patric Conrad has translated the original Space Invaders Enterprise Edition post into a Belarusian version! Дзякуй, Patric!

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor is a partner in the Games for Learning Institute, centered at NYU. We’re launching a game competition and invite you to participate!

wow! from 2003, some fun quotes here from our lab Director, such as
“I Love the Huge Pixels” — worthy of t-shirts!

Alex and I will be discussing the current state of RTS research and the StarCraft AI Competition today at 13:00 PST. https://my.dimdim.com/aigamedev/

My collaborator and publisher William Gillespie has a new book, Keyhole Factory, and has done a vigorous interview about it which I suggest you read.

This Friday I will be visiting Jose Zagal at DePaul University (his book Ludoliteracy has just come out) and giving a talk on my view of level design. My goal in giving the talk is to develop a framework spanning the research my students Gillian Smith, Ken Hullett, and I have been doing over the past few years (along with Mee Cha, Mike Treanor, and Michael Mateas). The core idea of the talk is this: level design is inherently a genre-specific activity, and each game genre possesses its own approach for designing levels in the genre. While there are some concepts, such as pacing and tension, that span multiple genres, to provide compelling explanations for how to create game levels requires an analytical approach that is tailored to a specific genre.

Place de la Bourse, Bordeaux, France

The yearly Foundations of Digital Games conference will be held in Europe for the first time in 2011. The Foundations of Digital Games promotes the exchange of information concerning the scientific foundations of digital games, technology used to develop digital games, and the study of digital games and their design, broadly construed. FDG 2011 will be held in Bordeaux, France from June 28-July 1, 2011. The conference General Chair is Marc Cavazza (Univ. Teeside, UK), and the Program Co-Chairs are Katherine Isbister (Polytechnic Inst. of NYU, USA) and Charles Rich (Worcester Polytechnic Inst.).

The Curveship Codefest today was all I hoped it would be – a source of ideas, a way to discuss how to progress toward release, and even a time for the development of several fiction files (games) and spin files (specifications for narrating), some profound, some amusing, some both. I have received some very useful patches, representing the first contributions to the core Curveship code from others since I started this project in 2006. It looks like – with some serious work on my part, and with further consultation from the Curveship cognoscenti – Curveship can finally be ready for release in a few months.

Thanks to all who came by to the Tuesday book release party for Riddle & Bind at Grafton Street. Riddles were pondered (and some solved) and many good times were had. Jason Scott stopped by, driving up from his archival compound in New York State! Recently kickstarted Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf) was there, too. Fiction writer Ralph Lombreglia, my mentor from Boston University, was one of several current colleagues from MIT’s Writing and Humanistic Studies who stopped by despite their teaching and event schedules – thanks as well to Bill Corbett, Ed Barrett, and Magdalena Rieb. All right, enough shout-outs for now. I do appreciate all of you who were able to come by and celebrate the publication of Riddle & Bind.

Thanks to all who came by to the Tuesday book release party for Riddle & Bind at Grafton Street. Riddles were pondered (and some solved) and many good times were had. Jason Scott stopped by, driving up from his archival compound in New York State! Recently kickstarted Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf) was there, too. Fiction writer Ralph Lombreglia, my mentor from Boston University, was one of several current colleagues from MIT’s Writing and Humanistic Studies who stopped by despite their teaching and event schedules – thanks as well to Bill Corbett, Ed Barrett, and Magdalena Rieb. All right, enough shout-outs for now. I do appreciate all of you who were able to come by and celebrate the publication of Riddle & Bind.

As my very crummy photo shows, Dave Lebling joined us (the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction) at MIT yesterday for a productive play session of his game The Lurking Horror. (We got 55 of 100 points, which isn’t bad for three hours, even if some of us who’d solved the game did nudge the others along now and then.) Afterwards, we went on a tour of MIT, checking out some of the locations that inspired those in Lebling’s game.