Grand Text Auto

“Code of Best Practices In Fair Use For Poetry” has just been released by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. “Poetry” as a cultural force, in the popular consciousness, is very traditional, but poets of course also have undertaken some of the our most unusual, avant-garde writing. The document gives a hint of the wide sweep of poetic practice while showing that poetry has long played host to quotation, parody, and other remixological practices. And the “Code” achieves its main purpose of outlining common sorts of writing and use that fair use seems to cover, as poets see it. I’m glad to have been involved in some of the meetings that led to this document. I hope it will helpful us continue the discussion about alternatives to cultural lockdown, bringing in the perspectives, not of industries, but of the creators of different sorts of culturally significant work.

In August 2010, the first ever Mario level generation competition was held at the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) conference. The contest involved generating a personalized level for a particular player, using metrics from a player’s  prior playthrough of a different level. There were three entries from the Expressive Intelligence Studio, including the winner, Ben Weber!

However, this competition had only the CIG audience as participants and judges. Julian Togelius and Noor Shaker at ITU Copenhagen have now opened up the competition for the general public to participate. The goal is to gather more (and more detailed) data on the differences between the generated levels and players’ preferences between them. We invite everyone to participate in these experiments!

Sherry Turkle is coming to Dartmouth to speak on the 10th of February about her newest research, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books. The 15th of April 2011 we’re hosting a DIGITAL POETRY SYMPOSIUM at DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, with leading digital poets John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Marjorie Luesebrink.
See more info at Dartmouth’s Digital Studies Website.

Last night I projected words to accompany music at a local lounge. This practice does not seem have an established name – does it? Please let me know if you’re aware of the conventional term. I have heard the phrase “text jockey” used. I’ve also come up with some other terms that don’t seem to fit perfectly. In a sense, this is VJing, but it’s also a practice that is compatible with VJing, since words can be projected in a subtitle-like fashion on moving images.

Building on the great success from last year, we are pleased to announce that there will be a second workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, to be held this coming June 28 in Bordeaux, France, co-located with FDG 2011. The workshop focuses on advancing the state of the art in computational techniques for creating content for computer games by bringing together researchers to discuss novel research and important issues in procedural content generation. The deadline for long and short papers is March 11, 2011.

Overview

Indie Game Designer E. McNeill's new game, Aurora

Dartmouth’s own E McNeill has released his indie game Aurora for PC. Aurora is an ambient indie RTS game. It’s beautiful, abstract, and — be warned, it is utterly addictive!

Congrats E, we are proud of this fantastic accomplishment!

This year’s MIT Mystery Hunt was won by my intrepid friends on team Codex Alimentarius early Sunday morning. I’m glad I had the drive (the 5.25″ drive, to be exact) to help them as they solved one of their puzzles.

It’s the beginning of another year, which means it’s time for another Global Game Jam. Santa Cruz is proud to host a site for the third year in a row, and we continue to grow. In fact, we’re currently tied for the 2nd largest site in the US and the 10th largest site in the world! But even if you’re not ready to dedicate a full 48 hours to the festivities, you should still come check out our keynote speakers this year, who will be talking from 4:30 on Friday, January 28th. We continue our tradition of world class talks to kick off our game jam, and this year we have three veterans of the industry that offer unique and fascinating perspectives on game design.

Researchers at Tiltfactor have been working into the wee hours on honing the Metadata system. Many doughnuts have been consumed as we work out plans for trust algorithms and community motivation.

Sukdith Punjasthitkul (Dartmouth ’98 MS Evaluative Clinical Sciences) and Robinson Tryon (Dartmouth ’04 BA Computer Science)

If you are interested in helping us test our system and games, let us know! We need many participants even in the testing phase.

Tiltfactor’s official foray into health games begins this spring. Our new board game and associated web based game are launching in March at the NH Immunization Conference. The game will be for sale on our newly designed website, launching also in March. Watch this space!

You put yourself on something unseen.
  Then, you are unable to take a look at something because you are not in the world.

While attempting to upgrade to a new Ubuntu distribution Sunday late night, I managed to slag nickm.com. I don’t mean that I insulted my server; rather, I irrevocably converted it into a molten heap, or at least the software equivalent.

The bright side of such failures (perhaps the light is provided by the glowing and otherwise useless material that used to be serving my website) is that one learns how good one’s been at backing up. In my case, I actually had recent copies of almost all of my data stashed away: not only important files, but also the mysql database. That means that after about 12 hours of reinstalling and once more setting up my server, most of it was up and running.