Grand Text Auto

Christian Bök is nearing completion of his 9-year Xenotext project.

Craig Dworkin edited Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing with Kenneth Goldsmith; it came out early this year.

Kenneth Goldsmith has a new interview up at the Academy of American Poets site.

Vanessa Place has now published two books of her trilogy Tragodía: Statement of Facts and Statement of the Case.

Well, technically all of us here at the Tilt team are Gen Con bound, but we know that you’ll be much more excited to meet the GIANT POX BOARD instead of our sorry smelly selves. (Just kidding, we do hygiene!)

BUT SERIOUSLY. It looks gameshow-tier kinda big and what fun is a gameshow without players and an audience? None.

And just so you know, the board pictured is just a prototype. The pieces for the real version have just arrived!

So if you’re just gonna, perhaps, be at Gen Con or something, don’t hesitate to play Giant Pox with us.
Maybe you can, you know, save some people, have some fun.

A couple of months back, Microsoft and the Games for Learning Institute(G4LI) challenged the public with the educational holy grail:

“Can you make learning fun?”

Tiltfactor, as the team of intrepid explorers that we are, rose to the challenge, and birthed Flagellla. Flagella was Tiltfactor’s response to Microsoft and G4LI’s task: To create games that can be introduced into schools that address certain curriculum points. Flagella is a flash game that not only addresses the concept of estimation but bundles in a mini-lesson on mutation as a bonus. In that sense it reminded me of the EA game Spore that I thoroughly enjoyed a while ago, but that’s a completely different ballgame.

In January 2009, I wrote a very short (one page) Python poetry generator that creates a limitless nature poem each time it is run. I wrote this generator, “Taroko Gorge,” mostly at Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, finishing it on the plane afterwards. I later ported it to JavaScript so that it could be easily run in a Web browser.

It seems the gorge goes ever ever on. The code from “Taroko Gorge” and the form it defines have been appropriated a few times. Here are five poetry generators that use the code from that project and replace my text with different, and often much more extensive, language:

I’ve made some hopefully superficial changes to the non-blog part of my website, nickm.com. Please let me know if you notice that I broke anything.

For the past several weeks the Tilt team has been working on (among other things) a zombie-themed board game.  After several different versions with tons of interesting mechanics, we’re closing in on our final design!  Work together with your fellow players to evacuate the office before the outbreak escapes into the city.  Over the next few weeks we’re going to be testing and revising, and you should look forward to seeing a prototype in early August. We’re researching cooperative play with this one too, a hallmark of our design approach.

Want to get your undead on?  Come play the game at Gen Con, the EPIC game convention in Indianapolis!

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context we cannot properly describe.

  –Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Thanks to Neural.it, the very long-running, vigorously-firing Italian site and magazine on digital media art and related topics. This publication did a writeup of my and Stephanie Strickland’s poetic system Sea and Spar Between. It’s available in English and in Italian.

First, as of this writing: I’m at the GAMBIT Summer Summit here at MIT, which runs today and is being streamed live. Do check it out if video game research interests you.

A few days ago, I was at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Bordeaux. On July 1 I presented the first conference paper on Curveship since the system has been released as free software. The paper is “Curveship’s Automatic Narrative Style,” which sums up or at least mentions many of the research results while documenting the practicalities of the system and using the current terminology of the release version.