Grand Text Auto

The Foundations of Digital Games conference, which covers research on a broad range of computer game topics, will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA from May 29-June 1, 2012. Magy Seif El-Nasr (Northeastern Univ.) is the conference General Chair, while Mia Consalvo (Concordia Univ.) and Steve Feiner (Columbia Univ.) are the Program Co-Chairs.

The conference will feature workshops immediately before the main conference, along with paper and poster presentations. As in past years, a doctoral consortium will provide a venue for new researchers to highlight their work. The call for papers is out, with full papers due December 19, 2011. Workshop proposals are due October 17, 2011.

In his just-released “Argot Ogre, OK!” Andrew Plotkin presents mash-ups and remixes of (almost) all the “Taroko Gorge” remixes to date (and of course the original “Taroko Gorge”), producing such poignant lines as “LAWN DARTS linger” along with single-source remixes and some different stanza shapes. Anyone interested in this thread of poetry generation projects should check it out and should certainly “view source.” Or don’t, if you don’t want to discover more about the secret of the monkey.

The Tiltfactor team got wind of a grant proposal being approved during GenCon last month, and last week we had our first brainstorming session on different types of games ideas we’re considering.

The goal is to explore the issues and the interpretation of gender, stereotype, and implicit bias. We will be working with middle school-aged girls around the country, thanks to Karen Peterson in association with the National Girls Collaborative Project, a group whose projects involve over 5 million girls. Belinda Gutierrez, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also joined us in our meeting and helped us bounce around ideas. And a big uberthanks to Dr. Jolene Jesse from the National Science Foundation for taking part in our kickoff meeting and being so supportive of our ideas!

The Tiltfactor team was busy at DiGRA 2011. Thursday September 15th, I presented (with  Jonathan Belman)  our paper on the design approach behind POX: Save the People. Friday September 16th, Jonathan Belman shared our latest paper on our Grow-A-Game cards, “Grow-A-Game: A Tool for Values Conscious Design and Analysis of Digital Games,” with audience members on Friday. Read the essays now!

Digra2011-PreventingPox-FlanaganEtAl-Paper

Digra2011 – GrowAGameTool-BelmanNissenbaumFlanaganDiamond
See below for full citations on these articles!

I’ll be following up with written thoughts, but here are a few video highlights courtesy of the Utrecht School of the Arts.

Illustration: Alexis Demetriades

Chris Lewis, a member of the Software Introspection Lab at UC Santa Cruz has his game testing work profiled in Science Notes 2011, in the article “Fixing Glitchy Games” by Donna Hesterman.

Games increasingly have emergent properties brought about by the complex interactions between the player, AI-driven non-player characters, level geometry and items in the game world. Except for the player, all of these have become more complex in the latest generation of AAA titles, leading to an exponential increase in potential interactions. Lewis states it well:

COMPUTER world hacked Mitnick

Digital being apprehended and N.C., It wasn’t five years in prison,

vid-like “A video friend)

Ghost in wizardry

Hacker attuned

recounts are one engineering”

cat-and-computer-to willingly provide

the online con his unknowing targets

What’s happening in Salzburg in September, you ask?

The Salzburg Global Seminar Session #468
Innovating for Value in Health Care Delivery:
Better cross-border learning, smarter adaptation and adoption

Salzburg Global Seminars, a non-profit organization that holds seminars on a variety of worldwide obstacles for humanity, was established in 1947, shortly after World War II in an effort to unite international leaders to solve issues of global concern.

Tiltfactor‘s Mary Flanagan will be giving a keynote at this year’s Digital Games Research Association Conference. “After Leveling Up in the Netherlands (2003), Changing Views in Canada (2005), Situated Play in Japan (2007) and Breaking New Ground in England (2009) the 5th DiGRA Conference returns to the Netherlands for THINK DESIGN PLAY. ” Tiltfactor’s Jonathan Belman is also presenting our new Grow a Game study, and we are co-presenting on our recent POX: Save the People study. We are also participating in the “Building a Game Lab 2.0: Surviving and Thriving” panel,  and a game scholar rant. Check out the schedule and come along if you are near Utrecht!

I keep hearing about this Believer article about palindromes – actually, it’s mostly an article exposing a particular palindromist to readers’ chortles. The article signals no awareness of the palindrome as a literary form, but I appreciate it pointing me to Mr. Duncan’s “A Greenward Palindrome,” written for my local eco-boutique and charming in its topicality.

A community of practice is a set of people who do the same type of work (writing, art, game development, etc.) and who are at least aware of one another and have some interaction with one another. Poets constitute a community of practice, for instance, or at least several significantly interlocking communities of practice. Poets are aware that there are other poets. They read each others’ work. Sometimes they hate one another, which shows that they care.

an event to welcome the Electronic Literature Organization to MIT
and to introduce the ELO to the MIT community
an open house / open mic / open mouse
featuring 5-7 minute presentations and readings
by a host of electronic literature authors (perhaps including you)

[LOCATION] The 6th floor of Fumihiko Maki’s new Media Lab building
in the large multipurpose room (E14-674)

[DATE & TIME] Monday September 19
5:30pm Kickoff, signup for open mic/open mouse begins
6:30pm Open mic/open mouse readings & presentations

an event in the Purple Blurb series
sponsored by Angus N. MacDonald Fund
and the Council for the Arts at MIT

Congrats to Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf), interactive fiction author and active member of our local People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, on the release of his first iPad app: My Secret Hideout. It’s not IF per se, but an interactive narrative toy – or, as Zarf says, “It’s an interactive toy… or rather poem… or artwork… It’s an interactive textual art generator set in a treehouse!” It has no score, possibly because life doesn’t work that way.

Check out Zarf’s page on My Secret Hideout for further details. Or, visit the App Store to nab it.

At MIT TechTV, there’s a new 5-minute video about me and my work, featuring Ad Verbum, Curveship, Taroko Gorge, the ppg256 series and (as examples of really cool things that have been done with computers and that are worth our attention) some productions by others from the demoscene.

Also see the excellent video covering the work of my colleague Fox Harrell and his Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab. Harrell describes his projects, reads from one of them, and discusses his concept of “phantasmal media.” That term provides the title for a book he’s completing for the MIT Press.