Grand Text Auto

Although a recent IF tribute to a They Might Be Giants album might help to delude some people about this, interactive fiction these days is not about fandom and is unusually not made in reference to and transformation of previous popular works.

An intriguing exception, however, can be found in the just-released Muggle Studies, a game by Flourish Klink that takes place in the wonderful wizarding world of Harry Potter. The player character is of the non-magical persuasion, but gets to wander, wand-free, at Hogwarts, solve puzzles, and discover things that bear on her relationship with her ex-girlfriend. You can play and download the game at the Muggle Studies site.

The organizer of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, Kevin Jackson-Mead, has organized and co-written a tribute to the 1992 They Might Be Giants Album, Apollo 18. At the PR-IF site, you can play and download 38 short games corresponding to every song (including the “Fingertips” songs) on the album. With its retro cachet, it may be today’s version of Dial-a-Song:

Apollo 18+20.

I went last weekend to visit the Big Reality exhibit at 319 Scholes in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It was an adventure and an excellent alternative to staying around in the East Village on March 17, the national day of drunkenness. The gallery space, set amid warehouses and with its somewhat alluring, somewhat foreboding basement area (I had to bring my own light source to the bathroom), was extremely appropriate for this show about tabletop and computer RPGs and their connections to “real life.” Kudos to Brian Droitcour for curating this unusual and incisive exhibit.

Marty Markowitz, borough president of Brooklyn, said his borough was “the heart of America” in welcoming the 35th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. My heart was certainly in Brooklyn last weekend, both literally and figuratively. I was there to participate in the First Annual World Palindrome Championship on Friday and, on Saturday, to visit Big Reality, a wonderful, scruffy art show that included some of my work. More on Big Reality soon; here’s a belated note about the WPC.

(Thanks to Mark Sample for alerting me to the trailer.)

This was good for 45 minutes of narratology discussion in the ol’ graduate seminar today.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a friend and collaborator, has a great editorial in Inside Higher Ed today. It’s called “The Prison-House of Data” and addresses a prevalent (if not all-inclusive) view of the digital humanities that focuses on the analysis of data and that overlooks how we can understand computation, too.

Today Inside Higher Education is running an editorial of mine.

In 2010, the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts convened a historic workshop — it was their first jointly funded project. This meeting marked the beginning of a new level of national conversation about how computer science and other STEM disciplines can work productively with arts and design in research, creation, education, and economic development. A number of projects and follow-up workshops resulted in 2011. I was lucky enough to attend three of these events and, in the midst of all the exciting follow-up conversations, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about the digital humanities?

I will be speaking on behalf of my artistic practice and Tiltfactor with Christopher Robbins, of the Ghana Think Tank, at TransTalks: Practice Makes Practice, a series of conversations among invited speakers, the MFA students in the Parsons Transdisciplinary Design program, and the public dedicated to exploring design’s capacity to investigate, disassemble and reframe the political, economic and social forces that define our everyday practices.

The goal for Flanagan is to allow the conversation to follow a similar path to the design process:  How do each of these artist/designers decide upon their design question? What methodologies are developed that shape that question? What outcomes could be considered successful? And importantly, in the form of a post-mortem across several projects as a reflective form of practice, How does failure play into particular experimental design endeavors?

I was recently notified that “The Purpling” was no longer online at its original published location, on a host named “research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu” which held The Iowa Review Web site. In fact, it seems that The Iowa Review Web is missing entirely from that host.

My first reaction was put my 2008 hypertext poem online now on my site, nickm.com, at:

http://nickm.com/poems/the_purpling/

Fortunately, TIWR has not vanished from the Web. I found that things are still in place at:

http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/

And “The Purpling” is also up there. Maybe I was using a non-canonical link to begin with? Or maybe things moved around?

When I first entered this class, I had a very clear definition of art, and interactivity wasn’t part of it. Anything that involved interaction was automatically a game. Engaging the user was an automatic distinction for me between what was art and a display.

I really began to understand new media art differently when analyzing interactive works. In many ways, interactive works become more forcibly engaging than static artworks are. For example, when passing by a classical painting or a photograph in an art gallery, a viewer can simply pass by with only a short glance to the work. Whereas, with interactive art, the person becomes the life for the work: a sound is heard, letters move, an image changes, a form is displayed on a screen. All becomes very apparent to the user that he/she is important to this work’s well-being. And so he/she stays.

Yesterday I held a paperback of Expressive Processing in my hand for the first time.
(This takes its price down to around $13 at places like Amazon.) I’ve also learned a number of interesting things about the book since it was published — learning more about what others think of it, of course, and also more about how the research and thinking behind the book is influencing my own work as a digital media creator. I wrote about the creation-focused set of lessons last month, in a post called Humanities-Based Game Design.

When one considers the breadth of new media art that has been popularized in the last several decades, a major trend emerges: they’re about big messages. Famous pieces we’ve examined this term, from Domestic Tension to The French Democracy, all have a serious thematic purpose. Rarely are works intended for fun or entertainment considered legitimate “art,” as though fun and artistic merit are mutually exclusive. Consider Roger Ebert’s assertion that “video games can never be art.” These arguments devolve largely into discussions of semantics, essentially claiming that entertainment is not artistic. But this seems to contradict the most basic idea of art: that which is aesthetically pleasing to behold.

Here’s a post from a computer scientist (Paul Fishwick) that not only embraces critical code studies (CCS), it suggests that collaborations are possible that would be a “remarkable intersection of culture and disciplines” – where the object of study and the methods are shared between the humanities and computer science. Radical.

“Losing my anonymity in this world I think is something that I find terrifying.” Alex O’Laughlin

For many of us this, this statement rings true. The public life is brutal, demanding, and demeaning. To be a public figure is to be subject to public scrutiny in every word and deed. To lose a part of oneself to others. To be, as Sarah Chalke described it, a little less human. Perhaps this is why, more and more, people are swarming upon opportunities to test out the experience without truly sacrificing a part of themselves. That is, they re taking on pseudo-anonymous identities through networked gaming, online forums, and their corollaries.

It’s this Friday in Brooklyn, and I’ll be one of six competitors.

This Friday night I’ll be competing in the First Annual World Palindrome Championship. If you insist, you can call it the First or the Inaugural World Palindrome Championship, but that’s the name of the event.

Er, Eh – Where?

The event will take place in Brooklyn at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. The competition, with a 75-minute time for palindrome composition based on a prompt, will kick off the 35th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and will start at 8pm. (Those cruciverbalists like to stay up late.) It’s all run by Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. The championship is the first thing on the tournament schedule.

New media art gives us the opportunity to explore further what networking can do for communities on a small and global scale.  In most cases, digital networking allows users to interact with an inflated number of people than they would have interacted with in person.  For some, this interface allows the user to gain confidence and encourage more self-disclosure.  Yet, for others, it is an outlet for harsh language and hurtful comments.

Can games have meaning beyond its context of entertainment? In the past, I never considered game development as a possible aspect of creating new media art. Indeed, many games created share no commonalities with the principles of new media art. The fact that games contain digitally-rendered content alone is not sufficient for their admittance into the art world. However, according to Christiane Paul, a renowned new media artist and curator, “games are an important part of [new media] art’s history in that early on they explored many of the paradigms that are now common in interactive art” (Paul 197). So, what constitutes a game that is also a piece of new media artwork? This is a serious and provocative question for me to consider, as my final group project in my new media class involves the creation of a piece of new media art with playful, game-like tendencies.

Imagine hiking across the lone desert with the sun beating down on you. You wipe your brow and taste the salty dry sweat on your brow. Your heart keeps tempo while you try to stay focused on the trail ahead. Suddenly, memories come rushing through your head. You remember the distant past like it had just happened. But the blisters on your toes bring you back to the desert. Then there are fleeting memories of how you got deported the last time. How the marriage didn’t work out and you couldn’t prove it. They didn’t want to hear your story. Instead they put you on a southbound bus to Yuma. You are an immigrant en route to El Norte in search of a better life. Carol Flax and Trebor Scholtz’s web artwork entitled, “Tuesday Afternoon” puts you in the shoes of the person who is willing to risk everything including their life to reach the United States.

We have an amazing Spring 2012 Purple Blurb lineup, thanks to this academic year’s organizer, Amaranth Borsuk, and featuring two special events and readings by two leading Canadian poets who work in sound, concrete, and conceptual poetry. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. All events are at MIT and are free and open to the public.

Monday, March 19
5:30 PM
6-120

Steve McCaffery

Author of Carnival, The Black Debt, Seven Pages Missing
Professor and David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, SUNY Buffalo

The term “New Media” is expanding, since its emergence out of Pop Art, Fluxus, and other earlier movements, to mean many things. It is digital, it is interactive, it is dynamic, it is animated, it is dangerously hactivist…it is an expression of changing times and cultures, of the horizon called the future coming closer to us. One particular instance of New Media which has branched out into its own discipline is “Bio Art,” such as that practiced by British artist Jane Prophet in her project Silver Heart, seen below.

I gave a lecture yesterday with Jesper Juul and Clara Fernandez-Vara called “Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History.” It was part of the Game Education Summit at GDC and Frank Cifaldi wrote a nice discussion of a couple of the key themes for Gamasutra.

We put our slides together on Jesper’s computer, so I don’t have them all, but here are mine with my presenter’s notes (what I actually said varied, of course).

The nice thing about teaching game history now is that we’re very close to agreeing on the list of essential games, from around the world, that students need to master in an introductory game class

Grouping like things together is something that we are taught to do from an early age, but what do we do with things, people and circumstances that blur the lines and the groups? In the work of Luis Gispert, we are forced to confront these issues in a new light through the contrast that is created between what we see and what we expect. A lot of Gispert’s work features a mixture of common stereotypes that are present in today’s society and puts them out of context creating a contrast. Once these stereotypes are out of context we are then forced to analyze why and how we associate certain activities, behavior, dress, and objects to certain people and certain cultures. Through this process Gispert is able to reveal some issues that are not often confronted, recognized, or thought about by the viewer.

Grouping like things together is something that we are taught to do from an early age, but what do we do with things, people and circumstances that blur the lines and the groups? In the work of Luis Gispert, we are forced to confront these issues in a new light through the contrast that is created between what we see and what we expect. A lot of Gispert’s work features a mixture of common stereotypes that are present in today’s society and puts them out of context creating a contrast. Once these stereotypes are out of context we are then forced to analyze why and how we associate certain activities, behavior, dress, and objects to certain people and certain cultures. Through this process Gispert is able to reveal some issues that are not often confronted, recognized, or thought about by the viewer.

A number of people asked me to post my introductory slides from the “What is a Research Game” session at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Here they are with my presenter notes.

Well, what is the current role of games in universities? Here’s the stereotype: Social scientists still talk with people, but now those people are WoW players, Humanists still think deep thoughts, but now they’re about Passage, Computer Scientists still build systems, and still only far enough to publish papers, Educators still do the same type of instruction, but now they add points and badges, Artists still make and exhibit pieces, but now they reference game culture