Grand Text Auto

Many exciting things here at ICCC-12 (the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012) in Dublin, but here are those that come from MIT, Writing and Humanistic Studies, and Comparative Media Studies:

I represented my lab, The Trope Tank, by presenting by the position paper “Small-Scale Systems and Computational Creativity” by Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova. The Trope Tank has a longer technical report that deals with this topic, written for a more general audience: “TROPE-12-02 – XS, S, M, XL: Creative Text Generators of Different Scales” by Nick Montfort.

There’s a nice new interview with game scholar and game maker Clara Fernandez, who is an affiliate of The Trope Tank. Check it out.

Mark Sample has posted five basic statements, ahem, I mean 5 BASIC statements, on computational literacy.

I must point out that while they are all programs, the third and fifth ones actually include multiple statements. And, the program that number 4 is referring to is:

10 PRINT "GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD"
20 NEW

Very much worth a read – from the standpoint of understanding programming and its cultural intersections generally, not only because Mark is promoting the book that he, I, and eight others wrote, which will be published in November.

(l to r): Sam Beattie, Oge Young, Dave Roberts, Michelle Favaloro, Justin Gary, and Tracy Hurley respond to provocative audience questions at Dartmouth at Play '12

Held the Friday of Green Key weekend, one of the busiest times of the year on campus, our first annual Dartmouth at Play event was a smashing success.

(PDF version here)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
cont…@tiltfactor.org
603.646.1007

Dr. Mary Flanagan, director of Tiltfactor Laboratory and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, will deliver several talks this summer and fall on such topics as critical play, games as an art form, and games as a medium for social change. Scheduled venues include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Games for Change Festival, and the IndieCade Conference.

This Friday, Dartmouth is proud to welcome alumni in the gaming industry back to Hanover!

Geoff Kaufman, our very own postdoctoral researcher, has just published his work on the effects of immersive fictional narrative on an individual’s behavior in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  His research (with Lisa Libby, OSU) is attracting a lot of attention due to its potential for social change. In the series of studies, Geoff examined what happened to people who felt “experience-taking” while reading a fictional story. ”Experience-taking” is a phenomenon that occurs when readers find themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own. Geoff and his research team found that for certain situations, “experience-taking” can lead to behavioral or attitudinal changes in the readers.

Last quarter I took a graduate seminar here at UCSC in procedural content generation, taught by Jim Whitehead. I’ve long been intrigued by the possibilities of PCG for interactive storytelling, but my past work hasn’t explored this terrain. The course inspired the short piece I’m posting today, Almost Goodbye, a parserless, browser-based, short-form experiment in procedural content generation for interactive stories. (It’s also science fiction, if none of the rest of that piques your interest.)

Games can be good for you in many ways– and there has been an explosion of  play systems and gadgets recently to help with obesity and fitness. Some new products have surfaced to popularity over last few months. Zamzee, Striiv, and SlimKicker are just a few of the examples popping up to join older systems such as Bodybugg. Yes, studies have shown that Wii and specifically DDR-style dance games can encourage weight loss, so there is significant promise for personal devices that come along on your day to also help you play.