Grand Text Auto

Since the news has apparently reached a certain social network (of which I am not a member), I’ll mention on here that with a minimum of fuss and no prior announcement, Flourish Klink and I got married today.

A challenge that arose was writing wedding vows that captured that essential and positive semantics of the traditional statements, but which acknowledged that two people can be, in some ways, opposites, looking at things from different directions while also agreeing to live as partners and to make the same commitment to one another.

The following is the third in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Here, interns Andrea and Viviana briefly describe their prototyping process for designing a competitive multi-player mobile game:

Our team was assigned with the task of creating a mobile, multiplayer metadata collection game that incorporates elements of fast paced competition and “one upping” your competitor. The catch is that we had to turn what worked as a competitive synchronous game into an asynchronous game. How would we enable players to form an exciting attachment to the game and be competitive with each other as each player interacted with the game over varying time spans? What would make players come back and play another round?

This week at the annual Game Developer’s Conference Education Summit, Tiltfactor Director Mary Flanagan has been called out to a ‘Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch,’ where leading game design instructors battle it out by revealing secrets to their game design teaching, their design philosophies, and pedagogical quirks. Speakers include yours truly (Mary), USC Interactive Media Division chair and Game Innovation Lab director Tracy Fullerton, UC Santa Cruz Expressive Intelligence Studio co-director and Expressive Processing author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Rules of Play and the Game Design Reader co-author and NYU Game Center professor Eric Zimmerman. The program will be MC’d by designer Justin Hall! Don’t miss it — the session ID is 823443.

This past week Tiltfactor sent a few versions of our Handwashing game to Haiti. Late last year, the former Minister of Health of Rwanda, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, requested that we try and come up with a solution, in the form of a game, to help encourage children to wash their hands more. Both in the United States and abroad, washing your hands is one of the most important ways to avoid getting sick, but too many children don’t do it. So, we are trying to help!

We hope that our testing in Haiti will reveal which of the various different illustration options (seen above) they prefer!

The following is the second in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Below, interns Alannah and Rebecca briefly describe their process for designing a tag verification digital game:

One classic downfall deserves another: Hitler reacting to the cancellation of Google Reader.

The University of California, Santa Cruz is hiring a new Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. This is someone who works full time helping students and faculty do interesting projects, thinks about the future technical direction of the program (and has a budget to purchase technical items worth investigating), helps people figure out how to exhibit and distribute their work, and manages the DANM spaces in the Digital Arts Research Center (including a black box theater, a white box gallery, a rapid prototyping lab, etc). The starting salary range is $57,500-$80,500 and review of applications begins March 20th. Please help spread the word, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Nick, a game design intern, and I teamed up for this term’s metadata game design challenge. Our assignment was to create a game designed to collect metadata to be associated with audio files, in order to make these files more accessible and retrievable via search engines. For this task, Nick and I (mostly Nick) designed a “Words-with-Friends”-style smart phone game, called Lost In Transmission, in which players are presented with segments from two sound clips: 1 “solution clip” (for our initial prototype of the game, we used the audio from an old school Chevrolet commercial) and 1 trash clip (for our prototype, the audio from an old coffee commercial). These clips were chopped into segments, scrambled, and divided randomly among players. By assigning tags to their segments, sharing them with each other, and collaborating to differentiate the “solution clip” from the “trash clip” and place the “solution clip” segments in the proper order, players work to accomplish the tagging required for providing accurate, quality metadata.

I send you, dear readers, the press release from Mark Saltveit
(palindromist, editor of The Palindromist, and stand-up comic) about yesterday’s award ceremonies, complete with amusing references to me – and I send my congratulations to Aric Maddux and the other winners!

Palindromes Win at SymmyS Awards

Shock as First-time Writer Takes Grand Prize With Serious Message On Pill Addiction; Discovered Via Tweet

PORTLAND, OR – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 11, 2013.

Aric Maddux of Indianapolis, Indiana won the Grand Prize for Best Palindrome at
the 2012 SymmyS Awards Sunday night with the first palindrome he ever wrote.
His winning entry, a rare “word-unit palindrome,” was a dark warning about the
dangers of prescription pill addiction:

This winter’s Winter Anthology, a collection of contemporary literature informed by history and older art, 21st century science and philosophy, and the ending of print culture, is now out.

This is volume three, and contains work by Joanna Howard, Andrew Zawacki, Andrew Grace, Ryan Flaherty, Srikanth Reddy, Ponç Pons, Lee Posna
Louis Armand, Dan Beachy-Quick, Steven Toussaint, and Nick Montfort & Stephanie Strickland.

I’m delighted to have our poetry generator “Sea and Spar Between” published in this context.

2002: A Palindrome Story

By Nick Montfort and William Gillespie. Illustrated by Shelley Jackson. Designed by Ingrid Ankerson. (24 pp., acknowledged by the Oulipo as the longest literary palindrome.) Spineless Books, 2002. $16.

The First M Numbers.

By Nick Montfort. Edition of 80. 4 pp. No Press, Calgary, Canada, 2013. $2.50.

In New York, Saint Mark’s Bookshop has copies of these two books for sale; in Cambridge, MA, they are available from the MIT Press Bookstore. 2002 is also available from the publisher, Spineless Books, and other online and local bookstores. I believe that No Press is out of copies of The First M Numbers.

Poet Michael Leong “tagged” me, not by spray-painting me or by assigning me a folksonomical string, but by sending me the following template of interview questions. This process is part of the project “The Next Big Thing,” in which people answer robotic, monomaniacal questions about recent or forthcoming books. I was supposed to post this on Wednesday, apparently, so it’s a good thing that I can set the date arbitrarily on my blog posts.

What is the working title of the book?
All the Way for the Win.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
Decades of intense poetic engagement with the English language.