Grand Text Auto

The first ever “Different Games” conference in 2013 was a resounding success. What a receptive community and the organizers, presenters, and attendees were all passionate, smart, and offered so much as game designers, writers, and researchers. I’ve never been to a conference that started off by following an inclusiveness statement, and now that I have, I think it is a great idea to get folks on the same page and open for what is to come. I sat in on the Queering Games panel run by Naomi Clark and Riley MacLeod; then went to the Twine workshop and read great IF/games by the Twine community. After that, there was a tremendous modding exercise of Awkward Moment where huge groups make their own in order to provoke discussion.

There’s a nice article by Illya Szilak, with a discussion/reporting by Melinda White, about the Library of Congress Electronic Literature Showcase. This ran April 3-5; I was down there to read from Ad Verbum and Taroko Gorge and to speak about electronic literature’s history with libraries on the last day of the event and exhibit. And it was an excellent exhibit.

Thanks to Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara, the Trope Tank has a new technical report, TROPE-13-01: “Electronic Literature for All: Performance in Exhibits and Public Readings.”

This report covers readings of interactive fiction done by the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, the Boston area IF group, and the exhibit Games by the Book, discussed previously on here. But there is much more detail in this report about how these attempts managed to share computational works (works that are both games and e-lit) with the public. If you are interested in outreach and presentations of this sort, please take a look.

April 2009

APRIL 28
Scott shared a link.

In 2013, my wife was part of the Atakan campaign for rector at UIB. When the opposition in a debate accused Team Atakan of knowing nothing about digitalization, Jill started up an “Atakan Meme” facebook page. I wanted to do what I could to help the campaign.

On May 10th, at the Computer History Museum, UC Santa Cruz will host some of the world’s most exciting thinkers on interactive storytelling for Inventing the Future of Games 2013. Rather than focus on yesterday’s tips and tricks, our focus is on how the future of interactive storytelling is being invented now. There will be talks, panels, discussion, and live demonstrations — including, I am excited to share, the first-ever public demonstration of a major, not-yet-announced interactive storytelling technology being developed by UC Santa Cruz and multiple partner organizations.

The Tiltfactor team is off next week to THREE exciting events! First is our RePlay Health Game at the Society of General Internal Medicine on Friday April 26, 2013, from 3-4:30pm.  Our team (Max and Geoff, with special guest star Dr. Pat Lee) will be playing our sport to help reconsider health care delivery initiatives with doctors from around the globe! Next, our research team (Cote and Geoff) will be presenting at the annual American Educational Research Association meeting in San Francisco. The conference theme is “Education and Poverty” and the team will be presenting our paper, “Poverty, Parity, and Play? The Possibility of ‘Unlearning’ Inhibiting Gender Biases through Games.”

We are pleased to announce that EIS co-director Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and myself, Eric Kaltman, along with Christy Caldwell at UCSC Library and Henry Lowood of Stanford University Library, have been awarded an NEH Digital Start Up Grant aimed at investigating archival and preservation methods for digital software and games! The grant covers the development of an initial archival methodology focused on the preservation of computer games created for academic research. We have chosen UCSC’s Prom Week as the case object for our investigation, and are extremely honored to be helping further archival research with an EIS created game. The project will focus not only on the game object itself, but also on its development process. Our hope is to enumerate, categorize and potentially archive all relevant secondary documentation along with Prom Week to gain a greater understanding of the requirements for preserving the process and creation of digital games.

18 Cadence is a new piece of electronic literature that’s almost definitely not a game, something less than a book, and explores a rarely tackled corner of interactivity in interactive narrative: the choices and decisions of how to tell a story, what bits to include, what to leave out, how to arrange them. It’s available for free on the web or as an iPad app.