Grand Text Auto

The current Scandanavian-focused issue of dichtung-digital has several new articles that should be of interest to the grandtextauto crowd, such as The Elements of Simulation in Digital Games by Äkin Jarvinen, Paradigms of Interaction: Conceptions and Misconceptions of the Field Today by Lisbeth Klastrup, Is There a Place for Digital Literature in the Information Society? by Raine Koskimaa, and The Geography of a Non-place by Torill Mortensen. Genießen Sie die Papiere.

Jill pulls an interesting quote from one of the papers.

This Friday at the Eyebeam gallery in Chelsea, NYC, is the opening of Beta Launch: Artists in Residence Part2, which includes Shadow, “an interactive installation that projects a disembodied, autonomous, human shadow on the ground. This apparently living, intelligent shadow attempts to merge itself with the viewer’s real shadow. When this occurs, the invisible figure, implied by the virtual shadow, inhabits the viewer’s own personal space.”

This is the kind of interactive art I really like, and wish there were more of. I strongly believe that there are so many interesting art pieces one can do with realtime autonomous characters in a gallery space — this is a frontier just waiting to be pioneered. For example, Simon Penny’s Petit Mal (1995), and Mark Bohlen and Michael Mateas’ Office Plant #1 (1998). Works likes these are both compelling conceptually and entertaining to experience.

A NYTimes article by James Gleick discusses new innovations in artificially intelligent houses. “Our technolust and Luddite impulses have rarely been so provoked — and at the same time and in the same people.”

Last August in Leipzig, Germany was apparently the world’s first symphony concert to feature music from popular Western and Japanese videogame soundtracks, including Final Fantasy, Battlefield 1942, and Zelda Wind Walker. Andy Brick conducted the Czech National Orchestra. (via Game Developer Magazine)

I haven’t yet had the chance to write a reaction to Randy Littlejohn’s impassioned article about interactive drama on Gamasutra from two weeks ago (requires free registration); I hope to post something next week. However I just discovered a discussion board hidden within Gamasutra called “Letters to the Editor“, where a lively debate about the article has already been going on. :-)

Actually it’s best to start reading the discussion starting from an October 3 letter that responds to Craig Lindley’s excellent game taxonomy article (that I had linked to in the midst of the Frasca fracas we had about a month back), and then work your way up through the next 17 or so “letters”.

Janet Murray is announcing a new PhD program in Digital Media at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Applications are due Feb 1.

I must say, it looks pretty tempting… great people, warm weather, land of soul food… I’d want to go there if I were looking to get a degree.

Just discovered a discussion that occurred a few weeks ago over at buzzcut about the lack of emotion in games, similar to the discussion we had recently here about the lack of games that address the “human condition”. Buzzcut is written by David Thomas, who also writes for DenverPost.com. Reading his blog I just discovered he was at LevelUp (here’s his pics), but I didn’t happen to meet him. It always sucks when you later realize you wish you’d met somebody in person when you had the chance.

I’ve given myself an hour to writeup my impressions from the LevelUp conference, which will be a challenge because it was a busy 3 days. I’ll give some highlights, anyway. (Here’s a WSJ article previewing the conference. And here’s some pics courtesy of Reality Panic.)

It was an energetic event in a pleasant city called Utrecht, at that town’s University, about 10 miles south of Amsterdam. The city center had pretty canals lined with restaurants, cafes and shops, an clean and efficient train and bus system, and lots of well-dressed people on bicycles. Our weather was pretty warm, making our 20 minute walk to and from the hostel enjoyable.

I arrived at 7am local time (1am body time) on an “overnight” flight from Boston, and the conference started at 9am — and I made it on time! (Just a wee bit tired, but the sunlight shining through the large windows of the Rem Koolhaas building where the conference was held helped keep me awake.) Everyone was surprised at how many attendees there were — about 500 in total, perhaps 20% American, and overall probably half students (grad and undergrad) from northern Europe. The lobby was lined with GameCube, PlayStation and XBox game consoles, so games and gamers were always in your peripheral vision as you chatted between sessions.

Terra Nova links to a personal account of a first kiss in the virtual world, There. It’s both sweet and disturbing to me. (Mostly because everybody looks like J.Crew models, but I know you can create less perfect-looking avatars. Which suddendly reminds me of the new reality show Average Joe I was just watching last weekend. I knew I wasn’t crazy when I alluded to just such a connection…)

(And I’m further unsettled (and intrigued) by the link in the Terra Nova post’s comments to Seducity.com… I didn’t know such a site existed yet! Wow… see you there… gulp?)

Game designers and academics Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca have begun a new blog called Water Cooler Games that “explores the emerging field of games [that] want to do more than simply being fun: they want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions. This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment.” I’ve added it to our blogroll.

I’ll be curious for a discussion that talks about the fine line between persuasion and propaganda, vis-a-vis political games…

On the blog Gonzalo mentions that his political commentary game Sept 12 (discussed recently here on GTxA) has now gotten over 100,000 unique hits.

There’s an extensive new article about interactive drama on Gamasutra called Agitating for Dramatic Change, by a game designer named Randy Littlejohn. It looks like a really great read — addressing in detail many of the issues we talk about here on grandtextauto. In fact he goes into detail about our interactive drama project, Facade, more so than any other paper to date not written by us.

If you haven’t registered with Gamasutra yet (for free), this article is surely worth the effort!

Four months ago I expressed interest in trying the new Star Wars Galaxies mmorpg. Although I’m not a fan of rpg’s, the idea of an online Star Wars universe has so much appeal that even a cynical non-gamer like me was ready to give it a try. I’ve been so busy lately that I hadn’t had a chance to try it yet — and now, unfortunately, it seems my delay may have been for the best. As of late there have been a few writeups about SWG‘s many problems, echoing what seem to be design problems with today’s mmorpgs in general. I think these critiques are very instructive not just for mmorpg design but as case studies of the challenges of interactive-experience genre innovation.

They seem to be coming fast and furious… this one in Sydney in February: IE2004: Australian Workshop on Interactive Entertainment. Most appealing is that the first eight topics of interest in the call for papers are AI & narrative / interactive drama / believable agent -oriented topics. (via Game-Culture)

Also, there will be a mini-symposium in the afternoon just after the Level Up conference ends, called FLUX: Game Industry in Transition; reserve your seat. Sadly my flight home leaves a few hours beforehand, so I’ll miss out.

From November 12 through March 28, Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center will have an exhibition called Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences: Storytelling and Computer Games. “The exhibition derives from research of the How They Got Game Project at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, a project seeking a path-finding narrative for the historical and critical appreciation of computer and video games. … A free conference on Friday, February 6, entitled ‘Story Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer Games,’ presents speakers from the industry and academia, addressing aspects of the role of narrative in computer games,” including Warren Spector, and Haden Blackman of LucasArts. (via GamesNetwork)

I find interactive drama to be a fascinating topic. It’s a fairly undefined and unproven thing, which makes it a lot of fun to think about, and attempt to build. Frustrating and humbling, too, of course.

Here’s a few rambling thoughts on the topic (many not new), partly motivated by a short essay about reality television that I recently came across while surfing.

While I’ve thought and read about interactive drama a lot (but am always finding more!), and with Michael have come up with an approach to it, a question I keep asking myself is: what exactly do you *do* in an interactive drama? What is it exactly? How does it operate, on a design / structural level?

The extensive list of presentations for March’s Game Developers Conference in San Jose is now online, and it looks as stimulating as ever! If you’ve never been to a GDC before, this looks like a great year to make the trip. There are a lot of talks to look through, so I took the time to pull out abstract excerpts of the ones I imagine would have particular interest to the GTxA crowd. Note there are a couple of presentations that specifically address issues of game research.

This conference has been getting better over time. It’s still definitely an industry conference (versus, say, the brand new Level Up, an academic one); GDC consistently and primarily offers hard-nosed, practical advice and information on building better games. But in recent years it seems to be trying to include more theoretical, experimental thinking and research. Cool.

112 games have been entered in 2004’s Independent Games Festival. Some dozen or so finalists will be chosen by a jury to compete at the Game Developers Conference in March in San Jose. The games’ development times range from 3 days to 8 years. Most seem like smallish web-based games, and I don’t see as many genre-busting works as I’d like, but I’m excited by the ~50% increase in the number of entries from last year.

Also, last weekend was the 2nd annual Independent Games Conference, sponsored by GarageGames. Looking at the schedule, it appears to have been a low-budget version of the expensive Game Developers Conference, with a few independent-games-oriented sessions thrown in the mix.

Greg Costikyan posts a strong, unhappy reaction to newsgaming.com‘s Sept 12. I was glad to read zang.org’s balanced reaction to Greg’s post. (Mind you, Greg is someone who lives a block from Ground Zero in NYC, who saw the towers fall.)

Without getting into the politics (other than to say I find Sept 12 to be a useful, thought-provoking piece, and exciting new genre for games), I’m not sure why Greg and some of his commenters are so vitriolically opposed to calling Sept 12 a simulation. Greg writes, at the height of his vehemence,

But to call this a “simulation,” as the creators do, is fucking obscene. Simulation of what? Where’s the research? What systems are simulated?

I just moved to Boston, and a few days ago happened to walk by Brookline Booksmith, noticing a sign that said Adrienne Eisen will be reading from her new book, called Making Scenes. I thought, huh, Adrienne Eisen, the hypertext writer, has a print book?

I’ve been a fan of Adrienne’s work since her first web-based hyperfiction, Six Sex Scenes, came out about 7 years ago now. We’d had some email discussions in the past — she’s a Petz fan — but we hadn’t met in person, so that was fun.

Here’s a quick link to Noah’s blog where he mentions his newly received copy of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s new book, Rules of Play. I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on it, especially after seeing their presentation at GDC last March.

I must say, between Rules of Play, The New Media Reader, Narrative Intelligence, The Art of Interactive Design, and the upcoming First Person and Twisty Little Passages (and the others I’m surely forgetting), this has been quite a year for meaty new books.

The annual international Vida (Life) competition, now in its fifth year, seeks “electronic art projects employing techniques such as digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, computer viruses, embodied artificial intelligence, avatars, virtual ecosystems, and interfaces between software, hardware and biomass.” Entries due Oct 31.

On the site you can peruse the past four years of winners and honorable mentions — some very cool stuff. (I was happy when Scott Draves, recipient of Vida 2001’s first prize for his piece Electric Sheep, contributed his thoughts to our Artist Programmer discussion last June.)

Mark Bernstein is asking (again), in the twenty-plus years that games have been around, what do they teach us about ourselves, e.g., about personal relationships, sexuality, the human condition?

The answer is: very little. But come on, this is obvious. (It’s true, some think we’re already there, but have thankfully come to their senses.) Over the years several have lamented publicly about this, e.g., Chris Crawford, Greg Costikyan, Brenda Laurel, Ernest Adams, and various articles; more recently Frasca, me, Michael, to name just a few. Michael and I use this as our motivation for developing Facade.

I’m always interested in cheap and easy (well, at a minimum, cheap) ways to develop your own graphical stories / games / worlds. We need to see more do-it-yourself independent game development — a lot more!

Now available on SourceForge: “Game development company Cat Mother Ltd. (www.catmother.com) has now closed its offices, but in their last meeting the company board decided to publish all company source code as open source. Also large part of the content is published. Published material includes fully playable prototype of a 3rd person action/adventure game and commercial quality in-house 3D-engine (C++/DirectX9). The source code is published under BSD license and the content is published under GPL license. All material can be downloaded from catmother.sourceforge.net.” (via Flipcode and Slashdot)

Call for entries for art and performance “which blurs the boundaries between online game space [The Sims Online] and the real world galleries of the Yerba Buena Center” in San Francisco. “What art can be within the constraints and rules of an online game?” Due Oct 31.

Also, a call for submissions for a book addressing the questions, “Can videogame art play with ideas or is it just meant to be played? Can a commercial computer game be art? Can art be playable? These issues and others are to be explored in a special edition of Anomalie: Computer Games and Art: Intersections and Interactions.” Due Nov 21.

Check out a new group blog that discusses “the rapidly emerging synthetic worlds of cyberspace” — MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds, and other realms of emergent collective reality. Today’s post, “Golems and Community,” raises the question, “do smarter bots make for better virtual communities?”

I’ve added Terra Nova to our list of links — it looks to be a blog worth regular visits. (via The Ludologist)