Grand Text Auto

A couple of weeks ago I received the sad news that my friend Steve Kurtz’s wife Hope had passed away in her sleep. This personal tragedy was compounded by the bizarre twist that, when police and medical workers arrived in response to Steve’s call, they saw some of the biological equipment in his home studio that Steve uses for biotech art performances with the Critical Art Ensemble. Hyped up on “War on Terror” fervor, they called in the Feds to investigate a potential bioterrorism case. While this was shocking, and certainly added insane stress to an already emotionally intense situation (Steve was even denied access to his wife’s body for awhile), I assumed that the bioterrorism case would blow over, as investigators discovered the ridiculous mistake they’d made. But, as many GTxA readers may already know, in the last few days the situation has grown ever more Kafkaesque, prompting me to make this public post on what was initially a private tragedy. Steve is now being brought before a Grand Jury on bioterrorism charges. Other artists have been called in to testify, including my friends Paul Vanouse and Beatriz (Shani) da Costa. Below I’ve included the text of a CAE defense fund press release.

Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’…

Previously at GTxA we’ve discussed the issue of whether media artists and theorists should program (1 2 3 4), mentioned Mary Flanagan’s and Ken Perlin’s new procedural literacy project, and generally championed the idea that new media artists, game designers and theorists, media and software studies theorists, and generally anyone involved in cultural production on, in or around a computer, should know how to program. Of course people have been talking about the importance of procedural literacy for awhile, with Seymour Papert describing his work with teaching children to program in Logo in the 1980 book Mindstorms, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg describing procedural environments in which everyone, including children, can build their own simulations in the 1977 paper Personal Dynamic Media, and Ted Nelson crying in the wilderness that “you can and must understand computers NOW” (including programming) in his 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines. But a couple of months ago Mark Guzdial turned me onto an even earlier argument for universal procedural literacy, one given by A. J. Perlis in a talk at a symposium held at M.I.T. in 1961 to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and published in the collection Management and the Computer of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.), MIT Press. The symposium consisted of 8 talks, with two discussants responding to each talk, and was attended by such luminaries as C. P. Snow, J. W. Forrester, Herb Simon, J. McCarthy, and A. J. Perlis. Perlis’ talk, The Computer in the University, focused on the role the computer should play in a university education.

CGAIDE 2004, the International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education, will be held at the Microsoft campus in Reading, UK, November 8-10 2004. The conference aims to bring together academics and game developers interested in AI and games, with special session topics on areas such as intelligent agents, learning and adaptation in games, and neural networks in games, as well sessions on game art and education for game design and development. Submissions are due July 30, 2004.

The Futurefarmers collective has released the online game Antiwargame. Like the controversial September 12 (GTxA discussion: 1 2), Antiwargame explores the politics of the war on terror via a game simulation. In Antiwargame you take actions such as setting your budget, sending troops overseas and manipulating the media, with the goal of maintaining a popularity high enough to remain president.

Via Rhizome

Update: More on the simulation rhetoric operating in Antiwargame can be found in the comments.

The 7th annual Subtle Technologies Festival of art and science takes place at the University of Toronto from May 27th to May 30th. “Subtle Technologies’ mandate is to blur the boundaries between art and science, presenting symposia, exhibitions and performances that juxtapose cutting-edge artistic endeavours and scientific exploration.” In addition to the symposium, there will be a performance and workshop by Pamela Z in partnership with Deep Wireless Festival and InterAccess Media Arts Centre. InterAccess will also host an installation, “Infrasense” by Robert Saucier and KIT. DeLeon White Gallery is hosting an installation, Champions of Entropy #3, by Brandon Vickerd. The full schedule of presentations, performances and installations is available on the website.

The submission deadline for the Computational Creativity Workshop at the 7th European Conference in Cased-Based Reasoning has been extended to May 17th. We have often discussed how AI-based approaches to interactive media can support a level of generativity, and thus support a depth and breadth of interaction, not possible with non-AI approaches. For AI-based art and entertainment, the AI subfield of Computational Creativity is particularly relevant as it explicitly focuses on systems that generate novel configurations out of raw material given to the system. Such systems could be used to generate novel character behaviors, story pieces, text, visual imagery, etc. in response to interaction.

This Spring I taught Interactive Narrative. In this class, through a mixture of readings and projects, we survey the landscape of interactive narrative, examining the theoretical issues, debates and design issues that arise around different conceptions of interactive narrative. As I’ve discussed previously, the class is organized around technical genres (e.g. interactive fiction, author-based story generation, interactive drama), where a technical genre consists of a community of practice (history of work and criticism) organized around specific computational and design commitments.

The class is heavily project-based – 6 weeks of the class are spent in two 3 week design cycles, including in-class critique, in which students design and implement an interactive narrative. For these projects, students are free to explore/invent any form that interests them, as long as they can articulate in what sense it is interactive and (harder) in what sense it is narrative. We actually look at works along four design dimensions, in terms of interactivity, narrativity, segmentation and representation (as I discussed earlier).

I do spend some time in the class exploring the ludology/narratology debate.

Following the advice of Matt Kirschenbaum, I’ve recently read The Bug, Ellen Ullman’s tale of obsessive programming, and the deterioration of a programmer in his year-long quest to fix an elusive bug. Matt includes The Bug on his list of Software Studies readings, and suggested it during our earlier discussion of my class Computation as an Expressive Medium (aka programming for artists). The book does a great job describing how software systems consist of layer upon layer of abstraction, describing the debugging process, and providing a visceral feel for all the computational work that goes into maintaining the abstraction of a graphical interface, all within an engaging story. The book also encapsulates the two cultures battle within the microcosm of a 1980s software company, with highly educated humanists in low-status testing jobs on one side, and narrowly technical, often self-taught (or possessing mere bachelor’s degrees), high-status programmers on the other. The book could nicely complement The New Media Reader readings and Java programming we do within the class.

Thomas Lux, the Bourne chair of poetry within LCC, has organized a series of poetry readings, performances and discussions at Georgia Tech. I recently attended a reading and discussion featuring British poet George Szirtes, and the US poet laureate (2001-2003) Billy Collins. Their discussion of their own creative process as poets led me to think about poetry generation, and particularly my discomfort with purely statistical approaches to poetry generation employed by systems such as gnoetry (1 2 3).

It was great to hear George and Billy both read poems and discuss the process of writing poetry, using their poems as examples. One issue they discussed was the problem of finding a balance between revealing and concealing. A poem that conceals too much from the reader becomes private language, something the reader is completely unable to enter. But a poem that reveals too much, that wears all of its meanings on its sleeve, in some sense fails to be poetry, fails to lead the reader to meanings not capturable in everyday language, fails to underlay meaning with mystery. One analogy they used for this was eye charts. On an eye chart, everyone can read the big “E” at the top of the chart. Eventually you get lines that are hard, and then impossible to read. A poem shouldn’t consist of only big Es or tiny small lines, but, like the eye chart, should have layers.

I’m on the program committee for the workshop Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, to be held at the 12th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in New York next October (details below). If you are interested in multimedia story systems, particularly systems that employ AI models of story and character, please consider attending!

The 1st ACM Workshop on
STORY REPRESENTATION, MECHANISM AND CONTEXT
In conjunction with the 12th ACM International Conference on Multimedia
October 15, 2004
Columbia University
New York, New York, USA
Papers due: June 15, 2004
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2004
Camera-ready papers due: August 1, 2004

I had a great time at the GDC last week. The positive buzz around Façade led me to consider once again the issue of whether the phrase “game research” makes sense. To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn’t believe in “game research”. You’re either working on a shippable product, or you’re bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can’t be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will? To put a finer point on it, how do I fund the next Façade?

Those GTxA readers in New York City should consider attending the seminar:

Playdate #1: War Games and Game Wars
Friday 9th April 1-3pm Wolff Conference Room
The New School 65 5th avenue (at 14th st)
Free. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Ed Halter will present War Games: Digital Gaming and Military Culture, and Alex Galloway will present Social Realism in Gaming. Perhaps someone who attends the talks can post something about them here.

Via Rhizome.

Continue reading for more detail about the two talks.

In the category of “this is not an April Fools joke”, Quake has been ported to the Inform interactive fiction language. As the IF Quake page describes it:

In IF Quake, you walk through the exact same levels you do in the graphical version of the game, only instead of circle-strafing and firing at your enemies, you type commands like “ATTACK GRUNT WITH SHOTGUN”.

Thanks to Slashdot for announcing this.

The Flash game Grow has been sweeping through the blogosphere for a couple of months now – it recently hit the IDT program at Tech, distracting people for a week of addictive play. When you first start playing, the placement of objects on the sphere and their transformations seem random – there’s no reason to prefer placing one object before another. Discovering the internal logic that governs the transformations of the initially abstract elements is the primary addictive pull of the game.

One of my students, Dave McColgin, made In the Car for the first three week project cycle in my Interactive Narrative class this semester. As he says:

It was an exercise in evoking emotion with digital tools, carrying the thread of a compelling narrative through a process partially controlled by the “player” (you). Elements from literary theory, video game traditions, and filmic methods were incorporated. The only instructions are to, when possible, use your cursor to interact. You should be able to figure the rest out from video, audio, and timing cues.

This came through my mailbox today, and the first few sentences sounded interesting:

E3 Expo to Feature Video Game Art Exhibit

Los Angeles — Organizers of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the video game industry’s annual convention in Los Angeles, on Thursday announced a call for entries for its first exhibit of video and computer game art, dubbed “Into the Pixel.”

Following on our discussion of code as art (Fear of Code), I came across an annoucment for the show Hackers: The Art of Abstraction currently on display at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. The show emphasizes the connection between hacking and creative activity in any medium. The Wired News article links to an interesting Marxist description of hacking, A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark.

I’m happy to announce that two new games studies faculty, Ian Bogost and Michael Nitsche will be joing us at Georgia Tech this Fall.

Some of you already know Ian from watercoolergames and as a frequent commentor here. Ian is interested in the rhetorical function of games, how they can be used to convey a position and change opinions. Ian also develops games, most recently the Howard Dean campaign game (which we discussed here).

The BBC reports that the gaming company There (1 2 3 4) is creating a detailed model of the entire earth for the US Army. The Army will use the simulated earth to plan future battles.

Beard of Bees Press has just made available The Dublin of Dr. Moreau, another collection of machine-generated poetry produced by Gnoetry, a poetry composition system that sythesizes new language based on probability distributions learned from existing texts. In the case of The Dublin of Dr. Moreau, the poems are based on the statistical properties of James Joyce’s Dubliners and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau.

We’ve previously mentioned Gnoetry (1 2 3 4).

I’m happy to announce the creation of the Experimental Game Lab, a new video game research lab I’ve founded at Georgia Tech. The EGL’s mission is to serve as an interdisciplinary meeting place, supporting work at the intersection of art, technology and culture, in which faculty and students work together to create the future of gaming. The lab has been active since early last fall, though we’re just now giving the lab a public face.

The speaker schedule for Form, Culture, & Video Game Criticism, a one day conference being held at Princeton on March 6th, has been announced. Looks like a good lineup, and includes our own Nick Montfort as well as frequent GTxA commentor Dennis Jerz. I couldn’t find a website with the conference schedule, so I include the full program below.

One of my students forwarded a link to this episode of Strongbad answering his email, in which he humorously riffs on classic games. His treatment of text adventures is particularly relevant given the historical context of the “this is not a game” comment that Noah describes below; one can imagine that this is pretty much what the hypertext folks thought interactive fiction was like. Make sure your sound is on.

The International Digital Media and Arts Association is holding their conference March 12 – 14 in Orlando. The iDMAa conference explores issues relevent for faculty and administrators of digital media and digital arts programs, particularly focusing on curriculum development, directions for research and creative work, resources (e.g. laboratories, external sponsors), and faculty development.

The Moves Institute of the Naval Postgraduate School has created a booklet describing the philosophy, history and implementation of their army recruitment game America’s Army, (mentioned here previously 1 2 3 4) for the Bang the Machine exhibit at the Yerba Buena Arts center in San Francisco. The booklet is available online.