Grand Text Auto

Scott needs a t-shirt, pronto! If you don’t end up entering his contest and designing him one by Friday, he might end up wearing one of these…

Update: There’s now a Purple Blurb Web page which will be kept up to date with information about the seties.

This Fall, a new reading series for digital writing will take place in the salon-like environs of the Trope Tank at MIT. The series is sponsored by the MIT programs in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies along with local arts organization Turbulence and the Electronic Literature Organization. It will feature readings and presentations by digital writers of all sorts – poets, fiction writers, writers of nonfiction and criticism, and others engaged in language, narrative, and letters on the computer.

Greg Costikyan has just introduced a separate but Manifesto-Games-owned site for game reviews, focusing on independent games. It’s called Play This Thing! It will feature – already features – games with online demos as well as free games. Reviewers will intone Csikszentmihalyi, Huizinga before commencing their daily posts, and will then go on to provide short and punchy takes on fun games that accessibly explain their cool aspects. The site already features reviews of:

• Introversion Software’s Defcon, a demo-available strategy game, reviewed by the99th
• Adam Cadre’s Lock and Key, an unusual interactive fiction piece, reviewed by Emily Short
• Chris Swain’s The Redistricting Game, a Flash piece

IF legend Andrew Plotkin has assembled the site Draco Concordans, a detailed multithreaded commentary on John M. Ford’s 1983 novel The Dragon Waiting, which won of the 1984 World Fantasy Award. This exceedingly detailed take on the novel looks to be a contribution that can play with the finest of Web commentaries, such as Stuart Moulthrop’s Watching the Detectives: An Internet Companion for Readers of Watchmen. Check it out.

Leonard Cohen

Manhattan: Taken.
Berlin: Taken.

The Rolling Stones

Satisfaction: That’s fixed in place.

It’s all just going to be tweaking from now until spring for Will Wright’s magnum opus, 1up says after an encounter with the pre-release game at the Leipzig Games Convention.

You don’t realize it, but while you’ve been innocently building Tesla coils and general infantry, Grand Text Auto has been in ur museum installing ur art.

Starting October 4, 2007, the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine will be multiplied by 256 and divided by zero. And besides that, the Beall Center will host the exhibition Grand Text Auto, featuring work by the six of us: Noah Wardrip-Fruin / Mary Flanagan / Michael Mateas / Andrew Stern / Nick Montfort / Scott Rettberg.

There have a been a few blog-to-book transfers, but this exhibit and the associated events are, as far as we know, the first time blog has had such a manifestation in the physical space of an art gallery.

I’m just now getting a chance to write briefly about the July 28-29 Classic Gaming Expo, where I met up with Ian Bogost, among others, to work further on our book Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform. Ian has a nice writeup at Gamasutra, more thoughtful than I will manage to offer here.

More than the frenzy of cartridge-swapping, I enjoyed writing and catching up with various interactive fiction folks, including the author of Fallacy of Dawn, the developer of the incredible Atari 2600 title Lord of the Rings, and the filmmaker behind Get Lamp.

Check out Dennis G. Jerz’s excellent article about Adventure‘s cave and Adventure‘s code, (link updated) now out in the second number of Digital Humanities Quarterly and already trumpeted in Boing Boing.

I was fascinated to find that this talk, “Dungeons and Hyperlinks: Electronic Literature and Digital Narratives from Text Adventures to Hypertext,” was given recently at the hackerfest called Chaos Communication Camp 2007. It covers the development of a MUD, text adventure, and finally a Shockwave game based on Nika Bertram’s novel Der Kahuna Modus (Kahuna Mode). The Shockwave game is available, although it doesn’t run on Intel Macs, which makes it not available to me. I can’t find the Inform interactive fiction on the IF Archive or the author’s site. Even a trip to the Kahuna Mode MUD didn’t help me locate the warez. If anyone finds this, please comment about where it is.

My dissertation, “Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction,” is now online.

If my slides and defense summary interested you, you can check out this long form writeup of my work. I guess there will be an “official” version coming from ProQuest/UMI before too long, too, via their open access option. I think that “official” in this case will mean that the papers I printed out will be scanned in again, imbuing the result with the authority of the page.

John Cayley has now developed a QuickTime version of riverIsland will run on (aqequately prepared) Windows as well as Mac system. The piece incorporates navigable images and uses Cayley’s transliteral morphing to allow movement through two loops of poems.

Many of you know that I’m not personally working toward the goal of interactive fiction profitability, and that I don’t think IF has to make money to be a meaningful part of our culture. I’m certainly a big fan of lots of early commercial work in IF, though, and I’m also glad to see interactive fiction practice expand in new ways. So I would of course support, for instance, a long-contributing member of the IF community creating a new company that aims to expand IF readership and offer a new type of work to a new audience. And I do support it – a new interactive fiction company of this sort has in fact been established, announcements have been made about IF authors will write games for the new venture, and a full website is being readied.

The company that seeks to bring IF to market again is Textfyre, an initiative of David Cornelson, who also published Graham Nelson’s Inform Designer’s Manual in print for the first time, started the tradition of two-hour IF creation sessions called SpeedIF, and started ifwiki. What follows is a summary of the major news so far about Textfyre and some replies from Cornelson about the company and the future of interactive fiction.

I Premio Literaturas en Español del Texto al Hipermedia has been announced, and includes categories for electronic editions of literary works in Spanish, online teaching of literature in Spanish, and creative digital literature in Spanish. The prize in this contest is journal publication.

Like a Sesame Street monster from a neighboring country, the site about the prize is (surprise) in Spanish, and it requires cookies. Deadline: October 30.

A quick note: The LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries in Gijón, Spain is running some very interesting workshops in July, on modding, bordergames, Second Life, and even chiptunes. Check the LABoral website for details.

Matt Barton has written an article on Zork through the ages over at Gamasutra. You shouldn’t trust me, since Barton quotes me copiously and plugs my book, but it’s a nice piece. (Barton also talked to and quoted several more authoritative sources, including Zork co-author Dave Lebling and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky.) Check it out for yourself.

I’ll also note, as Barton does, that Tim Anderson’s “History of Zork” article is a good read on this topic. Anderson, a Zork co-creator, goes into more detail about the specifics of the creation of the original game and the trilogy based on it. What Barton’s article adds to this is insight into the contexts of Zork‘s creation and the influence it has had, following through Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, the all-graphical Activision Zork games and into the present day.

The amazing thing about Han Hoogerbrugge’s Hotel is that like so many other works of e-lit (afternoon, Photopia, 253 if you expand the definition of “car” slightly) it involves a car crash. The design and visual appearance may dominate the text, but it does make for some interesting clicking.

Thanks to these three for pointing me to several interesting sites of note…

Dennis Jerz sent word of the fracas over Manchester Cathedral being modeled as part of Resistance: Fall of Man. A video walkthrough shows what the level looks like. Sony has apologized, as I think they should have: The cathedral is neither candle-lit nor full of doves, and it lacks Chow Yun-Fat. Fortunately, at least one of those problems is being addressed in another game.

Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction

Nick Montfort
University of Pennsylvania, Computer & Information Science
Mitchell P. Marcus & Gerald Prince, Advisors
Committee: Aravind Joshi, Mark Liberman, Fernando Pereira, Marie-Laure Ryan

(This is a distilled version of my dissertation defense from this morning, for Grand Text Auto.)

Update: My dissertation itself is now online.

The main question I’m considering today (after working on it for a few years) is:

How to create a text-generating automatic narrator to tell about the same events in different ways?

The context for this question is interactive fiction (IF). There are two parts to the answer:

• Develop a formal theory of narrative variation for IF
• Implement it in an IF and text-generation architecture

The intricate Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses will be enacted on Twitter today, Bloomsday, in two hours, by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy. They have already practiced. Note that this isn’t just one of those line-a-time book-reading robot runs.

The contest has been announced: Your newly-created Intellivision games are due on November 1.

Jason Nelson’s game, game, game and again game looks a bit like Paper Mario attacked by rock and scissors. It is an unusual platformer that takes a stand against the unfortunate lack of Super-8 footage in most games. And it is philosophical.

José Manuel García-Patos, who is at work on the interactive fiction system Gesaku, called my attention to a fascinating article about player freedom by Stephen Bond, author of Ramses.

Bond points out that the camp that expects IF to provide a more or less completely blank slate upon which the player’s experience can be realized (so that IF becomes simply a “a text-based vibrator for the imagination”) is quite distant from those who expect IF authors to supply treasures, dragons, puzzles, and conventional pleasures. He offers a third idea, that of “interactive fiction as a kind of art form,” allowing expression. In Bond’s view, artmaking is “egotistical” and “[a]n artwork is a reification of the artist’s self, a subjective consciousness made objective, bravely put forth and held out for admiration.”

The ideas of pure player choice may be as uninteresting as the cave-crawl, but I don’t think this concept of art is the only alternative.

From my own perspective, the quality is a bit disappointing, but it’s the only computer-generated generated description of our blog that I’ve found posted in several places online:

A group blog Grand Text Auto is about computer mediated and auto body replacement parts computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, …

Of course, what I think about this text doesn’t really matter. The real question is, does it help Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp, and similar crawlers get off? We invite comments from any robots who have an opinion about this text.

Mature viewers with minds akimbo may appreciate the unusual photographs, suited to the premade captions, in the series 13 Months in the Year of the Dog. Thanks, inky.