Grand Text Auto

Onward to day two, with more fascinating presentations about many aspects of many different sorts of games…

I’m here at the University of Florida attending the gaming group’s third annual conference, World Building: Space and Community For my own purposes and to highlight what’s being discussed here, I’ve typed up some notes. Conference speakers are particularly welcome to comment, particularly if my notes didn’t accurately record what you said — I’ll fix my notes, in that case. These notes are meant to point you to the authors’ own abstracts; please go there to read up on the research and to cite. Updated to include evening keynote.

I was delighted to read about two recent developments which involved one of my most beloved institutions, the library, working to preserve and provide access to one of my favorite forms of expressive, aesthetic media: the video game.

I learned from Jason R. Finley that UIUC’s undergrad library now offers video games. You can visit their gaming collection site, read all about their mission and use policies, and even suggest titles to buy. (I presume that suggestions from UIUC affiliates are weighted more highly.) The consoles listed are ones that are on the market today, but the library also boasts “a selection of retro/vintage games for use in-library only (including NES, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, etc.).”

Street Fighter: The Later Years. (The first three episodes are out.)

Mark Marino, one of the people named Time Magazine’s man of the year last year, has turned his bleeding-edge writing implements to the task of Web annotation. Travelogues and journals were in use for a while before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, and A Journal of the Plague Year, and, more recently, email had existed for a at least few decades before Carl Steadman wrote Two Solitudes, Rob Wittig Blue Company, and Scott Rettberg Kind of Blue. As Marino has noted, literature of annotation exists, too, but Nabokov and Wallace, for instance, had a long tradition of “real” endnotes and footnotes to build on. Web annotation isn’t even out of beta (and specifically, the Diigo system isn’t) and Marino is already digitally scribbling a story in the form.

The dog-eared tale is called “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” and, appropriately, annotates the referred-to Borges story as told to us by a little fish. Marino has offered some context for the project in another post, saying,

“Marginalia” offers one example of annotation used to write upon the web and to use the web as writing. Borges seems an uncanny muse for this project for a variety of reasons, explored in the tale. After introductory text post, the story begins with a machine translation of Borges’ tale, posted on the web. Floating over the text, are the reflections of a meta-narrator, who sends the reader to other places on the web. As a result, the story is also reading over the shoulder of this character. The bookmarks themselves are the story.

Important! System requirements ahead. To read, you must:

1. Install the magical Diigo button in your browser.
2. Use a supported browser (Firefox on OS X works; Opera doesn’t)
3. Be patient, since annotations will take some time to load.

One day, while playing the 1980 arcade game Berzerk, Abbott imagined a maze where the solver would have to avoid a robotic opponent.

Tony “Tablesaw” Delgado’s column on puzzle mazes traces the twisty path of maze design from the basic spatial variety, through logical mazes or “mazes with rules,” into the digital, and back into logical form. The main maze discussed is Theseus and the Minotaur by Robert Abbott. The short article is a fascinating read that sheds some light on how digital and non-digital games and puzzles exist in an ecology, how they evolve together, and how computer-based play differs from paper-based attempts at solution.

The Future of Electronic Literature, a symposium of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Electronic Literature Organization, will take place in College Park, MD on May 2 & 3. Registration is now open. Registration is free for ELO members and University of Maryland students (optionally, you can pay a small amount to get lunch), and it’s very cheap for others. Please register if you’re planning to attend!

Here’s the official word:

Here’s a note about my academic life: I’ve recently accepted a position at MIT as assistant professor of digital media. I’m planning to move up to the Cambridge area this summer, after I finish my dissertation here at Penn, and will start teaching in the fall. I’ll be joining the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and will be working with Comparative Media Studies and that program’s founder, Henry Jenkins. Of course, I’ll keep blogging – although I won’t possibly be able to write at the rate Henry does. I’m hoping to get a lot of great creative, teaching, and research work done at MIT; to learn a lot from my colleagues there, students and faculty; and to generally have a great time.

And then turn out the link? Note that links to the many good pages of the trAce Online Writing Centre (1995-2005), at trace.ntu.ac.uk, will no longer work, and should, in theory, be updated to point to tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk. Of course, there’s no easy, general way to deal with link rot; from a searcher’s perspective, you can try to find the old page on the Internet Archive, or maybe you know enough about the resource to re-Google what you’re seeking. You can read further about the trAce de-linking and the specific fracas surrounding it.

Gamer academics, take noteL T.L. Taylor sends word that ITU-Copenhagen is now looking for two game development professors. The university’s building is even cooler-looking than in the illustration below, and don’t worry – it isn’t that dark most of the time. Animations of the building, hopefully the same ones that had the great techno soundtracks, are also available.

The IT University (http://www.itu.dk/), home of the Center for Computer Games Research (http://game.itu.dk), is seeking applicants for two positions as Associate or Assistant Professor of game development. The faculty will teach in our international English language program that focuses on game design, analysis, and technology (http://www.itu.dk/mtg/). Relevant areas of research and teaching are:

I’m just back from a talk by Daniel C. Howe at Temple University. He showed us Phoneme.Machines, Code.Re(a)d, Open.Ended, Cave.Boxing, text.curtain, and Live.Text.Mix, many of which are linked from his home page.

And I’m about to head to the Flarf poetry festival at the Kelly Writers House, which starts at 6pm and is part of the MACHINE reading series that I founded. If you can’t make it but still want to Flarf out this evening, check out the YouTube videos of Flarf in action.

Joshua Birk of the blog Cathode Tan sheds some new, phosphorescent light on an H.P. Lovecraft story. His The Case of Randolph Carter is an AJAX hypertext, well-written and frequently engaging, designed to play out in nine different endings and to incorporate some elements of interactive fiction. One clicks to select words and actions rather than typing commands. While I don’t find the interface as appealing as the standard textual exchange of IF, those who aren’t fans of typing to their fiction may have a different opinion. Perhaps this tale will be of particular interest to some of those who reside in the eldritch birthplace of hypertext?

Leading IF author Emily Short has just posted a review of Pat Harrigan & our own Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Second Person – perhaps the first full length review of the recently-released book? At the risk of providing spoilers, I’ll mention that Short, who contributed a two-page article to the volume, gives a detailed assessment of what the book has to offer to those interested in interactive fiction, and concludes:

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a new column by Katie Haegele: DigitaLit. As you might guess, it is about digital literature. The first one introduces the concept and the online novel Mortal Ghost, by Lee Lowe.

If anyone made it to some of the weekend 1 events, let us know how they went.

OPENPORT: Realtime Performance, Sound, & Language
begins this week @
Links Hall
3435 N Sheffield, 2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60657
$12 ($10 students, seniors, unemployed)

Links Hall’s new Artistic Associates each curate a month-long series of performance, based on expertise in their respective artistic fields. February’s program has been curated by Nathan Butler (US), Mark Jeffery (UK), Judd Morrissey (US), and Lori Talley (US).

full details: http://www.openportchicago.com

A piece of LED art, referring to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force, seems to have been “neutralized” by a Boston police bomb squad. Police have found several other devices, presumably the same Lite-Brite-style artworks. And it seems they now have declared the devices part of a hoax that is “not funny.” A caption in that last article claims that at least of the devices was “detonated.” The news about this one came to me from Joe Shaw.

Liberty Arcade is a collection of interactive games that illustrate fundamental concepts from the social sciences. These games are designed to provide you with a better understanding of the underlying processes at work in modern, complex societies. Play the games, have fun and, by all means, think for yourself!

Very well! Let’s check out the quarterless arcade of The Institude for Humane Studies, “a unique organization that assists undergraduate and graduate students worldwide with an interest in individual liberty.” The game from Liberty Arcade that I’ll look at now is a simple but telling one, Tragedy of the Bunnies. It was created in 2004; the author doesn’t seem to be credited anywhere obvious. This exceedingly straightforward Flash game comes complete with an explanation of the “Moral of the Story,” so that if people don’t learn through gameplay, they’ll still be able to discover that…

As any economist will tell you, people respond to incentives. If there’s a valuable resource lying about in a commons—picture a pizza at a frat party—people will try and grab as much of that resource as they can before the resource is depleted. This response is natural—it’s an example of people responding to incentives. In other words, in a zero-sum game, you need to “get while the getting is good”. The more other people get, the less there is for you.

Jim Carpenter, poet-smith and blogger of The Prosthetic Imagination, has placed an early version of Erica T Carter, version 3 online. This is a poetry-generating machine that is the (beta) successor of Jim’s earlier ETC/Erica T. Carter/Electronic Text Composition projects, which have been discussed on here and at Autostart, exhibited at the Slought Foundation, and read as part of the MACHINE series and at Brown’s E-FEST.

The interface for ETC 3 is quite clever: The user is invited to type in a “topic” (perhaps a single word, perhaps a phrase?) and then generate a poem based on this. The difference between this sort of a system and one that generates poems with the click of a button is like the difference between the Oracle of Delphi and a guy babbling in the street. By accepting some topic T, the reader’s thoughts shift immediately from the skeptical posture of “does this text make any sense?” to the more inquisitive “how does this text relate to and comment upon topic T?” Even if the system were throwing away the input, this would be an interesting direction for the interface. However, it isn’t discarding it (at least, not always), as topic-words sometimes end up directly in the output text. For the casual Web user who wants to strap on an imagination, the simple interface also has some advantages over the complex settings of the earlier ETC systems, but perhaps an “advanced poem” page could be made available if there are other underlying parameters to vary.

newmediaFIX, in collaboration with Turbulence, presents three (or nine, depending upon how you look at it) new critical essays about some of the prodigious net art work that has been hosted in past years on the Turbulence site. The essays, at 3 X 3: New Media Fix(es), are each available in English, Italian, and Spanish. They are “The Body in Turbulence” by Josephine Bosma; “Narrating with New Media: What Happened with Whatever has Happened?” by Belén Gache; and “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats” by Eduardo Navas. They offer very interesting threads of thought, and also provide a good excuse to ply Turbulence’s archive of online art.

Not that Roland! The one with the sword. Vika Zafrin has linked to the latest version of RolandHT (with instructions) for use on Firefox or some other XSLT-capable browser, if there is one. (OS X Opera seems to work, too.) Her project – not fully loaded with lexias as yet – is a humanities computing project that promises to have wide appeal to the casual reader as well as disciplinary use. It allows the hypertext reader to compare different texts, by different authors, and see how literature has engaged Roland as a character. This sheds new light on how the the loveable, muslim-fighting paladin went from his starring role in The Song of Roland to become, as the font of all encyclopediac knowledge says, “a ‘pop icon’ in medieval minstrel culture.” There’s some more background about the project online, and for those who really must skip the instructions, here’s the direct link.

Slamdance hasn’t yet posted news of who won their games competition, which half of the games competition’s teams, including me, withdrew from. But congratulations go to the overall press winner, Danny Ledonne, whose game has become, by some counts, more popular than the entire Slamdance Film Festival. (This, even though one film there caused a melee in the street outside.) I hope that some of the interest in independent games outlasts this controversy, and that the other finalists – who put in so much work to offer beauty, fun, and various sorts of engagement with our world – will get at least some amount consideration from the public. And thanks to Arthouse Games, which reviewed all the games that were freely available or had downloadable demos.

This Thursday, January 18, the Archiving the Avant-Garde project’s New Media and Social Memory symposium is taking place at Berkeley. The symposium is public and free, but the organizers ask you register online. The topic, preserving digital art, is an important one that the Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination project has been working on for a while, but which is really rather neglected overall. Although I’ve put some effort into the ELO’s work myself, and I think that effort is important, it seems to me that no single person or organization is going be able to provide all the answers and do everything that’s needed to bear digital media into the future. We simply can’t put all the eggs in one basket or books in one library if we’re looking for them to survive. Because of this, the sort of meeting that is coming up at Berkeley is particularly important for allowing the intersection of and cross-pollination between Archiving the Avant-Garde: Documenting and Preserving Digital/Media Art (with its museum and visual art emphasis), the literary perspective of the ELO, the dead media mental muscle of Bruce Sterling, and thinkers from Wired Magazine and the Long Now Foundation.

I have 30 hand-labeled USB flash drives that contain my 2005 interactive fiction Book and Volume – they also contain a silly promotional video for Book and Volume and a press kit. These are material artifacts that store some of my free digital literary work. To be clear: you do not need one of these to play the game. Anyone can download Book and Volume for free. These USB drives are also not technological artifacts you’d want for their own sake. They hold only 32MB.

Nevertheless, would you like one of these? I will send one to anyone who sends me some material art object or creative document along with a return address. I don’t mind, of course, if the artwork you send is mass-produced – no “aura” is required. It could be, for instance, a book you wrote, a poem (written, printed, recorded), a print, a tape, CD, or DVD of yours, or some computer media with your work on it. You could send a bumper sticker you created, a Fluxus box, or documentation of one of your performances, installations, or exhibits.

Panoramas and Other Circular Stories
Esther M. Klein Gallery
3600 Market St, Philadelphia
January 12- March 31, 2007

Opening reception 5:30pm-8:30pm Friday January 12

[Sorry for the late notice about the opening, which starts in little more than an hour. The show is up until April, though!]

Circularities, repetitions and technological breakdowns are the themes of Roderick Coover’s multimedia show, comprised of six video works that incorporate layered photographs, audio, language and manipulated video recordings. Playing with text/image relationships, these works create strange stories that loop upon themselves and examine the ideas of travel and time in order to evoke ways that technology permeates the modern imagination.