Grand Text Auto

I have withdrawn Book and Volume from the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, for reasons discussed in the open letter I and other finalists sent to the festival.

Dear Slamdance festival organizers,

In recent years, the Slamdance film festival has become a major gathering for independent gamemakers. We were honored to have our games selected as finalists for this year’s Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition, and were looking forward to meeting our fellow gamemakers, filmmakers, and other festivalgoers in a context where our work was seen as legitimate, artistic, and meaningful.

Recently, the festival has made the decision to remove one of the finalists, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! by Danny Ledonne, from the competition – after this game was solicited by festival organizers, chosen by a jury, and publicized as a finalist. We have been unable to find mention of any other film, game, or screenplay that has been pulled from Slamdance at any point in the past, making this an unfortunate first for the festival.

We object to this decision and strongly urge the festival organizers to reinstate the game in the festival. It is legitimate for games to take on difficult topics and to challenge conventional ideas about what video games can do. No game should be rejected for moral or other reasons after a panel of judges has found the game to be of artistic merit and worthy of inclusion in the festival. We find it very unlikely that a similar decision would have been made about a jury-selected film, and see this decision as hurting the legitimacy of games as a form of expression, exploration, and experience.

Since the beginning of time, pure silence has been available only in the vacuum of space. Now conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has digitally generated a span of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length, portable enough to be carried on a cellphone. His silent ringtone, freely distributed through special arrangement with Start Mobile, is expected to bring quiet to the lives of millions of cellphone users, as well as those close to them.

Kotaku is reporting, and Water Cooler Games confirming, that Super Columbine RPG, accepted as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, has been pulled from the copetition by festival organizers under pressure from sponsors. Apparently this is a first for any film or game that has been accepted to Slamdance. Oddly, the game was actively courted by Slamdance before submissions were due. See the comments at GamePolitics.com, too.

Update (January 6): Two-time Slamdance finalist Ian Bogost says the decision was personal, not a business move, and declares the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition dead.

Liz Losh has handed out the un-prizes for the incompetence of government agencies and policy makers in the area of digital media, now named the Foleys. For instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency Calendar [PDF], which had the most phallic imagery of any government-produced calendar this year, was among the recognized media artifacts.

Matt Kirschenbaum has been massing blog entries for days, and has been massing wargaming board games for many years. This textual scholar by day has stepped out of the phone booth wearing a game studies suit and in command of a new blog, Zone of Influence. Matt announces:

Zone of Influence, a new game studies blog I created to combine my academic interests in modeling, simulation, and technologies of representation with my hobbyist interests in games, particularly board wargames.

As I mentioned in passing in my MLA post, this year’s Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference in Portland, Maine is about CODE:

Code can be “wet” (genetic, organic, human), “dry” (digital, mathematical, logical), something in-between, neither, or both (linguistic, symbolic, religious, moral, legal).

I prefer my code very dry – best to just show it the vermouth. But however you like your code, and even if you are legalistically or genetically inclined, you should find plenty of good discussion at SLSA. The deadline is March 15: See the SLSA ’07 call for papers.

The MLA was huge and hectic this year, as it usually is, with 40 panels going on at once; interviews happening in hotel suites, mass gladiatorial arena-like settings, and lobbies; a huge book exhibit; and unofficial events of various sorts.

Thursday contained a day of programs on the sound of poetry. I missed friends Matt Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, and Peter Stallybrass speaking about the material history of digital and non-digital texts due to the co-occurring Canadian sonic invasion: As they gave papers, Steve McCaffrey delivered Hugo Ball’s “Karawane” and Christian Bök read his “Mushroom Clouds” and “Synth Loops.” There were also papers from Kennry Goldsmith, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Craig Dworkin; Caroline Bergvall read as part of this track, too. The next day, Scott Rettberg spoke opposite his fellow Electronic Literature Collection editor Kate Hayles, the ELO had a get-together, and almost 60 people read in the MLA offsite reading.

Discussed in this post:
Adventure, Warren Robinett, Atari, Atari VCS, 1978
Qix, Randy Pfeiffer and Sandy Pfeiffer, Taito, Arcade coin-op, 1981
dotstream, Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, 2006

Video games sometimes take the minimalist approach of providing the player with an avatar, ship, or “man” that has as its visual representation a single pixel. As I briefly discuss in this post, several games in this category are totally sweet.

Game Studies 6:1 is out – Jesper tells us it’s the biggest issue yet. Here’s the list of articles:

• Nick Montfort: Combat in Context
• Mia Consalvo, Nathan Dutton: Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games
• Rob Cover: Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth
• Hans Christian Arnseth: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn – A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay
• Joris Dormans: On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules

Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, whose Inanimate Alice is featured in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 and on the project’s site, continues with a ludic and narrative third episode. A game of finding Russian dolls is threaded through the cinematic story of Alice’s isolated life in a new country, where she’s moved with her parents. The new piece is available exclusively on the Guardian’s site: Inanimate Alice Episode 3: Russia.

Donna Leishman sends word from Scotland that the University of Dundee’s School of Media Arts & Imaging is seeking an established senior academic to appoint to a chair of contemporary media arts & imaging. She writes that this position spans “practices as diverse as: performance art, film, web, audio art, 3d animation, data visualisation, illustration, interactive media and digital theory.” The deadline is February 9.

Terry Bosky has just posted an interview with Michael Gentry, the interactive fiction author who lovingly crafted Anchorhead and Little Blue Men, on Game Couch.

Xtreme Xmas Shopping, which allows you to pummel fellow purchasers for plunder, is now out from Persuasive Games. Oddly, this PG game, unlike several others, doesn’t feature much waiting in line, even though such lines are prime places for consumer beatdowns.

The Media in Transition Project at MIT now seeks submissions for MiT5: Creativity, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Digital Age:

(submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

2007 Independent Games Festival finalists have been named. (Via Arthouse Games.)

Slamdance Finalist Jason Rohrer (Cultivation) has an interview with me now online at his Arthouse Games, where he is also reviewing all the Slamdance finalists. I got asked to name the best IF piece and the best non-IF game, and instead of hemming and hawing about it I decided to just name games and discuss them. So far, there are reviews posted there of flOw, The Blob, Book and Volume, and Base Invaders.

Star C. Foster, blogger and co-author of the most highly acclaimed interactive fiction of 2003, Slouching towards Bedlam, died this morning in Philadelphia. Star was an editor of Phillyist, wrote for Shiny Shiny, and had her own corner of the blogosphere, Sarcasmo’s Corner. Two years ago she joined me and Scott, along with Dan Ravipinto and Emily Short, at the Interactive Fiction Walkthroughs event at the Kelly Writers House. On the Web, along with many of her own photos and much of her writing, you will find a portrait of Star in Rittenhouse Square. The news of her death was posted today on Phillyist.

Patrick S. Farley’s The Guy I Almost Was is Web comic that I recently looked at again. It resonates with my experience of mid-1990s San Francisco. It’s been around for several years, and it has aged well. Chapter 2 is particularly amusing for those who plugged into Wired and the like during those tumultuous times. (It picks up around 50.)

Ian Bogost & Nick Montfort are pleased to announce a new MIT Press series,

Investigating the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems.

The first book in the series is forthcoming in 2008:

Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform
by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost

For more about computing platforms and their relationship to new media, the new approaches which we hope this series will foster, examples of platforms, and answers to questions about the series concept, see our site:

http://platformstudies.com

Before this becomes stale or otherwise spoils, I’d better let you know that Bacteria Salad is the latest in The Arcade Wire series of newsgames by Persuasive Games, the studio of Water Cooler Games’ Ian Bogost. Sources of potential spinach contamination include not only otherwise-friendly bovines, but also agroterrorists. Safe for lunch.

Freeth et al. have uncovered additional inscriptions and evidence of gears in an intricate early computing device, the Antikythera Mechanism. In the abstract to a recent Nature article, they write:

The mechanism predicted lunar and solar eclipses on the basis of Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycles. The inscriptions support suggestions of mechanical display of planetary positions, now lost. In the second century BC, Hipparchos developed a theory to explain the irregularities of the Moon’s motion across the sky caused by its elliptic orbit. We find a mechanical realization of this theory in the gearing of the mechanism …

Jim Aikin, cellist and author of the old-school, maze-filled, shopping mall treasure quest Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, has just released a new piece of interactive fiction. It’s called Last Resort (download directly) and comes packed with a PDF map. Aikin calls it “a large, serious story” and notes that reaching a winning ending is not easy, and will take many tries for most people. Below is the first bit of Last Resort’s prologue…

Tuesday afternoon. Hot, with that sticky humid Southern heat that makes your hair droop and your shirt stick to you. Why on Earth did Aunt Caroline insist on bringing you to this horrible place? “Eternal Springs,” it said on the sign at the end of the driveway. Whatever.

A tenure-track faculty job has been posted in Nancy Kaplan & Stuart Moulthrop’s program:

Assistant Professor, Information Arts and Technologies

The School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor to begin August 2007. Doctorate or other terminal degree in computer science, interactive media, instructional technology, or human-computer interaction is highly desirable. Advanced degrees in other areas may be considered.

The successful candidate will have a strong commitment to teaching, demonstrated success in research and publication, and the ability to teach a range of courses in our two undergraduate and two graduate degree programs. We particularly seek candidates with background in programming, interactive media, game and simulation development, user-centered design, and/or media studies.

The December 2006 RCCS (Resource Center for Cyberclture Studies) book reviews are here, and there are lots. More than twice the usual number of books have been reviewed, and as you might expect, many are on topics close to the hearts of Grand Text Auto:

• Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, eds. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson
• Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature, eds. Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens
• Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, eds. Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick