Grand Text Auto

The interactive fiction Book and Volume is now headed to the finals of the 2007 Guerilla Games Competition at Slamdance. The Slamdance Film Festival will take place January 17-28 in Park City, Utah, with the games competition running from January 18-23. Book and Volume, by Nick Montfort, joins thirteen other very original independent games in the finals – see the Slamdance press release or the Slamdance games page for the full list.

“We are very excited about the finalists for this year’s GGC, ” said Sam Roberts, Slamdance’s Games Competition Manager. “This year’s entrants range from biting indictments of modern corporate culture to fantastical adventures crashing castles. We have interactive fiction, beat-em-ups, non-traditional puzzle games, and experiments in flow theory. These games push the edges of what games can be and can try to be, experimenting in art style, gameplay, metaphor, story, concept and time. They provide challenges and inspiration for game designers working the traditional space, and game designers who will work in the future. While each of these games forces you to examine something you thought you already knew, or experiment in life and evolution, they also all entertain – they strive to be fun, and to be true play experiences.”

Jena Osman’s 2002-2003 digital poem “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist” has been offline for a while, but thanks to David Ayre’s application of galvanic force and use of leet skillz, it is back online. Do take a look at it and enjoy working the now-working piece.

¿Habla usted español? The November issue of SPAC (Sociedad para la Preservación de las Aventuras Conversacionales) is now out – this is the Spanish online magazine covering interactive fiction. SPAC is back in HTML (not PDF) this month, and full of articles and reviews.

Portraits of people playing video games, from New York photographer Phillip Toledano. Which is your grimace? (Thanks to inky for the link.)

From JB, author of several interactive fictions (Echappée Belle Dans les Contrées du Rêve, La Mort Pour Seul Destin, and Filaments) comes a new and very substantial work, offering virtual European travels as well as graphics and sound: Ekphrasis: Les aventures de Gilbert Fontenelle. The game weighs in at 65 MB, and, as you might expect at this point, is in French.

The new electronic book review, “Fictions Present,” features an interview with Harry Mathews and a new story by Rob Swigart – among other delights.

(I should have thought to mention this earlier on here, but maybe at least one person will see this, happen to be in Philadelphia, and manage to come to the talk…)

Special Lecture
Friday, Nov. 17, 2006
2:00 p.m.
IRCS Large Conference Room
3401 Walnut – Suite 400A
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Jesper Juul, Center for Game Research in Copenhagen
Video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Center for Game Research in Copenhagen

Without a Goal
Games have had goals for millennia, and for good reason: Goals provide players with a clear sense of direction as well as a clear sense of accomplishment. In this talk, I will nevertheless argue that there is a problem with game goals: Goals often force players to focus on optimizing a strategy, at the expense of personal preferences such as issues of style or at the expense of social considerations in multi player games. This may not be an issue with the current generation of dedicated gamers, but it poses a problem if games want to reach a broader public that does not necessarily play video games on a daily basis.

A number of recent hit games have demonstrated that a game can be interesting because it has weak or non-existing goals. Hits such as the *Grand Theft Auto* series, *World of Warcraft*, and *The Sims* may be very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform actions that do not simply work towards a single game goal. In the presentation, I will focus on how video games seem to be moving away from the traditional “hardcore” model of punishing the player for every single mistake, and on how removing or weakening the goals of a game may expand the potential audience for a game.

The results are in, and Emily Short’s Floatpoint takes top honors at the 2006 Interactive Fiction Competition. The Primrose Path by Nolan Bonvouloir and The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve placed second and third. Congratulations to these authors and to the others who finished games, entered them, and placed in the Comp. Another person who deserves thanks and congratulations is Stephen Granade, who has been running the Comp since 1999. All the games are still available for download, of course.

Allow me to interject that Random Yahoo Link is still available. Also, Superbad is still there. I now return you to your regularly scheduled 2006.

Among other questions and conversation about the Electronic Literature Collection, I was pleased to get an email from Katherine Parrish (creator of MOOlipo, educational co-ordinator on Project Achieve, poetry generator generator) with a series of questions about volume one – questions that we probably deserve. One of these (about our selection criteria) was already asked by Jim Carpenter on his blog, where Scott and I left replies. I assume a few other people may be interested in this discussion. Katherine agreed to let me share her questions here along with my answers, so, they appear below…

The MACHINE team here at Penn just watched Jason Nelson‘s video presentation – a bit later than would have been ideal, but as Autostart was packed with presentations and Jason’s video was sharing a computer with Scott’s head, there wasn’t a chance to see it earlier. Jason cruised through several of his pieces and encouraged us to develop projects that help technical and creative collaborators work together.

Here are some comments from the rest of the peanut gallery…

Penn has a journal of undergraduate research writing, now in its third issue. The journal is called Res, and the current issue (available in print and linked as a PDF from the main page) is about digital culture. Jordan Straff’s “Facebook: Revolutionizing the College Experience” provides the perspective of a student at the institution where Facebook originated. In medias Res you’ll also find an article on the digital archiving of concrete poetry, one on the copyright-inflicted woes suffered by documentary filmmakers, and two about podcasting. Hopefully the authors will continue their searching out and writing about digital media, and we’ll have more to read from them in years to come.

A new research laboratory on hypermedia art and literature, nt2: New Technologies, New Textualities, has recently started up in Montreal, “to promote the study, reading, writing, and archiving of new textualities, of hypermedia and cyberart.” Bertrand Gervais at the Université du Québec à Montréal is director of nt2, which draws together researchers from Concordia, Université de Montréal, Université de Laval, and Université de Ottawa. We were fortunate to have coordinator Anick Bergeron and Alice van der Klei join us at Autostart and provide a pamphet – both slick and well-thought-out – explaining the lab’s goals and research directions and laying out the main questions it seeks to address.

The Story of Tetris, a venerable BBC documentary now online, is certainly worth seeing, although, as is always the case when the story of video games is told in popular culture, it’s about money money money business and money. This time the story is told well, featuring thrills, blunders, and a plucky underdog negotiator who keeps a video diary. There are some politics thrown in, and no doubt played up, to make things interesting, and some nice video of a very early version of Tetris running on an old Russian computer – for the true fetishists.

At Autostart I was given a wonderful gift, Craig Conley’s One Letter Words: A Dictionary. This is one of several strange and unusual dictionaries by Conley. I read about the online genesis of the book and was hoping to share the Web version with everyone here. Unfortunately, the free Web edition of the one-letter lexicon had to sacrifice itself for the good of its HarperCollinsPublished cousin, in a touching and grisly scene; it – alas – is now only available via the Internet Archive.

In opening the discussion that started Autostart, Jena Osman, poet and director of the creative writing program at Temple University, asked several good questions of the attendees. We could have easily filled the remaining time in the discussion with trying to answer these, but we moved along to hear other poets’ perspectives and didn’t get to really discuss Jena’s questions, although I know that some of us were turning them over in our minds. Fortunately, Jena was kind enough to provide her questions and to allow us to post them here. I’ll starting by doing this, and perhaps will offer some answers in comments (rather than as some sort of top-level annotation) in a bit.

I’m interested in the differences in terms of the reading process between texts that are pre-digital and then put up online and texts that are made with the screen in mind. it seems like they’re calling for two different kinds of attention. At least two. With the former I always feel a strain, that I’d much rather print it out and read (but maybe that’s generational). Unless they somehow acknowledge this transfer from hard text to screen – like Brian Kim Stefans’ rendition of Creeley’s “I Know A Man” or his other “One Letter at a Time Pieces.” (And I’m curious to learn about other examples of digital transcription.) But with etexts, I often feel like I’m reading much more for process and activity than for content – I’m reading the action of reading. What does it mean to separate out the act of reading from the text itself so distinctively?

Our featured readers ready for the discussion after the reading: Stuart Moulthrop, Aya Karpinska, Aaron Reed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Mary Flanagan. The piece “Talking Cure,” by Noah and others, was the last one presented and can be seen on the flat panel in the upper left.

The full announcement and Web site with participant bios are already up, but here’s a quick run-down of what’s coming up at the Writers House:

The festival is in Philadelphia, PA, at 3805 Locust Walk on the Penn campus. We’re celebrating the release of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1, which is being published on CD-ROM and the Web. AUTOSTART attendees will get a copy of the CD edition.

The big events are the discussion (1-2:30pm) and the reading (5:30-7:30pm) on Thursday. There’s an open house between these to allow people to drop in for discussion with festival participants, to see the ELC vol 1, and to take tours of it given by me and Stephanie Strickland.

iDream Interactive’s Rot Rox, which “simulates a human friend,” is claimed to be the first Apple OS X Dashboard widget “with Personality.” You might find higher-quality friends and better conversationalists by joining a cult, but this is a slick and telling piece of work. It runs on a proprietary, underpowered, new, and trendy platform (the Dashboard); incorporates about the level of verbal skill that Eliza did 40 years ago, but without the clever framework of a therapeutic session; and integrates standard Mac voices and an eye-follow-mouse gimmick. My opinion of the bot may be artificially deflated, because it is supposed to do something clever with iTunes, which I don’t use – perhaps there’s a great gimmick there. Of course, I wanted a better conversation and a more amusing framework for this interaction. I’m not sure exactly how to break the ice in the “there’s a metal man on your dashboard” situation. As the digital equivalent of a stress ball or other corporate toy, though, there’s no point in being disappointed about this empty robot-suit. It’s a good thing that people are continuing the march of bots and virtual characters into new niches of the digital world.

Those who can’t make it all the way from Texas to Philadelphia for AUTOSTART next week can still catch a grand several days of electronic media art…

.::::: TEXELECTRONICA ’06 :::::.
International Forum, Exhibition & Performance-Series featuring
Electronic Media Art & Music (Dallas/Ft Worth, Texas, USA)

–Theme: SPIN: SOCIETY, PERSONA, INTERACTIVITY & NETWORKS–

* 3-Day Forum: Fort Worth Modern Art Museum, Oct. 27-29
Free for the public with a suggested donation of $15 for 5
sessions, or $5 per session.
* Kickoff event Thursday night Oct. 26th starting at 7pm
* Nightly Exhibitions & Performances: DFW area art spaces

Ian Bogost announces his and Persuasive Games’ new Arcade Wire game, Oil God.

+ =

You are an Oil God! Wreak havoc on the world’s oil supplies by unleashing war and disaster. Bend governments and economies to your will to alter trade practices. Your goal? Double consumer gasoline prices in five years using whatever means necessary: start wars, overthrow leaders, spawn natural disasters ? even beckon the assistance of extra-terrestrial overlords. The game explores the relationship between gas prices, geopolitics, and oil profits.

Rumor has it that Ian’s original game idea, Crack God, was deemed too controversial and not newsworthy enough by his editor.

A new group of digital maquettes for “america jesus tOrture,” Joseph Nechvatal’s recent series of paintings, is now online. Nechavatal’s paitings are acrylic on canvas, created with digital assisstance and, in this case, incorporate images from the Abu Graib photographs. Images of some of his other computer-robotic assisted paitings have been published in Drunken Boat. More can be seen on Nechvatal’s site.

Hey, there’s a conference on a cruise ship. This sounds really good, but given my schedule, I’m holding out for a conference held on this cruise ship.

Call for Papers
Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education
February 22 – 25, 2007
Aboard the Disney Wonder Cruise Ship
Submission Deadline: November 5, 2006

The Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science
Education is seeking high quality unpublished original work on the
use of Game Development in Computer Science Education. For an html
version of the Call for Papers, see http://www.msadgd07.net/.

Sorry to repurpose the more boingable blogs, but it has become nececssary to inform you about an object. There are no reports of arrests due to Suspicious Looking Device, but maybe they’ve been hushed up. I thought this was already about as suspicious-looking as it could get – this other one might spur some people to activate their screaming phones. Be sure to check out the other bricolage from Junkfunnel Labs.

As subscribers to The Atlantic Monthly may have already noticed, there’s a story in the November issue, mentioned right there on the cover and called “Sex, Lies, and Video Games.” It’s a detailed, seven-page article about Façade, with shots of Grace and Trip. There are quotes from Will Wright and from an anonymous video game executive who explains that people like to “blow shit up.”

Jonathan Rauch wrote the piece and really managed to make a great case for how video gaming (and creative computing) can transcend its current licensed, hyperviolent state. He also gave a good account of Façade that is accurate without being overwhelming in its technical details. Gripping journalism is often built on oppositions and conflicts; here, the conflict is Andrew and Michael vs. the conventional world of videogaming, which, I think, is not a fabricated opposition.