Grand Text Auto

In order of increasing puerility and decreasing interactivity, some tributes to a great game by David Crane:

• The new, tubular Skatefall!
• A trailer for live-action Pitfall!
• Pitfall! on South Park
• Pitfall! outtakes

YOU are a Cubic Creature, Opposites create Opposites. Until cornered, word is fictitious.

Actually that isn’t what Jason Nelson claims in his The Poetry Cube; that’s from somewhere else. But it is the case that poem has four corners in The Poetry Cube, and poem can be loaded with sixteen newly-written or previously-saved lines, which are combinatorially reconfigured as one clicks to rotate or move to a different level. The lines and their framework really function as a machine, and they show off that function in a visually compelling way. The project was developed by Rory Hering and is now in beta. Jason welcomes feedback on it.

It’s about time I noted on here that my mentor Henry Jenkins has started a blog. Henry writes about a variety of topics, digital and non-digital, and is particularly deft at figuring out how fans and commuinities of readers/viewers/players/etc. connect to and rework media. Jesper mentioned his new blog a while ago, but I’ve kept forgetting to post something about it here. I have finally been parted to do this by Ian Bogost’s review of Henry’s new book, Convergence Culture, and by the three-part reply Henry has posted to it (1 2 3) and the comments that have followed. Join the fracas, or just unfold your lawn chair on a nearby hill and watch the fun.

Abstract shooter fans: Be sure to check out Grid Wars 2, programmed by Mark Incitti in Blitz Basic and available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The game seems to be the most famous in a series of Geometry Wars clones that use the dual-stick move-and-shoot control scheme of Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron 2084 and radiant vectorized graphics. Grid Wars 2 features a wide variety of geometric shapes along with some snakes. It’s been upgraded substantially since its first release. At World of Stuart you can read some about why the gameplay may exceed that of its visually very similar Xbox progenitor.

I just passed my thesis proposal defense here at Penn, which means I get to research and write “Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction.”

Curio Box 1, Spring 2006, edited by Phillip Dmochowski,
Steve McLaughlin, and Xiaowei Wang

I’m a sucker for issues of literary magazines that take the form of boxes filled with stuff. McSweeney’s 4 (Late Winter, 2000) may be the most well-known recent example. Other bundles in the fairly high production-value, wider-circulation category include McSweeney’s 16 (discussed on GTxA previously) and Wedge 3, 4, and 5 (Winter, Spring, and Summer 1983). I’m not sure who came up with this concept – Duchamp? – but it’s certainly a good one. The format seems to be used in even more interesting ways as one moves from (relatively) well-bankrolled publications to the fringes. The recent Curio Box 1 and Pandora’s Backpages, from a few years ago, offer a zany variety of art and writing in different material forms. These two also incorporate some digital work, and work that engages the digital, alongside print, something that codex-bound literary magazines have found difficult to accomplish.

“An Experimental Study of the Coloring Problem on Human Subject Networks” by Michael Kearns, Siddharth Suri, and Nick Montfort was just published in Science. The full text of the article is friendslocked to members of the AAAS, but the abstract explains the basics and a Penn press release offers some further details. The study dealt with “games” in the economic decisionmaking sense, and actually used several different graphs, although “games on six graphs” isn’t as catchy. WoW raiders and others may still wish to take note: The study is meant to shed some light on how, in general, a distributed group of players can solve a common problem together with very limited communication and information, under different incentive schemes and with different network structures.

A traveling essay stops at Grand Text Auto for a visit…

Don’t you have a map?
A collaborative, traveling essay in letters
‘twixt Erika Howsare & Jen Tynes.

Part 10, J to E—

A smelly flower grows in Brooklyn, I send you juttings in the mail. If a poem is going to
Be a thing you’ve got to keep on talking at it? If noticing is going to happen late I’ll see

Jeffrey Howard (whose dissertation on contemporary American fiction, with a chapter on IF, has been discussed on here) sends a report from the ACM Sandbox Symposium, which featured contrasting keynotes by Manifesto Games’s Greg Costikayan and EA’s Ian Shaw; Steve Meretzky’s less than cheerful take on gaming today; and the relevance of the gameplay mechanics of rock, paper, scissors to computer games:

I’ve been at the ACM Sandbox Symposium on Digital Games in Boston last weekend, listening to papers and panels as well as presenting my own paper (“Designing Interpretative Quests in the Literature Classroom.”)

Sandbox was a fun and interesting conference overall, consisting of a mixture of game designers and academicians (about 2/3 of developers to 1/3 academicians)

Dennis Jerz sent this CFP along to us – it certainly seems like it should interest a few of the Grand Text Auto crowd.

Computers & Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue, Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming

While video gaming has been a strong cultural force since the advent of the popular coin-operated arcades of the 1970s, it is only within the last few years that video/computer gaming has been an academic focus: there is a lot of catch-up work to do.

A short, melancholy article on “The Short, Happy Life of Infocom” is now in The Escapist. The piece is by Lara Crigger, who also wrote the April Compuer Games cover story on IF. Like many such articles, it casusally mentions that Infocom is dead, dead dead dead, not alive. This one is illustrated with a photo of a gravestone, once again following the “IF is history!” formula for such pieces that Jeremy Douglass has pointed out. Why don’t we see articles like “Back Before DOS Bit the Dust,” “Origin Systems: Once Great, Now Toast” or “Dreamcast: Fun, and Six Feet Under!” more often? Or do I just not notice these?

This morning at AAAI ’06 in Boston I heard the king of the Web speak about what he sees as the next step in this system’s evolution: the Semantic Web. The non-semantic Web has plenty of good introductory material on the topic, so I won’t try to paraphrase Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee — but I will mention what I remember of the brief, interesting question-and-answer period.

The first question (or first three questions, as Berners-Lee called them) were from Google’s director of research and search quality Peter Norvig (also a palindromist). Specifically, he identified three problems that were difficult to overcome in the Web (and which Google had spent a lot of effort working on) and which he saw as causing problems for the more general data-sharing system that Berners-Lee was working on.

Notes from today’s workshop are by Nick and Michael. We’ve tried to takes notes as best as we can to advertise what work is going on, but please consult the actual academic publications of these individuals for the official word about their projects!

Memex Music and Gambling Games: EVE’s Take on Lucky Number 13

Kevin Burns (MITRE Corporation)
Shlomo Dubnov (University of California at San Diego, US)

Bayesian mathematics + information theory, games + music. EVE is a computational theory of aesthethics – a tradeoff between being able to predict and being surprised: Expectations (E), Violations (V), and E’xplanations (E’).

Slot machines could be set to almost any P (probability of payout) and the payout amount varies. They are empirically set to P=0.13, a value that may represent “peak fun.” Enjoyment can be computed in terms of marginal entropies: A “Goldilocks” function showing pleasure at different values of surprise, peaks around 0.13.

Memex music: each note is linked to the next one in a piece (e.g., first note in Beethoven’s Fifth to second note) and is also linked forward to other notes with similar history. Independently, they were set to branch away with probability 13%. Changing the pleasure function to a product rather than sum of terms (surprise * resolve), an S-shaped function arises.

If a player’s/listener’s P and Q vary from the real ones, there is a difference in pleasure. May lead to a theory of aesthetic utility.

Our Madrid correspondent José Manuel sends word of two games: LocoRoco, a fun-looking, joy-filled PSP game that seems to merge the physics of the noir Gish with the slap-happiness of Quest for the Rest. Additionally, there’s Green, Eggs, and Pan! 2006 winner of the UIUC G4G competition. Strong enough for a man, it’s made for girls, and for Windows, the latter of which keeps me from saying anything more about it. It’s good to see both girl-oriented and PSP-oriented innovation, though, since I usually get word of almost nothing at all in the former category and of little beyond tedious side-fighters and licensed dreck in the latter.

“My Beating Blog” is an attempt to take the journaling aspect of blogging into a surrealistic future in which the author literally and metaphorically bares his heart. For three weeks, a series of posts contextualizing heart-rate visualizations, GPS-maps, and personal journal entries will give online users a rare entrance into personal medical-grade statistics, stalker-level location tracking, and the private thoughts of the blogger. Inevitably, issues regarding privacy, exhibitionism, and voyeurism playfully emerge as the blogosphere is infused with biofeedback and location technology. Rather than play into a dystopian or Orwellian future, blogs and biofeedback are given poetic license, reframing our awareness of our own and each others’ beating hearts.

When Katie walks, this simple pair accompany her side,
When Katie runs unwearied they follow on the road,
When Katie kneels, their loving hands still clasp her pious knee —
Ah! Katie! Smile at Fortune, with two so knit to thee!

Something to puzzle over during your long (or short, for those not in the USA) weekend. To read the answer I propose for this Emily Dickinson riddle (J222), highlight the text in the followng region by dragging over it with your mouse. Of course, feel free to comment and to let me know if you think I’m wrong.

Tim O’Reilly explains in this famous article (which, I swear, actually crashes Firefox on OS X) that “In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Now, the article goes on, but let’s stop at this first brainstorm. I didn’t bring my brain anorak and I don’t want to get brain drenched.

Aren’t there newly-evolved forms of some of the other famous “Web 1.0” ideas?

Word came to me on ifMUD of la Pâte à Son, a fascinating tile-based contraption for music-making by LaCielEstBlue. If you’re interested in the aesthetics of elaborate machinery in the digital age, or just would like to play with a fun music-producing toy, check it out. There’s a longer write-up of the piece on Jay is Games.

Two quick notes – I’d like to review these more fully, but since I don’t want to let the URLs languish unposted forever:

Jimmy Maher, the current editor of SPAG (Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games) Newsletter, has book about interactive fiction online: Let’s Tell a Story Together: A History of Interactive Fiction. This looks to provide an easy introduction to IF, tracking through the form’s history and for the most part following the same trail that Twisty Little Passages did.

To those of you who speak Beghilos, the practice of constrained writing using a calculator may come as no surprise – and I do recall it being mentioned during the recent E-Fest 2006 at Brown. To some, though, this concept could seem odd. Calculators can be art objects, yes, but tools for digital writing?

The major project in this category seems to be Amos Latteier’s Calculator Haikus, exhibited in 2000. (Note his use of the 6 for the lowercase “g” as opposed to the 9 for the capital “G” seen in the photo here.) From these texts, it seems that the calculator is predisposed to describe things like sludge underfoot and accidentally discharged petroleum.

Well, admittedly, this is the beardless GNOME developer that we spotted – not exactly what we’re looking for. But at least the GNOME foundation’s new Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006 now provides a better incentive for women to get involved!

The famous-among-the-geeky Summer of Code, which is thought to be named so as to allude to this summer, would have been a bit off-kilter this year if you were to look at it from a GNOME perspective. The GNOME project (they’re the ones who provide the Linux desktop used on, for instance, Ubuntu) got 181 applications for Summer of Code project, none of them from women. While we know that free software projects aren’t generally gender-balanced, this seems like a letdown.

To “like it” there must be intensity leading to activation. There must be a curl at the cusp.
—JT, part 8

Jen Tynes and Erika Howsare of Horse Less Press continue their multi-part, collaborative, espitolary “traveling essay” Don’t you have a map? Each installment of the project (we’re now on eight of at least ten) is posted on a different blog, while I would guess provides an interesting entree to the project for the regular readers of its points of publication. It’s not quite alternate reality literature, but it seems a much more interesting idea than, say the more prosaic blog carnival. And the writing, I find, has a cuspy curl.

There’s a nice piece by Karen Collins in Soundscapes, discussing Commodore 64 game music: “Loops and bloops.” The article delves into the SID (Sound Interface Device) in some technical detail, but the thing I found most interesting was the discussion of the influence of another contemporary platform later in the C64’s retail life. The tendency of the Nintendo Entertainment System to have music during gameplay (as opposed to just during the introduction or upon completing a level) is seen to influence the way music was used on the C64. Ben Daglish and Martin Galway (famous C64 composers) are quoted in the piece, looping is discussed at length (as the article’s title suggests), and the freewheeling use of cover songs is described. Thanks to Jesper for mentioning this one.

Imagine the situation, somewhat reminescient of another one you may remember: The sun is brought. You have a rock. You win, because Rock Shades Sun.

This is one of the 300 possible outcomes in RPS-25, a generalization of Rock, Paper, Scissors to 25 items. Be sure to see how all outcomes are spoken.

You know what a serious game and sport RPS is, surely. But the relevance to those in new media and compter gaming, those who don’t happen to be interested in decision theory? If this isn’t a digital game, I don’t know what is.

The new deadline to send proposals for the first issue of the review is

– the end of August if you send your paper both in English and in French
– as soon as possible if you send it only in one language (French or English). The paper will not be published if we don’t have time to translate it.

La date limite pour la réception des articles est portée à

– fin Août si vous fournissez l’article en français et en anglais
– le plus tôt possible si vous le fournissez dans une seule langue (français ou anglais). L’article ne pourra être publié si nous n’avons pas le temps de le traduire.