Grand Text Auto

QMail, by Andreas Lloyd, may not offer the lyrical turn of Richard Powers’ nicely presented “They Come in a Steady Stream Now,” but it does offer all the spam. It shares the simulated inbox medium with Scott’s Kind of Blue (Web interface) and Rob Wittig’s Blue Company (archived edition). I suppose it could be seen as an email narrative, although I’m not sure reading for plot is appropriate. The interface does have interesting angles and spaces, and the piece certainly scores points for toying with a corporate properties in an interesting way. There are also tasteful advertisements. And strange 404 pages.

“CC” is a poem by Nick Montfort, written for the Web in April and May 2006.

1. The poem is written for Carmen Conde’s centenary in 2007.
2. The poem contains 100 words, each of which are (more or less obscure) words in both English and Spanish.
3. Moving the pointer over a word highlights that word and one other, so that the pair can be read as a phrase, aloud or in the mind.
4. Conde’s book Jaguar puro inmarchito (Pure Unwithered Jaguar), and the fact that the word “jaguar” is a word in both English and Spanish, suggested that, in the interests of purity, the letters in that word should not occur anywhere in the poem.

When people play and try to figure out games, they work at learning to see and understand in new ways. When they seek help from others, asking people who have solved the game to supply hints, they give others the opportunity to teach, and to try to understand how to draw a solution out from a player who is puzzling over it.

In Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, I started to consider how a long-standing but neglected literary tradition, the riddle, offers a way to consider computer games and how people understand them, learn from them, and are able to see the world through them in new ways. In what follows, I’m going to suggest how the analogy between the riddle and interactive fiction can be extended to other sorts of games that involve figuring out. I’ll follow this post up with another in which I consider a bit more about how the riddle can help us understand interactions among computer gamers.

The trAce Online Writing Centre, having recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, has now moved into virtual archival boxes at Nottingham Trent University. Featured at the trAce Archive, along with many other materials, is a scanned-in copy of Cyberwriting: Selected Internet Resources for Writers by Simon Mills – the first document of the project and a fascinating backwards glance and writing online in the good old days.

While this marks the end of trAce at NTU, trAce is scheduled to reappear in September 2006 as an online journal at the University of Luton.

NILE ain’t just a river in Egypt … and it’s heading toward you. The 4th International Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments (NILE) Conference will be happening in Edinburgh August 8-11. While the paper deadline has long passed (March 1) and this particular blogger won’t be able to make it, we here at Grand Text Auto did want to note the event for those who might attend. We welcome any reports or comments about this conference. Thanks to Melanie Hundley for the note about NILE.

When Oulipians discover that someone else used a particular ingenious constraint for literary composition long before they thought to “invent” it, they call this plagiarism by anticipation. Reading through Craig Dworkin’s excellent Anthology of Conceptual Writing that is online at UBUWeb — all the way through it, this time — I see that famous conceptual artist and writer Lawrence Weiner, in his 1970 “Tracce/Traces,” appropriated of the visual and interactive framework for Digital Ream, or close to it: there are fifty (rather than five hundred) single, white, linked words on dark gray (not black), appearing on consecutive pages. At least, Weiner’s typesetter (Dworkin? UBU’s Goldsmith?), using BBEdit 6.5 according to metadata in the pages, managed to get this digital discount — all about three years before I posted Digital Ream. Now it makes me wonder if the print version of Ream was also ripped off years before it was created…

Poetry publisher Wave Books proffers an online system, Erasures, for creating subtractive poems. The project celebrates Wave’s recent publication of Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow, which was composed in this manner. A page links to that book and illustrious predecessors produced by deletion: Jen Bervin’s Nets, produced by removing letters from Shakespeare’s sonnets; Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, based on the first four books of Paradise Lost, and Tom Phillips’s A Humument. My favorite digital tool for creating texts in this way, presented in performance at A Night at the Cybertexts at DAC 2001, is John Cayley’s Instrumental, which allows the user to multi-select runs of text and then delete everything except what is highlighted. It’s nice, of course, to also have a flexible Web system like this to allow people to share what they’ve shored against ruin.

As a programming language, the natural-language-like Inform 7 (main I7 site) might recall COBOL — whether or not it fulfills a similar grim destiny. But in addition to being a way to write code, Inform 7 is a way to describe spaces and objects in a simulated world. An interesting precedent here, although it generates 3D graphical images instead of a simulation for textual interaction, is WordsEye, a system now in closed beta. More images and the texts that generated them are available at SemanticLight, and there’s a paper about the system.

Today’s Gamester column, written by Tom Leupold and appearing in Inside Bay Area, is about IF: “Games with no pictures? Yes, they really did exist.” The focus is on Scott Adams of Adventure International, Adventureland, and Pirate Adventure fame. He’s still writing IF, and is now at work on The Inheritance, a game based on the Old Testament.

David Welbourn is the force behind the content and upkeep of ifwiki, the increasingly useful wiki about IF founded by Dave Cornelson. David W. offers another useful index into interactive fiction at the Key & Compass IF Games index. Thanks to Dennis Jerz for pointing this one out.

In Soviet Russia, language says that William Burroughs is virus! Robert Kendall’s stickerific and aphoristic Logozoa project (mentioned before on here) now offers an “E-Doption” program — and a short program, too. Two lines of code will include an randomly reloading logozoan (one of about 200, for now) on your page.

The truly assiduous reader will be also be able to determine what other text on this page changes each time the page is reloaded.

This gem has probably become the most famous execution of an Apple II program recorded online. I’d be very interested to hear if you know of any other contenders, though.

Something like the reverse of this music video project has been done, too, using a soundtrack sampled from classic hardware and more “modern” video: “Video Computer System” by Brazilian electonica duo Golden Shower hit the net way back in 2000. Samples of VCS sounds aren’t truly chiptunes, sure, and you gotta like the textual Applesoft BASIC program idea, but both of these are still high-quality cultural productions.

The gaming website TeamHomp, while busy covering E3, has just added new column on IF and similar matters, Cardinal Points. Graphical adventures may be in the works for future installments, but the first column is a good introduction to IF with several solid recommendations of modern-day games.

deadline: 10 June 2006
La version française figure ci-dessous

Dear colleague,

The Paragraphe Laboratory at the University of Paris 8 is creating a new bilingual Fench/English academic review called regards croisés/crossed looks that focuses on the digital literature. This review will become a locus for exchanges between different points of view on digital literature. The review is resolutely multicultural and pluridisciplinary. It puts contributions by authors and researchers together. Researchers will come from literature, communications studies and new media studies, semiotics, psychology.

Electronic Book Review keeps on going, and going, and going: New contributions are now available on three threads, Writing [Post] Feminism, Critical Ecologies, and End Construction.

Among the new items on the feed is a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality, which I’m very glad to see being further discussed. (Noah’s review on here has been one of too few texts to grapple with this formidable book.) The ebr review seemed to me to based on more than one misreading, however – or at least to be written from a perspective or frame that doesn’t have much to do with Ryan’s arguments. My disappointment with these problems in the review was pretty much erased when I read Dave Ciccoricco’s riposte to review. I would say more nice things about this response, but I’d be writing a review review review if I did that. I’ll just encourage everyone to check out the whole thread, including, if you can manage, the book.

Have you been following this whole Harvard student book plagiarism story? I’m sorry that this young girl, pushed by the needs of a publishing machine and, no doubt, by her own ambition, should have fallen into this trap so early in her career. But the fact is that although she has been manipulated and packaged, what has happened to her has very largely been her own fault. The thing is, it’s not conventions of character and plot that Viswanathan is accused of copying, it’s whole sentences of text.

It’s not Tomb Raider, and it’s not Doom – but it is quite an adventure. At least, it’s a few minutes’ worth of an adventure. It’s Tomb of Doom. In Flash, and in claymation style.

Below, I’ve included three photos from my reading of Ream, taken by Jill Ivey, along with a link to a new digital version of the poem that was done by Jim Carpenter.

Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about: hypertext.

Okay, that’s not exactly the way that Melanie Hundley’s series of questions begins. But Hundley did contact me with a survey she is doing for her dissertation in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. It’s about how authors who have written both for print and hypertext compose their work.

I offered to post the questions and my replies here on Grand Text Auto, so that she could simply continue with her the survey in comments following this post. Others who want to answer some or all of the questions themselves, or to discuss them or my responses, are of course welcome to do so in comments, too. On to the questions and answers…

My poem Ream, discussed before on GTxA, is now – thanks to encouragement from Andrew – available in a Web edition.

Here it is: Digital Ream.

After years of work and anticipation, Graham Nelson’s new interactive fiction development system, Inform 7, is out. The new system is in many ways more different from Inform 6 than OS 10 was from System 9: Code looks like natural language (like English prose, specifically), a new and well-crafted IDE from Andrew Hunter is provided, and numerous improvements to the language and world model have been incorporated. Games still compile to z-code, however, to run on the standard interpreters that run earlier Inform games.

Brian Kim Stefans has just deployed Web-works aplenty in the container format of his Brown Masters of Fine Arts thesis, “Kluge: A Meditation, and Other Works.”

Moby Games (wonder where they got that adjective?) is running Terrence Bosky’s story “Something about Interactive Fiction.”

There’s some of the standard article-about-IF fare there, yes, along with some nice touches such as quotes from Don Woods and a write-up of the Mystery House Taken Over project. Since the piece was written up on Slashdot, you can even read the rereshingly unselfconcious comments available there. Slashdot rule #1: All jokes about IF must begin with “>”.

Stuart Moulthrop, author of Victory Garden, Hegirascope, Reagan Library, and Pax, will discuss his more than 15 years of work in digital writing and will read from new work.

Wednesday – April 19, 2006 – 5:30pm

The reading and discussion will take place at the Kelly Writers House, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, 3805 Locust Walk.

The event is free and open to the public, and is part of the MACHINE series at the Kelly Writers House, which is co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization.

Jim Carpenter and his prosthetic imagination now have a blog. Jim’s Electronic Text Composition project website just went up less than a month ago, as we announced here. At this rate we’ll have the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.poetry.etc before the end of May.