Grand Text Auto

A bit of Book and Volume news: I just finished release 8, incorporating very few changes – not much more than a handful of additional synonyms. Hopefully the most pesky bugs have been squashed by now and the rough edges smoothed over.

Also, there are two new reviews: Josemanuel’s review in SPAC #43 (in Spanish). And there’s Jonathan Goodwin’s slightly spoilery article in The Value – A Literary Organ.

Here is an excerpt (just the nice bits, of course) from Josemanuel’s review, in his English translation:

Yesterday I met up with MUD genealogist Martin Keegan and his fellow digital rights activist Julian Midgley, coordinator of the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. Martin was a wizard of Island, an early carved-out-of-C MUD, and he came to my talk last Tuesday, interested to hear about IF.

Adam Cadre has a new story, or set of stories, generated in PHP and with a twist. After reading one of the generated stories, you can vote on how five people rank in terms of culpability for a character’s death. Adam will post the statistics before too long, after harvesting some more votes. The project is called “23,040 Bridges,” no doubt because there are 192 of them for each of the (5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1) possible rankings of culpability.

The 2006 Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition Finalists have been announced, and one of them is Façade! Congratulations, Andrew and Michael, on another accolade for this interactive drama.

It looks like several other interesting pieces will be moshing at the festival (January 19-27, 2006 in Salt Lake City), including two games that have been featured on Grand Text Auto: Ian Bogost’s Disaffected! and Aaron Reed’s Whom the Telling Changed (GTxA discussion, download page.) Congratulations to these two as well, and to the other indie game developers who will be bringing their clouds, gems, labyrinths, wildlife, and body parts to encounter Sumerian fires, photoduplication, and marital dissolution at Slamdance.

Just wanted to note that a new printed, English issue of Italian magazine Neural is out, and there are many items of artistic and hacktivist interest firing away on the news feed.

I’m speaking on interactive fiction at the University of Cambridge tomorrow. Room 911, New Cavendish Laboratory.

Tonight red lanterns are battered, laughing, in the mechanism. The Agrippa Files, a site fashioned as part of it Transcriptions Project at UCSB, has gone online, documenting the 1992 Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) – the 1992 collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr.

Read on for news from the press release.

If you liked this, you very well might like this.

I have only a few selected links from the three interesting talks in this panel, not even sketchy notes; but here they are:

First up was Signe Schou, René Toft: A Theoretical Model for Experience and Social Interaction in Digitally Enhanced Environments; a detailed theoretical model which I could not hope to relate here, even had I made it to the beginning of the presentation – but I’ll link more information about it if I can find it online.

Next, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Jakob Wamberg: Interface or Interlace? Or How Art is Mediated in Augmented Reality. The fascinating works discussed included The Path of Illusion, Blendie, Exhale (breath between bodies), and Augmented Fish Reality.

Friday opened with a great session, dealing with non-commerical games. Who’d have thought?

Ludica – Losh – Camper

Please join us [for the Upgrade! at Eyebeam, New York City,] on Thursday, December 8, for a talk with poet, writer and programmer Nick Montfort. We’ll celebrate the launch of his new work Book and Volume, and close 2005.

[Details below…]

William Gillespie and I have a new piece, rather simple but jointly written in an interesting way, and programmed in Processing. We wrote it from the end to the beginning, alternating sentences. It’s in the new issue of BathHouse Magazine: A Journal of Hybrid Arts. Here’s “The Executor.”

I do not promise notes of this extent about every session, particularly since there are no electrical outlets nearby. But here are some notes about the first session.

Engeli – Bogost – Hutchison

Jesper Juul’s new book Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds is now out from MIT Press. I have not yet seen the book, but it has some basis in Jesper’s very high-quality dissertation of the same name, and I’m willing to recommend that people at least take a serious look at it for that reason alone. Jesper describes the book on his blog, The Ludologist, as being “brand new, all together nicer, more readable, more fun, and just better.” It’s evident from the companion site that he has put many new efforts into this new Half-Real.

Games need BLUE SKIES! … We want to play in a HAPPY PRETEND LAND, not a shit version of an American slum full of mixed-race gangsters wearing licensed sportswear!

Indeed, if I lived in the U.K., I’d be desperate for blue skies …

• Updated “Interactive Fiction Entrees” with suggested IF for newcomers – ten pieces that you can download, and five remarkable old-school pieces that aren’t freely available these days, except perhaps as abandonware.
• Perform (Perceptron Classifier in Inform), for my fellow Inform programmers.

I presented several digitial pieces to Charles Bernstein‘s English 589.301 / Comparative Literature 577.301 class (Modern, Modernist, Contemporary: Reading Poetry/Poetry Reading) yesterday night. I selected these to connect to existing discussion in the seminar and to make for an interesting sequence. I wasn’t trying to develop a “greatest hits” album, but a series of pieces that was interesting to show and briefly discuss for this particular group.

I think it went extraordinarily well – we not only went through enough of each of these pieces to allow everyone to see how they are operated (so that they can be pursued and read closely later on), but we even got into discussion of scriptons and textons, the Cave at Brown, and obfuscated code. Many thanks to the seminar participants who showed up the night before Thanksgiving! Here’s the lineup I came up with…

Hanna Wallach spoke today at Penn about women in free and open source software development. She described the pervasive nature of free software, the “four freedoms” that are referred to in the word “free,” and the distinction between the terms “free” and “open source.” Hanna also mentioned several commercial free software endeavors and many large-scale cases of free software use. She also showed a map with many Debian developers indicated, throughout the globe – at least one in Antartica.

The startling statistic that introduced Hanna’s discussion of women in free software: while 28% of proprietary software developers are female, only about 1.5% of free software developers are. This is certainly the sort of result that provokes a vigorous WTF? reaction, isn’t it?

I had a most unusual visitor a few weeks ago.

A Review of Turing (A Novel about Computation)
Christos H. Papadimitriou
MIT Press
2003/2005 paper
208 pp.
$32.00/$13.95 paper

I had been interested in Christos H. Papadimitriou’s Turing (A Novel about Computation) since I first learned about it – thanks to the book being published by MIT Press at about the same time that Twisty Little Passages came out. It was the only contemporary entry in MIT Press’s “fiction and literature” category, I believe, and had an alphabetically close title, so I kept noticing the book and wondering about it. When I found that Papadimitriou was coming to Penn, I used the excuse to finally get Turing and read it.

I’ve managed a certain ironic detachment from McSweeney’s for quite a while, but issue #16 (which includes a piece that Harry Mathews collaborated on and, in an unusual homage to Duchamp, an actual comb) has something in it that finally compelled me to deal out the asking price. This is a piece by Robert Coover, “Heart Suit.”

“Heart Suit” is printed on fifteen cards that are full of text on one side, and backed and cornered like playing cards. There is a “title” card, deuce through ace, and a joker. The instructions, which appear on the title card, read the “middle” thirteen in any order, and conclude with the joker. The tale, so shuffled, will be a story of tart theft in the court of hearts, will involve a bit of inquisition and investigation, will incude a great deal of queen-shtupping by a pack of paramours, and will conclude with a final – or perhaps not so final – meting out of punishment.

Vespers by Jason Devlin is the winner of this year’s IF Comp – the Wall Street Journal called it. There is a tie for second place: Beyond, a game by Italian authors Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro Peretti, and A New Life by Alexandre Owen Muñiz, which was also mentioned in the Journal article. Here are the full results. Congratulations to Jason, Roberto, Paolo, Alessandro, Alexandre, and all the other winners!

Dan Shiovitz has already posted an essay with some general observations about this year’s comp, and the usual deluge of reviews on rec.games.int-fiction seems to be beginning, too. Check ’em out – and, of course, check out the games.

Vauhini Vara’s Wall Street Journal Online article on interactive fiction is out. Sure, the headline, “Keeping a Genre Alive,” suggests Terri Schiavo more than a compelling creative practice. But still, it’s a short, decent piece describes IF and the “cult group of gamers,” members of whom “post their own text-only adventures online for free, and meet in chat rooms dedicated to the craft.” The article mentions Photopia and Shade and eschews the usual suspects for quotations. (I will mention, but not complain about, being interviewed but not quoted. I think several people are in the same inflatable boat; Vara seems to have done a good amount of research on the phone for this piece.) The article even ends with a quote from Steve Meretzky – albeit the least funny one I’ve ever read.

Calling all those with Java-capable mobile phones! Airport Insecurity, the mobile phone game made to be played while waiting in an airport security line, is now out. It costs less than $4, a price that wouldn’t even make Crazy Frog blink. Airport Insecurity is by Persuasive Games, behind which you’ll find Ian Bogost, who blogs at Water Cooler Games. You may remember this game from my writeup of Ian’s talk “Designing for Reproach.”

The new issue, phase, or manifestation of ebr (Electronic Book Review) is here, and there’s some really great stuff in it. Writing by John Cayley and Lori Emerson is part of that, but I have to call special attention to two responses to the book First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by GTxA’s own Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. The two responses are by Brian Kim Stefans and (again, our very own) Scott Rettberg. These aren’t just interesting comments on First Person; they at the very least powerful defenses of the literary. Perhaps they are manifestoes for computing and literature as well.