Grand Text Auto

Turns out that the Vintage Computer Festival 8.0 finishes up today. The festival is being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View; here’s the Festival’s overall page, which links to photos of many exhibits from VCF 7.0. It’s as if the computer industry had said to historically-minded geeks, look on my works, ye mighty, and drool.

L’édition 2005 de notre concours dédié à la fiction interactive francophone est enfin terminée.

The winner of this first French interactive fiction contest was Le Cercle des Gros Geeks disparus by Adrien Saurat. This game and the other five entries can be downloaded from the official competition page; there’s also a page in English on ifwiki about the contest.

… and Not Sticker Literature That Says What Someone Else Wants You Say. Well, that could have been the name of the project, but it’s called The Bubble Project. “I printed 15,000 of these bubble stickers and place them on top of ads all over New York City. Passersby fill them in. I go back and photograph the results.”

Game Studies 5:1 is out. The new issue includes:

• A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design, by John P. Davis, Keith Steury, and Randy Pagulayan
• The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming – CASE: Battlefield 1942, by Tony Manninen and Tomi Kujanpää
• Player-Centred Game Design: Experiences in Using Scenario Study to Inform Mobile Game Design, by Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä
• Formal Models and Game Design, by Stefan M. Grünvogel
• The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design, by Craig A. Lindley

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. (1996-2005)

The Space Under the Window. (1997-1999)

Tal Halpern’s “Le Nouveau Western,” a Turbulence commission, has just come online.

My first impression is that this is an intriguing segmented text, presented in a visually compelling way, with some interesting sound elements. It doesn’t take long to read through; I certainly recommend it. The interface is little more than a wrapper for this “content,” though, and there seems to be little that makes much interesting use of Flash here. (The main effect of the Flash implementation seems to be that there’s a delay between lexia, or at least, a more noticable one that is highlighted by a “loading…” notice.) To me the piece evoked Composition No. 1 and La Jette more than The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It seems to be a good example of a rather tired electronic literature form, the “interesting notebook.” Maybe the form actually isn’t a problem; perhaps it’s that the interface somehow seems to suggest or promise more to me, leaving me a bit disappointed as far as interactivity is concerned?

Belatedly, I’ve written up a few thoughts about the provocative Kelly Writers House sessions I went to at the Elective Affinities conference. These were on September 27, almost two weeks ago, and I did not take any notes, but I won’t try to represent the particular statements and arguments of all the speakers – just my reveries. I hope that audio of all these talks will be online, soon; I’ll link it in when I find out about it.

I’m not blogging live, but wanted to mention something else interesting from Thursday at the NMC conference at Yale. I was glad to hear Bill Crosbie (Rutgers) and Jessica Hammer (Columbia) preaching the gospel of play in their presentation “Letting Go of the Reins – Giving Your Learners the Freedom to Play.” They explained to the attendees there some of the history of game and play research, and how many of the benefits that gaming offers may not fit into the “mandatory fun” situation of gaming in the classroom as it exists today. They also suggested the game Insaniquarium as something that had some of the qualities of SimCity, Civilization, and other complex simulation-based games, and was educational in similar ways, but which could be played in only a few hours. (There are other versions of the game floating around out there, nyuk nyuk, including a perhaps more extensive pay version for Windows. But this on ran on my Mac. And I definitely think you should be able to convert a Mac into an aquarium.)

I took the first train of the morning up to New Haven on Thursday, arriving just in time to speak last on a panel called “A Dialog on Gaming and its Potential” at the New Media Consortium New England Regional Conference. I gave a short talk on IF, mainly to evagelize about the form to the courseware creators, educators, and educational IT folks who were there. I wish I could write up my reaction to the panel, but I missed almost all of it! From the Q&A, I gathered that it was pretty good.

WSU Vancouver, in the Portland area of the Pacific Northwest, has a program in “Digital Technology and Culture, a liberal arts-based curriculum exploring relationships between technology and meaning-making both in historical and contemporary contexts.” They’re seeking an assistant or asssociate professor. See below for details…

This is a version of my Elective Affinities talk “How Stella Got Her Text Back: Trajectories of Word and Image in Creative Computing” given on September 26, 2005, at the University of Pennsylvania.

All Your Base Rhapsody: Demonstrating that, despite what you might believe from watching Highlander, not every media experience is enhanced by a Queen soundtrack.

Many thanks to Rinku for pointing out Chris Crawford’s nice commentary on industry studies of video game demographics. Readers who care about this issue at all will want to read his article, but the gist of it is that the industry talk of a closing gender gap and a shift to older gamers has no basis in scientific studies; it is just public relations output from video game companies.

>GET GAMESThe 36 interactive fiction pieces that were entered in the 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp 2005) have been released. Download away! New this year are BitTorrents of the entries and the necessary interpreters.

For newcomers to the Comp: Judging in this competition is done by the public, so while you can wait around and see who the winners are, if you’re interested in IF, you should certainly download the games and take a look. Anyone who plays at least five games may vote, as explained on the page on judging games. Info about past Comps is available at the Comp site and on IF Wiki. Thanks to Stephen Granade of BrassLantern.org for once again organizing the Comp.

Last night at the Slought Foundation I saw two very interesting pieces for computer-controlled human face, by Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha of the IAAA (Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam). The two did a piece involving face interface which opened the 1997 Ars Electronica Festival.

A Strategy Guide for Studying the Grand Theft Auto Series: An Edited Collection of Essays

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 15, 2005

The present call for papers is for chapter length essays (5,000-7,500 words) that address one or more games in the Grand Theft Auto series…

I just heard a very interesting panel at the Elective Affinities conference that is going on here at Penn. Benjamin Harvey from Mississippi State University spoke first about Virgina Woolf and her relationship to the British Library reading room, which was renovated early in the 20th century so that it was lined with famous authors’ names – a register that was lacking in novelists and was also all male, although many users of the reading room were female, and a majority were by the 1930s. After that, Penn’s own Fernando Pereira – he’s the head of the computer and information science department – spoke about using statistical natural language processing to identify topics. It was quite a voyage out from the material nature of the library to its abstract existence as a document collection, and provocative.

I made that fortuitous discovery that Busted, a novel by Emma Harrison – surely not this Emma Harrison? – is now online. And it’s a hypertext, because the definitions of the SAT words that appear in the novel – one of the SAT Vocabulary Novel Series – are all linked. Yes, you no longer have to use readymade books to study for the SAT.

Wednesday, I decided to take advantage of the non-devastated condition of the mid-Atlantic. I hopped on a train and took a spur-of-the-moment trip down to Baltimore to hear Ian Bogost (of Water Cooler Games and Georgia Tech) give a talk at the University of Baltimore, a talk that was hosted by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s Information Arts and Technology program. The full title of Ian’s talk was “Designing for Reproach: Videogames and Consumer Advocacy.”

I want to mention first off that Ian busted out demos of two new games, premiering Disaffected! — a slick, isomorphic anti-Kinkos game in which you have to drive disgruntled employees, service obedient and exasperated customers, and sort through all sorts of stacks of papers — and Airport Insecurity, a game for mobile phones. Ian talked about some ideas that are discussed in his book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, which is coming in the spring from MIT Press; he has another book in the works about rhetoric and gaming.

Some notes on the talk follow.

IAWIS/AIERTI 7th International Conference on Word & Image Studies:
Elective Affinities
Philadelphia, 23-27 September, 2005

Those within range of Philly might particularly want to look into attending Words on Screen: Hierarchies of Text and Picture in Cyberculture (I’ll be presenting “How Stella Got Her Text Back” in that session) and and VVV-on-line: Verbal-Visual-Vocal Poetries in Hyperspace I, II, and III, a series of sessions put together by Charles Bernstein. The full announcement is below…

Proud Americans will recall the other great corporate innovation of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell: Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater, where one room featured a band of mechanical animal automata and others housed a resplendent array of video games, not to mention that great cash cow, skee ball. International readers and nostalgic Americans alike can find copious information online about the history of Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater and Showbiz Pizza Place. Curious readers can learn about the different stage configurations and the transition from a band of robot entertainers to a single animatronic rat/mouse supported by video screens; they can even read reviews of shows. Those who remain puzzled after reviewing these documents may need to study this nation’s cultural context further.

If you need a quick break from the onslaught of the new semester, or if you’re looking for an excuse to look at something besides the news, check out Kybernekyia: A Hypervortext of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI. It’s interesting as “a pedantic experiment” and can teach most readers a bit about the Cantos and about their author, even if it may not directly show the way to new scholarly and creative possibilities. If you’re really looking for a way to pound the Cantos into shape and make it new, check out a different neo-vorticist offering, Young-Hae Chang’s already-classic Dakota.

From this article on the Fossil / ABACUS Palm PDA watch, on the blog for Make magazine.

Over at Tea Leaves Peter Berger has done a really nice interview with game designer David Mullich. While the preface to the interview and Mullich’s discussion of Heroes IV is interesting, a particular treat for me was the discussion of Mullich’s famous Apple II game, The Prisoner, in the second half of the interview, which covers how the game was programmed in Applesoft BASIC, how permission to refer to the The Prisoner TV series was “secured,” and how playtesting was done. (Spoiler warning – after the playtester question!)

There’s a new article on interactive fiction in The Escapist, a recently-minted publication that I mentioned earlier. The piece is by Allen Varney, and is called “READ GAME.”