Grand Text Auto

There were protests, but none of the violence that had been expected, as the last books left the former Undergraduate Library at the University of Texas. The facility, housed in the Flawn Academic Center, opened in 1963 and was the campus’s first open-shelf library for undergraduates. The removal completes the planned disengagement.

The presence of the Undergraduate Library, or UGL, was always regarded as a “bone in the throat” by computer-savvy academics, as the staffing and machinery necessary for circulation and restocking got in the way of computer labs (such as the Student Microcomputer Facility or “Smurf,” the first large-scale undergraduate lab) and facilities for computing research (such as the Computer Writing and Research Lab), which was relegated to the basement with the undergraduate literary magazine.

They’ve had vending machines that dispense cigarettes for a while, but one that dispenses Cigarettes? Indeed, bibliophiles can now discreetely partake of French letters at convenient automatic dispensers. There are certainly precedents, but many found it newsworthy that Maxi-Livres has rolled out five book vending machines in Paris. The machines have only 25 best-sellers; there’s no print-on-demand press nestled inside.

In rather disturbing news, CNN reports that a South Korean man died after playing “online battle simulation games” for 50 hours in a Taegu cybercafe, almost non-stop.

On a happier note, Abdner Ashman broke the Ms. Pac Man record last year, getting through 141 screens and scoring 921,360 points. Twin Galaxies has finally approved the record and posted an extensive writeup of the game along with a board-by-board recap. There is some very interesting and detailed description of Ms. Pac Man in there, along with the wonderful sports-like commentary:

“Jamie Kane is the new online adventure from bbc.co.uk. It’s part game, part drama, part murder mystery…” The alternate reality game went live this weekend. You know, for kids. Mysteriously, some people have not been able to sign up for it. Unmysteriously, I’m not likely to have the time to try, but I’d be interested to know if anyone checks it out and wants to share their reaction – particularly those in the UK who can benefit from the mobile-phone-based aspects and the full alternation of reality.

Did you know that every time you launch an alternate reality game, God kills some luckless sucker?

The page for Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary, by BBS Documentary creator and cantankerous Grand Text Auto commenter Jason Scott of textfiles.com, is now live. Production is planned for 2006.

(Since my title for this post is ten times more obscure than my usual obscure jokes, I’ll mention that the text adventure Mystery Mansion, originally programmed in the 1970s for the HP-1000, would tell you that you had successfully taken some item by saying “YOUR BOOTY NOW CONTAINS THE [ITEM],” as you can see depicted in lovely computer graphics on the premier Mystery Mansion page.)

Alan Liu has finished many months of work on a report that will help to keep electronic literature working for readers, scholars, students, and authors in the future. The result is Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature, which outlines two main approaches to keeping e-lit functioning over the years, across changes in platform. While the responsibility of putting it all together fell to Alan, the report is an outcome of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s PAD (Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination) project and is co-authored by David Durand, Nick Montfort, Merrilee Proffitt, Liam R. E. Quin, Jean-Hugues Réty, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. There’s an announcement on the ELO site; of course, please check out Born-Again Bits itself, and feel free to comment here about it.

Because sometimes the scheme that works for baf’s guide is not enough: M.D. Dollahite offers IFMES (Interactive Fiction Metadata Element Set), derived from the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and invites comments on this proposal. The plan is to use this system to create a Mozilla-based IF organizer application, one that is already in development and sounds similar to the “iFiction” front-end that Andrew Hunter’s Zoom interpreter provides on the Mac. For compatibility with the Semantic Web and to foster the re-use of work, Dollahite has offered this proposal for an open metadata standard, rather than just making up something ad hoc to suit a particular program.

Watching and reading from some compelling multimedia poetry collections has gotten me thinking about their different approaches. The two Poetry in Motion CD-ROMs espouse a very different view of poetry and its place in culture than does An Invitation to Poetry, and this difference seems more interesting than the differences in interface, format, and publication dates.

Now, I say “very different,” but of course even the most radically different poets actually agree on a lot when it comes to language and poetry: it should be pleasing in its sound, its meaning, and the interplay between these; in general a poem manifests itself on the page, in the voice, and in the mind. It should work to do things that the newspaper does not. If you’re going to throw open the doors to every possible perspective on language and include, say, Joseph Goebbels, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Rove, then we’d have to say that poets are all pretty much allies – it would hardly be worth noting the differences even between poets of very different stripes, such as Derek Walcott and Amiri Baraka.

But, from a standpoint within poetry, these collections of texts and videos are indeed quite different. The poets documented by Ron Mann posit an image of poet as performer, physically present and supplying the expert voice that is uniquely qualified to utter the poem. Pinsky and Dietz, on the other hand, actually don’t even include the poets in their videos.

Acting on a tip from Stephanie Strickland, I’ve been reading Florian Cramer’s Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, a PDF book that is an impressively broad compendium of creative uses of code, stretching back deep into pre-computer times. It’s well worth checking out for those interested in the history of computational art.

Near the beginning, though, Cramer repeats a confusion that I’ve seen hinted at elsewhere. Although it doesn’t end up being important to the book, this point confuses clarity with obscurity and secrecy, so I thought I’d take the excuse to pick this nit before the infestation becomes more widespread:

As speculative codes, Egyptian hieroglyphs (in their two different historical readings), the Voynich Manuscript and Travis Dane’s CD-ROM render “code” ambiguous between its traditional meaning of a cryptographic code, i.e. a rule for transforming symbols into other symbols, and code in its computational meaning of a transformation rule for symbols into action. Ever since computer programmers referred to written algorithmic machine instructions as “code” and programming as “coding,” “code” not only refers to cryptographic codes, but to what makes up software … (p. 9)

“Absolutely not,” say Grand Text Auto executives. Bloggers at the popular site have categorically denied that, with the aid of a program freely available on the Internet, “secret content” can be unlocked and the blog can be revealed as being laced with sex and obscenity. The sharp reply came after the Entertainment Blog Rating Board, at the behest of Senator Hillary Clinton, issued a ruling revoking Grand Text Auto’s previously awarded rating of “serious hypertext.”

A certain documentary filmmaker who reads GTxA pointed out to me that the first issue of The Escapist is out. I don’t tend to be a big reader of PDF-based zines, but the “cover” of this one lured me in, and hey, there’s some interesting writing in here.

The magazine “covers gaming and gamer culture with a progressive editorial style.” An article by Jennifer Buckendorf takes on the stereotypical construction of the gamer as someone who plays FPSs (rather than Everquest or classic games) and who doesn’t pursue other hobbies, such as reading. Kieron Gillen investigates the nature of video game forms, answering those (such as a lawmaker bent on restricting video games) who see the simulation aspect of games as at odds with games being able to express anything. John Tynes argues that controller and display innovations (a la the Nintendo DS) are dead ends in a market where people want to push out the same standard game across as many platforms as possible.

The creators of the free documentarty Gamer Br (GTxA post, English home page) are gearing up for another project: a three-episode video on the way digital technology is influencing cultrual production, and the distribution and reception of media, in Brazil. The first, “Skip the Intermediary,” will cover the struggles of musicians and record labels. The second will cover the IP revolution that Creative Commons licenses and other challenges to traditional copyright are bringing in Brazil. The final video will cover the free software movement and its cultural effect.

I am extremely pleased to announce the release of Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Façade!

This long-awaited one-act interactive drama, featuring a 3D environment and voice-acted, AI-driven characters, has been a testbed for research in and development of new discourse-based NLP techniques, a new drama management framework, and new ways of allowing behavior hierarchies to interact. It has been the source of more than a dozen academic publications co-authored by Michael and Andrew, as well as Michael’s Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. dissertation. A pre-release version of Façade was a finalist in the 2004 Independent Games Festival. Façade is also delightfully entertaining and abundant in its dramatic and artistic merits. It offers a fairly short dramatic experience that is intensive and compelling, and unlike anything else I have seen in video games or other interactive systems. The New York Times called Façade “the future of video games” and one person who has devoted his life to interactive storytelling, Chris Crawford, said the system was “the best actual working interactive storyworld yet created.” You can read the official press release on Façade, read on for more about the release, or skip directly to the the download page on InteractiveStory.net.

Apropos of this, some a cappella Nintendo theme songs. If you ask me, even the appearance of the ninja doesn’t really redeem it, but hey, it’s topical.

Proof that young researchers can bolster their publication records when they write about video games: The BBC reports that South Africa’s main medical journal has accepted an article on “PlayStation Thumb” for publication – one written by a 13-year-old girl.

Her study found that 28 of the 60 boys and 17 of the 60 girls she spoke to played regularly.

Of these, eight boys and seven girls complained of symptoms such as redness, tingling and blisters.

The unfortunate thing is that Safura Abdool Karim, the author, does not herself own a PlayStation and finds them “a waste of time.” So here we have another case of game research being done by a non-gamer…

When I saw the headline “Fake spy guilty of kidnapping con” on BBC news today, I was worried that Harry Mathews might have gotten himself in trouble. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case.

Mathews, a novelist, poet of the New York School, fashioner of literary forms and sole American member of the Oulipo, is most recently the author of My Life in CIA. This delightful book was reviewed a while ago by local Oulipophile MadInkBeard. Mathews calls it an autobiographical novel; in it, he describes his dangerous escapades of 1973. That tumultuous year, he purportedly answered the suspicions of his friends abroad (who thought, or in some cases were certain, that he was a CIA man) by beginning to play spy.

Janet Murray has a great article just out in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Humanistic Approaches for Digital-Media Studies.” It discusses the Georgia Tech masters of science in information design program and technology and the new digital studies Ph.D. program (the first class just started last Fall) and also mentions the new undergraduate computational media program. Janet gives a great view from her own perspective of how these programs have some together, and she describes the faculty’s diversity (with a nod to Michael, of course) and the strength that the programs gain from this diversity. She makes a good case for studying outside of one’s core strengths and for taking the risks necessary to found new programs like these. She writes,

What interesting literary presentations I’ve been to recently. Yesterday Hanna and I took the train out to meet up with Scott in South Jersey. We went to a small, carceral structure in Ocean City where lawn furniture was set up in an arts and crafts studio. There we heard John Ashbery read to a crowd that was still ambulatory but of a noticeably different demographic than is the grad student/junior faculty crowd. The motto of the Ocean City Arts Center seems to be “Life is short … the arts extend it!”

Today, Hanna and I went to a “A Potable Joyce,” a show at the Rosenbach Library and Museum performed by actors and employing some shadow puppets. The performance tells (some of) the story of the Odyssey, Ulysses, and Joyce’s writing and publishing Ulysses. The Nausicaa episode was elided – probably a good move, as there were several audience members around age three.

Last week I finished watching Jason Scott’s BBS: The Documentary (which I mentioned earlier on here) and also saw Gamer Br [torrent], [main site] a freely available 45-minute documentary about video gaming in Brazil that’s available via Legaltorrents.

They’re both well worth watching if you like the kind of stuff we like here on Grand Text Auto. It was interesting to see, though, how the two films look very different approaches to talking with people about their computing experiences, the digital communities that they’ve been part of, and the things that make them passionate about computing.

Eliza Redux, by Adrianne Wortzel and Studio Blue at the Cooper Union, has just launched and is featured in the Turbulence Spotlight. The Eliza Redux site offers online access to a “a physical robot which, having passed the Turing test with flying colors, thinks it is a human psychoanalyst and persists in offering online pseudo- psychoanalytic sessions. … Peer consultation is available in the Reception Area as well as archived sessions and other reference materials.” Of course, the reference is to Eliza/Doctor, the 1964-1966 system Joseph Weizenbaum created at MIT. (Dennis has Charles Hayden’s implementation online – the same one we included in The New Media Reader and which is widely available for download.) Wortzel’s announcement reads, “In spite of the transparency of the program’s lack of intelligence, lab personnel were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish the machine from a human psychotherapist and became so dependent upon ELIZA for ‘therapeutic sessions’ that eventually Weizenbaum had to withdraw its use.”

Are they fun to send via SMS? I can’t say. But they do make for excellent short examples in a narratology lecture. the-phone-book.com offers six award-winning SMS stories.

I gave a lecture on Story and Games [slides in PDF] to the CIS 564 class on game design here at Penn. The first half was straight narratology; then we looked at the nature of games as simulations, game time as distinct from time in stories, etc., and I had the class play Varicella in two groups so that we could discuss it in some detail. Fun stuff.

What happens when your journalism classes do a four year investigation into who Deep Throat was, publish their results on the Web, garner huge amounts of press coverage, and then turn out to be wrong?

We’re back from Provflux, the Providence arts festival where Scott and I read Implementation at The Steel Yard, posted the novel throughout the city, and offered stickers at the CUBE2 Gallery, where photos of sticker placements were on display.

Thanks to Hanna for taking this photo of the reading. Scott has posted some photos from the exhibit and more photos from the reading on Flickr, available via his blog.

Scott, Hanna, and I are at Provflux. More later, but for now, a quick report: At the RISD Museum, in the Annual Graduate Student Exhibition, we found an electronic literature piece right there in the wild. Joseph Hecking’s Mimetics Simulation No. 1, done in the medium of “interactive computer graphics,” according to the placard, presented on overhead, game-like view of small figures running about bearing symbols – crosses, staffs, dollar signs, and so on. When one of them is touched via the touch-screen interface, texts appear, for instance:

drink a uniter to have cause on walt disney
at all medical institutions with a divider