Grand Text Auto

The latest SPAG Newsletter, number 40, features interviews with Roberto Grassi of the Italian IF community and Ruben “Urbatain” Nieto of the Spanish IF community.

I just stumbled upon “Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction” [PDF] [PS] by Adam Mathes, who got a Library and Information Science Masters recently from UIUC:

I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. … Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. … Much like rare books, older computer programs are in need of conservation if their intellectual material is going to be accessible today and in the future. … a special collections library is well suited to the large task of preserving these works …

If you’re in the mood to see interminable video of Final Fantasy VI being re-enacted by video game consoles (that is, the video game consoles are the characters), check out Sega Fantasy VI (in English). Update: link changed; thanks, DoomRater.

I had never heard of the WonderSwan, the PC-FX, or the Playdia before this. And, I must say, some of the parts I watched were quite touching. Maybe it’s just that sappy music, though.

Notes on Defending the Galaxy: The Complete Handbook of VideoGaming
edited by Michael Rubin
written by Michael Rubin, Carl Winefordner, and Sam Welker
illustrations by Rudy Young and Jeff Webber
photographs by Michael Rubin
Gainesville, Florida: Triad Publishing Company
1982
224 pp.

I recently borrowed Defending the Galaxy from Paul Shaffer, who not only is currently the Eniac curator here at Penn, but also happens to have worked for Scott Adams of Adventure International back in the early 1980s as a play-tester.

In a nice list of video game firsts published in the February 1984 issue of Computer Games magazine, Defending the Galaxy is listed as “The first ‘complete’ guide to video gaming (manners, maladies, dress, etc.)” We might take this declaration with a grain of salt, because the list happens to be drawn up by Michael Rubin, the editor of Defending the Galaxy. But it turns out to be an interesting book, for reasons that may not be obvious at a glance.

Mind’s Heart
  by Robert Creeley

Mind’s heart, it must
be that some
truth lies locked
in you.

Or else, lies, all
lies, and no man
true enough to know
the difference.

Poet Robert Creeley died on March 30. Charles Bernstein has recently updated the Creeley page on PennSound and the EPC Creeley page at the University of Buffalo, where this prolific and influential poet taught before recently moving to Brown. The EPC page has links to many obituaries. The main page of Conjunctions is now filled with tributes to Creeley, including one from e-lit writer and Brown student Brian Kim Stefans, who, in his Roger Pellett persona, reworked some of Creeley’s poems.

Maeda Path is a Flash game, with sound, by Jared Tarbell. It’s based on a short online game that John Maeda coded for Shiseido. “This game represents one component of a multipart series studying the astounding work of long time computational artist John Maeda.” Via Elastico.

Matt Kirschenbaum gave a talk today called “‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace:’ Computer Forensics and Electronic Textuality,” at Penn’s History of Material Texts Workshop. (The abstract is online.) He discussed the Department of Defense Clearing and Sanitization Matrix and how the seemingly extreme measures required to destroy digital data contradict the first wave of scholarly writing on the transient, unstable nature of digital text, from “the usual suspects.” He pointed to the luminous spectacle of Tron as one possible inspiration for this early discourse of speed and light.

I somehow just now got word of WRT: Writer Response Theory, a blog o’ blogs, already up and running for a while, that works to foster discussion on ASCII art, blog fiction, chatbots, email fiction, e-poetry, hypertext fiction, and interactive fiction (IF). The site can now be reached from our “Related Blogs” list.

The announcement explains that “WRT is a blogging collective dedicated to the discussion and exploration of digital character art — any art involving electrons and making use of letters, alphanumerics, or other characters in an interesting way. Our primary focus is on active and interactive works, in which users input text and receive textual responses as output.”

Christy Dena, Jeremy Douglass, and Mark Marino (bios below) run this open site. “Everyone who reads this blog is a member and may suggest a thread or a link,” they write. “As long as it pertains to digital letter/character art we will post and pursue it.”

I was recently alerted to Ferry Halim’s Orisinal, which offers pleasant-looking, easy-to-understand Flash games, reminiscient of greeting cards and often featuring happy animals. They’re worth looking at. While I can’t say that I find them very compelling, some people apparently do, from looking at some of the net-wide high scores for these games.

The IF Comp, which takes place in the fall (for those in the Northern Hemisphere), has traditionally been the annual big deal of interactive fiction production and critique. But there’s also a Spring Thing, a competition Adam Cadre ran in 2002 and 2003 and which is back this year, thanks to Greg Boettcher. The games are out for this year’s; you can download them from the IF Archive. The voting period ends May 1.

Our excellent blogging system here at Grand Text Auto is run on WordPress. We love this free and open-source software, but I am deeply disappointed (and I’m sure Michael, Andrew, Scott, and Noah are as well) that the main site for the project, WordPress.org, was recently unmasked as a search engine spamhaus – a huge number of hidden articles were placed there, courtesy of the founding developer, solely to distort or “game” Google for the profit of unscrupulous lawyers and merchants. As a result, Google has dropped the site from its index and – not that it matters, but it’s the thought that counts – we’ve de-linked the main WordPress site from here as well.

I’m pretty late in announcing this, but in a few hours (2pm UC Riverside time) there’s an interesting-sounding event featuring two professors: “Do Androids Dream? The Legacy of The Turing Test.” The cross-disciplinary influence of Turing is one topic for Saul Traiger, professor of cognitive science & philosophy, Occidental College, and Stephanie August, professor of computer science, Loyola Marymount University, who are speaking in the Global Interface workshop.

Now the world has truly begun to conquer my and Scott’s sticker novel Implementation.

We are delighted to announce that Riccardo Boglione, a scholar of 20th century Italian literature and graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, has translated the first installment of Implementation into Italian. His translation of installment 1 is now available for download and printout onto US Letter or A4 label paper. Riccardo plans to continue translating the novel, releasing one installment a month. (Implementation Italian home page.)

Ken Kahn just spoke at Penn about his system ToonTalk, a Windows programming environment for children (and others) which provides facilities for developing graphical computer games. His talk was “Learning using concrete virtual analogs of powerful abstractions: Lessons from ToonTalk, Playground, and WebLabs” — slides are online in HTML. Khan distinguished the reasons that Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and others might have for arguing for advocating what Michael calls procedural literacy, although he noted that all are clearly allies in looking beyond the current curriculum to try to allow students a better understanding of computational thinking.

Ok, I didn’t mishear the lyrics that severely, but I did want you new media/rock-n-roll scholars to know about Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium, even if you aren’t going to write about the fine piece of electronic literature that features the Boss as one of its main characters. The list of session rubrics includes “Springsteen as Narrative Poet,” “Springsteen and Gender,” and “Springsteen and Critical Theory.” Deadline April 30.

The big event, interactive fiction’s Oscars, will be held tomorrow (Sunday March 20th) at 4pm EST (9pm GMT), on ifMUD.

[Text of my address today to the Atelier-Auteur (the Authorship Workshop) of RTP-DOC.]

Today, I will discuss two categories of digital writing that I know something about, and that I am an author of: electronic literature and blogs. My point in introducing two types of digital writing is to distinguish between them — and between these sorts of digital writing and other sorts entirely — to explain what is special about electronic literature and about blogs and blogging. Both of these rely on traditional notions of an author in some ways, yet challenge those notions in other ways. I believe that by creating electronic literature and by blogging, one can become not only an author but, for lack of a better term, a new media author, a digital author, or an electronic author.

I will address Atelier-Auteur (the Authorship Workshop) of RTP-DOC (“Documents and Content: Creating, Indexing, Browsing”) via videoconference today, at 11:05am EST (Philadelphia) / 5:05pm CET (Paris), on the topic of electronic literature, blogging, and their relationship to authorship. The talk (which, I assure you, will be in English) will be webcast live. You’re welcome to virtually attend, even if you prefer an ouvroir to an atelier. I will post the text of the talk on here as soon as possible afterwards. … Update: The text is now posted.

I spoke to Norm Badler and Stephen Lane’s Virtual Worlds class here at Penn on Monday about storytelling and games. I hope my talk wasn’t too theoretical for this class, which has been busying producing virtual worlds all semester, but I took the angle that it’s important to first distinguish how we want storytelling to serve game design. I did treat the class to the beginning of Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, Grand Theft Auto 2, and Soul Reaver, on Dreamcast and PSX. My notes are below…

The MHTO Occupation Force is pleased to announce the launch of Mystery House Taken Over.

The Mystery House Advance Team — Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, and Emily Short — has reverse engineered Mystery House, the first text-and-graphics adventure game. Members of the Advance Team have reimplemented it in a modern, cross-platform, free language for interactive fiction development, and have fashioned a kit to allow others to easily modify this early game.

Modified versions of Mystery House have been created by the elite Mystery House Occupation Force, consisting of individuals from the interactive fiction, electronic literature, and net art communities:

• Adam Cadre (Varicella, Photopia)
• Daniel Garrido, a.k.a. dhan (Ocaso Mortal)
• Michael Gentry (Little Blue Men, Anchorhead)
• Yune Kyung Lee & Yoon Ha Lee (The Moonlit Tower, Swanglass)
• Nick Montfort (Ad Verbum, Implementation)
• Scott Rettberg (The Unknown, Implementation)
• Dan Shiovitz (Lethe Flow Phoenix, Bad Machine)
• Emily Short (Savoir-Faire, City of Secrets)

Video games based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Well, video game concepts and designs, anyway, by Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux, and Will Wright.

Gary Kasparov, the strongest chess player in the world, champion from 1985-2000, the highest rated player in history, and the one behind the excellent PC chess player/tutor Kasparov’s Gambit, won the Linares Super Chess tournament today despite losing his last game to Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria. Kasparov, age 41, announced that he is retiring from competitive chess.

Kasparov is also the head of Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group that aims to unseat Vladimir Putin as president of Russia.

I guess I should call it “Aarseth vs. Jenkins.” Henry Jenkins and Espen Aarseth recently debated game studies (streaming Real video), although I’d say it was somewhere in between a debate and a love fest – a good discussion, certainly. This was hosted at the HUMlab (Umeå University, Sweden) back on January 18. I’m a bit late in noting this, but it’s well worth watching this soon, in case link rot and the cost of streaming video hosting cause the video to drop offline. The topics range from the relationship between story and game to the relationship between developers and academics, with discussion of the institutional situation of game studies programs as well. Henry has some great comments about spatial story and the relationship of games to other narrative-evoking environments; Espen’s discussion of the need for a diversity of approaches – not just “narratology” and “ludology” – is also quite good to hear. Espen even explains how game studies should take literary studies as a model! You’ll have to watch the video yourself to find out what the context is for this suggestion – it’s about 49 minutes in.

Striking a blow for chair dancing and Romanian techno, Gary Brolsma’s Numa Numa Dance (recently written up in the New York Times) already seems to have eclipsed the fame of the Star Wars Kid, Badger Badger Badger, and their contemporary kin, and now seems poised to challenge that uncanny boss monster of moving pictures on the Web: The Dancing Baby.

The Times and other parties are puzzled about the popularity of this video, done by someone with (as The New York Daily News puts it) “the lip-synching talent of Ashlee Simpson and the physique of the Pillsbury Doughboy.” Why is this Flash file so compelling? Brolsma himself seems to have no idea, and commentators have done little more than note that it is amusing, makes for a convenient distraction, and is set to a catchy song.

Let us briefly consider the sublime qualities of Numa Numa Dance and its relevance to our cultural moment.

Why should we study simple, old computer programs that no one at the time (including the programmers) ever thought would be studied? I didn’t want Andrew’s reply regarding my study of Combat to take over the other discussion Noah began about going beyond procedural literacy – this is a side comment based on a parenthetical question Noah asked about studying source code. But I did think it is worth a response…

I find it charming that Nick (and others?) are studying the assembly code of Combat and other early computer games. I think they’re worthy of study because of their place in history, they have some elegant features, their necessary use of abstraction (as opposed to the ever-increasing realism of today’s games), their extremely constrained operating systems (so little memory, CPU speed, squeezing in computation in between drawing of frames when the raster gun was travelling back to pixel 1, etc.). I find it amusing because I’d bet the mindset of the folks making those games at the time was simply to get a dumb little tank to move around and shoot the other tank.

Robin Allen’s Hapland arrived this month. Those who like adventures (and puzzles) in Flash should check it out – it can be a bit annoying, employing some puzzles that rely on timing or repeated clicking and allowing you plenty of ways to get into unwinnable states. It’s not too elaborate or difficult, though. The clicky interactivity works pretty well with the stick-figure gore. Since the manipulation of the world/machine takes place on one screen, this isn’t as adventuresome as Samorost, but its mechanical workings make it similar in some ways, also giving it some affinity with Grow. In terms of Grand Text Auto-like convergence and confluence, it’s interesting to see that this self-proclaimed game debuted on deviantART, “an online art community for artists and art lovers to interact in a variety of ways, ranging from the submission of art to conversations on a number of topics,” where much of the work isn’t even originally digital, much less interactive.