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I found news of this March 3 London event posted on rec.games.int-fiction:
In honour of the BAFTA award nomination for the BBC’s new Internet edition of the classic Infocom computer game, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”, we present two titans of the text adventure: STEVE MERETZKY AND MICHAEL BYWATER, IN CONVERSATION (on interactive fiction, Douglas Adams and other lost worlds)
Colin Camerer of Caltech gave the 7th Annual Pinkel Endowed Lecture on Mind/Brain Paradigms at Penn today, describing his work in behavioral game theory and neuroeconomics.
says Lyn Hejinian. At the Kelly Writers House today, she described this blog, where someone else is posting a sentence of her well-known book-length poem My Life each day, as the closest she’s come to being stalked. She doesn’t intend to sue anyone over it, though. Although alleging to be technophobic and saying that this was the first webcast event she’s been part of, Hejinian is actually quite astute when it comes to computer technologies and language. She described how she wrote The Fatalist by taking a year’s worth of saved communication on her computer and carving away at it, finding poetry within it as a sculptor finds a figure in a stone block. A record of her reading yesterday and discussion today are available form the Writers House in Real Media format; you can read more of her thought about poetry in The Language of Inquiry, the introduction to which is online.
Everyone’s talking about The Gates, and the first thing they say is that everyone’s talking about The Gates. Tonight at my neighborhood coffeehouse/bar, a loud man behind me discusses the project and the use of the word “saffron.” At a party in Philadelphia last night, a Bulgarian woman, claiming Christo for Bulgaria, says that she’s seen the piece. On the train back from New York before that, a women in line in the café car explains that although she was skeptical at first, she found a metaphor for the decisions we make life, the way that we must make decisive choices that put us on one path or another. She says it made her cry.
Grafik Dynamo by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett feeds images from LiveJournal into a comic strip generator, juxtaposing them with curious captions, speech, and thought bubbles. (Quite apropos of the discussion about computer-generated comics that we had on here…) Although the resulting comics aren’t exactly Love and Rockets, the system is interesting. Framing disparate images from LiveJournal as art and as part of a narrative is effective and amusing. Crawling for images, rather than texts, makes for an interesting twist on projects such as Microsoft Comic Chat – not to mention another Turbulence commission, News Reader, by Noah et al. I do think that there’s still interesting work to be done that engages the meanings of images and texts. The non-automated site Exploding Dog provides proof of how effective such interplay can be in a project on the net.
The 6th Digital Arts and Culture Conference will take place at the IT University in Copenhagen on December 1-3, 2005. “Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice” is the tag line for this conference. Deadline: August 8. You can read about the history of DAC and the organization of the current conference; also, see the CFP.
William Gillespie (co-author with me of 2002: A Palindrome Story) and Mike Maguire (Drawn Inward) were in town yesterday to lead the “2/12” Palindrome Workshop at the Kelly Writers House – two workshops and a reading, actually. One group of 8th-grade students and another group from the Writers House community wrote reversible language, discovering some interesting things about literary composition. While people have written palindromes in classes before, this was the first stand-alone event we know of that was dedicated to palindrome writing. Scott made it into town for the writing games, too. Some of the word- and line-palindromes we drafted are online.
What really rounded off the day was the palindromic feast prepared by Adrienne Mishkin and volunteers from the Kelly Writers House’s Exquisite Corps. There was “go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog” and Doc Evil’s live cod. I should emphasize the desserts – yes, stressed desserts: Emily Ek key lime and a fruit salad with no lemon, no melon. Red ice cider and face decaf were provided, too. I might be able to coax Scott into providing a photo or two here at some point…
Update, Feb 17: See below the fold for two details from the feast.
The University of Iowa just announced its partnership with the ELO. (That’s the Electronic Literature Organization, an organization from the 1990s to facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media – not to be confused with any light or heavy electric orchestras from the 1970s and 1980s.) The partnership is thanks to Thom Swiss, a professor of English and the Rhetoric of Inquiry at Iowa who is the new president of the organization. The ELO is based at UCLA; this partnership initiates a new form of the organization, where different campuses will be able to participate as “nodes,” helping the ELO reach its goals in different ways.
No, I don’t mean that earth – there’s a new issue of Terra d’IF, Robert Grassi’s Italian interactive fiction zine. I can discern that issue 5 holds reviews of the recent Flamel by Francesco Cordella and the older L’anello di Lucrezia Borgia. For those who, like me, have no Italian, Grassi’s interview with Paul O’Brian is available in English. Two of Grassi’s reviews from earlier issues have been translated into English by Emily Short, too.
Jason Dyer, an IF author who has the distinction of having placed well in the first IF Comp in 1995, has started a new blog about IF, Renga in Blue. He’s got three posts up already – pretty good for the first day’s work. We’ll look forward to more. You can find the link on here under “Related Blogs,” too.
It’s 2014. Do you know where your New York Times is?
If Suck.com were reanimated, had its sense of humor removed, and made a PBS-history-documentary style Flash animation about Googlezon taking on the New York Times in an ecstasy of customized, micropayment-based, indie-news-making frenzy, it would be this one.
Doritos has some new ad campaign with some sort of AIM tie-in (I couldn’t stand to spend more than five seconds on their adversite, so I couldn’t exactly tell) and with posters that are written in some dialect of leetspeak or hax0r (one of which I noticed this morning). Or maybe they’re just encoded using some variant of the Prince compression algorithm.
Promoting unhealthy snack foods to the downtrodden, computer-bound population does rather smack of intensively marketing malt liquor in the hood. But, on the other hand, maybe that is a sign that one day, someone will be trying to communicate with a pasty, bespectacled passenger in seat 13C, and I’ll be able to say “oh, stewardess – I speak leet!”
Just a quick note to try to convince you: please please please stop using those “under construction” icons on your home pages! They are stupid, pointless, take up unnecessary bandwidth, and can sometimes be silly. They belong in a museum. At the very least, use an alternative icon that won’t make people bust out with some Village People song. I mean, really – get with the program. And whatever you do, please don’t use an animated GIF.
Jeremy Norman’s library of early computer books, including 1411 items, will be auctioned in 250 lots at Christie’s on February 23. The collection includes the typescript of the 1946 business plan for Univac by Eniac creators J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, valued at more than $50,000. I won’t be putting in any bids, but there is a lot of interesting bibliography about this collection available at Norman’s site. Thanks to Stephanie Strickland for the tip about this.
Peter Nepstad’s 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, a historically-grounded interactive fiction mystery written in TADS, may not have very impressive sales when compared to Halo 2. But it did rate an article in today’s New York Times. Here’s the info on 1983 from Baf’s Guide, including a link to free demo of the game.
On Armchair Arcade, Bill Loguidice provides detailed reviews of the Atari Flashback and the Commodore 64 30-in-1, comparing these two recent official entries in the “TV games” category. He finds the controllers on the Flashback (mentioned earlier on here) to work very well, although they aren’t compatible with the original 2600/7800 controllers. He writes that “where the Flashback fails is also where other TV games have failed—the quality of the emulation of the original system’s abilities. … these games are markedly different than their original 7800 and 2600 counterparts.” He notes that the C64-in-a-joystick only contains 30 games if you count fairly creatively. On the other hand, “everything looks and sounds almost exactly like the original, certainly better than any other TV game to date.” Unfortunately, to make up for excelling where the Flashback let us down, where Atari’s system worked well, the C64 30-in-1 has problems: the joystick has too much play in it and “does not accurately register directions.”
If so, turn to page (Clive Thompson), just published in Slate.
If not, turn to page (Rune Klevjer), older, but quite good.
(Unless you just like validating your existing opinions…)
Eyes on the Screen is a project encouraging you to download and watch Eyes on the Prize, “the most important documentary ever made about the Civil Rights Movement.” As The Globe and Mail explains, the video didn’t air on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and has been unavailable on TV or VHS, and was never released on DVD, because the makers of the documentary could only afford a time-limited license to use the archival footage that appears. So, the group Downhill Battle, working with Common Sense Culture, digitized the 10-part series and has made torrents available so that anyone can download it. (BitTorrent is required, but links and setup instructions are provided; At the moment, parts 1-3 are up.) Wired News calls this an act of civil disobedience – you gotta put something catchy in the lede – but Downhill Battle is more modest, taking the position that informing yourself about United States history by watching footage of historical events is “fair use” of copyrighted material, even if people happen to be singing “Happy Birthday” to Martin Luther King in some of that footage. They call, nevertheless, for a move back to the original purpose of copyright, so that other documentary filmmakers won’t be stifled in the future – and for widespread screenings of Part 1 of Eyes on the Prize on February 8, as part of Black History Month.
One of the PSP games that is positively surprising reviewers is Lumines, a fairly low-budget puzzle/music game by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the creator of Rez and Space Channel 5. Although it isn’t an abstract shooter, this somehwat Tetris-like music machine, with a constantly shifting background image, sounds like it may offer a bit succor those who mourn for Unity – maybe enough to last until the Yak is back on track with his next game. I don’t own a PSP or this game (needless to say), but take a look at the review of the Japanese release of Lumines on GamerFeed and the preview on Gamespot to learn more about it. Also, check out the recent interview with Mizuguchi on Tokyopia. (Cortesia de Elastico.)
A Review of A Theory of Fun for Game Design
written and illustrated by Raph Koster
Paraglyph Press
2004
244 pp.
$22.99
In an illustrated essay that is somewhere between a meditation and a manifesto, Raph Koster works to justify games to a general audience by characterizing them as learning experiences that can be tuned to challenge us in new ways. The book, based on a 2003 talk at the Austin Game Conference, is, unfortunately, short on real argument; Koster has thought out his positions in the book, but he usually neither backs up the claims he makes with much discussion nor follows through to investigate their implications. It’s interesting, though, that Koster has tried to make A Theory of Fun for Game Design itself a playful learning system, by juxtaposing text with diagrammatic or cartoon sorts of discussion, for example, and by providing copious endnotes with digressive comments and references. On the recto there are some gems: a nice chart showing the evolution of the 2-D shooter, drawings of game patterns for some of those shooters, and amusing cartoons in which teens brag about, among other things, beating the last level of Ulysses.
My recent attempts to get some work done have been accompanied by music from the The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC), a huge supply of files for the Commodore 64’s Sound Interface Device (SID) and apparently the largest archive of chiptunes. The SID, designed by Bob Yannes in 1981, “redefined the concept of sound in personal computers,” or so Byte Magazine claimed in 1995, naming it one of the 20 most important chips in history. The archive offers music from games and from the scene. Read on for how you can listen (on a non-C-64 computer) and for a few suggested tunes…
Last year the SLS (Society for Literature and Science) changed its name to acknowledge the longstanding involvement of the arts. The organization has hosted many presentations related to digital media at its past conferences, as you can see from the program of their 2003 conference and their 2004 conference. Now, the SLSA invites paper abstracts (150 words) and panel proposals, due May 1, for…
(Read on for the CFP)
In the latest IGDA Ivory Tower column, two University of Florida doctoral students call for an interdisciplinary approach to game studies – specifically, connecting children’s literature studies and video game studies. The authors are prolific digital media scholar Laurie Taylor and Cathlena Martin, who works with children’s literature and digital media.
I think they should go for it. A strong research result that comes from children’s lit + video game studies is exactly what would persuade me of the value of this combination.
Their proposal doesn’t seem to offer the clearest scenario showing the value of interdisciplinarity, though…
There’s a new Interactive Fiction FAQ for those new the puzzly pleasures of these programs that are games, potential narratives, and worlds. Some of us put it together recently on ifwiki, which Dave Cornelson has installed as a resource (and collaborative writing space) for the IF community. The IF FAQ is similar in purpose to Roger Firth’s Ifaq, but it’s meant to immediately offer a few more practical answers than that document or the welcome page for those new to the IF community, which is useful, but more focused on how to be a member of the IF community. Hopefully, it will complement Roger’s nicely designed FAQ, which answers questions with helpful links, by being a bit less superbrief but not too verbose. The IF FAQ’s “How can I download and play IF?” section is probably my favorite, as it includes a table of interpreters to help people quickly find an appropraite IF interpreter for their platform. (This task always seemed to me like it must be particularly daunting for those unfamiliar with the maze of interpreters available, even though lots of interpreters are centrally available at the IF Archive.) The “live” (and editable) version of the IF FAQ is available at ifwiki; the version 1.0 snapshot (which is available to everyone under a Creative Commons license) is what I’ve posted at nickm.com.
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