Grand Text Auto

As Jill pointed out not too long ago, Donna Leishman recently completed a practice-based PhD program, developing The Possession of Christian Shaw as part of that work. Her dissertation, “Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation,” is now online, too. Visually, interactively, and in terms of its relationship to a grim tale, her new artwork shares some some of the features of Donna’s earlier The Bloody Chamber and Red Riding Hood, building upon the idiom of those pieces in strange and elaborate ways. In a change from the previous peices, the grim tale of Possession is not from a fabular tradition, as will be explained at the end to the assiduous interactor.

In 1965, French artist Ben Vautier devised the provocative piece of mail art called “Postman’s Choice.” It was a postcard with lines on both sides, made to be addressed to two different destinations and then stamped on both sides. With no return address included, the letter carrier gets to choose who gets the postcard. While the postman may ring twice, he only gets to choose once, in this case. Of course, the postman might be clever enough, or the person sending the card might be such an obvious mail experimenter, that the postal system can take the third option.

Why hasn’t an email version of this project been devised? I have a few ideas about that…

For a limited time only (less than a month from now) you can download Lisbeth Klastrup‘s dissertation, Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds: Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story. The abstract explains that it “introduces and examines persistent online worlds (game worlds, social worlds, commercial chat worlds and educational worlds) as important cultural net-based phenomena” and “presents a number of concepts, definitions and analytic tools to be applied in the development of a poetics of virtual worlds, ‘poetics’ here understood as a systematic approach to examining the rules and aesthetic functions of virtual world systems.” It documents her lenghty quest for “EverQuestness,” the essence of the virtual world EverQuest. Also, there’s a section for “Worlds” on page 367 of the bibliography, which you don’t see every day.

Thanks to teh Dashslot Games, I learned that EA is looking into starting a Sims TV show.

One of the ideas is an interactive show that would “let viewers control the actions of the characters,” but of course, they have backup plans in case the interactive TV thing doesn’t work out. Here are a few of the concepts being thrown around…

I heard an interesting talk today by Penn film scholar Peter Decherney, author of the soon-to-be-released Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. He spoke about the topic of his next book, which he’s just stared on: Who Owns the Movies? A Cultural History of Film Copyright. Peter is also teaching a course on Copyright and Culture this semester, with lots of good Lessigian, Vaidhyanathanian, and Stallmanic stuff on the syllabus.

We knew that putting stickers on stuff could get you in trouble with the law, and that sticker literature is subversive and charged by the context it appears in, but those folks down in Cobb County went way beyond what we did with Implementation. They were so radical in their sticker writing – back in 2002, no less – that they’ve just managed to get a federal judge to write an analysis of their work. (On Slashdot, there was much rejoicing.) It’s bad enough that Georgia Tech is such an innovative place when it comes to digital media, but you’d think that those of us in other states might at least be able to develop the most controversial and groundbreaking sticker literature…

A Review of Narrative across Media
edited by Marie-Laure Ryan
University of Nebraska Press
2004
422 pp.
$35.00

This collection of essays, framed by Marie-Laure Ryan’s clear explanations of narratology and its application to different media, is an indispensable resource for those interested in how narrative and digital media interrelate. Without ever making the assertion that narratology will offer the dominant or controlling means of understanding video games or other computer works, the essays included explain how the approaches of narratology can work across different media to inform many different sorts of investigations. Ryan’s writing – the overall introduction, and introduction to each of the five sections, and an article on narrative in digital media – makes the volume particularly useful to the narratology newcomer and to those interested in digital media.

The Graduate Humanities Forum here at the University of Pennsylvania will be hosting an interdisciplinary conference on Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams on March 3-4, 2005. Princeton history professor Christine Stansell will keynote. This year, we invite applications from grad students at other universities: just supply a 200-word abstract by January 20. New media topics aren’t highlighted by the call for papers, it’s true, but takes on digital dreaming should be welcome at this gathering. The list of topics includes nightmares; nocturnes; dreams and the subversive discursive; dream poetics; prophecy, divination, or the oracular dream; and “brain in a vat”: from Descartes to The Matrix. For one thing, I bet there are some creative new media works about this sleep and dream stuff…

A post on ifMUD alerted me to the slim but intriguing public book selection that the California Digital Library has made freely available for online reading. Personally, my interest in this history-heavy, literature-heavy selection was piqued by The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley and by Christopher Beach’s book ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. I was about ready to start reading one of these, in fact…

I’ve been thinking a bit of the recent Macworld keynote and its slew of announcements, and of Apple’s lawsuit against Apple information site Think Secret, a lawsuit which lines the bad-boy corporation, “rip mix burn” Apple, up against the EFF.

After this latest salvo, will the sjuzet need a health pack?

Espen Aarseth declares on the first page of “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse,” his article in Narrative across Media: “The thought that these complex media [MMORPGs] can be understood by any existing media theory, such as narratology, which was developed for a totally different genre, grows more unlikely with every stage of the ongoing computer evolution.” I found this statement both potentially misleading and slightly amusing…

I finally finished reading Jesper Juul’s dissertation, “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.” It’s a great treatise on video games, devoting a lot of discussion to earlier forms of games, from sports to board and card games. While Jesper is a bit apologetic about this in his conclusion, I think it’s quite necessary to attend to the history of games and to games of other, non-computer forms. I’ve mentioned to Espen before that I find his strong focus on video games (to the exclusion of earlier games) a bit problematic, especially when you consider that there are computer chess games and computer simulations of sports games. I think Jesper’s work, along with Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, will begin to address the issue of how computer games fit into the millennia-long tradition of games. Of course, there is plenty more to say about the matter, but it’s good that several scholars have started to pick up on the relationship between computer games and “classical” games.

Looks like Natalie Bookchin’s speaking on January 25 at the next Global Interface UCR Mellon Workshop. Bookchin (creator of “The Intruder,” Metapet, and, with Jackie Stevens, agoraXchange) “will examine debates about the life and death of net art,” and she’ll apparently attempt to resurrect it, a surprise for the many of us who didn’t know it had died, and an even bigger surprise for the huge number of others who never knew net art was alive to begin with. I think the period in between “net” and “art” may have finally died, though, and it certainly deserves a eulogy.

A puzzling republication and tribute to literary semi-madman Harry Stephen Keeler can now be found at Spineless Books. Keeler, an arcane mystery writer, wrote a treatise describing how to construct the sort of elaborate plots that he used in his print novels. It was called ” The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction,” and William Gillespie has just published it in a new edition, online. Gillespie also presents a graphical bibliography of Keeler, an illustrated explication of Keeler’s theories and their applicability to hypertext writing, and a brief illustrated guide to writing like Keeler.

Looks like A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by game designer Raph Koster, is now out, as Andrew mentioned it soon would be. Perhaps that explains why Koster didn’t update his blog in 2004.

It was great getting to hang out with Christian Bök at MLA, even if his university wrote a horribly-headlined publicity article about him. His work in progress, The Cyborg Opera, attempts to take poetry straight from the influences of jazz into techno music. Parts of the poem, using ordinary English words, imitate the sound of the music from different segments of Super Mario Bros. You can get a sample of this work in these two bits of it, “Motorized Razor” and “Mushroom Clouds” [MP3]. Yes, Christian sounds pretty much like that in person, although he uses the word “cadenza” less often.

Tired: Not a new concept, but “The Year in Photos” from The New York Times offers some gripping images from Iraq, the campaign, and elsewhere in the world and nation. Wired: The year in search queries with Google’s “2004 Interactive Zeitgeist.” Expired: Wired News publishes “What Gamers Want: Year in Review.” Apparently the N-Gage was a flop. Wait, this article is from a year ago…

William Gillespie arrives, is interviewed, and learns how to mourn Derrida at the Slought Foundation, where we meet the unfractioned Christian Bök. Back at the Convention Center, in a panel on Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein describes Reading, PA as “a place aggressively without aesthetic decoration.” Poets manifest themselves: Joshua Corey, Jena Osman, and Bob Perelman among them. Author, artist, scholar, and publisher Johanna Drucker, who has the same effect on electronic literature scholar/authors as Indiana Jones did on his archeology class, describes an Ivanhoe game and then joins Christian Bök, Scott, and me back at Slought in a public discussion, opening the exhibit of Implementation there. Matt Kirschenbaum unfolds the NORA project’s plan for doing text mining on large corpora of literature. At the book exhibit, an intrepid loot collector scores a fountain pen as well as a shopping bag with an enlarged image of an Ayn Rand postage stamp. An editor who has flown The Chronicle of Higher Education for a new, web-based publication interviews a room full of so-called “bloggers.” Visiting humanists are lured to a German restaurant, an English pub, and a sushi bar. XML markup and a 1983 USENET posting appear on a screen thanks to transparencies and an overhead projector. The heavy security at the convention provides the only hint that the Culture War may still be going on.

Apple Computer got Graphing Calculator in its stocking at the end of 1993 (and early in 1994), thanks to Santas Ron Avitzur and Greg Robbins. After their contracts had ended, they covertly entered their old building and spent six months finishing the program, “sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work.” Read the story from Ron; there are comments on Slashdot about this tale, too. The article on design lessons from Graphing Calculator is a good one, too, with suggestions that may not be startling, but are still certainly valid.

Remember how the Fight Club game was in development and how all these, you know, gamers suggested that a Fight Club game should have a point to it, you know, like the book and the movie did, and how they bemoaned that the game concept was lame and missed out on the main thing the movie was about?

Well, the game’s out. I saw it proffered for sale in a store the other day. It seems that not only does it miss the point, it totally sucks in just about every other way. Fortunately, a Slaughterhouse Five game is in the works and will allow you to kick German ass escaping from a prisoner of war camp – in the end you’ll be rewarded by getting out only to be spectacularly killed in the bombing of Dresden.

“They Come in a Steady Stream Now” is a new electronic literature piece by Richard Powers, author of the novels Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, and Plowing the Dark, among others. It’s told (basically) in seven emails, which are delivered in a Flash faux-email-reader frame.

I learned about the piece from Jill, who learned about it from Eric, and, reading the comments that these two made about the story, I see that they didn’t like it very much. I liked it a lot, as it happens, and I’ll try to explain why.

Mark Marino (Barthes’ Bachelorettes, Grand Thieves Audio) has stopped fiddling with his radio dial long enough to blow the horn of summoning. There’s a graduate conference coming up at UCR, and he’s pointed out six special session CFPs – a full cylinder of ’em? – that will be of interest to Grand Text Auto-readin’ grad students:

(dis)junctions: theory reloaded (april 8-9, 2005)

The University of California Riverside’s 12th Annual Humanities Graduate Conference
CFP: (dis)junctions: Multiple-Media Panels (grad) (1/7/05; 4/8/05-4/9/05)

1. Media Crossings: Intersections of Film, Television, and Digital Culture
2. Online Gaming and Society
3. Original Hypermedia, Net.Art, Mods, Flash

We’re gutted, and we may never again check the price tag on a GameCube. Jeff Minter’s spectacular and innovative project Unity, which promised (some thought) to make Rez look like Qix, has been shelved. Check out the demo screens that Games Asylum has lined up, and share your sympathy and your support for Jeff (a.k.a. the Yak) on his warm and sometimes fuzzy blog, where the Yak posted the official announcement and commented on it. Thanks a lot to Intelligent Artifice, bearer of the bad news.

The calamities (and triumphs) that can be reached from the beginning of Edward Packard’s 1979 Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book The Third Planet from Altair are fully mapped by Greg Lord, as his justifiably proud professor Matt Kirschenbaum points out. Just as Andrew found four main paths in Night of a Thousand Boyfriends, Lord tracked down the four principal paths of Altair. He also provided a short essay relating his CYOA analysis to the theories of Espen Aarseth and Marie-Laure Ryan, and considering aspects of the material nature of the book (e.g., the effect of different “decisions” leadings to texts on facing pages, so that one can’t help but glimpse the other result). There’s a glossary explaining the terminology Lord developed and used, too.