Grand Text Auto

Millions of folded paper cranes fluttered down from warplanes in the skies over southern Thailand Sunday … Encouraged by the government, Thais across the country — Cabinet ministers, office workers, schoolchildren and even convicts — have been busily folding the Japanese-style origami birds for the past two weeks.

As the birds fell to their targets in the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, school children rushed out to collect them and seek the notes inside.

Did they get the idea from William Gillespie’s electronic writing?

I didn’t mention it in my review of the just-released Gamers, but the concluding piece in there, by Nic Kelman (a novelist and graduate of the Brown MFA program) contains a “Video Game Arts Manifesto.” The to-do list begins by declaring that video games must “become more than simply entertainment” and ends with a challenge to game developers: “Make someone cry.”

Funny thing is, squeezing out the tears has been an explicit goal for game designers for more than 20 years.

Mark Marino and his collaborators have rolled out Grand Thieves Audio, a set of MP3 “modologues” that are ready to be played within Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, as you play it. With these, you can supplant the uncannily accurate radio fare that is included in the game with the appeal of an army recruiter, the caring voice of Mama Vercetti, and helpful hints from a driving instructor who provides some history and tells of his past as a shop teacher. These first three monologues, written by Mark, are voiced by various talent. The speeches have their amusing period touches: The recruiter refers to recent victories in Granada rather than Iraq, and he and mom make mention of then-current video games rather than more recent developments, such as America’s Army. The fourth recording offers a (slightly anachronistic) reading and commentary from now-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Mark Unpingco). This “book on 8-track” is excused by the fact that time travel does, after all occur, in Terminator. I’m not sure if these pieces will become a habit and replace my usual soundtrack for GTA: Vice City, but they are worth listening to in-game, and provide an interesting twist – one that is a bit more subtle and nuanced than converting the Barons of Hell into Barney.

A Review of Gamers: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
Edited by Shanna Compton
Soft Skull Press
2004
260 pp.
$14.95

Like a piece of summarization software run with extreme parameters, I have located the single sentence that I believe best characterizes Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. It is found in Aaron McCollough’s essay, about two-thirds of the way through the book:

“When I attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, playing Madden was one of the few things that helped me briefly forget about being a fraud.”

According to the Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data, which is often indispensable when attempting to understand unusual volumes such as this one, this is a book about Video Games – Social aspects and Video games – Psychological aspects. According to the press release, it’s “The first book to ever seriously explore the culture of video and online games.” Actually, Gamers is probably best characterized as collection of personal essays, with a handful of rather impersonal ones thrown in to keep them company. The personal essay genre is not my favorite, and a video gaming theme doesn’t necessarily make the genre more palatable. I approached Gamers with some of the trepidation I might have felt starting in on Drivers: Writers and Visual Artists Discuss Their Fond Memories of Cars. Still, when I received Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (the bibliophilic, single-author equivalent of such a volume) as a gift not long ago I did go ahead and read it, and I even found things to like. Never one to be a snob for books about books, I was willing to read the confessions of common gamers, too.

Today in the department here at Penn, I heard David S. H. Rosenthal, of Stanford and Sun, speak on “Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe: Peer-to-Peer Digital Preservation” – the Stanford-based LOCKSS program for providing academic journals in a distributed, reliable way, through libraries.

The last votes from Iowa have been counted, and the 2004 IF Comp results have been released. Paul O’Brien’s Luminous Horizon, part of his Earth and Sky series, is the big winner. In second is Blue Chairs by Chris Klimas; third place goes to All Things Devours by half sick of shadows. 174 judges rated the games in this year’s competition. The whole slew of games is still available as a single download from the IF Comp site, and the traditional comp reviews are now being disgorged upon the traditional USENET newsgroup. (Update: zarf’s reviews and Dan Shiovitz’s reviews were posted early on and have been placed on the Web, too, so I’m adding links to them. Do check out the newsgroup if you’re interested in reading more.)

Just what I needed after hearing that my PowerBook hasn’t even been sent to Apple yet (after a week) and that it will take up to 10 business days to be repaired and returned.

My friend Swarat came to the IF Walkthroughs reading and must have liked it, since he wrote a column about interactive fiction in The Statesman for a few 100,000 of his readers in Calcutta.

On another obliquely self-promotional note, if you’re still puzzled about how Scott and I claim to have written a novel on stickers, I really encourage you to watch the video of Scott reading from Implementation in Bergen. Scott mentioned it already, but it’s worth repeating that there is video there from the rest of the Digital Og Sosial conference there, too. Such documentation is a real boon to us landlubbers here in the states.

Those crazy kids at UC Riverside are already hosting a talk about GTA: San Andreas, having made the game available last week for students to play.

Hello, world. Check out this map of presidential votes cast by county before you imagine that America is mostly Jesusland. (Red is all Bush, Blue is all Kerry, and purple is in between.) And if someone, such as Dick Cheney, tells you that George W. Bush got the largest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history – which is true – you can tell them that John Kerry got the second largest number of votes in history, and that more people voted against an incumbent president than ever before in our country’s history. Yes, Bush was finally elected – but not by much.

All eight installments of Implementation are now available to the world. But access to Implementation within the United States is restricted. If you are eligible to vote in the US today, you may download the final installment only after you vote. Enforcement is done using the honor system, although we aren’t kidding about the restriction.

Scott and I have been working on sticker lit for a year and a half. We’ve been disseminating the installments of Implementation since January. We are very glad to have completed the last installment of the first serialized sticker novel. Thanks to the Kelly Writers House for hosting the first reading of our sticker novel. Thanks to Rob Wittig for contributing some texts. And, thanks to everyone who participated by reading, putting up stickers, and sending us photographs, particularly Hanna and Jill.

I guess it shouldn’t amaze me, but it does. The Bush campaign’s use of digital media and the “Internets” seems to have so far involved digitally cloning supporters, sending emails to coordinate the suppression of the minority vote, and of course blocking the world from reading its website. They also have a new game, as I’ve mentioned on here already, which is accessible globally thanks to Water Cooler Games.

I recently blogged about a presidential campaign site located in Uruguay, encouraging people, such as my fellow US citizens, to check out the political expression going on there, and to learn some about another country’s politics by doing this. Unfortunately, people in Uruguay and other countries are now not allowed to view the campaign Web site of the president of the United States. Netcraft offers some charts and additional details. (If you live in the US you can reach Bush’s site, or you can check to see that you can’t if you live elsewhere.) Of course, US citizens who live overseas and are voting by mail, and those who are currently overseas and will be returning to vote in person in the November 2 election, use the same networks and are also being denied access to this president’s site. John Kerry’s site is still accessible overseas.

Jean-Michel Espitallier, poet and editor of Java, read at the Kelly Writers House yesterday, offering some poems that join mathematical principles with language and its sounds in ways that aren’t exactly Oulipian, but are certainly reminiscent of the algorithmic approaches of that group. And Espitallier’s work has something else in common with that of the Oulipo: it was playful and fun, even if it takes on rather serious topics. Espitallier and his translator, Sherry Brennan, read from the new chapbook Fantasy bouchère (Butcher Fantasy) and read several other pieces, showing a video work in progress that is based on his “De la guerre civile” (“On Civil War”). The Writers House has three of his poems (with translations) online. Of these, “De la guerre civile” (“On Civil War”), from Le Theorem d’Espitallier, is certainly the most principled in its construction.

Jill got the scoop already: At the second event in the Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series, on Friday, Noah and I gave readings and talked about new media history.

From the gaming house of Gonzalo Frasca comes the first political videogame for a non-U.S. presidential election, the election in Uruguay: “Cambiemos” (Let’s Change.)

“Cambiemos” is a short, positive game that is both fun and seems to be good at expressing political principles: rebuilding is important, rebuilding takes work and cooperation, you have to be perceptive as you work, … even “you can fix your mistakes if you have time,” I think. It’s not a Boalian system for working out people’s political approaches through play – and unless Boal runs for office again, I don’t think any political campaign would pay for Gonzalo to whip up one of those – but it is something else that’s pretty interesting. I have to admit that like it better than the Dean game, which was more of a campaign volunteer’s manual than an interestingly-presented political statement. “Cambiemos” is easy to play, not being fast-paced at all. It also has good gameplay, and is aesthetically pleasing, making good use of black-and-white and color images.

A new piece, [ FALLUJAH . IRAQ . 31/03/2004 ] is up at Turbulunce. It’s one of seven there by Michael Takeo Magruder. Some of his other pieces there are more intricate and offer interactvie options; this one is simpler in its form, meditative, and worth a look, even if your time is short. It has sound, so unmute as you visit the piece.

What exactly happened to the link-and-node hypertext novel? We don’t have to carry out that much of an investigation to see what’s going on with Flash poetry, or the network novel, or interactive fiction. But what’s up with the venerable form used by the soi-disant wunderkinder authors of The Unknown, the one in which Victory Garden took root, in which Shelley Jackson stitched together her Patchwork Girl?

Well, I’ll keep you in suspense no longer: Folks are still writing these sorts of things. Below, I’ll mention a few nice aspects of two recent, lengthy works of hypertext fiction I’ve managed to dip into. I’ll be reading more, when I can afford to, of both Praying to Frank, the first hypertext novel by Damon M. Smith, and a new work by veteran hypertext writer Edward Falco, Circa 1967-1968.

A Review of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm
Loss Pequeño Glazier
Salt Press
2003
112 pp.
$14.99

Loss Pequeño Glazier may have just experienced his geek apotheosis on Slashdot last December, but he’s a poet whose digitally engaged work, both creative and critical, has been progressing since before the time of Mosaic. His book of poems Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm is an engaging investigation of how the projects of poetry and computer technology can jostle our cultures and our imaginations. It’s “The Comedian as the Language C,” a voyage to the south, powered by Unix.

London’s Dali Museum has put on a show of the art of Myst, focused on the new Myst IV Revelation (185 MB demo available at that site). When even the Just Adventure review of the show refers to it as “a reasonably enlightening, if more than slightly blatant, piece of marketing fun,” it doesn’t cause me to wax too enthusiasic. The marketing (and perhaps art) must have been effective, though, since the reviewer also noted that the fourth Myst “goes way beyond Exile in terms of presenting a living, atmospheric world.” The new installment should have just been released, but I haven’t found a review yet. Thanks to Martin Hadis of Internetaleph for the news.

News Reader, by Noah, David Durand, Brian Moss, and Elaine Froehlich, is now available for download from the Turbulence site. This is the second of two news-eating textual instruments (Regime Change, discussed earlier, being the other) for Mac OS X and Windows, and this one plays on (initially) mainstream stories loaded live from Yahoo! News. “Playing these stories brings forth texts generated from alternative press stories,” the artists explain, “portions of which are introduced (through interaction) into the starting texts.”

The games begin: you can now download entries in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition. Thanks to Stephen Granade for organizing the Comp yet again this year. There are 38 entries: 9 TADS 2, 20 Inform/Z-code, 1 Hugo, 2 TADS 3, 1 Hugo, 1 Inform/Glulx, 1 Adrift, 1 Alan, and 2 Windows games. The rules specify that over the next six weeks, the judges (that’s you, unless you’re an author of a game or not interested) can play each for at most two hours before voting. Anyone who has played five or more can vote, although judges are ask to play as many as they can. More about how to judge is online, as are the rules the authors have to abide by and information on the history of The Comp. There are prizes, including US $500.

Mark Marino (of the Barthian and bachelor bots) sends word of Global Interface, a yearlong, interdisciplinary workshop on cyberculture that is just starting up with a talk from Kate Hayles on Monday, Oct 4. Meatspace meetings will happen monthly at UC Riverside. as is explained in the proposal. The diverse set of participants includes faculty from music, dance, and computer science. “The interface serves as the nexus between artist, viewer, programmer, technology, and industry,” the blog for the workshop declares. Mark and the other organizers hope that this blog will foster intersections and conversation online, too, and there’s a plan to post extensive notes on all the talks.

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Commodore International is about ready to roll out the new C32 (to be marketed as the VIC 40 in Europe), the world’s first hardware implementation of Infocom’s Z-Machine. There’s only one piece missing: Dave Bernazzani needs you to write interactive fiction for its 32kb Z-Carts.

of him who knew the most of all men know
who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;
….
open the copper chest with the iron locks;
the tablet of lapis lazuli tells the story.
(tr. David Ferry)

Apropos of only a few things digital, today I held and examined, illiterately, several 4,000-year-old Sumerian texts and one that was slightly more recent: one of the surviving tablets of clay upon which is written, in cuneiform Akkadian, part of the first known epic, Gilgamesh.