Grand Text Auto

I went out toward Atlantic City this weekend to hear William Gillespie and Talan Memmott read. On Friday, they kicked off Scott’s Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series this semester at Stockton, as promised. It was great to hang out and talk shop with those three throughout the weekend; I also enjoyed getting to talk to Stockton and community attendees at the reading who were interested in e-lit. The longer format allowed Talan to take us through some of several pieces, including a good bit of his in-progress piece dealing with René Margritte, one that joins visual transformations and 3D-like spaces (somewhat like those seen in Lolli’s Apartment) with the art-critical vein of his writing (seen also in The Berth of V.ness and Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]). William read from and discussed Table of Forms, The Unknown, 2002, and Trade Names, also talking about the form of 20 consonant poetry that he invented. I’ve heard Talan and William read many times before, sometimes in blitzkrieg readings (which I’ve been guilty of organizing). The short showcases have their uses, but it was good to hear these two go through some of their work in more depth out at Stockton, where I got a better sense of the overall questions, structures, and themes that their work engages.

Scott is quoted in Sunday’s New York Times in a story by Samantha Storey on sticker art:

Scott Rettberg, a scholar in new media, attributes the resurgence of stickers to low-cost inkjet printers and “the ubiquity of the global network.” “Cheap printers give artists the ability to mass-produce work intended for public consumption,” he said, “and stickers are easier to place than traditional graffiti.”

I’m mighty proud for my Implementation coauthor. More details are on the Implementation site. The nice links to sticker art sites from the story will remain available there after the Times pulls the story from the Web and Lexis-Nexizes it even deeper into inaccessibility.

Recommended reading: “Descriptions Constructed” by Stephen Granade, a just-posted close-up look at IF output text, and “Crimes Against Mimesis” by Roger Giner-Sorolla, a broader essay from 1996 on what can go right or wrong in IF, still worth a read today. More on these two below…

The exhibit Michael Winkler: Word Images 1982-2004: A New Visual Orthography opened today in the Rosenwald Gallery on the 6th Floor of the Van Pelt Library Center here at Penn. Winkler has based his work on an alternate way of representing words made up of letters in the Roman alphabet; he connects lines within a circle of 26 points, the vowels spaced evenly; “IS,” for example, is a single line between the spot corresponding to “I” and the spot corresponding to “S.” (The image here is worth a thousand words of description.) This new orthography doesn’t correspond one-to-one with existing spellings; reversible pairs words, like “mood” and “doom,” have the same representation, as do “ban” and “banana.” The exhibit includes stone tablets, installation materials bound in a large book, paintings, and a large set of cards with each words a long passage in “normal” and new renderings. Winkler told me at the opening that he was contemplating a computer piece that would go through all the words in a large dictionary (and that he manually did all of the “A” words) but, in the end, he wanted people in this exhibit to be able to look more deeply at the figures of single words. These works reminded me of the different, but related, takes on language and letter in John Maeda’s Tap, Type, Write and in Diana Slattery’s Glide. Of course, Winkler’s procedure for generating his main figures from words is purely algorithmic, even though he doesn’t use an electronic computer to do it. The exhibit is up through December 10.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the interactive fiction, by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky), as promised, has been re-implemented and (partially) illustrated and is now available online. It’s quite fascinating to see the first release of the new edition, not only because it demonstrates the continued vitality of 20-year-old IF, but also because I’m in the middle of a similar project. Here’s information on playing the new HHGTTG, on the making of the new edition, on how to submit illustrations that they may use to expand the edition, and on the making of the original 1984 Infocom interactive fiction. The last page links to a video clip of Adams discussing the game. As Richard Harris writes there, “There was a time when computer games didn’t have graphics. … Then graphics games came along and the computer using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together – the point’n’click game.”

I remember there was a cave, or some sort of underground area, and you could move around in it and do things by typing compass directions and stuff.

Perfectly apropos of Andrew’s recent post about, and the ensuing discussion of, interactivity and comics, is the release of a demo of Future Boy!, [36.3MB].

A special panel discussion, “Interdisciplinarity and the Humanities,” kicked off this year’s Graduate Humanities Forum meetings at Penn. Sheldon Hackney — history professor, former president of Penn, former chair of the NEH, and hero of the culture wars — described how, early in his academic career, he programmed a mainframe computer to manipulate data about votes in the Alabama legislature, only to find that political scientists had been done similar work, and discovered similar formulas, already. (A danger of interdisciplinary work, indeed.) Liliane Weissberg, professor of German and comparative literature, discussed how institutions related to fields of inquiry, describing how many current academic departmental boundaries arose in a 19th-century European political context. Gary Tomlinson, professor of music, talked about how ethnomusicology and the study of popular music arose to challenge traditional European musicology. He also talked about how his own work, which he was free to do as a tenured professor, might not be a good model for students who needed to seek entry-level academic jobs. Moderator Wendy Steiner, professor of English, discussed her work and its relation to visual art studies and English, mentioning several methodologies or approaches that enabled interdisciplinary practice: semiotics and narratology, for instance. (Ethnography, mentioned in Tomlinson’s discussion of ethnomusicology, seems to also be in this category.) Further comments from panelists were also insightful — I enjoyed hearing from Prof. Hackney about what might seem like a tedious administrative topic, for instance: how Penn’s institutional structure, with graduate groups separate from departments and the possibility of instituting programs and seminars, allowed for more flexible, if less well-funded, interdisciplinary discussion and inquiry. The discussion in Q&A was lively and interesting, too.

The first meeting this year of the History of Material Texts Workshop at Penn featured the presentation “The Materiality of the Digital Text” by Rebecca Bushnell, English professor and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. (The textual status of digital documents is one of three themes for the workshop this year.) Bushnell quoted Alberto Manguel, Roger Chartier, Robert Coover, and Sven Birkerts in investigating how to approach the material nature of digital facsimiles, and showed the on-line Furness Shakespeare Library from Penn’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. The digital text is clearly different than an original edition or printed facsimile, but neither Bushnell nor others in the seminar were stuck on thinking of it as immaterial, or as some simple confounding of the order of the codex. We even discussed a bit how the nature “born-digital” works differs from that of digital facsimiles of print texts. Classicist Shane Butler made clear how the methods of the seminar could be brought to bear on digital or other sorts of non-printed texts, stating that “the material text” can be thought of as any practice — oral, written, printed, or digital — that separates the author from expression of an idea and allows that expression to exist independently.

Ecotonoa, a NEC project, allows Web visitors to build onto a virtual tree by adding their own short messages, the most popular of which seems to be “smoke bowls.” Thanks to Ryan on ifMUD for the tip.

Sure, we don’t have a fancy logo, but the nickm.com Video Game Research Facility does its part to advance the field of game studies. Thanks to the Dreamcast, there’s access to the original versions of Jet Grind Radio, Rez, Shenmue, and other fine blockbuster commercial games, not to mention the latest and most advanced wave of homebrew console games. The Atari Jaguar (upper right) turns out to not be good for much except Tempest 2000, although there are several other cartridges available, should any scholars at nickm.com want to investigate how console game development can go horribly awry. The VGRF also features a Sony Playstation (bottom middle) for some 32-bit tomb raiding and for light-gun-enabled alien-killing. The Apple //c, seen directly beneath the authentic mid-1980s video output device, offers access to some 1980s home computer video gaming. Finally, the Atari 2600 Jr. (bottom left, atop the most frequently-accessed cartridges) provides a essential platform for historical research, particularly given the ready supply of controllers (trackball for Centipede and Missile Command, two pairs of paddles for four-player Warlords) and the library of more than 100 carts. It also offers a good way to negotiate power relationships with visiting scholars.

The Atari Flashback is slated to be released in November for $45, IGN reports. The story, and discussion, is on Slashdot, too. The Flashback seems hardware-compatible with the Atari 7800, a system that ran most Atari 2600/VCS cartridges, too. I’m excited because it’s a low-cost, plug-into-the-TV system that allows two people to play at once. (This experience was precluded by the all-in-a-joystick Atari VCS systems that have been released so far.) The 20 games for 2600 and 7800 that are installed in the Flashback include many standouts, and one game that was never released, Saboteur. However, it doesn’t look like it will accept cartridges, a disappointment for those who have cartridges sitting around or are planning to acquire them. And of course that would dash the hopes of those of us who want new cartridges to be made — but it turns out, those new Atari VCS games are in development, and don’t depend on the launch of the Flashback.

Andrew pointed to a followup conversation about academia vs. industry on GameGirlAdvance, following up on the GameSpot article on the topic. In GGA comments, gman wrote: “I don’t agree that academics can teach us ‘how we can make them [games] better’. I don’t think they’ve done it in any other entertainment.” Mark replied, “Without being too agressive, I’d say that your opinion IS uninformed.”

I have to side with Mark on this one. Looking at interactive fiction and the novel particularly, I’ve tried to explore the relationship of academia to “industry” (or, “the creative process”) below…

Robert Pinsky’s recent poem “Pixel,” celebrating the 50th anniversary of the picture element, is really worth a read, despite the inability of Wired to properly typeset poems online. (You can read this edition decently if your monitor has about 1600 pixels of horizontal resolution; otherwise, the “printer-friendly” page — you need to scroll down 1/3 of the way — is better.) After you get past the initial shock of the beginning of the poem (“Porn on the web: …”) you may be able to appreciate the project of it: to set up the digital arts as an inevitable extension of the past, to explain the different, complementary drives of artist and engineer to allow new and powerful sorts of expression; to connect even pornography with classical, traditional art.

New mainframe Zork for Z-machine. And the IF Hitchhiker’s Guide returning with illustrations. And IF in seemingly unlikely languages, see below…

I’ve been fascinated by the 18th-century French Enlightenment project, teleported into contemporary times and grafted onto the Web, that is Wikipedia. Although my contributions have been limited to a few minor and pedantic edits, I’ve not only looked up entries, but have also read some of the very involved discussions behind the articles. They can be quite interesting. What a crazy and fascinating plan: sum up the world’s knowledge by having anyone who wants edit or add anything at any point in time; keep the revision histories public; let controversy resolve itself through public discussion; keep a neutral point of view. And require that contributions be unencumbered by traditional intellectual property claims, available to all under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has issued a threatening legal notice to a person who mirrors the Interactive Fiction Archive because a person at this organization is painfully and pitifully laboring under the mistaken belief that a file named “Doom3.zip” (a 114KB file, uploaded almost 5 years ago) is an unauthorized copy of a game created by some company they represent. May these and similar bounty hunters all go the way of Boba Fett.

Michael is interviewed pretty extensively in a long Gamespot article on academics and computer games. The illustrated piece, unfortunately broken up into 18 ad-revenue-generating pages, is built around discussions with Michael as well as Janet Murray, Gonzalo Frasca, Christopher Lowood, and Paul D. Miller. Andrew’s mentioned in discussion of Façade; Grand Text Auto gets a special plug. Plenty of topics are taken on in the piece, from newsgaming to Army gaming to machinima to Janey Murray’s fated and fateful encounter with Mad Dog McCree.

Thanks to Ian for pointing the way to this bonanza.

Thanks to one of the Implementation authors who is an intrepid and prolific digital photographer (not me), I’ve just loaded up a new Baltic update to the Implementation site. The more than 100 new photos occupy huge tracts of disk (15MB) and picture bits of Implementation on the Baltic Sea and in Helsinki (where sticker art seems not too uncommon), Stockholm, and Tallinn. There’s even one site from Amsterdam that is pictured. This update follows fast upon the sizable and diverse “Pour la France” update supplied by yet another anonymous photographer and project participant. And we have some more photos waiting to be processed, too…

Looks like The Handbook of Computer Game Studies, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, is due out from MIT Press in January 2005. Both of the editors are from the University of Utrecht; The broad and nearly 500-page collection includes articles on video game prehistory, psychological research, video games vs. film and literature, and cultural connections. The contributor list includes several usual suspects (Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Katie Salen, Sherry Turkle, Mark J. P. Wolf, Eric Zimmerman), a few less usual but well-known suspects (e.g., Justin Hall), and numerous other names I’m not familiar with — presumably some of those are coming from the psychological, film, or “prehistorical” angles.

Bash.org is a fascinating record of IRC, occasionally containing amusing real quotes from conversations that aren’t staged especially for the sake of Bash.org.

For extra credit, develop a computational literary project that takes as input the URL of a specific Bash.org conversation, such as this one, and produces as output a 20th-century-style newspaper item relating the conversation, using some random journalistic variations, such as this one:

In a development that has disturbed many in the community, online communication occurred late yesterday. Using the IRC channel #leetchat, a user identified only as Zybl0re said “get up.” “get on up,” he continued, adding, “get up,” and then “get on up.” “and DANCE,” said an individual using the name phxl|paper.

For the next few days, you’re invited to submit information about your favorite video game to the beta site of The Museum of Video Game Ontology (moVGO), which Kim Marie will launch at movgo.org in September. Or you can at least go admire the submission form.

Scott will be hosting a reading of three IF works by Emily Short, myself, Dan Ravipinto, and Star Foster. The program is called “Interactive Fiction Walkthroughs” and will take place at the Kelly Writers House on October 27. There’s more information on this IF reading online.

An advantage of not being physically present at ISEA 2004 is my excellent Internet access. Here is the text of the talk Scott should have just delievered on my behalf, “Continuous Paper: Print interfaces and early computer writing.” Hopefully we’ll hear from the away team soon about how the panel (with Noah, Michael, and Jill) went. I hope Scott didn’t crack up the fifth time he had to say “Wumpus.”

Sure, I’m not off drinking Grand Text Auto‘s FY 2004 revenues on a cruise ship in the Baltic Sea, but I did get to catch up with Mike Maguire today in Philadelphia and talk about palindromes. Poe, Nabokov, and Cortázar liked ’em. They play an important role in children’s literature. Mike and I pondered whether nontrivial infinite palindromes can exist; perhaps if the sequence is biinfinite and a first and last element are always defined, as in 123123 … 1230321 … 321321? Mike showed me his very impressive palindrome notebook and told me about his tree-search method of composition. I told him some about how William Gillespie and I composed 2002, too, although that process seemed far less interesting and principled. (Well, of course it had the same principle in one sense.) Collaboratively writing palindromes with someone who can cull your sense from nonsense does seem to have the advantage of preventing linguistic insanity, however, an occupational risk among palindrome composers. Mike hardly seems in need of such measures, however, since — in contrast to 2002 — his poems, such as “Same Nice Cinemas,” are among the most lucid texts in the English language.