Grand Text Auto

“A Bad Machine Made of Words,” my review of Dan Shiovitz’s Bad Machine, is now up at trAce.

Brendan Desilets points to the new home of his valuable and long-standing site on interactive fiction and pedagogy, Teaching and Learning with IF. He writes on that site that he has, “Since 1985 … introduced about five hundred kids, aged eleven through fourteen, to interactive fiction. Most of them like it. In fact, it is the most popular form of literature with most.” Desilets, who teaches middle school in Massachusetts, is author of the article “Interactive Fiction vs. the Pause That Distresses: How Computer-Based Literature Interrupts the Reading Process Without Stopping the Fun.” Among the many resources on his site are suggestions for teachers about how they can help students write IF; an easy-to-run Windows IF kit for teachers, along with instructions on how to do further downloading; and a study showing significant improvement in students’ planning of their writing after interaction with IF.

Fight Club, the video game, is coming from Vivendi for the major platforms. There’s a video trailer promoting the game already online, and the online forums about it are already filling up with comments to the tune of “this is a travesty!” “it’s just supposed to be a game, you’re not supposed to think about it” and “hey, exactly the sort of mindless consumer product that Fight Club is all about.” Via Elastico.

After mention of the game on ifMUD, I finally got around to playing “The Anti-Bush Video Game,” a.k.a. “Bushgame,” by Starvingeyes. Michael Erard aptly characterized it in The New York Times as mixing “gruesome humor and a grab bag of pop-culture references with a detailed (if pedantic) presentation on tax issues and budget policy.” (This article also discussed Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost’s work; it isn’t still online, but discussion of it can be found at Ludology.org and Water Cooler Games.) The game has a nice look to it and works pretty smoothly. I can’t say it was an enjoyable play experience for me, though, with repetitive, one-track platform action and cut scenes that make the experience about as exciting as the bastard child of Math Blaster and infomercials. But there’s certainly some originality in the dogged storyline of this Flash-based piece. I didn’t guess from the article just how utterly outrageous the game is — as if it were crafted not just to attract attention but to attract lawsuits — so I’ve included a spoiler-filled list of some of the details in the next segment of the post.

At the beginning of the week I finished the report “Discovering Communities through Information Structure and Dynamics,” (pdf) a review of some recent research that provides insight into how the existence of, and structure of, computer-mediated communications can be used to learn about online communities. I gave a presentation on this topic on Monday, finishing my last preliminary exam. With my other requirements done, I now have only my dissertation to complete — of course, I need to begin it first, but if I can manage two years of focused research work, that could earn me a Ph.D.

J. Robinson Wheeler has written a nice article about creating IF, Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF. The article does a good job of explaining how the convention of a static “room description” has morphed to become a more interesting and fluid part of the narrative discourse in some more recent works of IF. Sure, using the framework of narratology could have made the discussion clearer and taken it a bit farther, but Rob’s awareness of how things fit together at the word, sentence, paragraph, and game level, and his close look at the way scene descriptions work in several important games, results in a very helpful essay. (The main flaw, I think, being Rob’s reliance on his own IF writing to supply “bad” examples; the nitpicking isn’t so helpful and the bits he cites are seldom that bad.) The article describes an aspect of IF authorship that may seem to correspond to bits of game design of other sorts — point-and-click graphical adventures: drawing the backdrops, first-person shooters and platform games: designing the levels. Upon closer inspection, scene description involves a lot of things that has no clear analog in graphical computer games, because the text that describes a scene ends up fitting into an overall, verbal narration, sometimes doing other sorts of narrative, literary, and gaming work at the same time. Update: I thought I’d get away with just plugging Rob’s article, but no — lengthy addendum below, in comments, about narratology and IF.

Unfortunately, the one bit of news I’ve gotten so far regarding the ACM Hypertext conference — which I’m not attending this year; GTxA is well-represented there by Noah, however — is from Andruid Kerne, who works with computing and collage and who I know from when he was doing his PhD at NYU. Andruid, now on the faculty of Texas A&M, describes how he was asked to change the content of a politically charged work that was accepted for presentation as a demo. Specifically, his hypermedia collage, available online, includes a linked photograph, published in The New York Times, of nude Iraqi prisoners being made to simulate fellatio. A linked photograph of President Bush, who seems to be staring right at the act, is juxtaposed.

Gaming Hacks has been announced by O’Reilly: a full descrption of the book is also online. Although the title may suggest it’s all about mods — and it does seem rich in discussion of these, from instructions for doing hardware mods of consoles and controllers to suggestions for twiddling your save game files — it also contains information about building games from scratch, including tips from Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin about how to write text adventures.

I’ll supply a real review if and when I break down and buy the book after it’s out in October … or if O’Reilly sends Grand Text Auto a review copy, of course…

The revamped site of Camille Utterback, who collaborated with Noah on Talking Cure, offers video documentation of her new, interactive, and “completely algorithmic” piece — that is, one doesn’t use a preexisting image, as Liquid Time does. This new piece is Untitled 5, which will be at Chelsea Marlborough (211 W. 19th St., New York) through September 10.

Newcomers interesting in creating interactive fiction, take note: The third edition of the Inform Beginner’s Guide (IBG) by Roger Firth and Sonja Kesserich, edited by Dennis G. Jerz, has just been published. While Graham Nelson’s Inform Designer’s Manual, 4th ed. (DM4) is the essential reference and a good introduction for those with programming experience, the step-by-step, example-based approach of the IBG is sure to be a great help for those less familiar with IF or less experienced as programmers. It’s now been updated for Inform 6.3, a nicely enhanced, bug-fixed, and Glulx-compatible release. The IBG can be downloaded in pdf format; The DM4 is also available in pdf and html.

Yesterday I went to the opening reception for Secrets of ENIAC, photographs by Benjamin Pierce, a professor of computer and information science here at Penn. The photographs are extreme close-ups, details of macros, showing a strange industrial landscape within the vacuum tubes of this early computer. They’re now exhibited in Penn’s Levine Hall, home of the CIS department. They can also be seen online.

A special treat was getting to go into the usually-inaccessible shrine called the ENIAC Museum, look at four of the 40 ENIAC consoles from all sides, and up close, and hear from curator Paul Shaffer. The history of computing, and how to assign credit for general-purpose computing, is complex, but ENIAC was the first machine to be able to do a conditional branch (an if statement). The capability wasn’t there from the start; someone (it’s not clear who, but it almost certainly was one of the women who regularly programmed the machine) figured out that a cable carrying a numerical output could be plugged into a control input, so that the program would only continue running on the next console if the output was nonzero. There’s much more to to say, but I’ll point to Penn Special Collections’s nice site to accompany the 1996 exhibit of ENIAC co-creator John W. Mauchly’s papers. In 1996, incidentally, then-Vice-President Al Gore came by for ENIAC’s 50th birthday celebration and flipped on Penn’s remnant of the ENIAC, which counted from 46 to 96.

I recently found, read, and had mixed feelings about a 2002 article by Julian Dibbell about Adventure, called “A Marketable Wonder: Spelunking the American Imagination.” (Dibbell is probably best-known online for his 1993 Village Voice article “A Rape in Cyberspace…”) The “marketable wonder” refers to Mammoth Cave as a popular attraction in the time of Stephen Bishop, the slave tour guide whose story takes up the first half of the article — and to Will Crowther’s Adventure, which of course wasn’t originally marketed, but later was. The article is addressed to a general, non-computer-fluent readership, which, dear reader, does not include us.

While my writing sense may be tuned for scholarly contexts, there seem to be some issues. Read on…

Sega and JC Entertainment (in Korea) have announced Shenmue Online, a MMOG for PC to be set in China in the 1980s. There’s just the one-page press release in English at the official site, but Shenmue Dojo has screenshots in their discussion area. Apparently the project, which has been underway for a while, has a US $28 million budget and is set to come out of beta early next year.

It’s a shame that Sega didn’t let the Dreamcast die like a warrior, and refrained from a U.S. release of Shenmue II so that Sony could have an “exclusive.” (They did the same with Rez.) Ah, well. Your region codes have no killing power…

I just posted a reply on rec.arts.int-fiction (Google Groups access) about how authentic a port of an old interactive fiction game should be. Roberto Grassi posted eight principles for IF porting being used in an Italian project to port IF. The emphasis is on creating, at worst, superset of the original.

This topic is not unique to IF, of course. I also wanted to mention it because of the issue of formal versus material authenticity — how can we make ports of systems not only produce the same output as the original, but do so in a way that at least recalls or is consistent with the material qualities of early interface, and is appropriate for students, programmers, and computer creatives to learn from? I didn’t really write about that issue specifically on the newsgroup, but here’s what I did write…

… the ideal for a port of any classic game, digital artwork, or other important system — if the port is being done to allow people to see what a historically important program was really like — is that the program work exactly like the original. At least, it should work as close to the original as is possible with modern hardware. So, for instance, there’s a “port” of Spacewar that is a PDP-1 emulator running in Java.

The first of these updates from ebr (Electronic Book Review is actually four-in-one: the Game Theories section of First Person, with essays by Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Celia Pearce, and Eric Zimmerman. This section was one of my favorites in First Person, offering some solid ideas as well as provocations.

Bowman provides all the “Animated Blood” and “Cartoon Violence” (as the ESRB would call it) that I’ve been missing since The Bilestoad. Although I don’t think Bowman offers amputations, as The Bilestoad did.

I enjoyed fidding with the interface for a bit in “Practice” and figuring out how to work it, although perhaps it’s more obvious to some and there will be nothing to learn. Modifying the options can make the game more challenging. Thanks to Allen on ifMUD for the link.

Meanwhile, another sign of stir crazy things going on at the Gore campaign, Chris Lehane, the campaign press secretary — I am told not directly by Mr. Lehane, but by those who have witnessed this — is playing a video game and vowing to continue to play the same video game until he gets a decision from the Supreme Court.
— Jonathan Karl, CNN Correspondent

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of why those Democrats have delayed Opinions. Bad associations from the past?

A source at Brown revealed that GTxA‘s own Noah is speaking tonight on “Computer Games and the Future of Fiction.” Sure enough, it’s the only thing on the university’s events calendar today. The details are that he’s speaking in MacMillan 117 at 7pm — hopefully that time, unlike the spelling of Noah’s name on the announcement, is correct. Here’s the whole series of talks of which Noah’s is one.

In September 2005, Penn will host Elective Affinities, a conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS). The deadline for a paper proposal (250-300 words) is this October 1.

One session, mentioned on the conference page but not yet described on the detailed description page, is of particular interest to the pedestrians and gang members here at Grand Text Auto. Here’s the description of that session:

Words on Screen: Hierarchies of Text and Picture in Cyberculture

Howard Rheingold writes in The Virtual Community (p. 77) that the first large mailing list on ARPANET was SF-LOVERS, for discussions about science fiction. A 1987 USENET post from the moderator of the list seems to be the best source on when the list started — around 1975. At that point, fewer than 100 hosts were online. It was nice of ARPA to allow users to put its network to literary uses then, almost 30 years ago.

Penn’s Masters in Computer Graphics and Game Technology is starting in the Fall, and a course in game design and development has been proposed as part of it. I hope it comes through, as I’d love to take it or sit in on it.

On ifMUD I learned of another new degree program, Champlain College’s Bachelors in Electronic Game & Interactive Development. The curriculum includes game-specific courses throughout the four years, including four courses on game design, an interactive storytelling course with two prerequisites, a course on game history and playability testing, a senior thesis and a senior team project.

This is the first question for a national research agenda that is proposed by a new NEA report:

How does literature, particularly serious literary work, compete with the Internet, popular entertainment, and other increased demands on leisure time?

As someone who writes and reads serious literary work on the Internet, this question seems to be staring up at me from a puddle of its own drool. It would make about as much sense as attempting to determine how libraries compete with serious literary work.

The editors of Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology are seeking abstracts for contributions to the book. The deadline is November 1, 2004.

There’s an email interview with me just up at E-Boredom, a low-gloss site covering movies, comics, and the Nintendo Entertainment System, none of which I discuss in my interview. I hope they still liked talking to me.

I think I look kinda fetching right under that cheap Web hosting ad banner.

It’s been making the rounds after an upgrade: Dennis Jerz blogged about the program written, and text produced, by Peter Norvig at Google. (Norvig is co-author of the excellent textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.) Norvig claims that his generated text, currently 17,259 words in length, is “the longest palindromic sentence ever created.”

Well … 0wn3d. Here is a palindromic sentence that is 40,000 words long.