Grand Text Auto

In the 1990s, Seiko manufactured and supported a service for a pager in a wristwatch’s guise. The unit could only display two eight-character lines, and because it (more or less) used a seven-segment display, it could only display a subset of the letters in the English alphabet. (I speak of it in the past tense, for service is discontinued as the device did not survive Y2K.) For instance, it could not display the letters K, M, or W, so it could not render the words “Seiko,” “Message,” or “Watch.” Nevertheless, Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an ode to the Seiko Messagewatch on the Seiko Messagewatch.

Jamey Pittman’s Pac-Man Dossier is a Web page that contains everything that is known about Namco’s famous arcade game Pac-Man. As Pittman writes, “New discoveries found during the research for this page in December 2008 have allowed for the clearest view yet of the actual ghost behavior and pathfinding logic used by the game.” On the page, you will find a detailed analysis of why turning the joystick before reaching a corner is a good idea; an enormous table listing Pac-Man’s speed, the ghosts’ fright time, and other statistics for each level; and a discussion of the accelerated “Cruise Elroy” state which Blinky enters under certain circumstances. Word of this resource reached us thanks to (no, really) Inky.

Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency
By Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala
2003
The MIT Press
xii, 182 p.

Just as Apple Stores can’t bite into Apple’s retail chain too deeply, we at Grand Text Auto have to save some (doggie) scoops for other Web outlets. This time it’s Gamasutra that got to break the news of a new iPhone game, Touch Pets Dogs by Andrew Stern’s Stumptown Game Machine. The announcement includes an interview with Andrew and producer Karlo Kilayko. Andrew’s latest virtual pet program looks to be a riot (check out the video and features like the Dog Feed) and will be actually shipping soon.

Riddle Me This: A World Treasury of Word Puzzles, Folk Wisdom, & Literary Conundrums
By Phil Cousineau
Barnes and Noble Books
1999
viii, 184 p.

Add-Art is a Firefox plugin that replaces online advertising with art. (Thanks for the tip, Gunther.) We like it. See what it does, if you’re interested, and feel free to download and install it.

oGFx (or, more fully, E15:oGFx) is a new system by Kyle Buza and Luis Blackaller that allows a programmer to procedurally generate 2D animations which are continually extruded into 3D forms – and to made changes to code as it is running and generating graphics. You can write (or modify) simple Python programs to get going in oGFx, within a few minutes. The system was just released on 1234567890 (Unix Epoch Time). oGFx is deeply beautiful, in that it allows for many sorts of visually compelling work, relates 2D to 3D graphics in a fascinating way, and allows for a better understanding of how computation and programming can be aesthetic. The system was developed in the MIT Physical Language Workshop which was run by John Maeda from 2006-2008. I’m glad to have been on Luis’s committee as he worked on the closely related project MyStudio, and to have gotten to talk with him about oGFx and see it in action as it developed.

If you’ve been looking for that excuse to write some IF, look no further. Interactive Fiction Writing Month is about to begin. During February 15-March 15, author/programmers will be encouraged with a series of tasks to learn about constructing IF in Inform 6. There’s also a blog; and there’s a forum. CMU is the focal point of this month of writing, and there will be some live lectures and events there, but participation is open to anyone.

Mary and I realized, at a bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, this particular language generator: “The Hangup.” We hope you enjoy it!

Check this out: Art and Code, “a low-key conference teaching a variety of tools specially developed for use in the arts and education to artists, young people, and everyone else.” It’s happening March 7-9 at CMU.

A long while ago Gilbert Bernstein discussed process intensity and programming with us in the comment section after my review of Alex Galloway’s Gaming. I mentioned one of Edsgar W. Dijkstra’s notes, EWD277, in which the problem of writing a program to find the first 1000 prime numbers is discussed.

Bernstein, who is from my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, where Dijkstra taught, recently pointed me to a hilarious paper that discusses the same problem and proposes a different programming methodology to solve it, while also referring to different Dijkstra note on structured programming and offering an excellent set of references. The paper is “Notes On Postmodern Programming” by James Noble and Robert Biddle. Section 13 is the one that lays out the new (or perhaps not so new) approach.

Here’s the latest on Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Ian and I have done a Q&A about our study of the Atari 2600 over at Powell’s Books, which has Racing the Beam on sale right now. On February 2 Amazon must have been out at the warehouse (good news from a standpoint of reader interest) because their time for delivery jumped up, but Amazon now flows with copies as well. For those who like to read with the ear, Ian offers a lively discussion of the book on this month’s MIT Press podcast, in the second segment of the program, after Stephen H. Axilrod talks about his Inside the Fed.

I’ve been wanting to take a moment to mention a game that I’ve found fun, wacky, and interesting, one that offers an innovative play feeling – and one which recently received a glowing review from GameCritics.com. (It’s been praised elsewhere; for instance, on Destructoid.) The game in question is CarneyVale Showtime, available since late December for the Xbox 360 via Xbox LIVE Community Games. In this “vertical ragdoll platform game,” you grip, release, and inflect a whirling clown, Slinky, who is flung through balloon-laden spaces. This game was an IGF finalist and won first place in the 2008 Dream-Build-Play Challenge. And, CarneyVale Showtime was developed right here at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Go go GAMBIT game!

Turbulence has just made two announcements. First, based on a bevy of quality proposals, authors have been selected for Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art). They are Anne Helmond, Patrick Lichty, Anna Munster, Marisa Olson, and Kazys Varnelis. Second, two new pieces commissioned by Turbulence have been unfurled: ABSML, a language for writing text-generation templates, and “Without a Trace,” a comic generated from tracings and traces of several sources, including The New York Times.

There’s a new issue of The New River: A Journal of Digital Writing & Art just out. It includes works by Andy Campbell, Jason Nelson & David Heckman, Angela Ferraiolo, Michael Maguire, and your own Nick Montfort. My (completely non-computational) piece is called “Ten Mobile Texts.” In introducing the issue, Nick Kocz and Manisha Sharma respond to Andrew Gallix’s essay on e-literature, in which he wonders if the form is dead, or just “one big anti-climax.” (I offered my own brief reply here, and the essay was further discussed in comments by several people, including Gallix.) Needless to say, those who put together this issue found the rumors (or oblique suggestions) of e-lit’s death to be quite exaggerated. In addition to effectively quoting Robert Coover’s keynote address at Scott’s September conference, they offer this data point: “we received more submissions for this New River Journal issue than any previous issue.”

Those of you who finished blueful know, but for others: Aaron Reed’s new full-scale, wayfaring interactive fiction piece is now available for download. It’s called Blue Lacuna: An Interactive Novel.

The online manifestation of the exhibit Search for a New(er) Digital Literature offers work by Jim Andrews, Marvin Bell & Ernesto Lavandera, Sommer Browning & Mark Lomond & Johanne Ste-Marie, Andy Campbell, J.R. Carpenter, Chris Joseph & Kate Pullinger, Tammy McGovern, Stuart Moulthrop, Alexander Mouton, Jason Nelson, Victoria Welby, and Jody Zellen. The exhibit also is up now in the Terminal space at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, USA – but hurry if you’re planning to go see it. The last day of the meatspace exhibit is tomorrow, January 30.

Let me tell you about two curious collections of words that engage digital media in intriguing, different ways: “Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze” and Hollis Frampton Comes Alive.

Textfyre, headed by David Cornelson, is planning to market three games in coming months, each the first of a new series:

• Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, Miradania Series, January 2009
• The Shadow in the Cathedral, Klockwerk Series, February 2009
• A Gift of Empathy, Giant Leaps Series, March 2009

Cornelson has a blog about Textfyre. His latest entry discusses how the ESRB ratings of Everyone or Everyone 10+ with Mild Violent References, which Textfyre was originally seeking for all of its games, wouldn’t allow for the meaningful reading (e.g. The Catcher in the Rye) that Cornelson and many other were doing in middle school. So, the company will be enlarging the scope of its publications.

Namely, a list of just-published Game Studies articles, of free 3D game download links, and of IF that has been reviewed and is available for play on the Web.

Game Studies 8:2 has been published, with articles on audio, torture, and game mechanics and ones that look at games from pedagogical and McLuhanesque perspectives.

Aaron Reed, author of Whom the Telling Changed, has distributed his new story, blueful, in a fascinating way. I could say more, but you’ll see how it works formally after a few seconds, and the story only takes a few minutes to read. Also, the story leads on to something else, something very intriguing. So why not fare your way over and see for yourself?

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, mentioned here previously, is now available from online and bricks-and-mortar booksellsers, including Amazon and Powells. The book is a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives, and is the first in the MIT Press platform studies series.

It’s a pleasure to read even one article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses the confluence of computation and programming with cultural and humanistic studies. Matt Kirschenbaum has written two, which are just out and well worth reading – and would be even if one didn’t offer us lavish praise, calling Grand Text Auto “the single must-read blog for the field.”

The longer article, “Hello Worlds,” makes the clear and powerful argument that humanities students should learn to program and to understand computation. While singing the praises of Adventure as the first virtual world and of modeling as a special ability of the compter, the article also sketches the idea of procedural rhetoric. This isn’t the first position paper on the subject – there is one from Michael Mateas for instance, and educators at Dartmouth were taking this position decades ago, and teaching the students as well. But this article is a well-developed and well-stated case for educating humanists to compute and to understand computing, and it comes at the right time and in the right context.

“When Computer Science and Cultural Studies Collide” surveys the many ways that CS and CS (or disciplines and fields like them) are being brought together to address new questions in new ways: “Game studies, software studies, critical-code studies, even platform studies …” Check out the full glowing review of our blog, too:

After many hold-ups at security, Jetset: A Game for Airports is out for the iPhone. The game, which revamps Airport Insecurity and offers special digital treats for those who play in particular airports, is by Ian Bogost’s joint Persuasive Games. While the game itself makes an argument, Bogost also offers an argument in old-fashioned format about how we might discern a proceduralist style emerging in games, even as the “games as art” discussion keeps on growing without fruit.

Legends of Zork, a browser-based game now in development by Jolt Online Gaming of Dublin, promises to bring the Zork product and process back to the Web. The press release explains how the new game will connect this venerable interactive fiction property, from more than 30 years ago, to current events:

The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The Royal Treasury has been sacked. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire.