Grand Text Auto

Now, to interrupt your regularly scheduled discussion of games (and other things) for a brief dip into evolutionary game theory (EGT), a field that looks at how different strategies can fare against each other, and against themselves, when they repeatedly play games in the von Neumann/Nash sense – and a comment on how game theory relates to game studies.

Ben Packer and I took the nicely implemented JPrison appplet for running EGT games, developed by Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Lille, and added a simple, but somewhat flexible, programming language to it: STRANGE, a STRategy lANGuagE. Today in Michael Kearns’ Networked Life class, we had four groups compete to devise strategies under different conditions…

The bot bachelors of Mark Marino and Alan Laser follow in Eliza‘s footsteps and provide amusement for those who browse on Windows with cookies turned on. (These aren’t my own turn-ons, and I’ve only chatted these bots up briefly on a borrowed computer, but doing much beyond a Web page that is accessbile can be difficult – that’s another discussion, anyway.) This offering sits on the site of full-featured Bunk Magazine, a periodical that seems to sit somewhere in between Salon and Albino Black Sheep.

What an interactive fiction news day! Dan Shiovitz has announced a new interactive fiction development system that is really really easy to use and produces code with a very small footprint – for instance, one byte long. Check out Snap.

Er, I just spent way too much time playing gameLab’s puzzler WorldBuilder, available on the Lego site. I did stop doing the bonus goals after a while, at least, and managed to forego playing past world one…

I guess my excuse is that, since I don’t have my Atari Lynx handy, I can’t play Crystal Mines II or Chip’s Challenge. WorldBuilder isn’t too shabby, though.

Joe Tabbi spoke here at the Institute for Cognitive Science on Wednesday and did a great deal to help me (and, I think, the cognitive science researchers in attendance) understand what a cogntivie approach to literary criticism is, and, more broadly, how different disciplines can learn from each other. The talk was part of the IRCS/Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Brain and Language series.

Jill mentioned agoraXchange, a project to create an explicitly utopian massively multiplayer persistent world “challenging the violence and inequality of our present political system.”

Will it be fun?

I’d promised to post this article back when Grand Text Auto ran the recent news about Gnoetry. This essay was published in the most recent Cybertext Yearbook; in it I discuss the Gnoetry-generated book Static Void, the composition of 2002: A Palindrome Story, and various taxonomies and literary procedures – all in an attempt to develop a more useful perspective on how humans and computers work together to create literary texts.

I’m going to be speaking about this issue in a panel discussion, “Public Override Void: On Poetry Engines,” on April 29, here in Phildadelphia at the Slought Foundation. The panel discussion will be accompanied by a demo and exhibit of Jim Carpenter’s poetry-generation work.

A brief dip into agonology with this comment on game studies, inspired by the discussion of Joust in Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play:

It’s possible to imagine game studies as being similar to Combat: whoever destroys their opponent most frequently is the winner.

I prefer to think of game studies as being more similar to Air-Sea Battle: everyone is shooting at the same targets. Some people may play antagonistically by picking off targets that you were about to shoot, but the firepower is always concentrated on understanding computer games.

Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism

Princeton University
6 March 2004

“We are not here to condemn games or to defend them, but to interpret them,” Roger Bellin, of Princeton’s PhD program in English, said in introducing the conference, as he cautioned against seeking a single, hegemonic approach to games and pointed out the diversity of approaches that are represented here. This excellent conference was co-organized by Dexter Palmer; it ran quite smoothly after the one audiovisual hitch (which involved my Atari 2600 Jr.).

About 45 people were there at the very beginning of the day; the number quickly swelled to about 75. I was slated to speak first, but was shuffled into the last spot of the panel as Roger went to chase down a coaxial cable. What follows are just my notes on the conference, posted after my late-night train trip back, pretty lacking in analysis, but perhaps of some use to those who want to know what the conference was like:

University of Pennsylvania Professor Barry Silverman has contributed a note on a very important topic for those doing engineering or science work on Grand Text Auto-style systems: how can you evaluate your development effort so that a granting agency (or thesis committee, or journal) can see if you made some measurable improvements?

Not too long ago, I became interested in the topic of how to evaluate an interactive fiction or drama-based game that might also have training value. This came about because I was applying to NIH for a grant to create a game and they wanted any game to prove it had value. My own thesis was that the training value would be enhanced to the extent that it was stealth learning, that the users were engaged/transported, and to the extent they were entertained. We compromised and the sponsors had me place a psychometrician and a narratologist on the team. It is now three years later, we completed the game (see here or here on this site), a clinical trial with 200 subjects is currently underway, and to conduct the trial the team had to produce a number of instruments by which to evaluate the game.

In particular, we developed various new survey instruments to capture user reactions to the game and shifts in their knowhow and behavioral intent. By comparing across various experimental arms (ie, game, movie version, pamphlet, etc.) we hope to capture the impact of the game relative to other mediums. Overall, in addition to a demographics instrument we have developed instruments for metrics in both training dimensions (Knowledge, Stated Intent, Willingness to Pay) as well as in aesthetic dimensions (Narrative Engagement, Game Entertainment, Usefulness, and Usability). We also make use of two previously developed instruments on decisional conflict and need for cognition. The nine draft instruments are provided in a recent report I have posted to my website – select “Evaluation” tab under http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~barryg/heart/index.html …

When I was up at Brown I ran into Michelle Higa, one of the four editors of Chaise Magazine. She gave me a copy of the first issue of this free DVD magazine (which has some associated Web selections.) Having now watched the videos (one of them is documentation Michelle did of the project Screen, a project of GTxA’s Noah Wardrip-Fruin and others), seen the stills, and listened to the audio, and poked at the interactive goodies, I am quite impressed and amused. This isn’t an upgrade of your cheesy mid-1990s CD magazine, but a collection of several great projects from digital media workers at Brown and RISD.

It’s been a week and a half since the fine E-Fest at Brown already — no time for me to write anything like a trip report — but I wanted to bring one incisive comment from there into this forum.

Brian Kim Stefans was one of many who provided great readings/performances and participated in interesting discussions. Speficially, he compared humanistic writing about internet and computing culture to the Orientalism that Edward Said discusses: people from a different culture, with no direct knowledge of the country or culture, learn about it second- or third-hand and construct their own fantasy of what it is like.

The current lead article on gaming site 1up is about interactive fiction, and it includes an excellent set of interiews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, and 2003 IF Comp winners Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. (Although there are many good bits apart from the interviews, the IF history part of the article, at the beginning, is cribbed from Graham Nelson’s brief history in the Inform Designer’s Manual — as stated in the article — and it’s better to just read Nelson’s history if you’re looking for brief background. The names of both Thomas M. Disch and Robert Pinsky are wrong in the article, too.) The article is by Andrew Vestal and Nich Maragos; 1up is a ZiffDavis joint.

Woohoo! Twisty Little Passages was reviewed in The Onion: “… too dense and dry for casual readers … mechanical contraptions … eschewing substantive literary analysis … deception or even murder … juicy …”

A few hours ago I gave a talk entitled “Continuous Paper.” It was at the History of Material Texts Seminar here at Penn, and dealt with the print-based heritage of computer interfaces. The full text is online.

There is something oddly compelling about Crimson Room (also available on a US server) by Toshimitsu Takagi. Not that it’s the best graphical adventure game that is available for free, but the conflation of camera movement from The 7th Guest with amusingly awkward English and puzzles worse than the ones in the most painful Penguinsoft title…

And it’s all online, in Flash. Yes, I finished it and have the right to be on the escape person list. (I did peek at the solution; the interface isn’t always pleasant.) Shout out to my poetry homie JK for passing along the link.

In case you were wondering about my life as a computer and information science Ph.D. student at Penn, I’ve put some information about my research, teaching, and studies online.

The Joint Work reading at the Kelly Writers House went wonderfully. As promised, the four of us read from 2002, Implementation, and The Unknown. There was a great turnout, the technologies involved worked smoothly (eh, the problem with the wireless mike didn’t really matter), and readers and read-to alike seemed to have great fun. Thanks to Jen Snead for introducing us and to her and the others at the Writers House for hosting us.

Implementation installment 1 is available to everyone on the Web now, in US Letter and A4 sizes. And the first reading of Implementation will occur Saturday, along with a reading of 2002 and The Unknown, at the Philadelphia event Joint Work…

Who knows what happened here? An honest error? Most likely, but it’s funnier to think that even “prominent” newspapers might give in to the urge to intentionally feed the wrong page title/headline to Google News once in a while, in an attempt to get some extra bang for their advertising buck. Of course, such an attempt could go horribly arwy…

Cannibal who fried victim in garlic is cleared of murder
Guardian – 2 hours ago
He arrived laughing and joking. Just over two hours later Armin Meiwes, the self-confessed German cannibal who killed and ate another man, left a stunned courtroom scarcely able to believe his luck.
A German Court Convicts Internet Cannibal of Manslaughter New York Times
Bag a family holiday to the Magic Kingdom The Sun