Grand Text Auto

An article by José Luis de Vicente in the January 9 El Mundo takes on some important issues with virtual worlds (focusing on MMORPGs) and describes some of the ways in which what goes on in them is real. Here’s the original article in Spanish, or you can see how well the Google translation reads. Here are some highlights that I translated:

I was very pleased to note that the first two English reviews of Twisty Little Passages were posted online yesterday. One of these reviews is from an IF author, editor of the SPAG Newsletter, and longtime, active member of the IF community, Paul O’Brian. The other, entitled “Wor(l)d Games,” is from Matt Kirchenbaum, assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of the forthcoming book Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality (MIT Press, 2005).

Find out.

You can look at the pages Google determines to be “related” in a new way using Google Browser from TouchGraph. Well, a fairly new way – the system has been out for a while and it or its cousins (Amazon Browser, LiveJournal Browser) have been mentioned here and there, but my advisor, Michael Kearns, showed it to me today since it’s one of the tools we’ll be using in a new undergraduate class this semester, “Networked Life.”

Brutal, bloody images, racist messages, and the suggestion that anyone who creates video games dealing with unpleasant aspects of life should be strangled. It’s all packaged in the local TV news.

Apparently in early November someone named Difenderfer said, speaking of Grand Theft Auto, that “My mission in the game is to kill the Haitians!” Sure, there is confusion about whether Difenderfer is a character in the game or is an outraged yet addicted “viewer” who wasn’t willing to appear on camera. But the basic point is still clear: People shouldn’t be using their television sets to play video games! How can the local TV news and our country’s advertising apparatus defecate down our throats if we’re busy using the TV to expore a rich, simulated word that critiques American culture?

Whilst in Texas recently, I read Jill Walker’s Dr. art. thesis, “Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World.” One important issue it tackled was one that I noted, but didn’t try to tackle, many years ago. It’s the question of what it means when a “real” action in the world (such as your really sending an email addressed to Online Caroline) is also to be an action in a fictional world (given that Online Caroline is not a real person, you have sent an email in the fictional world, too).

Well, the Open Directory did create a category for this, so in fairness, they had to create a category for this.

Ludologist Jesper Juul has posted the abstract of this Ph.D. disseration. In the dissertation, he presents a theory of video games, argues that comptuers have special affinity for game-playing, and pits the rules of video games against the simulated, fictional worlds in which they take place. To develop his approach he has drawn upon “literary theory, film theory, computer science, sciences of complexity, economic game theory, game design literature, and some psychology.”

The defense is January 16. Jesper, good luck! The abstract certain has whet my appetite; I’m looking forward to reading the whole document when it’s available.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Tempest 2000 — an excellent game that, along with the movie Tron, certainly was an inspiration for Rez. So I thought I’d check out what the designer of this game, the Yak (a.k.a. Jeff Minter), has been up to. As it turns out, this programmer of true cult classics, whose company is named Llamasoft, is collaborating with Peter Molyneux (Black & White) of Lionhead Studios on a GameCube puzzle-shooter.

Jill’s recent post on “linktheft” and the fact that I’ve recently read one of the PageRank papers got me thinking about links. Blog spam by those seeking more PageRank has become a real annoyance. We’ve be slogged by spam as well; some other bloggers have taken rather extreme measures in response. I re-read Jill’s paper Links and Power and also looked at some of the descriptions of PageRank online to make sure I understood the article by Larry Page et al. Here are a few observations…

Adam Cadre’s new interactive fiction, Narcolepsy, (top item on the page) is just out and seems at first taste to be curiously strong, magically delicious, etc. Although also named after an affliction, this piece isn’t as intricately puzzling as Adam’s Varicella. Exploration and alternate (and ontologically inconsistent) plot progression is more the idea in Narcolepsy.

While continuing the tradition of car accidents in ergodic literature and computer games, Cadre’s latest is, among other things, a rollicking and wacky conflation of aspects of Galatea, Patchwork Girl, The Manchurian Candidate, etc. I won’t give away which aspects.

Here’s one for the Cybertext Yearbook 2004 – IF author and novelist Adam Cadre has taken up a somewhat offhand comment that Espen Aarseth made in his chapter on Deadine, which he dubbed the “Autistic Detective Agency.” He writes that not only does the player character in IF have to behave like an autist, but that IF itself “is geared towards the preferences of the autist.”

Adam’s bloglike Calendar features more interesting fare, often essay-length.

I’ve completed my article “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction” after about two years of having drafts of the article available online. (The last round of changes was rather minor.) It is a more thorough look at a topic covered briefly in chapter one of Twisty Little Passages – how narratology can inform a formal theory of interactive fiction, one that isn’t restricted to the narrative aspect of the form. Thanks to the many who commented on and criticized the piece, helping me to revise it.

Hanna made the mistake of mentioning the Killer Instinct exhibition to me before she blogged about it herself. It’s at the New Museum, and features pieces created by these artists who work with computer games, including 8-bit modder Cory Arcangel (mentioned before on here) and first-person appropriationist Eddo Stern (also mentioned). Perhaps in January I’ll get to see the exhibit.

Although I should have been studying for my preliminary exam on Wednesday, today in the department I heard an unusual WPE-II presentation: “Interactive Storytelling: Coupling the Emotional Range of Drama with the Engagement of Interactivity.” (The WPE-II is the paper-and-talk that is the last of the preliminary exams here in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Penn, and will hopefully be my next stop after Wednesday.) The topic of Michael Johns’s talk (which was possibly closer to interactive drama than interactive storytelling) was hardly alien to me, but it was a bit different from the graph-theoretic or expectation-maximizing algorithmic goodness that we usually get around here.

In the latest installment of the ludology vs. narratology debate, Gonzalo Frasca says “that’s not an argument! there never was such a debate!” and I say “yes there was!”

Happy Thanksgiving; I’d like to give thanks to the military-academic-industrial complex for general-purpose computing and the Internet.

AGNI, a literary magazine I worked for when I was at Boston University, is now publishing some material exclusively online. (The magazine’s logo, incidentally, is a flying monkey.) AGNI was founded by Askold Melnyczuk, who ran the magazine for 30 years, but it has taken wing online under its new editor, none other than the famous book reviewer and famous book elegiast Sven Birkerts, who wrote in introducing the website:

Had you given me the crystal ball ten years ago, when I was putting out anti-technology jeremiads one after the next, I would have thought about going into the next room with my service revolver and doing what used to be called “the right thing.”

The results are in from the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition! The collaborative work Slouching Towards Bedlam by Star Foster and Daniel Ravipinto took top honors. In second place was Michael Coyne’s Risorgimento Represso, then Quintin Stone’s Scavenger, then Daniel Freas’s The Erudition Chamber, and then Aaron A. Reed ‘s Gourmet. And many of the 25 other entries are worth playing. For those who didn’t get to play during the Comp, you can still download all the games in one file.

A week and a half ago I went to Copyright and the Networked Computer. Noah was there too. There were lots of lawyers.

I enjoyed and learned from the presentations and questions and from many of my conversations with lawyers, computer scientists, and others. It was nice that some people appreciated the public domain and appropriationist art (and that all art is appropriationist to some extent), but hearing from staffers on “both sides” of the issue in the House of Representatives left me feeling unwell. The framework of the discussion simply seemed wrong. So I’ll leave the trip report duties to Noah and post something polemic instead.

No time for a full report on this conference or even on the last one that I went to, but, speaking of narrative intelligence and America’s Army, one program awaiting funding from the DoD is called “Episodic Memory” and seeks researchers who take something of an NI approach to memory and experience. There have been many interesting things at this DARPA/IPTO Cognitive Systems conference, which announces another big AI push, the presentation on this program by Doug Gage is one thing that stood out as being of to Grand Text Auto folks. Since many of us know already why, in general, it can be helpful to think of memory as being organized into narrative, I’ll instead mention the specific military uses that Gage discussed:

I somehow managed to pause halfway through Narrative Intelligence, edited by Grand Text Auto‘s own Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, and mentioned on here before. After losing track of the book for a while, I’ve finally finished reading it. Even knowing something of the breadth of inquiry undertaken by those in narrative intelligence, it’s a rich and surprisingly diverse collection. Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium 1999 are supplemented with other selections important to narrative intelligence research. One effect of the collection is to make me sorry that I missed the NI symposia and the active days of the NI group at MIT. But I’m glad this book is still around as a contribution to the academic discourse, and I hope future work will build on the insights in it.

NI researchers all share a concern with intelligence (human and computer) and with the use of narrative to organize events, but the field (if “field” is the best word for it) encompasses many different concepts and approaches, as Michael and Pheobe explain in their introduction. This means that people are more likely than usual to find a few essays to be gems and to find that others are of no use. In my case – as my interests seem to be pretty in keeping with the “typical” set of NI interests, assuming there is such a thing – I found something to redeem each of the articles, although it wasn’t always what I expected. For instance, an essay that didn’t provide me with any insight into the expected topics of computing and narrative (one about the design of a documentary about a band) offered helpful discussion on topics I didn’t expect to read about, such as the consistent ways that youth culture expresses itself within a mainstream culture.

I got to spend my long weekend up at Brown University, where I met up with numerous digital media folks in literature and the arts, including several of my collaborators: Rachel, Noah, and William. I also got to talk with Robert Coover and Talan Memmott and see some of the work they (and Noah, and William, and others at Brown) have been doing in the TCASCV, where they’ve been bringing literature into virtual reality in the Cave Writing project.

I saw Screen (by Noah and other collaborators) finally, which I’ve seen documentation of but hadn’t gotten to experience. I also saw a dynamic word lattice that was part of Talan’s in-progress project and heard about William’s in-progress museum of words to rotate and manipulate. An A.R. Ammons poem has been used as the framework and text for one complete, elaborate piece; a piece called Hypertable provided a setting for several shorter works that incorporated texts in different ways, one of which is pictured here.

Recently, we drivers have been discussing how to make the things we write on Grand Text Auto available under a Creative Commons license. I believe we all agree that things we write for the blog (and photos we take and images we create for the blog) should be available under the Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license. However, checking the checkbox and putting that license statement on the main page would suggest that we’re licensing content to which we don’t own the rights. That’s why I chose to indicate individually that particular entries by me are licensed. It’s clunky, but a broader, incorrect offer of a license throws those legitimately licensed items into suspicion.

Poems that Go made the move to Wisconsin successfully; the new issue on literary games has just been published. Congrats to Ingrid and Megan on finishing up this intriguing Fall 2003 issue. It has some recent pieces that are already often discussed along with what are probably the first Poems that Go publications involving Java (used to interpet a work written in TADS, actually) and CGI scripts. More important than the technological diversity is the wide range of approaches to literature and game that are represented.

Gonzalo Frasca and a bunch of fellow ludatics have just launched Newsgaming.com! Yes, they just launched it, although the announcement on Gonzalo’s Ludology.com has already been followed by blog posts at game girl advance and from Jill. Well, at least we beat Slashdot to this story – as wasn’t the case with the IF Comp news!

More on this after I kill a few more terrorists and/or civilians and play a few more IF Comp games.