Grand Text Auto

Noah just spoke at HASTAC II (Irvine, CA) about the process of reviewing Expressive Processing here on Grand Text Auto. Noah has of course written about this review process here on the blog. I don’t intend to thoroughly blog HASTAC II; anyway, it would make little sense to recapitulate Noah’s presentation here, since we know about the process first-hand and via his writing about it on here. But here’s a quick paraphrase of the Q&A:

Q: How did the press react? Do they think this will work in other fields? What will happen with this model?
A: Acknowledgment that it was a good investment of time for me, but only those who are really interested will do it in the future.

I just gave a talk at the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD – Michael is here, too, and Mary just showed up, and Noah is actually an organizer of the gathering. My talk was “My Generation about Talking,” now posted on nickm.com along with the program that I ran to accompany the talk, a suite of 15 tiny text generators.

Adam Cadre writes about Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, using the book’s unusual style as a starting point for discussions of impressionism and description in interactive fiction. You’ll definitely be interested if you’ve tried >COUNT LEAVES. In his calendar entry, he also states that Narcolepsey is his best-written game.

Ian Bogost writes in “The Rhetoric of Exergaming” that gross motor activity in the living room is inhibited by coffee tables. That seems to be true in many cases, but not when your coffee table is also a functional NES controller. Kyle Downes has built such a furnishing and functional piece of hardware, which also serves as a storage box. A glass tabletop places the unit in beverage-supporting mode. While playing the NES with this controller may not qualify as a fitness activity, it’s certainly a change and engages more than the player’s thumbs. If this trend of controller embiggenment, kicked off by Grand Text Auto‘s own Mary Flanagan and her [giantJoystick], keeps rolling along, we might be playing casual games on ginormous cell phones before too long. Oops – we already are. (Thanks to Hanna for the tip about Downes’ project.)

In early 2007, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a reading of all of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

On May 15, 2008, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will host a reading of another work that first appeared on a long scroll of paper – Adventure, in its original version by Will Crowther. “As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds, MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University.” This table-read is at noon on the basement level of McKeldin Library, in MITH’s conference room – at the table, I presume. And the reading may contain spoilers!

Personally, I’m struggling to keep my health up so I can continue playing this game, but if you’re the other way around, and in Baltimore, check out the second day of the Fourth Annual Games for Health Conference 2008. And, dear reader, if you are attending, drop us a note about how the conference is going or a link to anything you have online about your experiences.

May 8-9, 2008 / Baltimore Convention Center / Baltimore, Maryland / Web site for registration: www.gamesforhealth.org

A Review of Prehistoric Digital Poetry:
An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995
By Christopher T. Funkhouser
University of Alabama Press
2007
408 pp.
$75.00 cloth/$39.95 paper

This is an incredible compendium of decades of seldom-noticed work, guided by poetics, that has been done with language and computers. The work surveyed in this book is not “prehistoric” in the sense of being before history was developed; nor does it include pre-computer work that anticipated or laid the foundations for digital practice. But Funkhouser’s effort is clearly archaeological in terms of its scale and effort, and it is an attempt to recover a prehistory in the sense that our awareness of digital media history usually has the graphical, popular Web as its starting point. This recognition of our digital blind spot, or dark age, was what also motivated me and Noah to try to fill in a similar gap with The New Media Reader, which collects materials from WWII to the WWW.

Why must you hate gamers, game studies? Thus rants classics professor Roger Travis in The Escapist. Ian Bogost rants back.

Here’s something that’s new on the Web: Planet Interactive Fiction, an aggregration of blog posts (from Grand Text Auto among other fine places) about IF. Christopher Armstrong has set this up and, as you can see from a visit, it’s buzzing with useful IF information and discussion.

The book reviews at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies have been an extremely valuable resource for digital media scholars. The site has been online since 1996; it provides information about events and courses as well as about books. The book reviews in particular have helped those with different approaches (from literature, the visual arts, history, the social sciences, law, and so on) learn about important new media work in adjacent areas, and, of course, has helped to keep scholars aware of the new books available for personal consumption and use in courses. The site has been an important part of the discourse about digital media, one of the really important sites, along with ebr (Electronic Book Review), for discussion of book-length studies and arguments.

For one thing, I have to note that interactive fiction must be resurgent. There’s a vodka ad placed in a few Cambridge, Massachusetts bus stops that refers to text adventures pretty directly.

This has been so overexposed as to finally oblige a post – so, sorry if you’ve already heard it. There’s a set of backup files from the main Infocom disk that exists and seems to be in very small-scale but discernible circulation. Among other things, it contains emails about the eventually scuttled sequel to the game Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, design notes for this sequel, and two early very incomplete but working mock-ups of it. Andy Baio’s lengthy post on Waxy.org unearths an email conversation about the never-completed game Milliways, ak.a. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe from more than 20 years ago.

I suppose “digital materiality” (among other things, the topic that Matthew Kirschenbaum treated so well in his recent Mechanisms) is no longer widely considered an oxymoron. A scholarship is being offered this year along library and information science lines for PhD study of “Digital Materiality and the Management of Cultural Heritage Collections.” Follow the link for contact information:

Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) is offering a once-off Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Research Scholarship for a PhD in Digital Materiality. …

Chris Funkhouser is author of the excellent volume Prehistoric Digital Poetry, which I hope to write about at greater length before too long. He told us today during the Codework workshop at WVU about Emmett Williams’s “The IBM Poem,” a 1966 computationally-generated poem and system for generating poems. I can find little information about this poem on the Web – certainly, not the specification of how the generator works, which Funkhouser was kind enough to hand out to us on paper.

Here is a partial implementation (Update: a complete implementation; my earlier version is still available) of the poem-generating process in Python which I just wrote up. You may modify or do anything you like with this. I dedicate this program to the public domain as described in the linked document. I’ve uploaded a text file containing the program that also appears in this post, below.

I just got to hear Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext,” author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines) kick off the Codework workshop with his talk here at West Virginia University. I did not take notes during Nelson’s talk. The basic ideas he expounded (as one might guess) were the ones expressed in his books and in the last talk of his that I heard, in 2001 at Brown. He showed some examples of cross-document connections and transclusion in Xanadu Space, and demonstrated the underlying data representation, ZigZag.

Putting The New Media Reader together with Noah years ago meant amassing a huge variety of material from different sorts of sources. This diversity, and the sheer amount of text and images, made the book difficult to compile and edit. We knew that despite rather extreme efforts from us and from others at The MIT Press, there are minor errors throughout the book.

Daniel C. Howe and Aya’s Karpinska’s present to us, that is. I’m sure you think you don’t have time to look at it, but it’s worth the trip to their “No Time Machine,” which fetches statements from the Web about how people don’t have time, dropped into new dialogues. It’s a very pleasing piece in terms of how it sounds, looks, and ticks along. Among other things, it serves as a new media clock, along the lines of Speaking Clock, Sine Clock, and 12 o’clocks. I also found, among some flashes of humor, that it is deeply saddening to read. It is, after all, a true reflection of the things people say and write as they discuss missed opportunities and hopes they have decided not to attain.

(Update: April Foolery!) The official Website for the movie Superbad (IMDB) seems to have been hacked or something. The promotional content has been replaced with incomprehensible junk that seems to serve no commercial purpose.

Unless … a Superbad video game or similar spinoff is nearing launch, and this update signals the beginning of a new alternative realty game to promote that product.

(Update: somewhat obvious April Foolery!) News of a very surprising and innovative move in journalism: The former Los Angeles Times has transitioned to become The Los Wikiless Timespedia, “continuously updated by the fine people of Los Angeles and the World.”

“We tried basically all the gimmicks we know,” said new Editor-in-Chief Tony Cahter, recently promoted from the depleted typesetting staff. “Different fonts. Moving Marmaduke to the front page. Everything.”

The wiki news system allows readers to enter and edit articles as they please.

Call me method. Through a Commodore VIC-20 of recirculation I wet the bed early for a long time. Motherboard died today. A screaming comes across this guy – the guy above the port who was the color of television, tuned. It was a nice and stormy dork. As Feature awoke one morning from disquieting dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. It was a pleasure to burn, even at only 4x speed. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting the disk to satisfy misses in the L2 cache which also could not be found in RAM. Dr. Seuss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. The random access device (for so it will be convenient to speak of it) was expounding a recondite matter to us. Once upon a time the disk was round and you could go on it around and around. It was in those days that I wandered about hungry, encrypted. I would seek – seek unto death with that long agony; and when they at last unmounted me, and I was permitted to park, I felt that my sectors were leaving me. Night of my knife, fur of my lions. Every happy file system is alike. First post. You are about to begin executing Nick Montfort’s new novel, Moby Disk, or the Worm. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone vibrating three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end saying “forty one.” The station wagons arrived at noon. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. If you’re going to, read this. It was the best of rhymes, it was repetition.

It warms my heart to see that a major Internet company has turned its Web page black, joining the protest against the Communications Decency Act only 4433 days late.

The games are out! Go play the games! No, I’m not talking about the IF Comp or any run-of-the-mill videogaming competition. I sing of The Video Game Name Generator Competition, brought on by the Independent Gaming Source. Entrants had to use the Video Game Name Generator to produce a title and then develop a game to suit that name. Given three weeks to accomplish this feat, forty-eight people have managed it.

Click over to the competition site to see the screenshots and (if you’re brave and run Windows) to download the games that accompany these titles and others:

bleuOrange, a French-language literary magazine, has just launched. The new publication is a project of nt2 and figura. The first issue includes Annie Abrahams’s “Discours populaire sur la violence,” Grégory Chatonsky’s “Sodome@home,” Sébastien Cliche’s “Ruptures,” and Ollivier Dyens’s “De lettres et d’acier.” There are also two originally English works that appear in translation/adaptation. “Ream,” by Nick Montfort, your humble blogger, appears in a multimedia presentation by Anick Bergeron, who also adapted the text as the French “Rame.” The piece “open.ended” by Aya Karpinska and Daniel C. Howe also appears in French translation, and this translation was also done by Anick. Update: Luce Tremblay-Gaudette’s photos of the bleuOrange launch event, which took place at Oboro, are now online.

I don’t know exactly what to call this – a script, a scenario, a framework – but I wrote it at the Interactive Narrative conference at UCF to define, or scaffold, how a group of actors trained in interactive performance (knowing improv-like techniques, but with the ability to deal with an untrained performer) could work with a “spectactor,” a person without theatrical background who is not a member of the troupe, to create an interactive experience. The experience is played in the StoryBox, a square space closed off with black cloth, with cameras and microphones to convey what is going on to a remote audience.

The spectactor is given this information before the interactive experience begins:

You are a veteran going to visit your therapist, who you have been seeing for a while. Your therapist, Dr. Baum, is helping you to deal with your experience of a particular firefight during the war. Dr. Baum will discuss this with you briefly and will then invite you to relax and re-experience the firefight. You will be back on the battlefield with your platoon. After a while, you will come back to the world of Dr. Baum’s office and the discussion of your memory will continue. You will be invited to relax again and revisit the firefight in the same way. If Dr. Baum contradicts you or corrects your memory based on things you have previously established in sessions, remember that this is an attempt to help you. Keep working through your memories and reliving the firefight, even though it may be difficult.

UCF’s Interactive Narrative conference kicked off today with a really wonderful keynote talk by Chris Crawford. It was like a live-action video visit into the human brain, with a powerful conclusion about what artists should learn in order to drive the creative potential of the computer forward. Here are my notes – completely unofficial jottings, but ones that I hope will give you a sense of his argument. After these keynote notes, I discuss our encounters with the StoryBox environment.