Grand Text Auto

Three new issues of grand, textual, and sometimes automatic writing of different sorts are out. Creative digital writing can be found in the new issue of New River Journal, which includes:

• “All the News That’s Fit to Print” by Jody Zellen
• “The Wave” by Heather Raikes
• “Digital Paintings” by Karin Kuhlmann
• “A Sky of Cinders” by Tim Lockridge
• “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” by Mark Marino
• “Semantic Disturbances” by Agam Andreas
• “(NON)sense for to from Eva Hesse” by Carrie Meadows

It is too late for you to write the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia entries for World of Warcraft, Bill Gates, and cell phones, but these and other articles await your writing and editorial work. Don’t try to spend it elsewhere; at least, not officially. The small number of literate children who lived between the 5th and 12th centuries in England are counting on you.

Rhizome is now in the midst of the sixth year of our Commissions Program — a singular initiative that supports the creation of original works of new media art work. This year, we will award seven artists/ collectives with commissions ranging from $3000-$5000.

Rhizome Commissions Program
Deadline for applications: midnight, March 31, 2008

We support: New Media Art, by which we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and also works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Commissioned projects can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, or the web.

Tuned to a dead channel: Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak with flash programming by erational.org.

In my first recording experiment, I recorded a net broadcast from a friend in France, who provided me with a silent digital signal. This produced a completely silent recording. … After some research, it seemed that the voices required some background noise in order to take shape. The net broadcast transmitted a signal of white noise, that I digitally recorded. While recording the broadcast from France, I asked questions of whomever might be listening and recorded them separately into another recorder with an open-air microphone. I took the white noise broadcast recordings, slowed them down (as the voices are said to be in the higher registers), and filtered out the lower frequencies.

The big annual awards event for interactive fiction, the 2007 XYZZY awards, has just concluded. Admiral Jota’s Lost Pig, winner of the IF Comp, took four XYZZY awards including the big one, Best Game. I was pleased to see that the uncanny Deadline Enchanter by Alan DeNiro won the award for Best Use of Medium. Congratulations to these and other winners: James Webb, Maryam Gousheh-Forgeot, David Fisher, Stephen Granade, and Christopher Huang. And, congratulations to all the nominees this year.

Creator of ELIZA/Doctor, awarded the Norbert Wiener Award by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, author of Computer Power and Human Reason.

Play with a nice child

Face the dark winter

Have your head spontaneously catch fire

Gravitation is a new, free, low-res game for Windows, Mac, and Linux by Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage. After you play, you’ll probably want to read Jason’s note on the game.

I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game is an ultradifficult pastiche of early platformers. You could play that, or you could play, or watch someone painfully play, China Miner, a genuine early platformer that is exceedingly difficult. (Thanks to Jesper for first telling me about the amazing China Miner.) Both of these are hilarious and well worth dying for – repeatedly.

Check out josh g’s post about a heated discussion dealing with the inclusion of Lost in the Static (discussed previously on here) in the GDC program while a list of 300 game ideas (one of which was the basis for Lost in the Static, two of which were realized in other GDC-discussed games) didn’t make the cut.

I guess the main thing at issue is what status game ideas posted online should have when compared to actual games.

The truth is, executing a project is often a very important part of it – you can then show it to others, and you can adjust your concept and redesign repeatedly when you start working through the actual process of producing.

I just wrote up some notes toward a talk at the Codework workshop at WVU. I figured I’d drop them in here, for those interested in the aesthetics of programming and the relationship of programming and creative writing.

I start with a difference between computer programming and what is traditionally called creative writing: Code has both a human meaning and a formal machine semantics, while creative writing in the usual sense has only human meaning — it cannot be compiled and executed on a computer.

“I have poured the message of love and peace and happiness in Space Channel 5. These were the emotions and desires of this game.” -Tetsuya Mizuguchi

“Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. … [but] a lot of people like cake.” -Erik Wolpaw

What does it mean for a video game to have messages? Do any good ones have messages? Are there games that aren’t really fun to play, don’t have messages, but are still good games? That is, can games have anything besides message and gameplay?

Following up on recent discussion, I’ll describe here why I think Portal has more of a message than Passage. (I’ve tried to keep the spoilers to a minimum in this one…)

Okay okay, just one more short post and I’ll quiet down for a few hours. You can now submit to IndieCade: International Festivals of Independent Games. The main fest takes place July 10-13, 2008 in Bellevue, Washington, and there are year-round showcases of work as well. Check the IndieCade site for further details. Deadline: Midnight April 11, 2008 PST.

Andrew Plotkin, of interactive fiction fame among other types of gamey fame, has been blogging at The Gameshelf of late. His first post, early this month, was on games that don’t exist.

Emily Short has started a cover art drive and, to put a more appealing face on IF, is seeking contributed illustrations for existing works of interactive fiction.

A radical rehypertextualization of the Web appears with hints of Storyspace maps and multi-colored links of various sorts: Hypertextopia. There’s a library of marked-up work ready for your perusal and even a tray of wacky textual tools. (Via qumbler.)

How is it that a 2D, five-minute, public domain videogame with an effective resolution of 100×12, developed by one guy who uses a 250 MHz PPC computer, can be better than a 3D, five-hour videogame that runs at 1080i, is the product of a well-funded and well-equipped corporate workplace and has been named the best game of 2007 by numerous publications?

I’ll explain.

Many of you will be interested to know that Jeff Howard’s book Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives is now out from A K Peters. Jeff’s dissertation was discussed on here, and he sent us a writeup of an ACM symposium. The book is a very nice contribution which I read shortly before publication. Here’s the endorsement of it that I wrote:

A special situation obtains near Bedford Avenue tomorrow – the opportunity to play a newly computerized version of Guy Debord’s 1978 Kriegspiel. For those who can’t make it, you can still download Kriegspiel in beta form and play it. For those who can, the event is at the gallery Over the Opening, 60 North 6th Street, 2nd floor, Brooklyn (L train to Bedford Avenue). It takes place tomorrow (Friday February 22, 2008) from 7pm to 10pm. Prospective players should bring their own laptops.

The official word from the group RSG, creators of the computer version, follows…

A new site, Retro Sabotage, redoes classic games into short interactive snippets that comment cleverly on videogame themes and ideas – and, in the most recent case, make fun of one of the ways gaming has casually changed since the good old days. So far there are multiple parodical remixes of Space Invaders, Pac Man, and Pong.

My new year’s poem for 2008 was a computer program, a very short Perl program that generates poems without recourse to any external dictionary, word list, or other data file. I call it ppg256-1: “ppg” because it’s a Perl poetry generator, “256” for the length of the program in characters, and “-1” in the hopes that I will refine the program further and produce other versions. It was an attempt to drive process intensity up, keep program size down, and uncover what the essential elements of a poetry generator are.

To run ppg256-1, you can paste this onto your command line in Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, or (if you have Perl installed) Windows:

perl -le'sub w{substr("cococacamamadebapabohamolaburatamihopodito",2*int(rand 21),2).substr("estsnslldsckregspsstedbsnelengkemsattewsntarshnknd",2*int(rand 25),2)}{$l=rand 9;print "\n\nthe ".w."\n";{print w." ".substr("atonof",rand 5,2)." ".w;redo if $l-->0;}redo;}'

I found the process of developing this program very useful for my own thinking about computation and language. I’ll explain a bit about what that process was, in the hopes that I can communicate some of what I learned from it and to encourage you, if you’re interested in creative computation, to write short programs to explore the forms and ideas that you find most compelling.

For the first issue of Up Right Down, writers and other narrative artists were invited to find various different ways to tell the same story:

In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn’t tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

Facultad de Informática · Universidad Complutense de Madrid
17-19 September 2008

April 18, 2008 – Submission deadline
May 23, 2008 – Authors’ Notification
June 27, 2008 – Deadline for final camera-ready copies

The aim of the workshop is to facilitate exchange of ideas on the topic of computational creativity. It will bring together people from AI, Cognitive Science and related areas such as Psychology, Philosophy and the Arts who research questions related to the notion of creativity with respect to computers.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…

Malcolm Ryan, a frequent commenter on here who several of us recently heard undertaking to analyze a page of Peter Rabbit, has apparently been circulating the beginning of a manifesto pertaining to interactive narrative and drama systems. Most people in this area think of Dogz when they hear “dogmatic,” but there’s also the obedience to doctrine that the Dogme 95 filmmakers have pledged and the Dogma 2001 vows Ernest Adams proposed, following the lead of those filmmakers.

Grand Text Auto has managed to obtain the first vow from this still-secret document:

As a signatory to the 2007 Narrative AI Manifesto, I do hereby solemnly vow that:

1) I will no longer assign events a numeric “tension” value and plot a story as an Aristotelean “dramatic arc”. I recognise that real stories contain situations and devices that are more semantically complex than can be represented by a sequence of numbers that rises and falls.

What else might be in store? We have some ideas …

• I heard several wonderful talks from researchers at GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Game Lab. It was particularly good to hear from my new colleague, Jesper Juul, who has joined us as a lecturer in the program I’m in, Writing and Humanistic Studies. Welcome, Jesper!
• Ian Bogost and I completed our book on the Atari VCS, Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform. There is still copy-editing, indexing, design, production, much more to do before it manifests itself to the world, but we’ve got everything in to the press. Whew!

Things are bad! And ten of them are the worst of all, the worst of all time. With that in mind, and in the spirit of looking into the bottom 5% of user-created content, Grand Text Auto presents you with this list of the 10 worst lists of 10 worst things.

[10] The 10 Best and 10 Worst IT-Related Super Bowl Commercials of All Time (So Far). The compilers of these two lists say “we must admit to a soft spot for monkeys,” which won’t save them from a fusillade of my abuse. The lists are not ranked, precluding an exciting buildup of interest; they can’t keep themselves to ten and include an honorable mention; the article is broken up over six pages for no good reason; and there is only one case in which the commercial itself is included – every other entry just has a textual description. The payoff we get for clicking through this is learning about things like Autobytel.com’s lugubrious advertisement The Pajama Purchase. And, as the one person who bothered to comment on this list has written: “You should post a follow-up article to this: Top 10 worst spelling and grammar mistakes in this article.”