Grand Text Auto

“ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games” will be at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology from October 5th to November 24th. I’ll be around to be part of a panel of First Person contributors on October 5th, and also for the opening on October 7th. I’m looking forward to seeing folks there! (More info follows.)

I just got off the phone with Linda Lauro-Lazin, Chair of the SIGGRAPH 2005 Art Gallery. We had a very interesting conversation.

As many GTxA readers are aware, 2002 saw a number of disastrous decisions for SIGGRAPH. During the planning for SIGGRAPH 2003 the panels program was killed and interactive art was deleted from the art gallery. Most of the rest of my top reasons for attending SIGGRAPH (art and culture papers, artist talks, etc) disappeared.

Apparently, that’s all changing for 2005. Linda wants to bring back interactive art in a big way. And she’s recruiting committee members and jurors who are interested in experimental narrative forms, game art, and other work of interest to GTxA folks.

Tonight’s the opening of “The Passage of Mirage — Illusory Virtual Objects.” It’s curated by Christiane Paul and Zhang Ga, and features works by Jim Campbell, Vuk Cosic, John Gerrard, W. Bradford Paley, Eric Paulos, Wolfgang Staehle, Thomson & Craighaid, and Carlo Zanni. There are artist talks coming up on the 30th, and then a symposium titled “Negotiating Realities: New Media Art and the Post-Object” on October 10.

But that’s hardly all Christiane’s been up to. For example, two cool projects have recently gone up at the Whitney Artport (a space she curates). One is {Software} Structures by Casey Reas (with Robert Hodgin, William Ngan, Jared Tarbell). The other is Demonstrate by Ken Goldberg and Alpha Lab (click “view again” if your browser blocks popups).

More details on all of these below.

Fable is one of this year’s most anticipated games — and with good reason. The creative team behind it has been responsible for a string of innovative games (e.g., Black and White, Dungeon Keeper) and this time they’ve set themselves a massive challenge. Fable, which will be released shortly, aims to re-imagine the adventure game so that it doesn’t center on hoop-jumping — it aims to situate a traditional hero’s journey within a simulated world. While some early reviews bemoan the fact that elements of Fable had to be scaled back, it’s clear that the game is still remarkably ambitious. As the player’s character ages, and as the world changes around him (“him” because plans for female heros were among those cut), he can choose at almost any time to explore and adventure in the world, pick up the plot of the hero’s journey, or try to use the actions available in the simulated world to route around what would be the next necessary step in a hoop-jumping adventure game. And, what’s more, this world isn’t just a graphical world. It’s also a linguistic one. It’s one in which the work of writers — James Leach chief among them — is central.

You can read quite a bit online about the work of Peter Molyneux and Fable‘s game design (e.g., in The New York Times). You can read quite a bit about the work of the AI team and the simulated world and characters (e.g., early reviews from places like IGN). I will concentrate, in these posts, on the writing of Fable.

Today’s edition of The World (a BBC, PRI, and WGBH co-production) includes a story on newsgaming (wma), especially September 12th. There’s a nice bit of interview with Gonzalo, and also a couple comments from yours truly.

I’ve been talking quite a bit recently (e.g., in the Dichtung Digital interview) about the idea of playing (with) text — specifically, about textual play that operates via logics that are more linguistic than they are graphical. Not detecting collisions with graphical words, but, for example, interactively moving along chains of words that exist in bodies of text.

My first experiment in this direction — conceived and created with collaborators Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich — has just been released. Regime Change is the first of two “textual instruments” that were commissioned by Turbulence. We’ll be releasing the second, News Reader, later this month.

We’re scooting over to make room for a visiting driver, Mary Flanagan. Mary’s work ranges from games research to media projects to being a professor in NYC — you can read more in her GTxA bio (rollover her name above) or at her site. And check out the pages of Mary’s tiltfactor lab (with which — full disclosure — I’m affiliated). We’re looking forward to having Mary’s energetic, thoughtful, and thought-provoking voice added to the GTxA mix!

I had a great time talking with Roberto Simanowski earlier this year — our conversation ranging over topics of art, writing, digital media education, and more — and the resulting interview has just been published at Dichtung Digital. The new issue looks like a good one, and I’m particularly pleased to see John Cayley’s Overboard on the table of contents. The only blemish appears to be a review of First Person that gets many simple facts wrong — starting on the very first line, with Pat’s name. (As of this writing, the reviewer has him as “Herrigan” rather than “Harrigan.”)

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: “Control and Freedom: On Interactivity as a Software Effect”

Asked to address one of ISEA’s sins: Our tendency is to take work at interface value. To appreciate work because of its novelty, rather than the actual experience of work.

User-friendly interfaces conflate control with freedom. A version of freedom is emerging within politics, society, and computing that isn’t opposed to control. As in gated communities.

We just finished the panel with Michael, Nick/Scott, Jill, and yours truly. Now the keynote for ISEA’s “Histories of the New” thread: Shuddhabrata Sengupta on “The Remains of Tomorrows Past: Speculations on the Antiquity of New Media Practice in South Asia”

Starts with a reading of Kipling’s “The Deep Sea Cables.” (He’s happy to claim Kipling as a fellow South Asia, with a fascination with new media.) We are forced to occupy an eye of the storm called “the new” while waiting to be the ground for tomorrow’s mushrooms. The Remains of Tomorrows Past” — the things that appeared yesterday as though they might credibly grow into a tomorrow. Those that do are indebted to those that do not.

Well, the GTxA crew has certainly been enjoying ISEA. Personally, I’d say this is one of the most ambitious and interesting gatherings I’ve ever attended. But it hasn’t been terribly easy to blog — until now, in Helsinki. Now I’m writing notes about a panel on “Curating and Preserving New Media Art.”

Steve Dietz. Two core principles for curating new media art. (1) Like curating any art, but different. (2) The most interesting potential is how it might change the practice of curating.

While I plan to do a bit more updating of the notes from day 1 and day 2 (using material I wrote up at the conference), I’ll be making separate posts about the sessions in which I spoke. (As you might imagine, I didn’t take too many notes during these.) I’m writing this from Helsinki, where I’ve found an open wireless connection that will let me web surf, but not email (unfortunately). I’m here for ISEA 2004 — as are Michael, Andrew, and Scott. Hopefully we’ll continue to find access and do some posting about this conference as well.

Back to Hypertext, on Wednesday I was part of the hypertext readings. These kicked off with Rob Kendall, who did a reading/divination with a new (or maybe still in-process) piece called Soothcircuits. His two questions from the audience were “Which of the next sessions should I attend?” and “Is there a path to peace?” — both of which he handled with aplomb. Soothcircuits is on the web somewhere, for those who want to do their own “readings,” but I haven’t been able to find the URL. (If someone has it, could they post it in the comments?)

I presented this morning, and so couldn’t blog — but here’s a start at the afternoon. There will be more filling in, of both pages, I hope, before I fly to Helsinki tomorrow.

“Saving Private Hypertext” by Marshall and Golovchinsky. (Obviously, related to Acid-Free Bits and the ELO PAD project.) Starts with an image of the contents of Uncle Buddy’s — she can’t read the floppies, or even play the audio tapes, so all she can do is read the documentation. Then she saw that the web version of Forward Anywhere had a problem. She went to look at it, had a hard time reading her own code, and then finally discovered that the directory was protected by a password she’d forgotten.

I’m having some trouble getting online at the conference, but will be trying to blog a bit at ACM Hypertext 2004. (Right now I can’t get email, but I’m able to web browse/post.) Anyway, here are some notes from yesterday (which I’ll be updating a couple times after this first posting).

Doug Engelbart’s keynote: “Facilitating the Evolution of our Collective IQ: What Universities and Professional Societies Can Do.” He’s got more slides than he can get through, but Jim Whitehead says the slides can go online. Doug says he’s presenting a challenge to this community. His 1951 lifetime goal: “As much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.” Not office automation, but human augmentation. An example of the kinds of problems that Doug wants to help people solve are the large-scale, urgent ones that the AC/UNU Millennium Project identifies.

Pat and I have been officially informed by MIT Press that Sizirak Publishing Co. of Seoul (web presence apparently coming soon) will be publishing a Korean edition of First Person. It’s great that the ideas will be getting out into wider circulation!

We’ve also been offered the opportunity to review the translation before publication. Unfortunately, neither of us would be able to do this on our own. Any thoughts on whose command of the language and the subject matter might be up to the task?

Turbulence’s new Networked_Performance blog has only been going in earnest for a couple weeks, and it’s already hopping. Head over to learn, contribute, or help plan the 2006 conference (which will be organized by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.; Emerson College, Boston; and California State University at Monterey Bay). Meanwhile, Matt Kirschenbaum brings word of WriteHere.net — “a wiki community for creative writers and fiction readers.” My Spring 2003 workshop did some WikiWork, and I’ll be interested to see how such things scale up at WriteHere. Finally, there’s a new issue of Intelligent Agent with essays on copyright, free cooperation, and virtual embodiment. The reviews section also has some reflections on Bang the Machine and GDC from GTxA drinking buddy Adam Chapman.

Many people teach with blogs these days, and there are a number of approaches. For example, Liz Lawley’s mt courseware helps one make a cool, faculty-authored blog out of the course website. (A nice example of this in use is Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Computer and Text.)

I used blogs with my students in Spring 2003 (I didn’t teach during 2003-04, instead opting for the carefree life of the “Traveling Scholar”). My approach to teaching with blogs was a bit different, organizing the class blogging around a mini-blogsphere (each student having an independent blog, for which the course might be one of many subjects blogged). I’ve never written it up before, but now have in preparation for the Blogging Tutorial that Matt Webb and I are doing in sunny Santa Cruz, CA next week.

In various news… Via Joah, a Chinese author has sold an SMS novel for a pretty penny (especially when you consider how artificially depressed China’s currency is). Via Michelle, on a less-commercial note, the Long Island City-based Flux Factory is currently showing Cartünnel: a comix fluxture — a physical maze of intersecting paths, lined with comics, and created by a group of authors aiming for a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience. Finally, don’t forget the ACM Hypertext conference next week in Santa Cruz. I’ll be presenting four times — and participants in the Blogging Tutorial will spend a full day hanging out with me and Matt Webb.

A new installment of First Person — Critical Simulation — is live at electronic book review. It includes essays by Simon Penny, Gonzalo Frasca, and Phoebe Sengers — as well as responses by folks like N. Katherine Hayles, Mizuko Ito, and GTxA’s own Michael Mateas. This section takes up questions of simulation which have also been of concern in essays posted earlier (such as Espen Aarseth’s) but these essays foreground ethical and political concerns. Gonzalo Frasca’s contribution, for example, is his well-known “Videogames of the Oppressed” which (as the title suggests) engages with the work of Augusto Boal.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to visit the eternal city this fall, here’s your opportunity. October 21-22 at the University of Roma Tre, the Department of Linguistics is running a two-day colloquium on writing and new media. The three areas of focus will be:

• Orality, Writing, Memory
• Writing and the Professions
• Writing and New Media

New media artworks that aren’t digitally distributable are near-invisible until they have good, accessible documentation. Screen — a collaborative project I helped create in Brown’s virtual reality “Cave” — just became visible today.

Now, in addition to the interview mentioned by Nick, the feature at The Iowa Review Web includes both a Screen overview video and a document of the entire piece. Michelle Higa‘s work on the second of these is so artful that I think of it as a single-channel video artwork in its own right, rather than simply documentation.

I’m happy to say that the Ludology section of First Person is now live at electronic book review. What is ludology? That question is part of what this section aims to address.

The term was brought into computer game studies by Gonzalo Frasca, who is well known for his thinking about connecting games with politics and the wider culture. But the term is now used, at least by some, to identify a type of game studies that emphasizes formal aspects of games — at times seeming to bracket off nearly all concern with anything beyond the mechanisms of gameplay.

Nick and I are pleased to announce the publication of a new pamphlet we’ve written, Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature. AFB is the first publication of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project. While we wrote most of the text of the pamphlet, Nick and I are very much building on the work of the last couple of years by the participants in PAD.

This is one I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. What happens when you take a writer, who is editor-in-chief for a gaming magazine, and put a Ted Nelson book in her hands? You get a combination of three perspectives that we’re accustomed to only seeing pairwise: Storytronics.

Katherine Phelps is the author, and while she was pretty early to the party with Storytronics (1998/99) you still don’t see many references to her work. It’s a pity, because things like her Story Shapes for Digital Media offer some of the same example-driven help out of the “Choose your own adventure” box that I also admire in Narrative as Virtual Reality. With Andrew Pam (who is also behind Xanadu Australia) she’s been running the literary website Glass Wings for a decade, as of this March. (You might remember reading about them in this Salon article).

I’m working on a short paper for ACM Hypertext 2004, which will be at UC Santa Cruz this August (and where Matt Webb and I will be offering a tutorial on blogging). The short papers deadline is the 28th of this month. The working title of my paper is “What Hypertext Is” and my goal is to provide a 2-page answer to the old chestnut “What is Hypertext?” I want to give a much, much better answer than you find in many places — such as the current everything2 entry, which begins: “Hypertext is nothing more than the inclusion of links within a body of text.”

I’m including a draft below, and would definitely appreciate comments. I can’t make it any longer, but I could substitute, clarify, reconsider, etc. Here’s a preview:

We can now, based on our examination of Nelson’s texts, provide a relatively concise definition of hypertext appropriate for a world familiar with the Web: “Hypertext is a term coined by Ted Nelson for textually-focused forms of hypermedia (new media that branch or perform on request). Examples include the link-based ‘discrete hypertext’ (of which the Web is one example) and the level-of-detail-based ‘stretchtext.'”