Grand Text Auto

Since our jobs thread seems to be a useful resource, perhaps it would also be good to collect some of the upcoming conference deadlines of interest to GTxA folks.

14 November (less than two weeks from now) is the deadline for ISEA 2008 submissions.

18 November (also quite close) is the deadline for Digital Humanities 2008 submissions.

30 November is the deadline for the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization conference (calls for presentations and a media art show). I’m excited to have a U.S. conference on digital literature with an open call. It’s been a while.

Last year I posted a series of thoughts about two story generation systems: Minstrel and Universe (1 2 3 4 5). I had some critical things to say about the Minstrel system, but they were based on my reading — I hadn’t yet been in contact with the system’s author, Scott Turner. This month I finally connected with Scott, and yesterday he sent me the following thoughtful response to the issues raised by our previous discussion on Grand Text Auto.

I’m particularly happy about this because Scott has graciously offered to try to respond to any further questions in the comments for this thread. Also, I’ll be paying close attention to the conversation, given I’m writing about Minstrel in my forthcoming book. Below are Scott’s thoughts.

I haven’t worked in AI for many years, but I was delighted when Noah contacted me and I had a chance to read the discussion on this blog of my dissertation work. At the time I did this work there was no Internet as we know it today, and in some sense I worked virtually in isolation. No one else was working on computer storytelling, creativity or related subjects such as interactive fiction. The best that I could hope for in the way of a community of interest was occasionally meeting up with folks like Michael Lebowitz at a conference. I can’t help but think that if I were doing my work today, the feedback I could get through the Internet would greatly improve my results. The Internet is truly wonderful in the way it can bridge space and economics to bring together similar interests in ways that could never happen in the physical world!

After Noah pointed me towards this blog I read through the discussion of Minstrel and found it very thought provoking. I thought I’d take a few minutes to share some insight into how Minstrel came to be and discuss some of the issues that Noah raised.

From my earlier post on James Meehan’s Tale-Spin (now with a new comment from Scott Turner, author of Minstrel) some may remember that there are three versions of the system that I know about. First, the full Tale-Spin, created by Meehan at Yale, then pursued further at UC Irvine. Second, Micro Tale-spin, created as a pedagogical example by Meehan (and translated into Common Lisp by Warren Sack). Third, the version created by Meehan for “Smart Machines” — an exhibition at the Boston Computer Museum in 1987.

I find the original Tale-Spin a fascinating system. Unfortunately, it seems completely lost. Meehan (now at Google) has been through his garage on my behalf, with no luck. Chances of archives remaining at Yale or UCI seem slim.

Micro Tale-spin, while instructive, is so simplified that it loses much of what was compelling to me about the original.

This leaves us with the version created for “Smart Machines.” According to Meehan, it existed at a level of complexity between that of the full and micro versions. For the past year I’ve been hoping to find it.

It’s time to get hands-on with the future of scholarship. This is the message of ThoughtMesh, one of the intriguing projects in the new “Difference” issue of Vectors. I decided to give it a try.

I know we don’t often make personal posts here, but people have been asking about the fires and how I’m doing. This is a quick note to say I’m still at home, the fires aren’t (yet) near where I live in San Diego, and they’ve asked us to stay off the roads and our cellphones (to keep capacity free for emergency personnel). I’ve been getting my fire updates from KPBS via Twitter and the local paper via Blogspot.

I thought we’d already seen The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age — but if I could make it to Frankfurt I’d certainly drop in on Art Machines Machine Art, running now through January 27th.

Nick turned Grand Text Auto into a platform for literary gameplay with his post on When Musicians Play Interactive Fiction. Then a recent email query from Mike Alber reminded me of one of my favorite Oulipian literary games, much less well known than “N + 7”: larding. I suggest we give larding a try here on GTxA.

The process of larding, also known as “line-stretcher’s constraint” (after 19th Century writers who were paid by the line) creates a very simple game. From a given text, pick two sentences. Then write another sentence in the interval between them. Then write another sentence in each of the two available intervals of the new text (between first and second, between second and third). Then write another sentence in each of the four available intervals, and so on until the desired length is reached.

Tom Boellstorff, author of the eagerly anticipated Coming of Age in Second Life (expected next spring), sends word of a UC Irvine / Intel Research workshop on the Cultures of Virtual Worlds. There’s an abstract deadline December 1st, graduate student submissions are particularly encouraged, and there are even some travel funds to support grad student participation.

I’ve been talking with Raph Koster about using Metaplace for a graduate workshop I’ll be teaching at UCSD. I’ve had conversations with a number of PhD and MFA students who are excited by the potential — and I’m looking forward to it myself.

Recently, on Raph’s website, I came upon a link to a large (three part) interview about Metaplace on MMO Gamer. It’s wide-ranging and generous, delving into the history from which the project grows, its future goals, and its current state. If you’re hungry for a discussion of the future of virtual worlds that talks more about things like DikuMUD, open architectures, and community experimentation than World of Warcraft and Second Life, this interview is for you.

At GTxA we’ve already mentioned two reviews of Second Person (by Emily Short and Bijan Forutanpour) and recently two more have caught my eye, by two Davids: Dave Thomas and David Cox. One is from Games for Lunch, a quirky review site that plays a game for an hour, gives a stream-of-consciousness overview of that hour, and then asks the all-important question: “Do I want to keep playing?”

Since moving from http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu to http://grandtextauto.org, I’ve noticed some problems. Technorati, for example, thinks the two URLs point to two different blogs — and, even after “claiming” both on Technorati’s site, I can’t find a way to tell it they’re the same blog. We also had some serious trouble getting Google to pay attention — and now I notice we’re often not one of the top Google hits for our own posts, even after doing a “301” permanent redirect of all our old pages. Anyone out there have advice or experience with these sorts of issues?

I’ve enjoyed reading a couple rather different responses to the Grand Text Auto show at the Beall Center for Art and Technology. One appeared in New University, the campus paper at UC Irvine. The general take of “Big Joy Stick, Big Fun at the Beall Center” is probably clear from this sentence:

Anyone expecting guns and violence because of this title might be disappointed, but any student who is interested in the future of video games, digital literature or technology or their impact on culture will be pleasantly surprised.

From Gamasutra via USC IMD:

The East and West organizations of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) have announced the creation of the WGA’s inaugural Videogame Writing Award to be presented for the first time ever at the Los Angeles ceremony of the 2008 Writers Guild Awards … The new award was developed by the WGA and spearheaded by the guild’s New Media Caucus “to encourage storytelling excellence in video games, to improve the status of writers, and to begin to encourage uniform standards” within the gaming industry.

One of the pleasures of SIGGRAPH 2007 was the art gallery, clearly back in full glory — with installations, wall pieces, monitor-based works, papers, panels, and even performances. Personally, I was particularly excited that the gallery provided the opportunity to finally play, myself, two experimental games I’d previously only read about and seen demonstrated: Scalable City and The Night Journey. In their gameplay and installation forms I found them two very different approaches to the experimental art game, an impression deepened by my conversations with the lead designer of each project.

The Cybertext Yearbooks, starting in the year 2000, have been an outstanding series of anthologies covering one of GTxA’s favorite topics: textual machines. This year, editors Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa decided to convert the series to a freely-available online database, new additions to which will continue to be released as a series of volumes. As a result, I’m finally getting a chance to read the articles from 2006’s yearbook, Ergodic Histories.

Finally, it arrives.

EXHIBITION: Grand Text Auto

LOCATION: The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine

OPENING RECEPTION: October 4th, 6:30pm-9:00pm, Beall Center

SYMPOSIUM: October 5th, 1:00-5:00pm, Studio Art Bldg. 712, Room 160, UC Irvine

PERFORMANCE: October 5th, 6:00-8:00pm, Winifred Smith Hall, UC Irvine

We at Grand Text Auto are happy to announce our move to sunny southern California, where we’re now hosted by UC San Diego’s Center for Research in Computing in the Arts. CRCA’s interdisciplinary mission and high-octane crew make it a perfect match. We also want to offer our sincere thanks to the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture for hosting us from 2003 to the present.

Also, apologies to you who had trouble reaching the blog over the last week. Some issues arose in the testing and implementation of the move, including our shift to “grandtextauto.org” as our primary domain. Hopefully we’ve finished bumping through that set of potholes…

In addition to the two game-related jobs at UC Santa Cruz, there are a lot of other interesting jobs out there right now. For example, UCLA has two digital humanities faculty positions, and a post-doc.

My eye was also caught by an interesting creative writing job at Eastern Michigan University.

This Saturday, Sunday, and Monday UCSD’s Calit2 and CRCA will host a great selection of performances, installations, and screenings in collaboration with the SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery. You can see “Crossing the Line” (Peter Jackson’s 4k short film), “Takashi’s Season” (live shadow puppets combined with animation), ATLAS in Silico (playful interaction with our new metaphor for life, metagenomics, on a 100 million pixel display), my collaborative literary game project Screen (running on a 12-screen version of UCSD’s new StarCave), and much more.

I have never attended a convention with the level of contempt for its attendees displayed by Comic-Con 2007. Here’s what bothered me the most. Thousands of people who had pre-registered and paid online had to wait for hours (Jen and I waited two hours, and the line got longer behind us) in the sun, outside the convention center, just to pick up their badges. No one was there to apologize — though, toward the end of the line, some convention center employees were trying to sell overpriced water to the people who (having dressed for air conditioning) were on the edge of heatstroke after their first 90 minutes in the sun.

On the other hand, the content of the conference was great — as you can tell from this picture of me at the Kingdom of Loathing booth.

J.P. Lewis, Morgan McGuire, and Pamela Fox are asking for as many game fans as possible to take a 10-minute survey with the goal of producing data that can help improve game design. You can read about results so far or, for those who want it straight from the source, see their upcoming presentation at the 2007 ACM Sandbox Symposium (co-located with SIGGRAPH in San Diego next month).

Word on the street has it that some of the more controversial ideas are Morgan’s. Full disclosure: Morgan and I were at Brown at the same time — and the project I’ll be showing at SIGGRAPH actually depends on his G3D.

Nick and I both have the desire to write longer considerations of Ian Bogost’s new book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames — but, for now, let me just say that it’s an absolute must read. I taught pre-publication versions of the first chapter in both my graduate and undergraduate game studies courses last year. In both cases it set the stage for one of the best discussions of the term. If you’re hungry to think not just about how games work, but what they mean, and how they create meaning through their operations in ways that are different from non-procedural media (and you should be) this is the most important book for you to be reading right now.

When those cops got the drop on me, I knew it was the decisive moment, when it all came together, the turning point of my life. Never would a game of two-handed Simon mean more…

Yes, it’s time to continue the discussion of Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) and in particular what it can teach us about the fit between gameplay and story. Last week I started out by saying how engrossing and different I found the initial scenes — first covering up for a murder my avatar (Lucas Kane) committed, then investigating it (as my two police officer avatars, Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles), with good atmosphere and a nice take on dialogue trees. Then, in the next scene, things started to go wrong: irrelevant fiddling encouraged by the environment, mundane activities encouraged by the mental health meter, navigation away from the site of action encouraged by hidden Tarot cards, and one special issue left for this post: the directional-input challenges.

I remember my avatar murdering a stranger — and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Then another couple of my avatars came in to investigate the crime scene. A large black bird watched it all happen.

Yes, that’s right, recently I’ve been thinking about Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit, outside the U.S.). I realize it’s not exactly a new release, but games are not fruit, either. And I think there are some useful lessons to draw from this ambitious, flawed 2005 release from David Cage and Quantic Dream.

I’m interested here, primarily, in thinking about the relationship between gameplay and story. Cage’s ambitions in this area have been discussed by Andrew in his more timely GTxA post on Indigo Prophecy. Cage’s goals might be considered a less-risky version of the “interactive drama” vision that guides Façade: the gameplay can change the story in significant ways, but the system ensures the story retains an essential shape and pacing. In other words, the story becomes playable, rather than something that happens between moments of play.

That, however, is not what I want to talk about here. Rather, I want to discuss the fit between gameplay and story.

The “Skunk Works” product review section of the June/July issue of Game Developer magazine has a full-page discussion of Second Person by Bijan Forutanpour. It begins on an intriguing note:

As a word of advice, when meeting a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time, it’s wise to stay away from the sticky subjects of art, politics, and religion. There are certain subjects that defy definition and unanimous agreement, and if the conversation ends up there, you know you’re in for a long evening.

I don’t know if those words produced a flashback for you. Let’s just say that my flashback includes the line, “Noah says the war is all about oil!”