Grand Text Auto

I’m excited to announce an opening for a Postdoctoral Researcher to work at UCSD with Lev Manovich and yours truly. We’re developing a number of research and field-building projects in the area of software studies. The position is available immediately — and application details are below.

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH POSITION
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

We are currently recruiting for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join a new Software Studies initiative at UCSD. The researcher will work with Dr. Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts) and Dr. Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Assistant Professor, Communication), playing a key role in all projects and field-building activities.

The goals of Software Studies initiative at UCSD are:

* to foster research and develop models and tools for the study of software from the perspectives of cultural criticism, the humanities, and the social sciences;
* to help establish the new field of “software studies” that will complement existing research in cyberculture and new media;
* to develop projects that will demonstrate how next generation cyberinfrastructure can be used by humanists, social scientists, and cultural practitioners.

Here’s a promising blog launched last month: http://virtualcultures.typepad.com

Ron Meiners & Celia Pearce present Virtual Cultures, a blog and online discussion on the design, management and study of community and culture in online games and virtual worlds. Please join us and our guest authors for a lively and in-depth in “applied cybersociology,” exploring philosophical, sociological and practical issues of social dynamics and emergent behavior in online virtual spaces. Our initial posts talk about our intentions and perspectives regarding the blog, which will focus on the emerging understanding of online social behavior. We also report on the recent IMGDC 2007 Indie MMO conference, which we both attended.

Jesper Juul and Judith Faifman will be speaking at UCSD on Wednesday from noon to 2pm. All welcome! Official information follows…

What is Game Literacy? Two presentations on playing and reading games

Noon- 2pm, Wednesday, April 18th
San Diego Supercomputer Center Auditorium

On Wednesday, April 18, 2007, two international authorities will examine video gaming and literacy, from the perspective of the game maker and the player. Both talks will be delivered from 12 noon to 2pm in the auditorium of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, based at UC San Diego.

This coming Wednesday, Jordan Mechner, Mark Marino, Jeremy Douglass, and yours truly will be at USC for an evening of discussion around “writing and gameplay” — in part as a celebration of the publication of Second Person. As Mark discusses over at WRT, even with four speakers we’re barely able to scratch the surface of the book’s diversity. But I’m very glad to have one of the world’s most respected game designers (and game writers, who also makes films) on stage with interdisciplinary scholar/artists like Mark and Jeremy. It should be a fun evening.

I’ve just received my copy of The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media. Editors Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a great table of contents — including contributions from Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Laura Borràs Castanyer, Markku Eskelinen, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Marie-Laure Ryan, Roberto Simanowski, and yours truly. My piece is a revised version of my Playable Media and Textual Instruments essay.

The Eighteenth International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia is operating under the banner “Five Autonomous Programmes, One Unified Conference.” The programs, each with its own chair and committee, are: Hypertext Models and Theory, Practical Hypertext, Hypertext and Society, Hypertext and the Person, and Hypertext, Culture, and Communication. The deadline is May 7th.

There’s a special issue out of Bathhouse, a journal of “interdisciplinary and hybrid arts.” It features a new essay from Dmitry Golynko-Volfson on the history and future of the Russian Net art scene. I was happy to hang out with Dmitry at the Summer Literary Seminars last year, in between wandering the city reading sticker literature. The new Bathhouse also has video of Talking Cure, which I performed in St. Petersburg during the same trip.

Bathhouse is edited by current Creative Writing graduate students at Eastern Michigan University — and earlier featured Nick’s collaboration with William Gillespie on The Executor.

I’m excited about an upcoming event — next Thursday at UCSD — on Massively Multiplayer Online worlds, game studies, economics, and cultural politics. The off-campus guests are Julian Dibbell and Raph Koster, and the local talent includes a grad student from my department Ge Jin (aka Jingle) as well as William Huber (a grad student in Vis Arts). It’s from 4-6:30pm, and there’s more info below.

Earlier this month I posted an excerpt from my in-process manuscript — currently titled Expressive Processing — on the topic of process intensity. Interesting discussion ensued, I decided to post further excerpts, and I realized what excerpt I’d post next: the part of the book that comes just before the section on process intensity.

This is a central passage for the book. I’m laying out my basic perspective — what it is that draws me toward examining processes — and starting to work through the practice-oriented part of that perspective.

I appreciated the comments from people last time (they’ve already resulted in manuscript revisions) and I’ll be interested to hear any thoughts on the moves this excerpt makes.

Media Machines

A computer is a strange type of machine. While most machines were developed for particular purposes — washing machines, forklifts, movie projectors, typewriters — modern computers are designed specifically to be able to simulate the operations of many different types of machines, depending on the computer’s current instructions.

This is why a computer can simulate a movie projector: showing a set of image frames in quick succession. It’s also why a computer can act like a tape player: reading and amplifying a stream of sound data.

And it is for this same reason that computers can be instructed to act like previously-impossible types of machines.

Earlier I posted about the publication of the Encyclopedia Project‘s first volume, Encyclopedia: A-E. Well, now Encyclopedia launch events have come to So Cal. Last night’s event in San Diego was a blast (and standing room only) so I’m looking forward to tonight’s — at Betalevel in Los Angeles — and I encourage folks to join us.

After the enthusiastic response to First Person, many people suggested that we create a sequel — and we acted on that idea. Today Pat Harrigan and I are happy to announce the publication of a new edited volume: Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (table of contents, Booksense link, ISBN.nu link).

Like First Person, Second Person takes an unusually broad look at our field — and, in order to do so, discusses topics rarely given their due in previous scholarly publications. These range from tabletop role-playing games to improvisational theater, from political games to procedural authorship. The approach is to begin with specifics, and from there build up the insights of game designers, artists, writers, computer scientists, and scholars.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about Second Person in the future. But now, for those interested, I’ll include the book’s introduction below.

I’m currently working on the first chapter of a book manuscript, trying to find the right way to introduce a number of concepts that will be key for understanding the chapters that follow. Recently I’ve been trying to find a concise way to introduce Chris Crawford’s 1980s concept of “process intensity” — while also arguing for a view of the concept updated for our current circumstances. My current draft is below.

We might think of Pong and many other early computer games (e.g., Tetris) as being authored almost entirely in terms of processes, rather than data. An “e-book,” on the other hand, might be just the opposite — a digital media artifact authored almost completely by the arrangement of pre-created text and image data. In an influential 1987 article, game designer and digital media theorist Chris Crawford coined the phrase “process intensity” to describe a work’s balance between process and data (what he called its “crunch per bits ratio”).

The 17th issue of Vodaphone’s receiver just launched, with a great collection of articles on games and play. Editor Katja Hoffmann has gathered an eclectic group of authors from industry, journalism, academe, and the arts — from Matt Jones (Director of User-Experience Design for Nokia Design Multimedia) to Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn (Tale of Tales / Entropy8zuper!, as discussed earlier) to folks like Lev Manovich, Gonzalo Frasca, and yours truly.

If you want an MFA in writing for digital media, Brown’s Literary Arts department has the program for you. And, as it happens, Brown offers a generous fellowship specifically in this area, which provides two years of support to do your own work, participate in three writing workshops, and take four other Brown courses of your choice. Deadline this year: December 15th postmark.

October 31st is the deadline for submissions to a digital narrative panel, co-sponsored by GTxA compatriots Writer Response Theory, at the “3rd Online Congresss of the Observatory for Cybersociety.” Full papers are required, and 10-32 pages is the normal range, though the length restrictions are flexible. More details follow.

My contribution to the Tate’s e and eye project has just gone live: “e and eyeToy.” Where else can you get Myron Krueger, Camille Utterback, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, EyeToy: Play and much more all bundled into one short essay?

Also, if you’ve called for an “e and eye” reservation, but found them all full, I’ve been told that the Tate has now expanded the number of available reservations. The next event is tonight, after which there’s one on the 30th of October and the series concludes on the 13th of November.

Michael and Noah are at a A Multi-Discipinary Approach to Computer Games at UC Irvine. We’re trading off coverage (and remember that we’re just reporting it as we hear it — don’t quote the speakers without hearing it from them). Today’s speakers come from backgrounds ranging from CSCW (Bonnie Nardi, “Liminoid Play in World of Warcraft”) to computer graphics (Bill Tomlinson, “A Technique for Improving Cross-device Graphics and Animation for Multi-Device Games”) to AI (Michael’s “Towards Game Generation”) to game design (Tracy Fullerton’s “Process of Discovery: The Night Journey Project as Game/Art Research”).

Spreading the disciplinary umbrella further, the first speaker is Walt Scacchi discussing “Computer Gaming as a Social Movement.”

If you want to spend a few days of gloomy January in beautiful Italy, and you are interested in how current research on computer games calls for clarification of philosophical issues, then hopefully you have an abstract ready to go (or nearly so). The deadline for “The Philosophy of Computer Games” — to be held in Modena/Reggio Emilia, Italy, on January 25-27, 2007 — is tomorrow, October 16. Details follow.

I’m currently enjoying a fascinating email discussion sparked by an invitation from Penny Florence, Tim Mathews, and John Cayley to be a “virtual critic” for a series of events at the Tate Modern this fall. The series is e and eye: art and poetry between the electronic and the visual. The live events will take place Mondays from 6:30 to 8pm, starting two weeks from now on the 16th of October, continuing on the 23rd and 30th of October, and concluding the 13th of November. I hope some folks will be able to make it to the Tate in person, and I’ll post something (maybe just a comment below) when the e and eye website opens the “virtual” contributions for reading and comments from afar.

My expensive typewriter‘s email program recently popped up with the CFP (deadline November 6) for a digital literature conference in the Netherlands with an impressive lineup of keynotes:

An international conference on literature and the new media entitled Re-mediating Literature will take place at Utrecht University (the Netherlands) 4-6 July 2007, with keynote speakers Katherine Hayles, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan Baetens, and Samuel Weber. The aim of this conference is to examine how technological changes have affected the ‘old’ medium of literature in the present (digital media) and the past (writing machines, film, radio, phonograph, grammophone, television). Our website features all relevant information concerning the conference including the call for papers (deadline is November 6, 2006):
http://www2.let.uu.nl/remediatingliterature/

The CFP for the upcoming Digital Games Research Association International Conference has just appeared. The conference will be September 24th to 28th, 2007, in Tokyo (right after the Tokyo Game Show). The deadline for papers and panel proposals is midnight (Apia time), February 14, 2007. The selection will be based on full papers and panel proposals. Details follow.

Last month I posted about a job in my department for which I’m on the search committee. Well, now it’s been approved for us to also advertise another tenure-track position for this year “with an emphasis on information and communication technology, and new media industries.” Review of applications for this second position begins November 15th.

Ian Bogost kicks off his new column — “Games with an Agenda” — with a familiar picture of yours truly toting a rather large rifle. What follows is a thoughtful discussion of the NRA’s game development work and the representation of guns in games generally. The column’s publisher is Serious Games Source, the serious games outlet of CMP’s website Gamasutra. Stay tuned for next week, when Gonzalo Frasca’s column — “Playing with Fire” — debuts in the same place. Gonzalo and Ian will publish their columns on alternating weeks, and the agenda is sure to get heated.

Maybe you read about it in the LA Weekly or The Believer or some other leading edge news source — but now it’s time to experience the world’s finest alphabetically-ordered literary publication first hand. If you live near Providence or Philadelphia, I jealously report that you can attend one of the first launch parties for the Encyclopedia Project‘s stunning initial publication: Encyclopedia volume 1: A-E. The Providence event is this Saturday, September 23rd, 9pm, at AS220. The Philadelphia event is Monday, September 25, 7:30pm, at NEXUS. Even if you can’t make it, scope out your entry for F-K.

Last summer an email from Jim Whitehead kicked off an interesting GTxA thread on teaching computer games. Since then, Jim has taught his Foundations of Interactive Game Design and helped launch the new undergraduate degree in computer game design at UC Santa Cruz (where they’ve also recently hired GTxA’s own Michael). I’ve also recently put together a draft of the syllabus for my Fall graduate seminar in computer game studies, where I tried to put into practice some of my thoughts from the conversation we had here last summer.

Recently, in an email exchange with Jim, he and I started talking more concretely about a problem that also came up in our earlier theoretical discussions: getting students access to games. We can’t do what people do with the last generation of “new media” (film and video). We can’t do group showings, because students need to experience the games individually and in small groups. We can’t send students to the library media center, because libraries may be set up for individual experiences of laserdisks, but not game disks.