Grand Text Auto

As mentioned in my previous post, the first publication about Minstrel appeared in the mid-1980s. The system was brought to completion over the course of a decade, resulting in Turner’s 1994 publication of The Creative Process: A Computer Model of Storytelling and Creativity. Over the first few years of Minstrel‘s development, some of the ideas at its foundation continued to evolve. Particularly, in Schank’s lab the model of dynamic memory and its adaptations was extended into the idea of “Case-Based Reasoning” (CBR). The basic idea of CBR is in some ways quite close to that of scripts: in the main people do not decide what to do in each situation by reasoning from first principles, but rather by drawing on previous knowledge. However, rather than suggesting that each of us has a “restaurant script” and a “sports event script” and so on, case-based reasoning assumes that we remember many cases, and reason from them — much as the learning of previous cases is formalized in legal and business education. (I’m adapting this account from 1989’s Inside Case-Based Reasoning.)

We’ve had quite a bit of writing about literary work using digital computation since the 1990s (e.g., Landow’s Hypertext; Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory; Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck; Aarseth’s Cybertext). But there’s been surprisingly little written about two story generation systems that got their start in the mid-1980s: Minstrel and Universe. They’ve caught my attention recently, so I’m planning to write two or three posts (after this introductory post) about them. I’ll be contrasting them with the best-known story generator, Tale-Spin — which, if memory serves, is written about in all but one of the books mentioned above.

This Friday and Saturday (February 17-18) at UC Irvine there’s a free single-track conference in Humanities Instructional Building 135. I’m looking forward to great presentations, given that it’s organized by smart folks (Barbara Cohen and Peter Krapp) and the speakers include Mark Hansen, Erkki Huhtamo, Henry Lowood, Lev Manovich, Tara McPherson, Robert Nideffer, Mark Poster, John Seely Brown, Rita Raley, Jennifer Urban, and other luminaries. You can check out the online schedule, and if you want to catch me I’m presenting at 3:15 on Friday.

Now’s a great time both to apply for some funding from Turbulence and to offer your support to one of digital media’s most important institutions.

You can get funding by applying (before February 28th) to Turbulence’s New England Initiative II. The first round of this provided the support for Regime Change and News Reader. The new round’s projects will be featured both at the Turbulence site and at Art Interactive.

Here are some folks who think about “digital writing” in somewhat different terms than we usually do at GTxA. The Writing in Digital Environments Research Center has just announced the First WIDE Conference, “Writing : : Digital Knowledge,” to be held April 6th and 7th, 2006, at the James B. Henry Center of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. The information here is from their announcement email.

January 30th is the deadline for proposals to the ISEA 2006 Symposium. ISEA is the International Symposium on Electronic Art — the big gathering that took most of GTxA to Scandinavia in 2004 (where we raised a toast and took notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7). This year the ISEA 2006 Festival and Symposium will take place in San Jose, California from August 5th through 13th. The Symposium will include papers, artist presentations, and posters on the themes of Transvergence, Interactive City, Community Domain, and Pacific Rim. This year’s co-chairs are the extremely savvy Steve Dietz and Joel Slayton — so expect a great event, and get those proposals done in the next 10 days!

The medi@terra 06 festival will run September 27 – October 1, 2006. They’re calling for papers about games, and also for games (and machinima).

If submitting a paper, you’ll give an abstract (March 10, 2006), then find out if you’re accepted (May 8, 2006), and then need to turn in a full paper (June 12, 2006). For games it’s simpler. Just submit your material (April 28, 2006) and then hear back (June 9, 2006). They’re particularly interested in “games with socio-political content” and “games that constitute tools for education and other scientific fields.”

Festival statement and full call follows.

On the plane ride back from DAC 2005 (the second day of which was certainly one of my favorite conference days ever — the papers were great) I read Jesper Juul’s brand new book Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (GTxA post, Jesper’s post, book site).

I’m too caught up with my own manuscripts at the moment to write a full review, but suffice it to say that I heartily recommend it. I particularly think it should be used for teaching immediately. It’s a short (~200 pages), well informed, and carefully thought out book. For those already involved in the field it provides good grist: strong arguments and an appropriate framework. For new folks it builds things up from the beginning nicely, showing the current state of the field by demonstration and description, while providing the pointers for further research that one would want.

Guest editors: Mark Blythe, University of York; Ann Light, Queen Mary, University of London; Shaleph O’Neill, University of Dundee. Deadline: February 24th 2006.

Advances in interactive computing technology have blurred the line between art, social studies and science. The age of digital reproduction is making radical changes in how art is created, distributed and perceived. Recent work from the humanities and arts has constructively critiqued traditional Interaction Design theory and practice. Studies of experience with technology can provide new insights into the potential of interactivity in contemporary arts and performance, as well as new tools for creativity.

The University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the 2006 UF Game Studies Conference: “Video Games and the Alien/Other,” which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on April 7-8 2006. Keynote Speaker: Lee Sheldon

There’s just one week left to apply for what I believe is the world’s only graduate fellowship specifically for electronic writing (deadline December 15th). It comes with two years of support, three workshops with world-class writers, four other courses at Brown of your choice, and a nice MFA at the end. Last year’s graduate was William Gillespie, and the year before’s was Talan Memmott.

This session includes:
– Ole Ertløv Hansen: Neuroaesthetics and the Digital Interactive Experience
– Lewis, Nadeau: Inter-inactivity
– Robert Sweeny: Net_work_ed

There are three papers in this session:

– Douglass, Marino, Dena: .Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies
– Scott Rettberg: All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation
– Mateas, Stern: Procedural Authorship: A Case-Study of the Interactive Drama Façade

Now I’m in the second track of session 4, which includes:

– Maria Engberg: Stepping into the River
– Louisa Wei & Huaxin Wei: Illustrative Narratology for the Digital Artist/Designer
– Dene Grigar & Steve Gibson: Ephemeral Writing

In the third session of DAC we went to two parallel tracks of short papers. I’m in the second set, where the presentations are:

– Laura Ermi & Frans Mayra: Players’ Emotional Experiences with Digital Games
– Cynthia Haynes: DisArmageddon Army: Of Gods, Mods, and God Mode Rhetorics
– Lorna Macdonald: Designing for Location-Dependence

I’m pleased to announce the release of Nick Montfort’s new interactive fiction: Book and Volume.

It’s been more than five years since Nick burst on the IF scene with the release of Winchester’s Nightmare (1999) and Ad Verbum (2000). His new piece, which I’ve had the privilege of playing in pre-release versions, is an addition to the field that will appeal to veterans and newcomers alike.

As a sysadmin in Book and Volume‘s nTopia, it’s easy to know what to do. Your computer, your pager, and your boss are constantly telling you. And you must spend your Sunday night running around rebooting servers whether you like it or not (there’s a big demo coming up!) or get fired. But there’s more to B&V than what the voice from your pager commands. In fact, part of what this story and game explores, over time, is the potential for performing actions beyond those made available most obviously.

Following the re-launch of the First Person thread on ebr (with excellent new additions noted by Nick), I’m pleased to announce that the book version of First Person will also be arriving in a new form. With a bound book date of February 3rd, 2006, and a cover price of $22 (so, about $16 at the online discounters), the First Person paperback might make the perfect addition to some Spring syllabi…

On October 28-29 (today and tomorrow) the second annual experimental writing conference hosted by the CalArts MFA Writing Program focuses on the legacy of Oulipo — the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”) founded in Paris 45 years ago. Comprising writers, poets, mathematicians and logicians, the group has formulated playful and exotic new “constraints” as alternatives to the hidebound rules of traditional literary forms. This conference presents two members of the group, including its current President, as well as a host of American, Canadian and English writers influenced by them in varying degrees: Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Paul Fournel, Tan Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Ian Monk, Harryette Mullen, Douglas Nufer, Vanessa Place, Janet Sarbanes, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, & Rob Wittig (see schedule for details).

The Electronic Literature Organization has just announced a new project, the Electronic Literature Collection.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature intended for individual, library, and classroom use — and will be open to interactive fiction, interactive drama, literary games, and other forms of interest to GTxA folks. The publication will be made available both on the Web and as a packaged, cross-platform disc, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others. The Collection will feature a variety of electronic literature in many forms and genres — a broad selection of quality work. This will include new work that has been selected by editors as well as notable electronic literature from the past.

Jim Whitehead, whose email this summer kicked off a thought-provoking GTxA thread on game curricula, has sent me another interesting message. He writes because the Computer Science Dept. at UC Santa Cruz has been given the authority to hire a tenure-track faculty member (assistant professor) whose research interests lie in computer games. His question:

I was hoping you might have some insight on where we could advertise this position. We’re frankly a bit stumped on how to find a gaming-interested person who has strong technical research credentials.

This month’s conversation on the empyre mailing list will be on the topic “Digital Writing.” The guests will include digital authors and commentators Bill Seaman, Brigid McLeer, Friedrich Block, Giselle Beiguelman, and Sue Thomas. Nick and I were guests on the empyre list in January 2004 and found it a thoughtful and engaged community.

Thanks to Jo-Anne Green (of Turbulence) for a pointer to an unusual net-literature competition. Sponsored by Literaturhaus Stuttgart, the 1st Bachelors’ Prize for Net-Literature is “aimed at making the sterile bachelors’ machine fertile and is calling for entries in a productive net-literature competition.” The site goes on to say: “In accordance with the nature of the venture, participation is restricted to men.” The winner will receive 2000 euros, and the deadline is September 30th. Only web addresses can be submitted.

Given the enormous influence of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature on studies of elit, it’s no surprise that people new to the field have asked me, from time to time, to clarify for them what Aarseth’s neologisms “ergodic” and “cybertext” mean. I’ve been happily supplying people with my understandings of what the terms mean, and have only in the last week or so begun to realize that I was probably wrong in my explanation — every time.

I’ve been telling people some variation of this: ergodic literature requires the reader to undertake “non-trivial” effort in order to traverse the text, and cybertext is the kind of text one reads ergodically. Two sides of the same coin. And I’d point them to this paragraph (p. 1-2):

The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in the head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that various concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path.” In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

I’ve never made it to one of the E-Poetry festivals, but I’ve heard great things from those who’ve attended. This is a bad travel year for me, but I’m very tempted…

E-Poetry 2005: An International Digital Poetry Festival

London: Wednesday, 28 September – Saturday, 1 October 2005

E-Poetry 2005 is both a conference and festival, dedicated to showcasing the best talent in digital poetry and poetics from around the world. E-Poetry combines a high-level academic conference and workshop (examining growing trends in this young art form) with a festival of the latest and most exciting work from both established and new practitioners.

Christopher Strachey is rightly viewed as a pioneer of modern computing. He’s not usually, however, viewed as the creator of the first work of digital literature. Research toward my submission for DAC, however, has lead me to believe that he was — and that his initial digital literature project was also, quite probably, the first piece of digital art. I’d be quite interested to hear any thoughts (or refutations) from GTxA readers.

To begin with, however, I should explain that when I use the terms “digital literature” and “digital art” I mean something in particular by them.

Of course, a phrase like “digital literature” could refer to finger-oriented literature (fingers are “digits”) or numerically-displayed literature (numbers are “digits”) — but I mean “digital” in relation to computers, specifically as it appears in phrases such as “stored program digital computer.” I mean literary work that requires the digital computation performed by laptops, desktops, servers, cellphones, game consoles, interactive environments, or any of the other computers that surround us. I think that’s what most of us mean.