Grand Text Auto

Piksel, a festival for free-software-creating and -using artists and developers, has begun in Bergen, Norway. If you can’t drop by, at least visit the festival on the Web and check out the brilliant hackery on display at the main exhibition.

Rachel Miller of Virginia Commonwealth University just interviewed me about my electronic literature work – my digital writing, focusing on my interactive fiction. She asked some very good questions. In return, I asked if she’d let me post the interview here, to which she kindly agreed.

1. Do you have a specific audience you are trying to appeal to with your work? (It may be different audiences depending on the genre.)

Yes, certainly. I even think of specific people who I would like to enjoy particular pieces of work, and that offers very good guidance. I also think of groups of people such as the interactive fiction community, digital poets, and electronic literature authors and scholars.

Andrew Stern’s company Stumptown Game Machine released their Touch Pets Dogs, published by ngmoco for the iPhone. On this social network, everyone knows that you’re a virtual dog. Versions of it are in the top 10 free apps on the iPhone App Store now, and in the top 100 of pay apps.

Rover’s Day Out is the winner of the IF Comp. (Dogs everywhere!) The game is by Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman. Broken Legs by Sarah Morayati took second, Snowquest by Eric Eve third. Congratulations to all authors! If you haven’t played the games yet, they’re still there waiting for you.

Only with the absurdity of this video can you accurately capture the almost-entirely failed message of Call of Duty.

Choice quote: “My girlfriend has walked in front of the telly again.”

This just in from Tiltfactor at Sea correspondent E McNeill via games(TM) magazine.

While every boy knows that Fighting Fantasy was like, you know, 900 times better, than Choose Your Own Adventure, the level to which Christian Swinheart goes to dissect the CYOA series is nothing short of phenomenal. His visualizations of the story paths, in particular, are beautiful depictions of a system in operation.

While I won’t bother trying to add anything to Christian’s epic foresight into the series, I have to say I was fascinated by Inside UFO 54-40:

Distinguished Lecture: Frank Lantz
Interim Director, NYU Game Center and Creative Director, Area/Code
Wednesday, Nov 18th, 2-3:30pm
Engineering 2, room 506

“Innovations in Game Design: Through Practice to Theory”

Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has been an innovator in the field of game design for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

For the ears: cfml-prototype.mp3

Context Free is an excellent tool for exploring generative spaces in the domain of 2D visual art (and Structure Synth does a fantastic job in 3D), but can a language of circles, rectangles, and triangles mutated by rotates, translates, and scales be translated into the domain of music? The result is not just a rich analogy, but a fun and expressive software performance instrument.

On Monday (November 16) at 6pm in MIT’s room 14E-310,

The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing will present a talk by

D. Fox Harrell

creator of GRIOT, a system that generates poetry and interactive multimedia narrative using his Alloy algorithm. Alloy uses an algebraic semiotics formalization of the cognitive linguistics theory of conceptual integration, also called conceptual blending.

The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment.  The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.

Competition details are available here.

Actually I haven’t had the energy to keep mining each of the presentations at The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice, but they were rich in provocation and new ideas, and now I have to post something to follow “part 1.” The workshop went very well; particularly good were two long evenings of electronic literature, digital poetry, and readable digital art that were done by individuals but showcased collaboration. These two readings stood out because so much of the workshop time (which usually would have gone to very full days of panels) was dedicated to the presentation of creative work, and because the variety and quality of work was stellar.

Thursday 12 November 2009
at Dartmouth College

Feeling PLAYFUL this Autumn?
Join us anytime 4-7pm this Thursday, 12th of November for a
TILTFACTOR OPEN HOUSE!

Visit Dartmouth’s GAME RESEARCH LABORATORY, Tiltfactor
(http://www.tiltfactor.org).

ENCOUNTER our research with the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Values at Play, and the Games and Learning Institute!
PLAY our games (such as the casual hit of the spring, LAYOFF, and our new board game, VEXATA)!
SIP COCOA in the PLAYCUBE!
EXPLORE the games of Dartmouth’s student game designers!
JAM with Rockband — and SING so much, you’ll be a POPSTAR!!
EAT like Pac-Man from our esteemed snacks while you play!
ASK us about digital culture and games-related majors, minors, and courses!

The Electronic Literature Organization’s
Fourth International Conference
& Program of Digitally Mediated Literary Art

June 3-6, 2010
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by the ELO and Writing Digital Media 
at the Brown University Literary Arts Program
dedicated to Robert Coover

The Electronic Literature Organization and Brown University’s Literary Arts Program invite submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference to be held from June 3-6, 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

• electronic literature
• writing digital media
• language-driven digital poesis
• literal art

I’m not up to a writeup of the recent &Now: A Conference of Innovative Writing and the Literary Arts, a festival/conference (”festerence,” as someone noted) which just shuffled through Buffalo. But while you are waiting for the deadpan article in Harper’s about the event, these should be worth about 3000 words.

Google book search, on track to become the world’s largest digital library, is discussed in this important Chronicle article. This is an important discussion about rights, access, searching, and metadata. The article points to the mislableling of metadata and other issues in searching Google books.

I have a new blog: Post Position. Here’s my welcome post.

ICCC X, the First International Conference on Computational Creativity, will be taking place January 7-9 in Lisbon. The X, I believe, indicates the decade of workshops and symposia leading up to this conference. Here’s the scoop:

Although it seems clear that creativity plays an important role in developing intelligent computational systems, it is less clear how to model, simulate, or evaluate creativity in such systems. In other words, it is often easier to recognize the presence and effect of creativity than to describe or prescribe it.

The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the exchange of ideas on the topic of computational creativity in a cross-disciplinary setting.

Pat Harrigan and I are pleased to announce the publication of the final volume in our POV series: Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Following the first two volumes (First Person and Second Person) this project broadens our scope yet again. While the first volume was mostly (though not exclusively) focused on computer games and electronic literature, and the second injected tabletop gaming, performance-oriented play, and other kinds of systems that create meaning through play, this new volume greatly increases the range of narrative forms considered, while continuing to keep our previous concerns in play.

Given this, it’s probably no surprise that this is the biggest volume yet (more than 400 pages, though not, as the catalog currently states, more than 600). We continue to include the voices of practitioners and critics — for example, both Rafael Alvarez, who wrote for The Wire, and critic Jason Mittell reading The Wire‘s structure in game-like terms. We also continue to bring together popular arts (e.g., The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Watchmen, and Doctor Who) with experiments that will only be directly experienced by a select audience (e.g., Tamiko Thiel’s culture-crossing VR installations and Richard Grossman’s three-million-word, four-thousand-volume novel). And we also continue to connect the present and past, bringing in writing on vast narratives ranging from the early female superhero Miss Fury to Thomas Mann’s masterwork Joseph and His Brothers.

But shifting the focus to vast narrative also, of course, introduces discontinuities with the previous volumes.

There is a new podcast interview featuring yours truly, Mary Flanagan, along with Suzanne Seggerman about games for change at the Brainy Gamer. Everyone’s preparing for the Games for Change festival in NYC — just a few weeks away! Read more at http://www.tiltfactor.org.

Daniel Benmergui of “Storyteller” and “I wish I were the Moon” fame has a beautiful new piece out, one that is a poem as well as a game: “Today I Die.” Announcement of release here.

MAYA Design’s whitepaper “The Wrong Could” by Peter Lucas, Joseph Ballay, and Ralph Lombreglia contains the best cloud-computing metaphors yet, ones that are incisive as well as amusing:

Today’s so-called cloud isn’t really a cloud at all. It’s a bunch of corporate dirigibles painted to look like clouds. You can tell they’re fake because they all have logos on them. Real clouds don’t have logos.

Here’s what the Boston Cyberarts Festival exhibit at 1305 Boylston Street, which offered visitors the opportunity to play several Atari VCS games along with Tempest 2000 (Jaguar), Rez (Dreamcast), and Bit.Trip Beat (Wii), looked like:

The last photo shows George Fifield (director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival), Andrew Y Ames, and Nick Montfort (caught by the camera in his weekend attire).

Today Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, spoke at Dartmouth on “Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet.” Zittrain first defined the term “civic technologies” to mean those technologies that rise and fall and depend on participation.

Zittrain spoke first on Internet history: the development of the Arpanet –> Internet, he noted, was inherently playful and had an exhilarating sense of freedom and respect among users. The financial constraints for the development of the Internet significantly influenced — helpfully so — its design. Courtesy in networks, from access to attitude, as well as the the lack of business plans made this endeavor revolve around free information in the first place. Costs were low in production, and fees were not expected to be recouped through the use of the system (no sales, for example, were planned to support the infrastructure).

No, people weren’t ticked off – we had a great event full of Processing programming today at MIT, at Processing Time, part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Update: Screenshot of the winning program from the MIT News Office.