Grand Text Auto

After many hold-ups at security, Jetset: A Game for Airports is out for the iPhone. The game, which revamps Airport Insecurity and offers special digital treats for those who play in particular airports, is by Ian Bogost’s joint Persuasive Games. While the game itself makes an argument, Bogost also offers an argument in old-fashioned format about how we might discern a proceduralist style emerging in games, even as the “games as art” discussion keeps on growing without fruit.

For a few months now my electronic life has been all iPhone all the time, whether it’s reading news and blogs, developing a game, even the occasional phone call. If I had time to play games though, I’m not sure the iPhone would fit the bill just yet. There may be 4000 game apps currently available, but I’m still waiting for that breakthrough app that appeals to me, top-selling fart simulators notwithstanding.

Legends of Zork, a browser-based game now in development by Jolt Online Gaming of Dublin, promises to bring the Zork product and process back to the Web. The press release explains how the new game will connect this venerable interactive fiction property, from more than 30 years ago, to current events:

The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The Royal Treasury has been sacked. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire.

From Jan 17-20, Post-Moot, A Radically Inclusive Online Anthology of Responses to the Inauguration of the President-Elect Barack Obama, presents a monument to tolerance and an experiment in radical democracy:
Everyone is encouraged to send ANY and ALL responses to this historic event (no matter what your point of view). . . in TEXT, POEM, PHOTO, SOUND-FILE, SPEECH, SONG, TWEET and SHORT VIDEO forms.
Comment: http://www.postmoot.net
Email: postmoot@gmail.com
Tweets: http://twitter.com/postmoot
Sound/photo/vid: post@postmoot.posterous.com

All AAAI conference proceedings are now available to the public at no cost. This is the first step in the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) initiative to make all the content in its digital library freely available. Yay!

Yoot Saito, the developer of SimTower and the deeply uncanny Seaman (you remember, the Dreamcast game with the microphone interface and the fishlike creature with the head of a man and the voice of, specifically, Leonard Nimoy) has developed an amusing and odd caveman simulator called Gabo. It runs on the iPhone, but you won’t be able to get it because Apple has nixed the game. I suppose people didn’t want to lick their iPhones anymore after interacting with Gabo.

Caleb Emmons has assigned a unique number to every poem. And bpNichol has written the complete works. What’s left to do?

Currently up at The Big Jewel is a rendition of a famous Robert Frost poem as a BASIC program. Thanks for the link, Jason.

And, something that way more people online are interested in and which is turning out to be much more lucrative than Save Karyn: Take Natalie.

Come one, come all to the variable_d public lecture series on Digital Arts and Humanities this Winter and Spring at Dartmouth College, Hanover NH. Jesper Juul, Celia Pearce, our own Nick Montfort, Tracy Fullerton, Eric Zimmerman, Katherine Isbister, Luis von Ahn, Ros Picard, and Doris Rusch will be visiting from January 2009 – June 2009.

We are very pleased to bring these fine scholars, artists, and designers to campus.

Sentences
By Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner
Sun and Moon Press
New American Poetry Series: 18
1995
84 p.

Sentences begins.

money must
Sentences
Parsing
Sentences
Sentences
Sentences for love forsaken.

After a last-minute gift? I’m looking forward to receiving a copy of Ted Nelson’s brand-new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the computer world got this way.

To my knowledge, this is the first new volume in years from the author of the original personal computer book (Computer Lib / Dream Machines) and developer of key concepts in digital media (most famously, hypertext), who remains one of the field’s consistently engaging thinkers.

Oddly enough, there’s Rara Racer. (Thanks, Jaroslav.)

An elusive 3.5″ diskette of William Gibson’s Agrippa has finally been located, and video of a 1992-era Mac computer running it under System 7 is now available (along with the bit-for-bit image of the disk itself) on The Agrippa Files. The site is part of Alan Liu’s Transcriptions Project at UCSB, with this emulation prepared by Matt Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities with help from several others, including Robert Maxwell at the University of Maryland’s Digital Forensics Lab. New bootleg video footage of the Agrippa launch event – an hour’s worth – is also now online. Many, many details of the process of recovering and presenting this important piece of imaginative, poetic software are available in the article “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

Blogging
By Jill Walker Rettberg
Digital Media and Society Series
Polity
2008
184 pp.

Blogging suits two sorts of readers perfectly: traditional writers (and instructors) looking to understanding more about writing in digital media, and the tech-savvy (including today’s students) seeking to reflect on blogging and understand the practice more deeply, as something that is potentially social, narrative, literary, and political. While elegantly written, the book delves into the history of hypertext, the nature of social networks, and oral and print cultures in addition to covering Web history through the 2.0 days, corporate blogging, hoaxes, and the relationship of blogging to journalism. For students who are to learn about writing and the Web through blogging, this book is a must. Accessible to undergraduates, it goes beyond how-tos and chronicling to inquire about where blogging has been, is now, and will go. Finally, there’s coverage of so many aspects of blogging that only an uber-blogger would know it all already. Even new media scholars and bloggers will benefit from Blogging.

The students in my Comparative Media Studies Workshop have just shared their Web edition of the first anthology of Imagist poetry, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914. Des Imagistes was not (as far as I could determine) previously available online, isn’t in print, and is not even very easily found in libraries. We don’t have a copy of it here at MIT, for instance.

Jason Nelson’s new game is called “i made this. you play this. we are enemies.”

The game deals with the difficult issue of his current residence in Australia. It is an investigation of the link, and of corporations and communities on the Web. There are video snippets with unusual stories or story-like discourses (about potatoes, a jar of hands, and so on) embedded within the game. There are screenshots and things to read – or not read, which might be more typical of the Web experience. Figure and ground are constantly at play, unless you are better than I am at discerning what parts of the image are background and what parts are the platforms and walls and such. And it looks pretty much like this:

Dear GTxA readers, come one, come all to the inaugural open house at the new Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College!

Student researchers, lab staff, affiliated faculty, and I will be hosting our open house and holiday festival: TUESDAY the 2nd of December, 2008, from 3-7.
We will be showing games we’ve made (RAPUNSEL project’s PEEPS game, Profit Seed, Massively Multiplayer Soba, prototypes of Skoolin (codename) and Layoff) and games we like to study (too many to list here!). Hear the students talk about their projects, including a study being conducted in Aden Evens’ course on immersion with the game Warhammer, which I have heard will culminate in a performative game action on the college green this week.

We are also announcing our new lecture series, courses, and salon. The new lecture series, called the Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series 2009, will be underway as of January. Invited speakers include Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Nick Montfort, and more.

To follow up on the 1K story generator I posted ten days ago, here is a slightly revised version of that generator and two new ones.

• story1.py – Story generation by elision. This is a slightly modified version of the November 20 “original.” It uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed and the remaining text is presented as the story.

e-mail trouble: love & addiction @ the matrix
By S. Paige Baty
University of Texas Press
1999
167 pp.

A great programming language, which I happen to have used very productively for computational experimentation, art, and teaching, has just finally been released after many years of development and (very functional) beta versions. It’s Processing 1.0, now ready for download. Congratulations to Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and the others who have participated in the project, and yay for us. Here’s the blurb on Processing 1.0:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

The 2009 Foundations of Digital Games conference is now accepting applications for two student-oriented programs. For PhD students there is a Doctoral Consortium, chaired by Ian Horswill, with applications due December 19th. For advanced undergraduate and Masters students there is a Student Scholarships program, chaired by yours truly, with a deadline of December 20th. Both provide ways for students to attend FDG free of charge, get additional feedback about their work, and make valuable connections. Please encourage students you know to apply!

Sam Deese is working to foster student digital scholarship projects at Boston University. He asked me about good free software for editing video and for producing slideshows with voice-overs. I didn’t know the answer – do you?

As reported earlier this fall by the San Jose Mercury News and others, UC Santa Cruz recently received more than $450,000 from Sony Computer Entertainment America (as part of a class-action settlement) to fund undergraduate scholarships.

I’m happy to announce that application information is now online. The first scholarships will be available to students applying this year — each will provide $10,000 to students entering the B.S. Computer Science: Computer Game Design degree.

Michael’s here at MIT and just gave a great talk. While he was preparing for it, apropos of conversations I’ve had recently with him and Beth Cardier, I wrote something that I think is a story generator, and which is a self-contained 1K python program. Here it is: story1.py (Update: This is a slightly modified version of November 30, which uses the same algorithm but has a streamlined implementation and a few more sentences.)

Let me know if you think it’s a story generator, and, whether or not you think it is, if you think of anything interesting about stories and computation as a result of looking at the program and running it.

ISEA 2009 will be held from 23 AUGUST – 01 SEPTEMBER 2009 in Belfast, Colraine, Derry, and Dublin, Ireland. Proposals for papers and art projects are due this Friday, Nov. 21, by midnight. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. Conference themes include Citizenship and Contested Spaces, Interactive Storytelling and Memory Building in Post-conflict society, Interactive Textiles, Positionings: Local and Global Transactions, Transformative Creativity – Participatory Practices, Tracking Emotions, Posthumanisms: New Technologies & Creative Strategies, and Entertainment and Mobility.