Grand Text Auto

Welcome to the new home of Grand Text Auto! There are still a few lingering DNS problems, but if you’ve made it to this page you’re now seeing us at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering of UC Santa Cruz. Both Michael and Noah are now faculty in the Baskin School’s department of Computer Science — which hosts the UC system’s first computer game degree. We’ll be updating the template and doing some further changes soon.

The deadline is October 15, 2008 for the second HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition, which has participatory learning as its theme. Apply for big bucks – or, if you’re an upstart but don’t have a gigantic digital learning project to fund, apply for smaller but quite helpful bucks:

Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards support large-scale digital learning projects
$30,000-$250,000

Young Innovator Awards are targeted at 18-25 year olds
$5,000-$30,000

Check the site for all the details.

Ian Bogost’s game Honorarium is now available on EA’s Sims Carnival (direct link to the game). In it, you pick up puzzle pieces and match them to give a lecture or to answer the occasional question of an urchin-like character – presumably a student, who emits a heart after a correct answer to express either enlightenment or having on a crush on you. If you do well, you get invitations to go elsewhere and give lectures with famous landmarks visible out of the window of otherwise identical classrooms. I have not gotten to the level where you get to be on The Colbert Report.

Like holiday decorations in your favorite retail outlet, faculty positions are being announced earlier and earlier every year!! Looking back on 2007’s post by Noah on available spots in the digital arts and humanities, game studies, and other positions related to those who might read (and post on) this blog, and seeing what a valuable asset to the community such postings are, I thought I’d start a “2008-2009” academic application year by beginning with an opening at Dartmouth College in Music.

It’s good to see expanding and continuing opportunities for residencies in digital media – for both scholars and artists.

At Cornell, there’s a chance for six to eight people to earn Society for the Humanities Fellowships to study “Networks/Mobilities” – relating to the theme of the recent HASTAC II conference in Irvine and Los Angeles. Those selected will work with two senior scholars in residence. In Fall 2009, this person will be Keller Easterling, Associate Professor of Architecture, Yale University. The Spring 2009 scholar will be Brian Massumi, Professor of Communications, University of Montreal. Application procedures, requirements, and terms. The hard deadline for receipt of all application materials is 1 October 2008.

Aya Karpinska has just published a piece for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Shadows Never Sleep. You can get it for free from the iTunes App Store – just search for it by title. Aya writes:

the piece uses a combinatory structure and the rhetoric of children’s literature to tell the story of a restless shadow on a nighttime adventure. I describe it as a “zoom narrative” which takes advantage of the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPod Touch to allow readers to swipe their fingers across the screen and zoom in and out of images instead of turning pages.

FDG ’09, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research involving computer and console games, game technologies, game play and game design. Previously known as the Conference on Game Development and Computer Science Education (GDCSE), this year’s conference broadens its scope to cover the breadth of game research and education. The conference is targeted at researchers making contributions that promote new game capabilities, designs, applications and modes of play.

The next Media in Transition conference (see reports from the last one: 1 2) will focus on storage and transmission – a hot topic in digital media that continues to heat up. Note that although the deadline is not until January 9, submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, so those with ideas for the conference should submit now.

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

Rilke turned to writing poems in French because there was no good word for “absence” in German. J. R. Carpenter’s in absentia presents place and the lack of place in English and French, mashing up a Google map (or, actually, a satellite view) of Montréal with rental and real estate annotations by herself and others. (The standard schmear of mash-up gaudiness is not present here, I should note.) “The guy upstairs cross-dresses; his unsteady stiletto gait traipses heavily over my head. The girl next door turns tricks, for cash or beer or kicks I couldn’t say; five in the morning, five in the afternoon, her headboard bucks at the wall behind mine.” Even those interested in video games will find something to pursue in these locational texts, as Ubisoft’s involvement with the local community is one of the subjects of discussion.

Malcolm Ryan has started a new project on his new blog, Words on Play, to review one book a week, covering topics such as game design and interactive narrative. The list is not restricted to those books that have just recently been released. The review project was prompted, in part, by his recently starting a list of “Secret Books of Game Design” – books that are not explicitly about the topic, but which are well-known by designers.

I’m pleased to announce, and link to, the first work in Inform 7 by a major poet. Now, it does compile without any trouble in its current form, but the file might need further editing to actually produce a playable, enjoyable game. Is anyone up to it?

In the past, when Pat Harrigan and I both contributed to a book, it was always as the editors. But now Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball (from gameplaywright) have announced Things We Think About Games. Pat and I each shared a little of what we think with the book’s author/editors, as did such folks as John August, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, John Kovalic, Michelle Nephew, Philip Reed, S. John Ross, and Mike Selinker. Robin D. Laws calls the result an “unholy mixture of helpful guidebook and jabbing provocation.” I’m looking forward to holding one in my hands!

The latest issue of The Iowa Review Web, volume 9, number 2, is out. This is a special issue on “Instruments and Playable Texts,” guest-edited by long-singing hypertext star Stuart Moulthrop, author of the 1991 Victory Garden and winner of the 2007 Vinaròs prizes in both narrative and poetry. One of his prize-winning pieces, “Under Language,” is included in the new TIRW number.

This September will be the third Game Writers Conference, now called the Writing for Games Track, part of the annual Austin GDC. The theme this year is “The Future of Storytelling in Games”, and includes intriguing lecture titles and topics such as “Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing Great Game Characters”, “New Interfaces, New Gamewriting Opportunities”, “Writing for Socially Networked Games: Blending User-Generated Content with Storytelling”, “The Play is the Thing: Interactive Storytelling from the World of Improv Comedy”, “Special Ops: The Writer of the Future”, and many more.

There is apparently “anti-video game legislation” happening in New York state. Check out the letter from our own J.D.R. to NY developers, and if you are a New Yorker, decide to help if you can.

I’m honored to announce that Second Person is a finalist for the Diana Jones Award! Pat and I are very pleased to be in such great company, ranging from a major RPG (Grey Ranks) to an innovative festival (Come Out and Play), a worthy charity (Child’s Play), a popular podcast (Canon Puncture), and an innovative publishing model (Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design). We’re also impressed to have our book characterized as a “necessary, seminal volume” in the statement on the nominees.

I haven’t posted for the past few months, a big reason being that I’ve been consumed by starting up a new game production studio in my home town of Portland. In May I founded Stumptown Game Machine, a sister company to Procedural Arts. SGM’s first project is to build a substantial collection of web-based 3D casual games for a major reality-television show, to go live in the fall with the new TV season.

The Games, Learning, and Society conference v. 4.0 this year in Madison Wisconsin gathered an insightful group of educators and designers who are intent on making a difference in the domain of learning and play. I ran a workshop there for Values at Play, and many of the panels during the full two days of conference-going were amazing.

Among the best of the panels

Ian Bogost just pointed me to a page on building your own modern version of Tennis for Two, the proto-Pong, proto-Odyssey game that Willy Higinbotham devised in 1958. It’s just the thing to do with that oscilloscope you have lying around. Interesting that the game is in side view and has a net, unlike the first wave of digital tennis games that were to follow.

Sorry, our blog went south for the summer. We’re back now.

Three of us (Andrew, Michael, and yours truly) attended the first AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies in November of last year just outside Washington D.C. Andrew provided a summary of the talks and mentioned that the gathering was a productive and interesting one. I found the talks and discussion to be very stimulating, and some new collaboration has developed from contacts I made at that gathering. Now, the call for submissions is out for the sequel: the AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, to be held at Stanford University on March 23-25, 2009.

AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of all human societies. Human beings make sense of the world by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. In addition, stories as a form of entertainment play a central role in our social and leisure lives. As a result, story and narrative have become a key interest for Artificial Intelligence researchers. The role of narrative as a primary mechanism for organizing human experience has been recognized in many fields, spawning multidisciplinary research that encompasses philosophy, art, psychology, cultural and literary studies, drama, and other domains.

Quick link — the pioneering electronic literature author Deena Larsen has been putting together a site for high school and introductory college teachers of electronic literature as a creative writing or rhetoric course called Fundamentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature that does a great job of describing some of the basics of how the electronic media can change the way that literary artists communicate with their audiences. Nice tool for writing teachers of all stripes.

Last month UCSD hosted SoftWhere 2008 — the first software studies workshop in North America. It was a great experience compressed into a short time period, with one afternoon for an overview of the broad variety of work being done by participants and one morning for a set of focused discussions on the state of the field and possible future projects.

Now there are online videos available for a number of the presentations, each in a punchy “Pecha Kucha” style (under 7 minutes). They can be downloaded in QuickTime form at the workshop page and are becoming available on YouTube and in other forms.

Remember the Codework workshop at WVU – the one about the relationship between creative writing and programming? Maybe not, but my posts on on Emmett Williams’s IBM Poem and programs Ted Nelson likes were from there. Nineteen short position papers from the workshop are now available online in PDF. Although the index is somewhat uninformative, listing only the participants’ names, there is a good store of material for those interested in investigating what transpired at the workshop. I’m not up to playing favorites right now and suggesting any reading, and I’m certainly not up to writing a summary of all nineteen papers, but please drop a note on here if you find something particularly interesting in this pile. I’ll try to do the same as I revisit these in the future. I know from participating in the workshop that there are a lot of interesting arguments and discussions in there.

• Brown is raising Interrput 2008, an electronic literature festival that will run October 17-19.
• Henry Lowood’s article about the Machinima Archive explains some of the value of preserving records of player perfomance. Thanks to Matt Kirschenbaum for the link.
• A growing list of teaching projects that use Inform 7 appears now on Emily Short’s site. Short has been quite busy of late; she has a new biweekly column at Game Set Watch and continues to kick out the reviews for Play This Thing. Her game Metamorphoses has also been translated to Russian.