Grand Text Auto

Call me method. Through a Commodore VIC-20 of recirculation I wet the bed early for a long time. Motherboard died today. A screaming comes across this guy – the guy above the port who was the color of television, tuned. It was a nice and stormy dork. As Feature awoke one morning from disquieting dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. It was a pleasure to burn, even at only 4x speed. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting the disk to satisfy misses in the L2 cache which also could not be found in RAM. Dr. Seuss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. The random access device (for so it will be convenient to speak of it) was expounding a recondite matter to us. Once upon a time the disk was round and you could go on it around and around. It was in those days that I wandered about hungry, encrypted. I would seek – seek unto death with that long agony; and when they at last unmounted me, and I was permitted to park, I felt that my sectors were leaving me. Night of my knife, fur of my lions. Every happy file system is alike. First post. You are about to begin executing Nick Montfort’s new novel, Moby Disk, or the Worm. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone vibrating three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end saying “forty one.” The station wagons arrived at noon. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. If you’re going to, read this. It was the best of rhymes, it was repetition.

It warms my heart to see that a major Internet company has turned its Web page black, joining the protest against the Communications Decency Act only 4433 days late.

From the CFP for The Future of Storytelling in Games, Austin GDC, September 15-17, 2008. Submissions are due April 14.

The theme for the Game Writing track is “The Future of Storytelling in Games.” This theme is a designing principle, applied to each day as follows:

• The Future Is Now: A look at how this year’s crop of games is breaking the storytelling mold in games
• The Future Is Coming: Revelations on the future of game writing from game projects currently in development
• The Future Is Yours: A no-holds-barred look at what’s possible in the world of interactive storytelling

The games are out! Go play the games! No, I’m not talking about the IF Comp or any run-of-the-mill videogaming competition. I sing of The Video Game Name Generator Competition, brought on by the Independent Gaming Source. Entrants had to use the Video Game Name Generator to produce a title and then develop a game to suit that name. Given three weeks to accomplish this feat, forty-eight people have managed it.

Click over to the competition site to see the screenshots and (if you’re brave and run Windows) to download the games that accompany these titles and others:

After the hyperbole in my last post, here is a more grounded series of links. First, pieces from three of my favorite game journalists: Clive Thompson, Chris Dahlen and Kieron Gillen.

• I quoted Clive’s piece, Videogames are Post-Turing, in our recent discussion of transparency in the behavior of NPCs. See links to Bart Simon’s paper in that discussion too.
   
• I hope Chris is right: may YouTube speed the demise of cutscenes in games!
   
• Kieron Gillen on text in games, past and future.
   
• The Sims 3 has officially been announced! The Create-A-Sim screenshots look great. I look forward to hearing more detail about the AI.

I occasionally make posts composed of link dumps, to help GTxA readers find articles they might enjoy and may have missed. This time I need to split the dump into two parts, the first part being a set of articles ranging from the slightly over-the-top to the truly hyperbolic. I will gently attempt to challenge, refute or debunk each as I go. :-)

• Hypertext boring? That’s the assertion Ben Vershbow made in a post that leads with a commentary on Hypertextopia, spawned from an earlier GTxA post. I’ve certainly been one to vent my issues with hypertext as a form for fiction, but “boring”, hypertext isn’t. Like Nick’s Portal v. Passage post, Ben’s post spawned a good discussion though, including reactions elsewhere (1 2 3); in the discussion, Ben admits to being deliberately provocative. (As a side note, btw, Ben is a developer of CommentPress, used to implement Noah’s Expressive Processing blog-review project here on GTxA.)
   
• In the annual GDC rant session, Clint Hocking asked:

bleuOrange, a French-language literary magazine, has just launched. The new publication is a project of nt2 and figura. The first issue includes Annie Abrahams’s “Discours populaire sur la violence,” Grégory Chatonsky’s “Sodome@home,” Sébastien Cliche’s “Ruptures,” and Ollivier Dyens’s “De lettres et d’acier.” There are also two originally English works that appear in translation/adaptation. “Ream,” by Nick Montfort, your humble blogger, appears in a multimedia presentation by Anick Bergeron, who also adapted the text as the French “Rame.” The piece “open.ended” by Aya Karpinska and Daniel C. Howe also appears in French translation, and this translation was also done by Anick. Update: Luce Tremblay-Gaudette’s photos of the bleuOrange launch event, which took place at Oboro, are now online.

I don’t know exactly what to call this – a script, a scenario, a framework – but I wrote it at the Interactive Narrative conference at UCF to define, or scaffold, how a group of actors trained in interactive performance (knowing improv-like techniques, but with the ability to deal with an untrained performer) could work with a “spectactor,” a person without theatrical background who is not a member of the troupe, to create an interactive experience. The experience is played in the StoryBox, a square space closed off with black cloth, with cameras and microphones to convey what is going on to a remote audience.

The spectactor is given this information before the interactive experience begins:

You are a veteran going to visit your therapist, who you have been seeing for a while. Your therapist, Dr. Baum, is helping you to deal with your experience of a particular firefight during the war. Dr. Baum will discuss this with you briefly and will then invite you to relax and re-experience the firefight. You will be back on the battlefield with your platoon. After a while, you will come back to the world of Dr. Baum’s office and the discussion of your memory will continue. You will be invited to relax again and revisit the firefight in the same way. If Dr. Baum contradicts you or corrects your memory based on things you have previously established in sessions, remember that this is an attempt to help you. Keep working through your memories and reliving the firefight, even though it may be difficult.

Two or three characters in a room, with dark walls… probing, therapeutic conversations that expose repressed feelings about dysfunctional relationships… myriad threads and variations on the topics of marriage, sex and the mistakes we make… All free and digitally distributed.

Sound interesting? Watch the first 15 episodes of HBO’s In Treatment. I’ve been bingeing for the past few evenings. For me, it’s a vision of Eliza vs. Grace and Trip.

Metacommentary available here and here; funky hypermedia trailer here. I do love the Internet age.

UCF’s Interactive Narrative conference kicked off today with a really wonderful keynote talk by Chris Crawford. It was like a live-action video visit into the human brain, with a powerful conclusion about what artists should learn in order to drive the creative potential of the computer forward. Here are my notes – completely unofficial jottings, but ones that I hope will give you a sense of his argument. After these keynote notes, I discuss our encounters with the StoryBox environment.

Noah’s analysis of The Sims suggests that The Sims succeeds as a game experience because it exposes the characters’ inner processes to the player. In reaction, Richard Evans, working on a related to-be-announced product, describes the debate he and his colleagues are having over how much of their NPCs’ inner workings to expose. Richard’s position is that players need “a clear mental model” of how the characters operate in order to for players to “project” themselves onto the characters — in particular, to allow players to believe the characters are deeper than they actually are, to believe in them as true characters.

This is a perfect opportunity for me to revive a discussion from about a year ago, “Transparency in the Behavior of and Interface to NPCs“. A very good discussion was just getting underway at the time, that due to time constraints I never added further comments to.

I’d like to continue that discussion, if any of you would like to. Please (re-)read that post, or my attempt here to summarize the discussion’s essential points:

I (Andrew) wrote: when interacting with a system/simulation/world, transparency is highly desirable, since transparency makes a system easy to learn, understand, and use. Simultaneously, we desire to make humanistic NPCs that, via interaction, allow players to experience and gain understanding of the nature of real people, e.g. human behavior, psychology, and culture. An essential human quality is our messiness: people are complicated, mysterious, nuanced, moody, fickle, often surprising and unpredictable under pressure. Similarly (and problematically), compelling characters are not transparent; you can’t control them, and that’s the point. That’s why they’re interesting to interact with. Real people aren’t machines that can be fiddled with once you understand their mechanism. In fact we should build our NPCs to get annoyed if you try to break them or crack them! Furthermore, exposing the inner workings of NPCs can hamper players from believing in them as flesh-and-blood characters, since their artificiality is made so obvious.

In the discussion, Nicolas H. agreed: “We can’t read minds. We can’t be in other people’s heads. … I know many Non-Gamers (especially women) who think that this is the fun in human interaction: Guessing what other people are up to, how they ‘tick’ inside.”

Breslin countered with several insightful points, with a similar view to Richard’s now. “I think it’s wrong to conceal the mechanism entirely, to try to make the mechanism too smart to be gamed, and so on.

Three new issues of grand, textual, and sometimes automatic writing of different sorts are out. Creative digital writing can be found in the new issue of New River Journal, which includes:

• “All the News That’s Fit to Print” by Jody Zellen
• “The Wave” by Heather Raikes
• “Digital Paintings” by Karin Kuhlmann
• “A Sky of Cinders” by Tim Lockridge
• “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” by Mark Marino
• “Semantic Disturbances” by Agam Andreas
• “(NON)sense for to from Eva Hesse” by Carrie Meadows

A new book by N. Katherine Hayles: Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary was released today from the University of Notre Dame Press. The publication of the book is a major event for the field of electronic literature. In addition to the printed book, each copy comes with a CD-ROM of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. In addition, there is a great website accompanying the book at newhorizons.eliterature.org that includes syllabi for electronic literature courses, a blog/forum, and an additional online anthology of essays by students and scholars of e-lit.

It is too late for you to write the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia entries for World of Warcraft, Bill Gates, and cell phones, but these and other articles await your writing and editorial work. Don’t try to spend it elsewhere; at least, not officially. The small number of literate children who lived between the 5th and 12th centuries in England are counting on you.

Rhizome is now in the midst of the sixth year of our Commissions Program — a singular initiative that supports the creation of original works of new media art work. This year, we will award seven artists/ collectives with commissions ranging from $3000-$5000.

Rhizome Commissions Program
Deadline for applications: midnight, March 31, 2008

We support: New Media Art, by which we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and also works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Commissioned projects can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, or the web.

Tuned to a dead channel: Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak with flash programming by erational.org.

In my first recording experiment, I recorded a net broadcast from a friend in France, who provided me with a silent digital signal. This produced a completely silent recording. … After some research, it seemed that the voices required some background noise in order to take shape. The net broadcast transmitted a signal of white noise, that I digitally recorded. While recording the broadcast from France, I asked questions of whomever might be listening and recorded them separately into another recorder with an open-air microphone. I took the white noise broadcast recordings, slowed them down (as the voices are said to be in the higher registers), and filtered out the lower frequencies.

The co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons rose in fame, in his lifetime, to the point of gathering an obituary in The New York Times. But Pat Harrigan pointed me to Paul La Farge’s 2006 essay in The Believer as a more substantial reflection on the history and hobby of D&D.

The big annual awards event for interactive fiction, the 2007 XYZZY awards, has just concluded. Admiral Jota’s Lost Pig, winner of the IF Comp, took four XYZZY awards including the big one, Best Game. I was pleased to see that the uncanny Deadline Enchanter by Alan DeNiro won the award for Best Use of Medium. Congratulations to these and other winners: James Webb, Maryam Gousheh-Forgeot, David Fisher, Stephen Granade, and Christopher Huang. And, congratulations to all the nominees this year.

Creator of ELIZA/Doctor, awarded the Norbert Wiener Award by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, author of Computer Power and Human Reason.

Play with a nice child

Face the dark winter

Have your head spontaneously catch fire

Gravitation is a new, free, low-res game for Windows, Mac, and Linux by Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage. After you play, you’ll probably want to read Jason’s note on the game.

If I’ve been remiss at blogging over the past few months, it’s not from lack of interest; my finite time at the keyboard has been consumed with work. (Even keeping up with the daily unfolding of Noah’s excellent book takes a bit of time — well worth it though!)

About 9 months ago (time flies!) I posted my thoughts on an improved natural language understanding interface for interactive comedies/dramas. NLU is one of the R&D fronts I’ve been working on since that post — improved drama management and authoring tools being the other major fronts.

In that post I talked about the advantages, from an AI-implementation perspective, of limiting the player’s input to only eight words. After some further design work, I’ve now brought that number down to six. In my estimation, six words of natural language, per utterance, seems to be the smallest number that still allows a player to be highly expressive in a natural, conversational way.

I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game is an ultradifficult pastiche of early platformers. You could play that, or you could play, or watch someone painfully play, China Miner, a genuine early platformer that is exceedingly difficult. (Thanks to Jesper for first telling me about the amazing China Miner.) Both of these are hilarious and well worth dying for – repeatedly.

Check out josh g’s post about a heated discussion dealing with the inclusion of Lost in the Static (discussed previously on here) in the GDC program while a list of 300 game ideas (one of which was the basis for Lost in the Static, two of which were realized in other GDC-discussed games) didn’t make the cut.

I guess the main thing at issue is what status game ideas posted online should have when compared to actual games.

The truth is, executing a project is often a very important part of it – you can then show it to others, and you can adjust your concept and redesign repeatedly when you start working through the actual process of producing.

Speaking of Scott Turner (author of Minstrel, a major subject of the EP chapter currently being discussed) he recently drew my attention to an article in the Guardian titled “Automatic writing.”

Philip M Parker, a professor of management science at Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France, patented what he calls a “method and apparatus for automated authoring and marketing”.

Issue 11 of the online journal Fibreculture is now out. The journal features a collection of essays from the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture conference, including my essay “Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature“, as well as eleven other notable essays from the conference. Among the highlights: Axel Bruns on Produsage, Jim Bizzocchi on ambient video, Fox Harrel on African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce on the Gendered Poetics of Space in computer games, Jaako Suominen on Retrogaming and more.