Grand Text Auto

I just wrote up some notes toward a talk at the Codework workshop at WVU. I figured I’d drop them in here, for those interested in the aesthetics of programming and the relationship of programming and creative writing.

I start with a difference between computer programming and what is traditionally called creative writing: Code has both a human meaning and a formal machine semantics, while creative writing in the usual sense has only human meaning — it cannot be compiled and executed on a computer.

This Sunday in NYC, Hunter College is hosting The 5th Annual Grassroots Media Conference!
The Conference is a chance for media activists to come together, compare notes, and stratagize. It’s always worth attending. This year, the Tiltfactor Lab will be facilitating a game design workshop

“I have poured the message of love and peace and happiness in Space Channel 5. These were the emotions and desires of this game.” -Tetsuya Mizuguchi

“Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. … [but] a lot of people like cake.” -Erik Wolpaw

What does it mean for a video game to have messages? Do any good ones have messages? Are there games that aren’t really fun to play, don’t have messages, but are still good games? That is, can games have anything besides message and gameplay?

Following up on recent discussion, I’ll describe here why I think Portal has more of a message than Passage. (I’ve tried to keep the spoilers to a minimum in this one…)

Okay okay, just one more short post and I’ll quiet down for a few hours. You can now submit to IndieCade: International Festivals of Independent Games. The main fest takes place July 10-13, 2008 in Bellevue, Washington, and there are year-round showcases of work as well. Check the IndieCade site for further details. Deadline: Midnight April 11, 2008 PST.

Andrew Plotkin, of interactive fiction fame among other types of gamey fame, has been blogging at The Gameshelf of late. His first post, early this month, was on games that don’t exist.

Emily Short has started a cover art drive and, to put a more appealing face on IF, is seeking contributed illustrations for existing works of interactive fiction.

A radical rehypertextualization of the Web appears with hints of Storyspace maps and multi-colored links of various sorts: Hypertextopia. There’s a library of marked-up work ready for your perusal and even a tray of wacky textual tools. (Via qumbler.)

How is it that a 2D, five-minute, public domain videogame with an effective resolution of 100×12, developed by one guy who uses a 250 MHz PPC computer, can be better than a 3D, five-hour videogame that runs at 1080i, is the product of a well-funded and well-equipped corporate workplace and has been named the best game of 2007 by numerous publications?

I’ll explain.

These were almost directly across from each other on the expo floor.

Many of you will be interested to know that Jeff Howard’s book Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives is now out from A K Peters. Jeff’s dissertation was discussed on here, and he sent us a writeup of an ACM symposium. The book is a very nice contribution which I read shortly before publication. Here’s the endorsement of it that I wrote:

A special situation obtains near Bedford Avenue tomorrow – the opportunity to play a newly computerized version of Guy Debord’s 1978 Kriegspiel. For those who can’t make it, you can still download Kriegspiel in beta form and play it. For those who can, the event is at the gallery Over the Opening, 60 North 6th Street, 2nd floor, Brooklyn (L train to Bedford Avenue). It takes place tomorrow (Friday February 22, 2008) from 7pm to 10pm. Prospective players should bring their own laptops.

The official word from the group RSG, creators of the computer version, follows…

Check out the NYTimes supplement Taking Play Seriously from the 2/17/08 NYTimes Magazine. It’s a brief update on current thinking on play from psychology to education.

A new site, Retro Sabotage, redoes classic games into short interactive snippets that comment cleverly on videogame themes and ideas – and, in the most recent case, make fun of one of the ways gaming has casually changed since the good old days. So far there are multiple parodical remixes of Space Invaders, Pac Man, and Pong.

My new year’s poem for 2008 was a computer program, a very short Perl program that generates poems without recourse to any external dictionary, word list, or other data file. I call it ppg256-1: “ppg” because it’s a Perl poetry generator, “256” for the length of the program in characters, and “-1” in the hopes that I will refine the program further and produce other versions. It was an attempt to drive process intensity up, keep program size down, and uncover what the essential elements of a poetry generator are.

To run ppg256-1, you can paste this onto your command line in Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, or (if you have Perl installed) Windows:

perl -le'sub w{substr("cococacamamadebapabohamolaburatamihopodito",2*int(rand 21),2).substr("estsnslldsckregspsstedbsnelengkemsattewsntarshnknd",2*int(rand 25),2)}{$l=rand 9;print "\n\nthe ".w."\n";{print w." ".substr("atonof",rand 5,2)." ".w;redo if $l-->0;}redo;}'

I found the process of developing this program very useful for my own thinking about computation and language. I’ll explain a bit about what that process was, in the hopes that I can communicate some of what I learned from it and to encourage you, if you’re interested in creative computation, to write short programs to explore the forms and ideas that you find most compelling.

For the first issue of Up Right Down, writers and other narrative artists were invited to find various different ways to tell the same story:

In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn’t tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

I’ve been asked to serve as an adviser for the 2008 Ars Electronica Competition (the group that gives out the Golden Nicas) for the Digital Communities category, and to suggest some sites that might be worthy of the prestigous honor before the end of this month. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I thought I’d ask the GTxA community for some suggestions. Please suggest sites in the comments, along with a couple of lines about why you think the digital community is important. Don’t be shy about suggesting a site you are involved in developing.

Ian Bogost and I had a great time doing a panel at the last HASTAC conference. Ian presented some of the “platform studies” work he and Nick are pursuing, and I presented some of the first formulations of the ideas in Expressive Processing. The deadline for submissions to this year’s HASTAC II is almost here: February 15th. I’m writing mine right now…

As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, one of the goals that Pat Harrigan and I had for Second Person was to provide a set of writings that take tabletop games seriously. This means seeing them not just as computer game incunabula, but looking carefully at their structures, experiences, and histories.

Now these essays are becoming part of the First Person thread on electronic book review. This release includes full-length essays by Will Hindmarch, Rebecca Borgstrom, and James Wallis:

Facultad de Informática · Universidad Complutense de Madrid
17-19 September 2008

April 18, 2008 – Submission deadline
May 23, 2008 – Authors’ Notification
June 27, 2008 – Deadline for final camera-ready copies

The aim of the workshop is to facilitate exchange of ideas on the topic of computational creativity. It will bring together people from AI, Cognitive Science and related areas such as Psychology, Philosophy and the Arts who research questions related to the notion of creativity with respect to computers.

This Thursday and Friday, I’ll be attending a seminar, “Questions autor des poésies numériques” at the Laboratoire Paragaphe at Université Paris 8. The seminar will include talks by European, American, and Brazilian digital poets and electronic literature scholars, and the seminar is also intended to launch the development of a European research network on digital poetry. I will take notes and send in a report this weekend.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…

Speaking of $200 books, I just received my copy of Blackwell’s A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. It looks great, with essays by a range of interesting people, including digital media heavy-hitters like Alan Liu, Marie-Laure Ryan, Johanna Drucker, and GTxA’s Nick Montfort. If you’re at an academic institution, make sure your library is getting a copy.

Lauren Collins’ 21 January 2008 article, “Friend Game: Behind the Online Hoax that led to a Girl’s Suicide” seems to me as significant and timely an examination of online culture as Julian Dibbell’s

• Six years in the making, Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer is an impressive collection of 29 essays by an array of computer scientists, philosophers and bot builders. Published by Springer, it’s pricey at $199, so I plan to use my local university library to access a copy. (Also, Amazon lets you browse random scanned-in pages of the book, to give you a flavor; it looks really good.)
• Seven years in the making, Erica T. Carter, Jim Carpenter’s poetry generation system, has gone open source. Read a GTxA post on Erica from a year ago here.

Malcolm Ryan, a frequent commenter on here who several of us recently heard undertaking to analyze a page of Peter Rabbit, has apparently been circulating the beginning of a manifesto pertaining to interactive narrative and drama systems. Most people in this area think of Dogz when they hear “dogmatic,” but there’s also the obedience to doctrine that the Dogme 95 filmmakers have pledged and the Dogma 2001 vows Ernest Adams proposed, following the lead of those filmmakers.

Grand Text Auto has managed to obtain the first vow from this still-secret document:

As a signatory to the 2007 Narrative AI Manifesto, I do hereby solemnly vow that:

1) I will no longer assign events a numeric “tension” value and plot a story as an Aristotelean “dramatic arc”. I recognise that real stories contain situations and devices that are more semantically complex than can be represented by a sequence of numbers that rises and falls.

What else might be in store? We have some ideas …

• I heard several wonderful talks from researchers at GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Game Lab. It was particularly good to hear from my new colleague, Jesper Juul, who has joined us as a lecturer in the program I’m in, Writing and Humanistic Studies. Welcome, Jesper!
• Ian Bogost and I completed our book on the Atari VCS, Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform. There is still copy-editing, indexing, design, production, much more to do before it manifests itself to the world, but we’ve got everything in to the press. Whew!