Grand Text Auto

Sandbox games populated by NPCs invite players to screw around. One of our design goals when developing Façade was believability; we put significant effort into supporting and rewarding what we called “crazy guy” behavior from the player.

A few players over at Something Awful desire that kind of gameplay in mainstream games — charmingly describing it as “Asshole Physics”. A manifesto on the topic was recently updated from the original from 2003.

A link to Façade in the article created a big spike in downloads this week… Grace and Trip are surely being thoroughly abused as you read this.

I’m sure that many of you are interested in the DAC 2007 Perth conference goings-on. There were a lot of good presentations of papers, good people, and some weird bio-art. I’m sure Mary will post some intelligent thoughts here about the content of the conference, and I may as well, at some future date or if I get bored on the plane. In the meantime, here is some low quality footage of the dance party with which we ended the last night of the conference. Fox Harrell is an excellent dancer, and Mary Flanagan does some amazing hyperkinetic lawnmower-and-grocery-shopping-moves. Lisbeth Klastrup was clearly the most agile of the Scandinavians, though Jaakko was nearly as fluid and he won the prize for the coolest T-Shirt — the “conference moderator” shirt with the built-in-clock. I was shuffling at about an equivalent level to Raine Koskimaa, average Finnish dancer.

Scott needs a t-shirt, pronto! If you don’t end up entering his contest and designing him one by Friday, he might end up wearing one of these…

Starting next week the GameWorld exhibition , ongoing at Laboral in Gijon, Spain (1 2), is expanding the show with Playware, adding more experimental commercial games, individual-produced games and installations. (via Rhizome News)

Check out this excellent YouTube video documenting a few of the works in the initial launch of GameWorld in April, including several of the installation pieces. The video also shows off the architecture of the museum space itself, designed for the show by Leeser Architecture.

I’m not sure how we missed this at GDC last March… a brilliant interactive installation by Philip Worthington called Shadow Monsters. Taking a page from the works of Camille Utterback, Zack Simpson and the 2003 Indie Game Jam, Worthington’s Shadow Monsters has players collaborating with the system to create real-time animated, vocalizing monsters. Wow! Watch the video at Kotaku.

And if you’re into playing with shadows and light at home, Adam Frank has a new product for you, Reveal. (Adam made the installation Shadow with Zack Simpson, as well as Petz and Babyz with me.) Makes a great gift!

Update: There’s now a Purple Blurb Web page which will be kept up to date with information about the seties.

This Fall, a new reading series for digital writing will take place in the salon-like environs of the Trope Tank at MIT. The series is sponsored by the MIT programs in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies along with local arts organization Turbulence and the Electronic Literature Organization. It will feature readings and presentations by digital writers of all sorts – poets, fiction writers, writers of nonfiction and criticism, and others engaged in language, narrative, and letters on the computer.

Greg Costikyan has just introduced a separate but Manifesto-Games-owned site for game reviews, focusing on independent games. It’s called Play This Thing! It will feature – already features – games with online demos as well as free games. Reviewers will intone Csikszentmihalyi, Huizinga before commencing their daily posts, and will then go on to provide short and punchy takes on fun games that accessibly explain their cool aspects. The site already features reviews of:

• Introversion Software’s Defcon, a demo-available strategy game, reviewed by the99th
• Adam Cadre’s Lock and Key, an unusual interactive fiction piece, reviewed by Emily Short
• Chris Swain’s The Redistricting Game, a Flash piece

It just occurred to me. The name is great and the logo is familiar, but sometimes I look at the blue, and the orange, and the sort off-brown and the, what, light blue, same logo, same site, and I think to myself, “I don’t even have a Grand Text Auto T-shirt and if this site was a T-shirt I’m not even sure I’d wear it, man.” We need some cool T-shirts, and I think we need something fresh, textual, vivid, new. Therefore, I announce the first annual Grand Text Auto Alan Turing Memorial T-shirt design competition. Here’s how it works: you design a Grand Text Auto T-shirt at Cafe-Press and post a link to your design here by Friday, September 21, 2007. We select the best T-shirt from the submissions, and I send the winner a T-shirt, and additionally, wear that T-shirt to the Grand Text Auto symposium at the Beall Center for Arts and Technology on October 5, 2007, and maybe some of these other people buy T-shirts too. That’s right, I’ll buy you a T-shirt if you design a cool one. I’ll also send you an autographed photo of Interactive Fiction guru and MIT professor Nick Montfort wearing either a white T-shirt, no logo, or a blue button-down shirt, also no logo. If he refuses to autograph the photo, I will do so myself. Either way, if you win, you get a T-shirt. If you are creative, and strong, and brave, and you act now, and win. What are you waiting for? Add a Grand Text Auto T-shirt to my closet and yours.

Or, Choose Your Own Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Choice #1, re-blogged here from Save the Robot: a play called Intimate Exchanges recently staged in NYC, as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway festival.

‘A 750-page epic by Alan Ayckbourn that asks 2 actors to play 10 characters in 8 interconnected plays.’ The two actors’ decisions at the beginning lead to different middles and ends. If the actress lights a cigarette in the first scene, it sets them down one path; if not, they go down another. Theatergoers have gone multiple times to catch the different permutations.

Also read about it in the NYTimes. Talk about let’s do it again, groundhog!

—

Choice #2

Chris Dahlen is a profilic writer of many great reads on games, music, tech and beyond, for such outlets as The Onion A.V. Club, Pitchfork, Paste, The Escapist… at one point The Boston Phoenix (for which he reviewed Façade)… He has interviewed all kinds of folks including Paul McCartney, Daryl Hall, David Sylvian, Chris Ware, Ron Moore, Richard Garriott, the Penny Arcade guys… He’s also a software project manager and Java developer. If you like Clive Thompson, you’ll like Chris too.

IF legend Andrew Plotkin has assembled the site Draco Concordans, a detailed multithreaded commentary on John M. Ford’s 1983 novel The Dragon Waiting, which won of the 1984 World Fantasy Award. This exceedingly detailed take on the novel looks to be a contribution that can play with the finest of Web commentaries, such as Stuart Moulthrop’s Watching the Detectives: An Internet Companion for Readers of Watchmen. Check it out.

Leonard Cohen

Manhattan: Taken.
Berlin: Taken.

The Rolling Stones

Satisfaction: That’s fixed in place.

A couple of quick links worth reading:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Matt Kirschenbaum muses on the challenges and opportunities for future literary studies in an era when the material basis of authorship—including journals, notes, correspondence, and manuscripts—is increasingly born-digital in hamlet.doc.

And over at if:book, Dan Visel considers tabs, nonlinearity, and parallel reading styles in tab, tab, tab.

This kind of stuff is my music to my ears.

Also read about Gamecock Media in the NYTimes from last February, when they first launched, and this article in Variety last month.

May mega-angels and their minions save the game industry…

I just saw this tonight, with my local gang of indie developers — fabulous. A must see!

The critics are unanimous as well: 98% on rotten tomatoes.

No, not that… this!

Congrats Dr. Frasca!

Not long ago the question you loved to hate was, are games stories? Lately your favorite quandry getting attention is, are games art? Poor games.

While for me the concern (if there ever was one) was sufficiently addressed recently by designer Clint Hocking, for mainstream games within popular culture, at a minimum — I’m interested to read the overviews, interviews and personal views, situated more in the realm of high art, from the new volume Videogames and Art, edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell.

It’s been over two years since Façade‘s release, and bits of coverage continue to appear in a variety of formats. In the unlikely event you’re not sick to death of it, please read on.

Hypertext innovator Stuart Moulthrop has been a guest researcher at the University of Bergen for the past two weeks. Over the past couple of days, Stuart gave a couple of wonderful lectures. In the first Stuart proposed that we supplant the commonplace notion of “content” based on withholding or separating off with the idea of “d8a” (pronounced ‘dataleet’), based on the ideas of giving in and giving out. Moulthrop encouraged the audience to consider new forms of secondary literacy based on an understanding of participatory procedurality. In his second presentation, today, Stuart showed several newer pieces of his electronic writing, including a brand new work, “Under Language,” in which the users’ interaction with parts of the poem/game affect the procedural properties of the work. Based on your reading of/interaction with particular lines of the poem, you might for instance, crash it, change its visual presentation, adjust its volume, or change a variety of its other properties. It is a particularly interesting work from the perspective of “codework” because the operations of the program are part and parcel of the work as it is presented to its reader in a particularly intriguing way that would be difficult for me to explain until you see the program in operation. “Under Language” is a work in progress, that Stuart has been working on while he has been at UiB, and one that I think will be interesting to a lot of people interested in codework and procedural literacy when it is published. But that is not what this post is about. This post is to notify you that we have discovered what the future of hypertext is all about. It is a Norwegian band named, simply, Hypertext. Moulthrop and I will attend their show tomorrow night in Bergen.

Ian Horswill is a researcher and professor at Northwestern University well-known for, among other things, his excellent AI, robotics and vision work, leading a computer science meets arts-and-entertainment lab whose members included Robin Hunicke (now MySims design lead) and Rob Zubek (of Breakup Conversation fame), and administrator of a progressive Animate Arts curriculum at Northwestern.

Ian is now working on some AI-based interactive characters with procedural animation, and blogging about it.

This is very exciting. I’ve known Ian for over 10 years, he’s a regular at the AAAI meetings and GDC, a long-time supporter of our crazy ideas, an encouragement for me as an industry guy to wade into academic waters, a member of Michael’s thesis committee, the list goes on.

It’s all just going to be tweaking from now until spring for Will Wright’s magnum opus, 1up says after an encounter with the pre-release game at the Leipzig Games Convention.

Leonarado/Olats, the French branch of Leonardo, have recently published an online book, Phillipe Bootz’s Les Basiques : La Littérature numérique. A quick browse based on sketchy French language skills suggests that the extensively hyperlinked 15 chapter document provides a very good historical introduction to some forms of electronic writing, with a particular focus on francophone work, from the prehistory of electronic writing in avant-garde traditions, through hypertext, combinatory forms, and animated interactive poetry. Les Basiques would make a nice companion to N. Katherine Hayles’s Electronic Literature: What is it?.

A new issue of the Iowa Review Web has been published, guest-edited by Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Coverely Luesebrink, and featuring the work of Donna Leishman. Titled “MultiModal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman and Electronic Writing,” the issue features an in-depth double interview of the two artists, essays by each artist on the other’s work, essays by Talan Memmott on Leishman and Nelson’s work, and links to their works, including Leishman’s Deviant, Nelson’s Pandemic Rooms and much more. The issue provides a good case study on these two innovative electronic authors. I also note that TIRWeb is sporting a new interface. I think I like it better than the last, though I’m still not sure if I’m completely sold on the design.

You don’t realize it, but while you’ve been innocently building Tesla coils and general infantry, Grand Text Auto has been in ur museum installing ur art.

Starting October 4, 2007, the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine will be multiplied by 256 and divided by zero. And besides that, the Beall Center will host the exhibition Grand Text Auto, featuring work by the six of us: Noah Wardrip-Fruin / Mary Flanagan / Michael Mateas / Andrew Stern / Nick Montfort / Scott Rettberg.

There have a been a few blog-to-book transfers, but this exhibit and the associated events are, as far as we know, the first time blog has had such a manifestation in the physical space of an art gallery.

I’m just now getting a chance to write briefly about the July 28-29 Classic Gaming Expo, where I met up with Ian Bogost, among others, to work further on our book Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform. Ian has a nice writeup at Gamasutra, more thoughtful than I will manage to offer here.

More than the frenzy of cartridge-swapping, I enjoyed writing and catching up with various interactive fiction folks, including the author of Fallacy of Dawn, the developer of the incredible Atari 2600 title Lord of the Rings, and the filmmaker behind Get Lamp.