Grand Text Auto

While attempting to upgrade to a new Ubuntu distribution Sunday late night, I managed to slag nickm.com. I don’t mean that I insulted my server; rather, I irrevocably converted it into a molten heap, or at least the software equivalent.

The bright side of such failures (perhaps the light is provided by the glowing and otherwise useless material that used to be serving my website) is that one learns how good one’s been at backing up. In my case, I actually had recent copies of almost all of my data stashed away: not only important files, but also the mysql database. That means that after about 12 hours of reinstalling and once more setting up my server, most of it was up and running.

Nick Montfort will be joining us on January 10th-12th and will be giving two talks and a presentation of his literary work.

Bio:

Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is now serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Since the 1950s, games have been a part of the culture of scientific discovery.
In 1951, The Nimrod was a special purpose computer built to play the game of Nim, for display at the Exhibition of Science during the 1951 Festival of Britain. In 1952, the game OXO, a naughts and crosses game (tic-tack-toe for Americans) was developed in Cambridge UK by Alexander S. Douglas, a PhD candidate, for an EDSAC computer, and this research lead to the development of the field of Human Computer Interaction. The game was displayed on a cathode ray tube used to control tanks.
In 1958, William Higinbotham, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, developed Tennis for Two.

see an emulation of the game, above!

Just published in Dear Navigator 1:2/3 is a new poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between, by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland.

This has been a major project of mine and Stephanie’s over the past year. We started seriously working on this project on December 15, 2009, when we met for the first of a few days in New York to discuss and start developing it. I thought it might take only a few days to complete – not a completely outrageous idea, since I have been working on tiny poetry generators such as “The Two” those in the ppg256 series, which were not time-consuming to produce. As you might guess, since it was just published today (on December 16, 2010), I was wrong about the time it would take. But, I am delighted that the project is appearing now in wonderful company in Dear Navigator, a beautiful and appropriately-named journal.

I’ve been working the past few days to change the way actions are represented in Curveship. The previous model for actions is described well in sections 5.1.3 and 5.1.4 of my dissertation. I won’t go into it in any detail here, but it involved two sorts of abstractions (one higher-level and associated with intention and narrating, the other lower-level and used directly in the simulation) and was considerably more complex than what I have in the current system.

I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest game, As I Lay Dying! or, Teale’s Big Hike! It is a challenging puzzle platformer I began writing in the spring of 2010 for Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Playable Media course. You can play it free online here. I would love to hear what you think of it!

Before you continue reading some of my thoughts about the game, I encourage you to play it for a few minutes to get a feel for what the game is all about. If you can get past one or two levels, you should be in good shape.

I’ve attached after the jump the Call for Papers for the first ever Games and Software Engineering Workshop (GAS 2011), which will be held at ICSE 2011 in idyllic Honolulu, Hawaii! Jim and I have been working very hard getting everything together on what promises to be a great workshop, and we’re honored to have such an illustrious program committee. Papers are four page position papers, to be in by January 21st.

Call for Papers: GAS 2011: The 1st Games and Software Engineering Workshop

Important Dates

Topics

I just wanted to thank Norman Ramsey, Eddie Aftandilian, and Brad Larsen for the very productive day-long discussion of Curveship that we undertook on Friday. I’ve spent most of the weekend and much of today implementing just one of the ideas for changes that came out of this. The discussion certainly gives me more to do, but it also does a great amount to focus my efforts as I work toward a release of system.

Dartmouth student designer Max Seidman watches a playtest while MVHI Program Coordinator Edward Ihejirika plays

Tiltfactor is finalizing a game with local public health group Mascoma Valley Health Initiative in New Hampshire on immunization. The game will players understand “herd” immunity and the need to vaccinate against particularly pernicious diseases.

If you’re looking for my new book of poems, Riddle & Bind, and you happen to be near the MBTA’s Red Line or Harvard Square specifically, prepare for excitement. You can not only purchase the book in this venerable area of Cambridge; you can have the Harvard Book Store’s book-making robot, Paige M. Gutenborg, manufacture a copy of Riddle & Bind for you in about four minutes. The cost for the book and the bibliotronic display in which it is forged is simply the retail price, $16.

I have the feeling that someone must have put in a good word for me.

In the past, I’ve written about game design as a new domain for automated discovery, in which one might build discovery systems which uncovered new and interesting knowledge in game design. However, unless you are already familiar with discovery systems, all this might sound too blue-sky to even visualize. So what does it even mean for machine to discover something about game design?

I was startled to discover these two things at the post office today, the immediate implications of this message:

1. The US Postal Service has developed a kiosk/robot capable of experiencing pleasure.
2. Said robot is stimulated pleasurably by selling me a stamp.

At UC Santa Cruz we’re looking for someone to help us conceptualize, launch, and run a new “Center for Games and Playable Media.” We’re seeking someone who would be interested in representing Santa Cruz at events, working with the new center’s affiliates (in industry, government, etc), imagining how new game research technologies could be made into experimental games, and working with students and faculty to bring the game-related activities at Santa Cruz to the next level.

Excerpts from the official information are below. People can apply by going to http://jobs.ucsc.edu and searching for job number 1002822. Also, feel free to leave comments with questions.

Check out the interview by our director on Resonance FM, UK from October 2010: Mary Flanagan discusses art, games, and activism.

NextSpace in Santa Cruz is ending its 2010 What’s Next lectures with a talk titled “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Future of Gaming and Social Media” — 7 p.m. Thursday, December 2, on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Our own Michael Mateas will be one of the panelists, along with CBS Interactive’s Simon Whitcombe and Sol Lipman of AOL / Rally Up.

The journal IEEE Software will be running a special issue on the topic of “Engineering Fun” for its September/October 2011 issue. The call for papers is out now, with a deadline of February 1, 2011. Guest editors for the issue are Clark Verbrugge of McGill University and Paul Kruszewski of GRIP Entertainment. IEEE Software has a magazine format and publishes academic research aimed at a software practitioner audience. It has a circulation of over 10,000.

Audio podcasts of the events at the Boston Book Festival are now online – along with some videos. Whether you were one of the 25,000 attendees or not, you can catch some of the 2010 festival via the Web. The panel that I was on, “The Novel: A Prognosis,” can be heard right here.

I’ve recently returned from a great trip to Mexico City. I was at the 5th Mexican International Colloquium on Computational Creativity presenting alongside two other foreign guests, Graeme Ritchie and Dan Ventura, and two local researchers, Rafael Pérez y Pérez and Eduardo Peñaloza. There was a productive and lively roundtable on interdisciplinary work and collaboration the day before the talk, too. Rafael Pérez y Pérez, a collaborator of mine, arranged the colloquium and was a very gracious host, making sure that we got to and from the airport, to all of the colloquium events, and to several excellent meals.

For our (possibly) sizable Belarusian readership, Patric Conrad has translated the original Space Invaders Enterprise Edition post into a Belarusian version! Дзякуй, Patric!

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor is a partner in the Games for Learning Institute, centered at NYU. We’re launching a game competition and invite you to participate!

wow! from 2003, some fun quotes here from our lab Director, such as
“I Love the Huge Pixels” — worthy of t-shirts!

Alex and I will be discussing the current state of RTS research and the StarCraft AI Competition today at 13:00 PST. https://my.dimdim.com/aigamedev/

My collaborator and publisher William Gillespie has a new book, Keyhole Factory, and has done a vigorous interview about it which I suggest you read.

This Friday I will be visiting Jose Zagal at DePaul University (his book Ludoliteracy has just come out) and giving a talk on my view of level design. My goal in giving the talk is to develop a framework spanning the research my students Gillian Smith, Ken Hullett, and I have been doing over the past few years (along with Mee Cha, Mike Treanor, and Michael Mateas). The core idea of the talk is this: level design is inherently a genre-specific activity, and each game genre possesses its own approach for designing levels in the genre. While there are some concepts, such as pacing and tension, that span multiple genres, to provide compelling explanations for how to create game levels requires an analytical approach that is tailored to a specific genre.