Grand Text Auto

An Open Letter to Organizers of the Slamdance Film and Game Festival, from Last Year’s Grand Jury Prize Winner for Games

January 7, 2007

We recently learned of the decision of the president and founder of the Slamdance Film and Guerrilla Game Festival, Peter Baxter, to pull one of the game festival finalists, “Super Columbine Massacre RPG!”, from this year’s competition. As reported in the Rocky Mountain News on January 5th, Baxter “made a ‘personal decision’ based on moral grounds and concern for the future of the organization.”

As recipients of last year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance game festival for “Façade”, we wish to express our strong disapproval of Baxter’s decision, and urge him to reconsider allowing “Super Columbine Massacre RPG!” to rejoin this year’s competition.

Since the beginning of time, pure silence has been available only in the vacuum of space. Now conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has digitally generated a span of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length, portable enough to be carried on a cellphone. His silent ringtone, freely distributed through special arrangement with Start Mobile, is expected to bring quiet to the lives of millions of cellphone users, as well as those close to them.

Kotaku is reporting, and Water Cooler Games confirming, that Super Columbine RPG, accepted as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition, has been pulled from the copetition by festival organizers under pressure from sponsors. Apparently this is a first for any film or game that has been accepted to Slamdance. Oddly, the game was actively courted by Slamdance before submissions were due. See the comments at GamePolitics.com, too.

Update (January 6): Two-time Slamdance finalist Ian Bogost says the decision was personal, not a business move, and declares the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition dead.

Liz Losh has handed out the un-prizes for the incompetence of government agencies and policy makers in the area of digital media, now named the Foleys. For instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency Calendar [PDF], which had the most phallic imagery of any government-produced calendar this year, was among the recognized media artifacts.

Matt Kirschenbaum has been massing blog entries for days, and has been massing wargaming board games for many years. This textual scholar by day has stepped out of the phone booth wearing a game studies suit and in command of a new blog, Zone of Influence. Matt announces:

Zone of Influence, a new game studies blog I created to combine my academic interests in modeling, simulation, and technologies of representation with my hobbyist interests in games, particularly board wargames.

As I mentioned in passing in my MLA post, this year’s Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference in Portland, Maine is about CODE:

Code can be “wet” (genetic, organic, human), “dry” (digital, mathematical, logical), something in-between, neither, or both (linguistic, symbolic, religious, moral, legal).

I prefer my code very dry – best to just show it the vermouth. But however you like your code, and even if you are legalistically or genetically inclined, you should find plenty of good discussion at SLSA. The deadline is March 15: See the SLSA ’07 call for papers.

The casual game review site Jay Is Games is conducting a poll for best of 2006, including a category for IF or art — I think there’s one more day to vote, in case there’s a nominated art/game there you like…

[Update: Never mind, voting is over!]

The MLA was huge and hectic this year, as it usually is, with 40 panels going on at once; interviews happening in hotel suites, mass gladiatorial arena-like settings, and lobbies; a huge book exhibit; and unofficial events of various sorts.

Thursday contained a day of programs on the sound of poetry. I missed friends Matt Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, and Peter Stallybrass speaking about the material history of digital and non-digital texts due to the co-occurring Canadian sonic invasion: As they gave papers, Steve McCaffrey delivered Hugo Ball’s “Karawane” and Christian Bök read his “Mushroom Clouds” and “Synth Loops.” There were also papers from Kennry Goldsmith, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Craig Dworkin; Caroline Bergvall read as part of this track, too. The next day, Scott Rettberg spoke opposite his fellow Electronic Literature Collection editor Kate Hayles, the ELO had a get-together, and almost 60 people read in the MLA offsite reading.

As we’re talking about the challenges of getting a commercial indie production off the ground, I thought I’d link to these (1 2 3 4 5) posts from Eduardo Sanchez of Haxan, co-creator of the 1999 indie film mega-hit The Blair Witch Project, that cost $22,000 to produce and earned an estimated $250 million at the box office.

The 5 posts are about the nightmare they’re going through with their follow-up project, Altered:

I mean, how can you go from one of the biggest INDIE successes of all time to a straight-to-DVD release? How?

Now that’s scary.

Discussed in this post:
Adventure, Warren Robinett, Atari, Atari VCS, 1978
Qix, Randy Pfeiffer and Sandy Pfeiffer, Taito, Arcade coin-op, 1981
dotstream, Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, 2006

Video games sometimes take the minimalist approach of providing the player with an avatar, ship, or “man” that has as its visual representation a single pixel. As I briefly discuss in this post, several games in this category are totally sweet.

Game Studies 6:1 is out – Jesper tells us it’s the biggest issue yet. Here’s the list of articles:

• Nick Montfort: Combat in Context
• Mia Consalvo, Nathan Dutton: Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games
• Rob Cover: Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth
• Hans Christian Arnseth: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn – A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay
• Joris Dormans: On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules

Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, whose Inanimate Alice is featured in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 and on the project’s site, continues with a ludic and narrative third episode. A game of finding Russian dolls is threaded through the cinematic story of Alice’s isolated life in a new country, where she’s moved with her parents. The new piece is available exclusively on the Guardian’s site: Inanimate Alice Episode 3: Russia.

Last week Good Times, a local Santa Cruz weekly, ran a cover story about my research and the new game program at UC Santa Cruz.

Donna Leishman sends word from Scotland that the University of Dundee’s School of Media Arts & Imaging is seeking an established senior academic to appoint to a chair of contemporary media arts & imaging. She writes that this position spans “practices as diverse as: performance art, film, web, audio art, 3d animation, data visualisation, illustration, interactive media and digital theory.” The deadline is February 9.

The 17th issue of Vodaphone’s receiver just launched, with a great collection of articles on games and play. Editor Katja Hoffmann has gathered an eclectic group of authors from industry, journalism, academe, and the arts — from Matt Jones (Director of User-Experience Design for Nokia Design Multimedia) to Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn (Tale of Tales / Entropy8zuper!, as discussed earlier) to folks like Lev Manovich, Gonzalo Frasca, and yours truly.

We recently came across two quirky, independently-produced interactive dramas, each set at a fashion magazine, strangely enough.

The first is a visually minimal but relatively sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure -style story called Masq, written and programmed a few years ago by Javier Maldonado of Alteraction. The drama is presented in small comic-like panels, with a few dynamic menu choices below each. Playing through it a few times, I can sense the underlying structure is something akin to this, although probably a bit more complex. There’s also a bit autonomy in the presentation, where panels will occasionally advance on their own if you don’t take action.

Terry Bosky has just posted an interview with Michael Gentry, the interactive fiction author who lovingly crafted Anchorhead and Little Blue Men, on Game Couch.

Xtreme Xmas Shopping, which allows you to pummel fellow purchasers for plunder, is now out from Persuasive Games. Oddly, this PG game, unlike several others, doesn’t feature much waiting in line, even though such lines are prime places for consumer beatdowns.

The Media in Transition Project at MIT now seeks submissions for MiT5: Creativity, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Digital Age:

(submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

2007 Independent Games Festival finalists have been named. (Via Arthouse Games.)

Slamdance Finalist Jason Rohrer (Cultivation) has an interview with me now online at his Arthouse Games, where he is also reviewing all the Slamdance finalists. I got asked to name the best IF piece and the best non-IF game, and instead of hemming and hawing about it I decided to just name games and discuss them. So far, there are reviews posted there of flOw, The Blob, Book and Volume, and Base Invaders.

Yikes, I’m over two months late with Part 2 of this post announcing production of The Party. My only excuse is that life is hectic for me these days. As Part 1 described, pre-production, authoring-tool building and prototyping of The Party has been underway for about a year now.

Building next-generation interactive characters and stories has many design, technology, production and fundraising issues. In this post I thought I’d lay out a series of issues we’re grappling with, and give my initial take on each. (I may have subtly different takes than my collaborator Michael.) We’d like to hear any thoughts, opinions and suggestions you have on these, and anything major you think I’ve left out. This helps us think through the issues and figure out solutions.

First, I have two assumptions that I hope won’t require debate in this thread,

Nicolas Szilas of IDTension, who just reported on TIDSE06 for us, announces a new collection of papers co-edited with Jean-Hughes Réty, “Création de récits pour les fictions interactives : simulation et réalisation” (as you can see, in French), at the intersection of games and stories.

Authors are a mix of academic and videogame designers coming from disciplines ranging from hypertext literature to computer science. They include independent scholar and frequent GTxA commentor Marie-Laure Ryan, Stéphane Natkin (researcher of video games and head of a new school of video games in France), Stéphane Donikian (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique), Sandy Louchart (working with Ruth Aylett on emergent narrative), Nicolas himself, and Jean-Noel Portugal, a game author whose views on Interactive Drama are quite relevant, says Nicolas.

Star C. Foster, blogger and co-author of the most highly acclaimed interactive fiction of 2003, Slouching towards Bedlam, died this morning in Philadelphia. Star was an editor of Phillyist, wrote for Shiny Shiny, and had her own corner of the blogosphere, Sarcasmo’s Corner. Two years ago she joined me and Scott, along with Dan Ravipinto and Emily Short, at the Interactive Fiction Walkthroughs event at the Kelly Writers House. On the Web, along with many of her own photos and much of her writing, you will find a portrait of Star in Rittenhouse Square. The news of her death was posted today on Phillyist.

The website wiihaveaproblem.com offers some photographs of televisions, windows, and various glassware destroyed by overzealous wii-ing. (via the NYTimes)