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Thanks to past GTxA hosts: the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
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is the shortest way to get to this blog.
Patrick S. Farley’s The Guy I Almost Was is Web comic that I recently looked at again. It resonates with my experience of mid-1990s San Francisco. It’s been around for several years, and it has aged well. Chapter 2 is particularly amusing for those who plugged into Wired and the like during those tumultuous times. (It picks up around 50.)
This year’s TIDSE conference just ended, and the always outspoken Chris Crawford just wrote up his take on it; bring a few grains of salt with you as you read :-)
(Update: Nicolas Szilas added his description of TIDSE06 in the comments.)
One of the cool things they did this year was a workshop where attendees came with their own interactive version of Little Red Riding Hood (known in German as Little Red Cap), implemented in each participant’s particular architecture; here’s the original call for participants (pdf). That would have been instructive to see. (Although, even I had time to attend, sadly I wouldn’t have had time to implement my own version.)
A vibrant lineup for this March’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is now fully online, packed with interesting talks. Here’s a few that caught my eye, listed in alphabetical order. (My eye is more business-oriented these days than it used to be.)
After the Party: Introversion Software, One Year on from IGF 2006
Behavioral Theory in the Design of Serious Games
Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant
Can You Make Them Cry Without Tearing Your Hair Out? Emotional Characters
… says Will Wright of Spore, as heard on The Colbert Report last night. Watch it here via King Lud IC via YouTube via Comedy Central.
Ian Bogost & Nick Montfort are pleased to announce a new MIT Press series,
Investigating the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems.
The first book in the series is forthcoming in 2008:
Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform
by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
For more about computing platforms and their relationship to new media, the new approaches which we hope this series will foster, examples of platforms, and answers to questions about the series concept, see our site:
Before this becomes stale or otherwise spoils, I’d better let you know that Bacteria Salad is the latest in The Arcade Wire series of newsgames by Persuasive Games, the studio of Water Cooler Games’ Ian Bogost. Sources of potential spinach contamination include not only otherwise-friendly bovines, but also agroterrorists. Safe for lunch.
Freeth et al. have uncovered additional inscriptions and evidence of gears in an intricate early computing device, the Antikythera Mechanism. In the abstract to a recent Nature article, they write:
The mechanism predicted lunar and solar eclipses on the basis of Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycles. The inscriptions support suggestions of mechanical display of planetary positions, now lost. In the second century BC, Hipparchos developed a theory to explain the irregularities of the Moon’s motion across the sky caused by its elliptic orbit. We find a mechanical realization of this theory in the gearing of the mechanism …
Jim Aikin, cellist and author of the old-school, maze-filled, shopping mall treasure quest Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, has just released a new piece of interactive fiction. It’s called Last Resort (download directly) and comes packed with a PDF map. Aikin calls it “a large, serious story” and notes that reaching a winning ending is not easy, and will take many tries for most people. Below is the first bit of Last Resort’s prologue…
Tuesday afternoon. Hot, with that sticky humid Southern heat that makes your hair droop and your shirt stick to you. Why on Earth did Aunt Caroline insist on bringing you to this horrible place? “Eternal Springs,” it said on the sign at the end of the driveway. Whatever.
A tenure-track faculty job has been posted in Nancy Kaplan & Stuart Moulthrop’s program:
Assistant Professor, Information Arts and Technologies
The School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor to begin August 2007. Doctorate or other terminal degree in computer science, interactive media, instructional technology, or human-computer interaction is highly desirable. Advanced degrees in other areas may be considered.
The successful candidate will have a strong commitment to teaching, demonstrated success in research and publication, and the ability to teach a range of courses in our two undergraduate and two graduate degree programs. We particularly seek candidates with background in programming, interactive media, game and simulation development, user-centered design, and/or media studies.
The December 2006 RCCS (Resource Center for Cyberclture Studies) book reviews are here, and there are lots. More than twice the usual number of books have been reviewed, and as you might expect, many are on topics close to the hearts of Grand Text Auto:
The interactive fiction Book and Volume is now headed to the finals of the 2007 Guerilla Games Competition at Slamdance. The Slamdance Film Festival will take place January 17-28 in Park City, Utah, with the games competition running from January 18-23. Book and Volume, by Nick Montfort, joins thirteen other very original independent games in the finals – see the Slamdance press release or the Slamdance games page for the full list.
“We are very excited about the finalists for this year’s GGC, ” said Sam Roberts, Slamdance’s Games Competition Manager. “This year’s entrants range from biting indictments of modern corporate culture to fantastical adventures crashing castles. We have interactive fiction, beat-em-ups, non-traditional puzzle games, and experiments in flow theory. These games push the edges of what games can be and can try to be, experimenting in art style, gameplay, metaphor, story, concept and time. They provide challenges and inspiration for game designers working the traditional space, and game designers who will work in the future. While each of these games forces you to examine something you thought you already knew, or experiment in life and evolution, they also all entertain – they strive to be fun, and to be true play experiences.”
Jena Osman’s 2002-2003 digital poem “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist” has been offline for a while, but thanks to David Ayre’s application of galvanic force and use of leet skillz, it is back online. Do take a look at it and enjoy working the now-working piece.
¿Habla usted español? The November issue of SPAC (Sociedad para la Preservación de las Aventuras Conversacionales) is now out – this is the Spanish online magazine covering interactive fiction. SPAC is back in HTML (not PDF) this month, and full of articles and reviews.
If you want an MFA in writing for digital media, Brown’s Literary Arts department has the program for you. And, as it happens, Brown offers a generous fellowship specifically in this area, which provides two years of support to do your own work, participate in three writing workshops, and take four other Brown courses of your choice. Deadline this year: December 15th postmark.
Tiltfactor, the first academic center to focus on social activist games, celebrated its annual fabulous open house! Started in 2005, our mission is to research and develop software and art that creates rewarding, compelling, and socially responsible interactions, with a focus on inventive game design for social change.
There is a call for particpants out there for a workshop on Tangible Play: Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games for the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference 2007. Submissions may address any “topic related to tangible or digital tabletop gaming, from game case studies, to research on sensing technologies, theoretical overviews, or the design of tangible objects for game interaction.”
Raph Koster links to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” segment about widening the market for videogames. Much of the discussion focuses on moving beyond the buttons-and-thumbpad controller interface, e.g. to the gestural interface of the newly-released Wii. (No mention of natural language interfaces for games, though. :-)
Anyhow, it’s a good overview of the issues involved, discussed in layperson’s terms.
Portraits of people playing video games, from New York photographer Phillip Toledano. Which is your grimace? (Thanks to inky for the link.)
As the program chair for this year’s AIIDE conference (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment), I’ve been horribly remiss in not blogging this CFP earlier. AIIDE 2007 will happen June 6-8, 2007, at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA. Papers are due January 22, 2007. New to AIIDE this year, we have two paper tracks: the research track, focusing on core AI research results that make advances towards solving a known game AI problem or enabling a new form of interactive digital entertainment, and the published games track, focusing on AI techniques developed and fielded in commercial games. AIIDE is the conference for enabling conversations between academic and industry game AI researchers and developers. With the two, distinct types of papers this year, we’re hoping to encourage even more fruitful interactions between academia and industry. The full CFP is available here. Please check the AIIDE web page for future updates.
From JB, author of several interactive fictions (Echappée Belle Dans les Contrées du Rêve, La Mort Pour Seul Destin, and Filaments) comes a new and very substantial work, offering virtual European travels as well as graphics and sound: Ekphrasis: Les aventures de Gilbert Fontenelle. The game weighs in at 65 MB, and, as you might expect at this point, is in French.
The new electronic book review, “Fictions Present,” features an interview with Harry Mathews and a new story by Rob Swigart – among other delights.
Scott Draves (aka Spot) gave a great talk on the Electric Sheep project yesterday to the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz. Spot is well known for his algorithmic artwork based on cellular automata (CA) and fractals. When I knew him at CMU in 1996-1997, he had been working for several years on a CA-based screen saver called Bomb.
What I like about Scott’s work is the rich, organic feel of his mathematically-based generated images. I find that much CA and fractal art has a cold, clinical flavor that makes it feel like an illustration for a math text. Scott has found ways to twist and tweak such systems so that the images they produce escape out of “math space” and become interesting in their own right.
Electric Sheep combines the concepts of screensaver-based massively parallel supercomputers (ala SETI@Home), genetic algorithms, and fractal generated art (using recursive set functions that employ non-linear rather than the standard linear transfer functions) to generate morphing fractal animations that breed and reproduce. Scott’s server now contains thousands of these sheep, both the ones that were popular (received many votes while running on screensavers, and thus reproduced) and ones that weren’t. He has recently teamed up with the famous UCSC chaos theoretician Ralph Abraham to statistically analyze the properties of the sheep stored on his server, looking for correlations between formal properties of the sheep and aesthetic judgments (based on the popularity votes that drive the evolution of the sheep). They are currently focusing on fractal dimension as the correlate.
(I should have thought to mention this earlier on here, but maybe at least one person will see this, happen to be in Philadelphia, and manage to come to the talk…)
Special Lecture
Friday, Nov. 17, 2006
2:00 p.m.
IRCS Large Conference Room
3401 Walnut – Suite 400A
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Jesper Juul, Center for Game Research in Copenhagen
Video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Center for Game Research in Copenhagen
Without a Goal
Games have had goals for millennia, and for good reason: Goals provide players with a clear sense of direction as well as a clear sense of accomplishment. In this talk, I will nevertheless argue that there is a problem with game goals: Goals often force players to focus on optimizing a strategy, at the expense of personal preferences such as issues of style or at the expense of social considerations in multi player games. This may not be an issue with the current generation of dedicated gamers, but it poses a problem if games want to reach a broader public that does not necessarily play video games on a daily basis.
A number of recent hit games have demonstrated that a game can be interesting because it has weak or non-existing goals. Hits such as the *Grand Theft Auto* series, *World of Warcraft*, and *The Sims* may be very different games, but they all share the fact that the player is free to perform actions that do not simply work towards a single game goal. In the presentation, I will focus on how video games seem to be moving away from the traditional “hardcore” model of punishing the player for every single mistake, and on how removing or weakening the goals of a game may expand the potential audience for a game.
The results are in, and Emily Short’s Floatpoint takes top honors at the 2006 Interactive Fiction Competition. The Primrose Path by Nolan Bonvouloir and The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve placed second and third. Congratulations to these authors and to the others who finished games, entered them, and placed in the Comp. Another person who deserves thanks and congratulations is Stephen Granade, who has been running the Comp since 1999. All the games are still available for download, of course.
Allow me to interject that Random Yahoo Link is still available. Also, Superbad is still there. I now return you to your regularly scheduled 2006.
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