Grand Text Auto

According to “Game News”‘ report on the Nielsen Entertainment’s third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study (released 2 days ago),

Hey, there’s a conference on a cruise ship. This sounds really good, but given my schedule, I’m holding out for a conference held on this cruise ship.

Call for Papers
Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education
February 22 – 25, 2007
Aboard the Disney Wonder Cruise Ship
Submission Deadline: November 5, 2006

The Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science
Education is seeking high quality unpublished original work on the
use of Game Development in Computer Science Education. For an html
version of the Call for Papers, see http://www.msadgd07.net/.

Sorry to repurpose the more boingable blogs, but it has become nececssary to inform you about an object. There are no reports of arrests due to Suspicious Looking Device, but maybe they’ve been hushed up. I thought this was already about as suspicious-looking as it could get – this other one might spur some people to activate their screaming phones. Be sure to check out the other bricolage from Junkfunnel Labs.

As subscribers to The Atlantic Monthly may have already noticed, there’s a story in the November issue, mentioned right there on the cover and called “Sex, Lies, and Video Games.” It’s a detailed, seven-page article about Façade, with shots of Grace and Trip. There are quotes from Will Wright and from an anonymous video game executive who explains that people like to “blow shit up.”

Jonathan Rauch wrote the piece and really managed to make a great case for how video gaming (and creative computing) can transcend its current licensed, hyperviolent state. He also gave a good account of Façade that is accurate without being overwhelming in its technical details. Gripping journalism is often built on oppositions and conflicts; here, the conflict is Andrew and Michael vs. the conventional world of videogaming, which, I think, is not a fabricated opposition.

Hi All, for those in London for the London Games Festival, the [giantJoystick] is front and centre –check it out! The LGF is a week-long celebration & offers a series of events across multiple locations showcasing the ‘hottest’ games, seminars and people helping to shape the UK gaming industry. The World Series event @ LGF is hosting a lounge for viewing the staged tournaments & features the [gJ].

The meatblog Harper’s Magazine had a great roundtable last month entitled “Grand Theft Education” (Grand Title Auto!) and featuring Steven Johnson and Raph Koster as representatives of everything-fun-is-good-for-you cyberspace. The conversation was great, and Johnson and Koster both made a good case for games, of the sort one wouldn’t have seen – even in progressive serials such as this one – a decade ago. My favorite part was Jane Avrich’s description of dressing up like a Puritan schoolteacher, requiring her students to call her “Mistress Jane,” and providing disobedient students with “public humiliation.” Which does make blowing away zombies seem totally normal.

Submissions are sought for E-Poetry 2007, Paris, organized by:

Loss Glazier (EPC, University SUNY Buffalo)
Philippe Bootz (Paragraphe, University Paris8)
Jean Clément (Paragraphe, University Paris8)
Patrick Burgaud (MOTS-VOIR)
Alexandre Gherban (MOTS-VOIR)

Call for Papers
The reign of Catz and Dogz?
The role of virtual creatures in a computerised society

A one day symposium at AISB’07 to be held at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2-5 April 2007

Prompted in part by Adam Cadre’s second article on Tron, and in part because I wanted to illutrate where Rez comes from, I recently saw Tron again. Adam has already said many interesting things about the movie and our current cultural moment in his lavishly illustrated post, but I thought of a few comments to make:

• Tron is almost entirely black with some blue and red lines. The red and blue lines glow brilliantly, making the black even blacker. Tron may have the largest share of cinematic darkness ever. The Maltese Falcon and Lost Highway look like “It’s a Small World” compared to Tron.

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:.. =  .=  ..: d1scuss1on - open house - workshop - read1ng - tour - jam
:
.
:    AUTOSTART - A Festival of Digital Literature
:
.    Kelly Writers House, October 26 & 27
:    Celebrating the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1
:    MACHINE series # Electronic Literature Organization

:     http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/autostart.html

:
:=:#=:.#=::==.=....:...>  Charles Bernstein
.#.=..=:#.=::===...:.:.>  Jim Carpenter
::.=.==...::==:.=#:...#>  Mary Flanagan
:#.:...:.:=#..=.=.=:==:>  N. Katherine Hayles
:.=#:.===.:.:::.=..#..=>  Daniel C. Howe
:=#:::=:.#:=.=.=....=..>  Aya Karpinska
..:.==#==::#==:......:.>  Aaron Levy
:#=.=..:..=.::=::#..==.>  Marjorie Luesebrink
::=:=:...:=..#.==#.=.:.>  Nick Montfort
.....:==::.=.#:.=.==#.:>  Stuart Moulthrop
:=...=#:...:::=#===..:.>  Jason Nelson
:#..=.==..:=.=..:#.=:::>  Jena Osman
:..=.=.=.=#:=:#.:...=::>  Bob Perelman
:::=..=:.===.:#:.=#....>  Aaron A. Reed
:....:.:.===#=.:=:#=..:>  Scott Rettberg
.==:.=...:..#.::=:.=.=#>  Ron Silliman
.=...:=#.=:..=:..#.==::>  Brian Kim Stefans
:#.::...=:.:.==.==:..#=>  Stephanie Strickland
...=..=#=::=.=..:.:=:.#>  Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Digital artist Jonah Brucker-Cohen has a retrospective of sorts on exhibit in Montréal; the show, “Deconstructing Networks,” is a collection of projects which shift perceptions of network interaction and experience. Works in the exhibition include “Alerting Infrastructure!,” a website hit counter that destroys a building (in fact, the Oboro Gallery site is linked into this; visiting the Oboro exhibition announcement will contribute to the work in the gallery!); PoliceState, a fleet of radio-controlled police cars whose movements are dictated by “suspicious” keywords scanned on a local network;
Wifi-Hog,

I’m currently at Blogtalk in Vienna, surrounded by bloggers blogging. While I’m going to sit here quietly and pose as a baffled technophobe, I would like to point out that Jill Walker is sitting to my right assiduously “liveblogging” the proceedings (while also having a conversation with Danah Boyd in iChat and flickring photos and responding to email). Amazing. I encourage you to visit jilltxt for updates.

Turbulence has just launched a beautiful and resonant new piece by Jason Freeman, with Patricia Reed and Maja Cerar. “Graph Theory” allows the interactor to take an open walk on a connected graph of violin vertices, and to influence future live performances of this piece, as the description of this piece explains:

I’m currently enjoying a fascinating email discussion sparked by an invitation from Penny Florence, Tim Mathews, and John Cayley to be a “virtual critic” for a series of events at the Tate Modern this fall. The series is e and eye: art and poetry between the electronic and the visual. The live events will take place Mondays from 6:30 to 8pm, starting two weeks from now on the 16th of October, continuing on the 23rd and 30th of October, and concluding the 13th of November. I hope some folks will be able to make it to the Tate in person, and I’ll post something (maybe just a comment below) when the e and eye website opens the “virtual” contributions for reading and comments from afar.

The games are out for IF Comp 2006 – head to the downloads page to slake your thirst on a torrent of interactive fiction. The number of games is up from last year, to 44. If you know even a bit about IF, you’re very likely to recognize some of the names of entrants this year; a variety of development systems, including the new ones, have also been put to use on this year’s games.

Also of note: Karl Parakenings has kicked off his coverage of interactive fiction in his “Cardinal Points” column with an interview of Stephen Granade.

Make Your Own Adventure offers a collaborative system for selecting/reading or adding to CYOA-style stories. The system is by Jonathan Aquino, built on the Ning social software framework. The demo story is piratical (or at least nautical), and the concept is clever, but does it result in a more resonant work when one is able to add another option for dealing with Stumpy Jack? (Thanks to Darius for news of this.)

NYTimes

I’ve posted numerous times about virtual characters (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8), and in my posts I’ve always been critical of shallow, cardboard-cutout characters. I’ve always had trouble understanding how players can tolerate them.

However, sometimes a cardboard cutout is all you’ve got, and it’s better than nothing.

The Maine National Guard is giving life-size from-the-waist-up pictures of soldiers to the families of deployed guard members. Guard officials and families say the cutouts, known as Flat Daddies or Flat Soldiers, connect families with a relative who is thousands of miles away. The Flat Daddies are toted everywhere from soccer practice to coffee shops to weddings.

My expensive typewriter‘s email program recently popped up with the CFP (deadline November 6) for a digital literature conference in the Netherlands with an impressive lineup of keynotes:

An international conference on literature and the new media entitled Re-mediating Literature will take place at Utrecht University (the Netherlands) 4-6 July 2007, with keynote speakers Katherine Hayles, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan Baetens, and Samuel Weber. The aim of this conference is to examine how technological changes have affected the ‘old’ medium of literature in the present (digital media) and the past (writing machines, film, radio, phonograph, grammophone, television). Our website features all relevant information concerning the conference including the call for papers (deadline is November 6, 2006):
http://www2.let.uu.nl/remediatingliterature/

The CFP for the upcoming Digital Games Research Association International Conference has just appeared. The conference will be September 24th to 28th, 2007, in Tokyo (right after the Tokyo Game Show). The deadline for papers and panel proposals is midnight (Apia time), February 14, 2007. The selection will be based on full papers and panel proposals. Details follow.

I’ll be giving a keynote talk at the March 1-2, 2007 World Building: Space and Community, the UF Games and Digital Media conference:

The University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of English are pleased to announce the 2007 UF Conference on Games and Digital Media: “World Building: Space and Community,” which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 1-2, 2007, in conjunction with the annual Conference on Comics, which will be March 3-4.

LEA just released an extensive new issue on Digital Poetry. While I’ve just taken a quick look, it appears to be a terrific collection of essays on contemporary digital poetry, in addition to featuring several compelling works in the gallery. The issue edited by Tim Peterson includes essays by Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg, and Matthias Hilner, in addition to works in the gallery by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska and Daniel Howe, mEIKAL aND and CamillE BacoS, and Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. The correlation between the essayists, authors and works reviewed in this issue of LEA and the contributors to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One suggests to me that the two free publications will make a great pair for teaching. All of the essays in this edition of LEA are available both in HTML and downloadable PDFs.

Last month I posted about a job in my department for which I’m on the search committee. Well, now it’s been approved for us to also advertise another tenure-track position for this year “with an emphasis on information and communication technology, and new media industries.” Review of applications for this second position begins November 15th.

GrandTextAuto’s own Mary Flanagan appears in the documentary 8 Bit, premiering October 7 at the New York MOMA. The trailer is now available for your viewing pleasure.

A Review of Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture
Alexander R. Galloway
University of Minnesota Press
2006
168 pp.
$17.95 paper / $54.00 cloth

The five essays that make up Galloway’s book Gaming are conversant and compelling, offering valuable perspectives on gaming and culture. They are appropriately concise and well-written, and they show Galloway’s sure command of theory and his solid understanding of games and how they are played.

To be sure, the essays take a high-level view of gaming and its place in culture; although Galloway cites and considers numerous titles, his book will be less useful for close critical encounters with particular games and more useful for understanding the shape and topology of gaming overall. There is another strange twist: the essays fail to inform one another on important points and perspectives, limiting the reach and success of the discussion. But this book does work very well in opening up new ways of thinking about gaming – for instance, in showing how new connections to film and art can be usefully drawn – and supplies good food for thought for scholars and students.

I’ll briefly mention some of the most intriguing things about the five essays in Gaming in order:

As I mentioned I’m currently developing authoring tools to be used for creating character behavior for interactive drama. Depending on how this is approached, this can overlap quite a bit with visual programming. I’m in the middle of researching people’s various approaches to visual programming, paying particular attention to user interfaces. (I’m still experimenting with what extent our authoring tools will expose the programming layer below, but I’d like to see how others have attempted to visually represent programs.)

In doing so I came across an very interesting ongoing project called Subtext by a research fellow at MIT named Jonathan Edwards, whose goal is nothing less than a complete revolution of how we program, to make a “fundamentally better programming language”. He’s created a pair of geekily entertaining demo movies that demonstrate a UI for programming in Subtext, definitely worth 30 minutes of your time.

Here’s a screen capture of Subtext from the movie, just to give you a flavor: