Place de la Bourse, Bordeaux, France

The yearly Foundations of Digital Games conference will be held in Europe for the first time in 2011. The Foundations of Digital Games promotes the exchange of information concerning the scientific foundations of digital games, technology used to develop digital games, and the study of digital games and their design, broadly construed. FDG 2011 will be held in Bordeaux, France from June 28-July 1, 2011. The conference General Chair is Marc Cavazza (Univ. Teeside, UK), and the Program Co-Chairs are Katherine Isbister (Polytechnic Inst. of NYU, USA) and Charles Rich (Worcester Polytechnic Inst.).

The Curveship Codefest today was all I hoped it would be – a source of ideas, a way to discuss how to progress toward release, and even a time for the development of several fiction files (games) and spin files (specifications for narrating), some profound, some amusing, some both. I have received some very useful patches, representing the first contributions to the core Curveship code from others since I started this project in 2006. It looks like – with some serious work on my part, and with further consultation from the Curveship cognoscenti – Curveship can finally be ready for release in a few months.

Thanks to all who came by to the Tuesday book release party for Riddle & Bind at Grafton Street. Riddles were pondered (and some solved) and many good times were had. Jason Scott stopped by, driving up from his archival compound in New York State! Recently kickstarted Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf) was there, too. Fiction writer Ralph Lombreglia, my mentor from Boston University, was one of several current colleagues from MIT’s Writing and Humanistic Studies who stopped by despite their teaching and event schedules – thanks as well to Bill Corbett, Ed Barrett, and Magdalena Rieb. All right, enough shout-outs for now. I do appreciate all of you who were able to come by and celebrate the publication of Riddle & Bind.

Thanks to all who came by to the Tuesday book release party for Riddle & Bind at Grafton Street. Riddles were pondered (and some solved) and many good times were had. Jason Scott stopped by, driving up from his archival compound in New York State! Recently kickstarted Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf) was there, too. Fiction writer Ralph Lombreglia, my mentor from Boston University, was one of several current colleagues from MIT’s Writing and Humanistic Studies who stopped by despite their teaching and event schedules – thanks as well to Bill Corbett, Ed Barrett, and Magdalena Rieb. All right, enough shout-outs for now. I do appreciate all of you who were able to come by and celebrate the publication of Riddle & Bind.

As my very crummy photo shows, Dave Lebling joined us (the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction) at MIT yesterday for a productive play session of his game The Lurking Horror. (We got 55 of 100 points, which isn’t bad for three hours, even if some of us who’d solved the game did nudge the others along now and then.) Afterwards, we went on a tour of MIT, checking out some of the locations that inspired those in Lebling’s game.

A special event: The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction is hosting a session in which we’ll play The Lurking Horror, October 31, 2-5pm, MIT’s room 4-145. We’ll take a tour of some MIT campus locations that inspired the ones in this game, and David Lebling, the Infocom implementor who created the game, will be joining us.

Also, remember that there’s a Tuesday Nov 2 book party for the release of my Riddle & Bind, at Grafton St. in Harvard Square, 6-9pm. And on Sunday Nov 7 we’ll have a codefest where people can work on games in Curveship, or on the core system, if they like. Contact me (the login name is “nickm”, the domain to use is this one) if you’d like to join us for that event.

My book Riddle & Bind (with an official publication date of October 31) is out. One day Amazon will have an image of the cover. But for now, anyone can order it through Spineless Books or Amazon, and … there’s a book release party here in Cambridge, in Harvard Square:

Grafton Street Restaurant and Bar
1230 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138

Tuesday November 2
6-9pm

Isn’t it interesting to get a reminder that even in carnie games, the American obsession with guns prevails? In the UK, the carnie game of choice is archery, as seen here in a vibrant Leicester Square.

and stereotypical, this recently spotted advert in London by Tiltfactor folks reminds us of some of the, ah, allegedly ‘old school myths’ about gender and computing.

Holiday shopping is already in swing. For him, the Vanquish Game. For her, Stella McCartney Gift Set.

Anyone who is in the Boston area and interested in spending a day (or a good chunk thereof) helping me push Curveship toward release should shoot me an email. Thanks to a great suggestion from Prof. Fox Harrell, I’ll be hosting a one-day Curveship Codefest soon in MIT’s building 14. People are welcome to write games, to write spin (ways of narrating), and to hack on the core Curveship system with me. We’ll be working toward a release of Curveship under a free software license in December or January.

• Title: Human Play Machine
• Speaker: Chaim Gingold
• When: Wednesday 10/20/10 at 11am
• Where: E2 room 506

• Abstract:
Every game or form of play toys with some human faculty. Slot machines play with our sense of probability and reward, and soccer players play with social coordination, physics, and their bodies. Newborn babies play with and explore their hands. In a sense, our games are software that run on our players’ physical, cognitive, emotional, and social hardware. But what are the specs of the human game playing machine? Are we using all of its memory, processing power, and input/output devices?

Tiltfactor’s Mary Flanagan is giving a talk this Wednesday in the UK at METAL, and participating in an arts pecha kucha this Thursday.

METAL is the artist’s laboratory space set up by Jude Kelly OBE in 2002 to create space for artists and thinkers to develop their ideas and further the philosophy of their work. METAL is committed to supporting artists from all disciplines through residencies, commissioning, producing, debate and discussion, touring and publishing.

The public is invited to participate in the third autumn debate sponsored by METAL, entitled ‘Visualising Our World’ at the Park Suite, Chalkwell Park at 7.30PM on Wednesday 20 October 2010.

A reminder that the deadline for the 2nd International Conference on Computational Creativity, taking place in Mexico City, April 27-29, 2011, is now in less than two months:

• December 13, 2010 – Submission deadline
• February 14, 2011 – Authors’ Notification
• March 14, 2011 – Deadline for final camera-ready copies
• April 27-29, 2011 – ICCC in Mexico City

I posted about the conference back in July; the CFP has been out since then and information has been up on the Web. Our site (I’m one of the organizers) now has resources for authors preparing papers as well as travel information.

I had a great time speaking with people and giving a talk about Curveship, my interactive fiction and interactive narrating system, at Tufts University today in the Department of Computer Science.

Next up is my panel discussion with two others at the Boston Book Festival. It’s on Saturday at 10:30am in the main auditorium of the Boston Public Library. If you read the following incisive paragraph very carefully …

You’ll see that Eugenia Williamson of The Boston Phoenix considers me “a novelist of supreme confidence” – wow! I’m flattered!

The AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition has come to a close. The challenge given to competitors was to build the best performing bot for an immensely popular, commercial game. The competition consisted of four tournaments of varying complexity. This was the first year the competition was held and it turned out to be a success. Even though no prizes were offered, twenty-eight teams participated in the competition. My presentation on the competition provides an overview of the  participants and results.

My new book – a book of poems entitled Riddle & Bind – has been published by Spineless Books. The book contains figurative language that does not explicitly state what is described, but leaves this for the reader to discern: riddle. And I have placed myself within certain constraints to write poems in this book: bind. The official publication date is October 31, but thanks to the attention and deft work of my publisher, I was able to lay my hands on a book and volume today. I will follow up soon with details about this tome and its availability, but for now: Riddle & Bind is bound. And it even has a spine.

Tiltfactor is interested in design and human values, and our influential research project begun in 2005 with Helen Nissenbaum and Mary Flanagan (PIs) with a group of diligent, introspective, and committed researchers called Values at Play has produced a strong body of research. Check out the article in the Canadian game studies journal Loading… Vol 3, No 4 (2009) for our article “Instructional Methods and Curricula for “Values Conscious Design,” which details the curricula and instructional materials created to date. Values at Play researchers investigate how social, moral, and political values are expressed in digital games. Values at Play has developed a systematic approach to considering values in the design process. We have also created and disseminate for all a values based curricula and instructional materials including online Grow-a-Game tool for introducing game design students to the consideration of values in “values conscious” design. Another useful report on research is published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 2010; 4 (1), p. 57-67. “Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Design: Students’ Experiences with the Values at Play Curriculum” offers a report and discussion the results of a focus group study and design work conducted with students in an undergrad game design course with the Values at Play curriculum. Enjoy more articles posted on our website — the project has produced nearly ten journal and conference publications to date , and games from Layoff Profit Seed to Massively Multiplayer Soba and Massively Multiplayer 晚餐 [wǎncān] – and thanks to all of our team members, and especially our Advisory Board: Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Katie Salen. Values at Play has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Narrative Intelligence: AI Approaches for Games and Fiction

DATE: October 14th, 2010 — 9:30am to 5:30pm
LOCATION: UCSC Campus, Engineering 2, Room 599
PRICE: Free (though UCSC parking pass required)
HOSTED BY: The UCSC Center for Games and Playable Media. Co-sponsored by the Digital Arts and New Media program and Institute for Humanities Research.

Clara Fernandez-Vara, a postdoc here at MIT in Comparative Media Studies who researches at the GAMBIT lab and is part of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, has written a short, helpful piece for Adventure Classic Gaming, explaining some ways that academics have studied adventure games – and some of what’s useful about that activity. The piece is called “Adventures in games research.” Give it a read and, if you have one, drop a comment there or here.

I just have to mention the 16-bit ALU implemented in the 3D environment of Minecraft, which has been much discussed by now. I’m glad to hear this game is keeping up with Dwarf Fortress. By the way, the particular piece of hardware that has been (virtually) built, on the way to creating a full CPU, is the one described in The Elements of Computing Systems, a book I wrote about on Grand Text Auto back in 2006.

The opera and “robot pageant” composed by Tod Machover, directed by Diane Paulis and with a libretto by Robert Pinsky has finally been staged in Monaco. I won’t see it until it comes to the Boston area in a few months, but I’m delighted to see the project reach the stage. Death and the Powers (discussed in this WBUR interview) has been in the works for about a decade. I wrote about it as we rang in the new year (2006) at Grand Text Auto, and I was very pleased to hear the workshop performance of the opera at A.R.T., here in Cambirdge. By now, we not only have the performances in Monaco: The libretto has been printed in Poetry and is available online at the Poetry Foundation. And those of us in the US can look forward to the March arrival of Death and the Powers in Boston.

“‘When You Are Strange’: Mutual Intelligibility, Intercoporeality, and Accountability in Stranger Encounters”
Brian Lande, Ph.D, Program Manager, DARPA, Arlington VA

Date: Thursday, September 30, 2010
Time: 11:00 am
Place: Engineering 2 Room 399

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the School of Engineering.

I was a sort of “international observer” at the latest ELMCIP Seminar in Bergen, Norway. ELCMIP is a European project, funded by HERA, which looks at the ways electronic literature communities function and foster creativity. On the first day of the seminar (Monday, September 20) I presented about the IF community, supplementing that evening’s screening of Get Lamp at the Landmark Cafe. I offered some thoughts, summarized here, for those working in other types of electronic literature practices.

Better than ever before, the new series of Grow-A-Game cards are out!

Grow-a-Game are colorful, professionally produced brainstorming tools used in top game design programs at major universities, in game design companies, and in high school programs. Version 2.0 now comes in three different sets (Classic, Apprentice, and Expert). Thousands of participants since 2007 have brainstormed games using these values-centered tools. Tiltfactor developed the cards as part of our research with Values at Play, a National Science Foundation research project led by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum.