Grand Text Auto

It’s not Tomb Raider, and it’s not Doom – but it is quite an adventure. At least, it’s a few minutes’ worth of an adventure. It’s Tomb of Doom. In Flash, and in claymation style.

The latest version of Chris Crawford’s elusive Erasmatron — renamed the Storytron — is out. Here’s his announcement of the pre-alpha version of their Story World Authoring Tool (Swat):

At last, after years of work and rivers of hype, our first version of Swat is available for download! It’s not even an alpha version — not all the features are in place, and there are plenty of bugs. But it’s good enough for you to start learning about our technology and how it all works. We would very much like to hear your comments on Swat. Yes, it’s far from complete — this is version 0.51, because we figure it’s only half-finished. And if you’re leery of being a lab rat, you might want to wait a month or two for a more complete version. But if you’re the kind of pioneering soul we seek, then you can exert a lot of influence over the development of the technology by getting in at this early stage.

Below, I’ve included three photos from my reading of Ream, taken by Jill Ivey, along with a link to a new digital version of the poem that was done by Jim Carpenter.

Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about: hypertext.

Okay, that’s not exactly the way that Melanie Hundley’s series of questions begins. But Hundley did contact me with a survey she is doing for her dissertation in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. It’s about how authors who have written both for print and hypertext compose their work.

I offered to post the questions and my replies here on Grand Text Auto, so that she could simply continue with her the survey in comments following this post. Others who want to answer some or all of the questions themselves, or to discuss them or my responses, are of course welcome to do so in comments, too. On to the questions and answers…

My poem Ream, discussed before on GTxA, is now – thanks to encouragement from Andrew – available in a Web edition.

Here it is: Digital Ream.

After years of work and anticipation, Graham Nelson’s new interactive fiction development system, Inform 7, is out. The new system is in many ways more different from Inform 6 than OS 10 was from System 9: Code looks like natural language (like English prose, specifically), a new and well-crafted IDE from Andrew Hunter is provided, and numerous improvements to the language and world model have been incorporated. Games still compile to z-code, however, to run on the standard interpreters that run earlier Inform games.

Check out the World of Awe Enhanced CD and Aspect 7: Personas and Personalities.

I know you are out there…

There are a number of interesting conference and workshop deadlines approaching.

The 3rd international Conference on Technologies in Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE 2006), Darmstadt, Germany, December 4-6, 2006. Papers are due July 15, 2006.

Workshop on adaptive approaches to optimizing player satisfaction in games, held in conjunction Simulation of Adaptive Behavior 2006, Rome, Italy, September 25-29, 2006. Papers due May 21, 2006.

Sandbox: ACM SIGGRAPH Video Game Symposium, Boston, MA, USA, July 29-30, 2006. Papers due May 15, 2006 (Extended deadline!)

Game-On 2006, Braunschweig, Germany, November 29-December 1, 2006. Early submissions due July 31, 2006 (there’s a later deadline of September 15th).

Greetings from Karlskrona, Sweden, where I’m a visiting distinguished scholar at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. While my students at Hunter College NYC are busy prepping for their graduate reviews (crits) mid-May, I’ve been making the rounds with folks here in the Literature, Culture and Digital Media program. Past scholar visitors to the program have included Kate Hayles, Jesper Juul, and Jay Bolter.

(large scale chess demo derby, Stockholm)

Brian Kim Stefans has just deployed Web-works aplenty in the container format of his Brown Masters of Fine Arts thesis, “Kluge: A Meditation, and Other Works.”

I don’t know how many Brazilian GTxA readers we have, but I’ll be giving a few lectures in Brazil during the third week of May (the 17th, 18th, and 20th). It’d be great to meet folks down there.

Some enterprising folks in my hometown of Portland, Oregon are organizing a free, one-day games festival on Saturday June 3rd, called the Northwest Games Festival. Register on-line to come show off your game, attend sessions, awards, etc. Everyone is invited, including all you up in Seattle and Vancouver, you out there in Boise, come on Eureka, hey you up in Anchorage…

I hope to do a session on getting into game programming, participate on a panel with local indie studio folks, and make Façade available to play.

Procedural Arts is proud to be a sponsor of the festival.

Check out a new interview I discovered at furtherfield.org with GTxA’s Mary Flanagan on net art, cyberfeminism and authorship.

Moby Games (wonder where they got that adjective?) is running Terrence Bosky’s story “Something about Interactive Fiction.”

There’s some of the standard article-about-IF fare there, yes, along with some nice touches such as quotes from Don Woods and a write-up of the Mystery House Taken Over project. Since the piece was written up on Slashdot, you can even read the rereshingly unselfconcious comments available there. Slashdot rule #1: All jokes about IF must begin with “>”.

While I appreciate the “rah-rah, boo-hoo, emotion in games!” cheerleading in this week’s The Escapist — I too am all for creating more affective interactive experiences — let’s get real about the status quo of gaming’s expressiveness, please?

I’m at UCI’s Massive gathering today, although I had to arrive a little late.

One of the more intriguing things I’ve heard so far is about some developments in Second Life. They’re building an API into the system. It sounds like it might just be for pulling live data out of Second Life for use elsewhere, but my hope is that it will be possible to structure and control elements of Second Life via external processes (e.g., characters controlled by AI running outside Second Life‘s scripting system). Similarly, they’re working toward an open source viewer that they imagine being customized by different communities. These might both open up interesting possibilities for researchers and artists.

Stuart Moulthrop, author of Victory Garden, Hegirascope, Reagan Library, and Pax, will discuss his more than 15 years of work in digital writing and will read from new work.

Wednesday – April 19, 2006 – 5:30pm

The reading and discussion will take place at the Kelly Writers House, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, 3805 Locust Walk.

The event is free and open to the public, and is part of the MACHINE series at the Kelly Writers House, which is co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization.

Jim Carpenter and his prosthetic imagination now have a blog. Jim’s Electronic Text Composition project website just went up less than a month ago, as we announced here. At this rate we’ll have the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.poetry.etc before the end of May.

• I thought Tadhg Kelly’s particleblog ended in July 2004, shortly after his interesting insyn proposal. I didn’t realize he was back to blogging, as of last summer; he’s been working at Lionhead as a scene designer on The Movies (although apparently is leaving Lionhead along with many others in the recent re-shuffle). Anyhow, he’s got two new essays I enjoyed, one on moving beyond fun in videogames, and a response to Warren Spector’s Escapist article series. Also check out this Next Gen article he wrote on using human-captured motion/imagery in games, although I found it problematic.

Robert Kendall has just launched the site for his new generator-backed, photo-enabled sticker literature project, Logozoa. Photos provide the logozoo – more exhibits are sought from contributors – while texts are downloadable and sticker-printable from the adopt-a-zoa section of the site. This project is aphoristic rather than novelistic or completely open and blank. It’s is based on Rob’s earlier Soothcircuit system, emplying some of the sayings that system can diagram.

Some of this, some of this, and even a touch of this to help you get fully iPoemd up during our noble country’s National Poetry Month. It’s the cruelest month, and sometimes it snows in April; but celebrate it or oppose it, it is indeed here.

• “If Someone Touches You,” by People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly (more by PLU)
• “The Jezebel Spirit,” Brian Eno and David Byrne (last.fm) (info)
• “Mayakovsky,” The Four Horsemen
• “Rocked by Rape,” Evolution Control Committee (more by ECC)
• “PoetryMix” (Christian Bök + Caroline Bergvall), DJ Disaffected (special to GTxA!)

Quickly on the heels of my previous personal announcement, I have another one. This summer will be my last summer at Georgia Tech. Starting this fall I will be joining UC Santa Cruz, where I will help in building up their new, technically-focused undergraduate degree program in computer game design (here are some working papers describing the degree program), as well as help in building up a new game research lab. The last few years at Georgia Tech have been good ones; I will certainly miss my friends and colleagues here, though I’m sure we’ll continue to actively collaborate and will see each other on a regular basis.

I was delighted to see that someone at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin – to wit, Jeffrey Lamar Howard – wrote a dissertation engaging interactive fiction and contemporary literature, and ways that IF can inform the teaching of postmodern writing. Jeffrey Howard’s dissertation is “Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy.” Update, May 9: It’s now online.

I will just quote a few passages from it and mention one point that it makes. This won’t provide anything like a summary of Howard’s work, of course, but hopefully it will show something about the very novel approach to interactive fiction and postmodern literature that he has taken.

Literary pedagogy can be thought of as a form of game design, in which the teacher transforms a printed text into an interactive fiction by locating and devising “puzzles” in the form of interpretative challenges for the student to solve. By applying the principles of game design while teaching postmodern novels, instructors can draw upon the theories and examples of interactivity already associated with interactive fiction to enhance their own pedagogical imaginations.

[reas’ process-ed work “Path 14”]

Some observations drawn from Friday’s keynote lecture at the 2006 iDMAa + IMS Conference- HumanSystems | DigitalBodies follows!
For the last two years, Casey Reas has been writing software utilizing the principles of emergence and simple machines and ‘vehicles’ which develop neural systems. His work is created these days primarily using Processing (surely blogged about before on gtxa)…