Grand Text Auto

It must be national poetry month. In addition to Nick Montfort’s foray into deforestation this morning my email included note of two other strange poetic projects. William Gillespie at Spineless Books announced that to celebrate Charles Fourier’s 234th birthday and the first birthday of Joshua Corey’s Fourier Series, the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award For Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literature (2005), there has been an update to the Fourier Series web suite to include recordings of the author reading (recorded in the offices of Burning Deck Press), a PDF excerpt of the book’s inventive layout, and Fourier Electronique, a ten-minute MP3 poetry remix. The MP3 is haunting, western, and linguistically interesting, well worth a listen. Ken Tompkins also passed along a link to The Fib, a poetic form based on the Fibonacci sequence: a 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8. Although others, including Paul Braffort, have experiemented with the famous pattern before, this seems like a fun form to try on a plane, shortly before bed, or to inflict on one’s students in an Art, Games and Narrative course.

I write a lot of things intended for the computer. I decided, for a change, to write a poem that was fit for print and paper. Here are a few notes about the project:

1. Ream is a 500 page poem.
2. The writing of Ream was entirely imagined and executed on one day: April 5, 2006.
3. On each page of Ream a single, one-syllable word appears, centered, in ordinary, 14-point type.
4. Page numbers do not appear on any of the pages and are unnecessary, since the words are in alphabetical order.
5. Pages 1-51 recapitulate Poe’s “The Raven.”

I haven’t had a chance to read Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (I need to get past a couple looming deadlines first). But I was just looking at the website, which is definitely one of the more interesting book-related sites I’ve ever seen. For starters, there’s an End-User License Agreement, a simulated packet sniffer and webcams, and some rather suggestive imagery. In terms of the book itself, if her ISEA keynote (pdf) is any indicator, it’s going to be a very thought provoking read.

As easily predicted Darwinia swept the GDC’s Independent Games Festival, and also predictably there is a bit of controversy over whether Darwinia deserved to compete, since it’s now distributed by Steam and has had some moderate commercial success. I think the answer is an obvious “yes” — Darwinia was created in true indie style, and just because the game is now moderately successful, by no means disqualifies it as indie.

On April 20th UC Irvine will host “Massive” — a one-day event about the present and future of MMO games. There’s an early registration discount, but the deadline is tomorrow (April 6th). From the site: MASSIVE will engage 25 speakers and approximately 80 registrants from industry and academia in a dialog about the future design, technical and cultural challenges presented by massively multiplayer games, current and future research agendas from both industry and academia, and case studies and future models for industry academia collaboration.

Happy 01:02:03 04/05/06! Although if you’re on a 24-hour clock in this time zone, you may have missed your last chance to celebrate this rare alignment of the digits, 12 hours ago…

Jill Walker reports that there is a Ph.D. fellowship opportunity at the University of Bergen’s Department of Humanistic Informatics. The Faculty of Arts has seven fellowships available, and proposals are competitive among all the departments concerned. This year, UiB is advertising in English as well as Norsk, and is encouraging international applications. I’ll be teaching at UiB next year and perhaps longer. I would love to see some applicants for the position who are writing about electronic literature or some other aspect of new media in the context of the humanities. Ph.D. fellowships in Norway are richly funded, with a decent salary for four years and additional research funds for books and conference travel. Applicants must have completed an M.A. in a related subject and must prepare a short dissertation proposal. See more details in Jill’s post and in the advertisement.

• A Bob Ross “Joy of Painting” videogame. Oh dear, I hope we don’t have to shoot at happy little clouds and bushes…
• Awesome — Game Music Radio. (Ah, we’ve got to submit our Façade soundtrack files to the station, especially the rare bizarre Noh-drama tracks that only occur 10% of the time you play Façade…)



• Irascible blog commenters out there, you should like this new freeware game… Flamewar!
• Intel Game Demo Contest — win $30K or more!



• Opening April 13 at IIT in Chicago, ben f. laposky: the 1953 electronic abstractions exhibition: restaged and remixed

This week the International Digital Media and Arts Association will have its annual conference, code> humanSystems/digitalBodies. CEB Reas and I are keynoters among many interesting presenters and topics – check out the schedule, and I hope to see some GTXxters there!

Mark Tribe and Reena Jana’s new book, New Media Art is due out this month from Taschen.

This semester, students in my New Media Studies course produced podcasts. Their assignment was to create a story on some aspect of their interaction with new media and contemporary communication technologies. The resulting podcasts are available on the Digital Life website. I’m pretty pleased with the results. Students covered topics ranging from music downloading, to creating an online radio show, to instant messaging, to MySpace, to World of Warcraft, to online poker, to Deviant Art, and other online manifestations of Indy Culture. In preparing for the assignment, we listened both to popular podcasts and more importantly, to well-produced NPR shows such as This American Life. Some of the better-produced podcasts borrow techniques, such as using appropriate sound effects, editing together choice bits of several interviews, creating an overall narrative arc, and integrating musical interludes, from those NPR-style talk shows. Overall I’m satisfied with their work, and with the assignment. It has both enabled them to see the relative ease with which some kinds of new media artifacts can be produced, and offers a format that really allows their individual (Jersey) personalities to shine through.

Thursday March 30th I gave a presentation positioning “radical computing” amidst gaming and computer science at the Columbia University Women in Computer Science (WICS) group.

I met some wonderful students and faculty, including a few folks from Teacher’s College and of course the Computer Science department. Dr. Julia Hirschberg is one of the WICS mentors at Columbia and does fascinating work in spoken language processing. Most campuses have WICS groups — if one does not, I encourage folks to start one!

Best would be to do nothing. If not that, at least read nothing relevant to what you should be working on. If not that, at least don’t shoot the puppy.

[Note: I timestamped this post 11:59pm March 31, so you’d know I wasn’t joking.]

There was sometimes fascinating, sometimes frightening testimony at a U.S. Senate hearing last Wednesday on the effects of violence in games. One of the only voices suggesting that the social science data is perhaps not yet conclusive was UIUC prof Dmitri Williams, who blogs at GTxA compatriot site Terra Nova. (Interestingly Williams’ was the only testimony not available to the press as of yesterday; luckily Williams has posted his statement on his site, along with everyone else’s.)

Violence in games is not something we usually talk about on this blog; we’re more interested in the aspects of human behavior typically not represented or simulated to date in interactive entertainment (1 2 3 4 5 6 7, for example). When we do occasionally talk about violence, it might be about how it seems to seep its way into character-centric interactive entertainment experiences, how violence is such a one-note tune in contemporary game design or in media coverage of games, maybe how life can eerily imitate game violence, or meta-commentaries on violence in life vs. games, or the military’s involvement in gaming (1 2 3), or perhaps to expose the occasional violent debate between game scholars.

An axe I often grind is the need for what I’ve called “authentically interactive” characters and stories — how we need them for the medium to progress and mature, for creative, artistic and aesthetic reasons.

But couldn’t authentic characters also be the salvation for the violence in games crisis?

April 15th is the deadline (don’t believe the March 31st listed on the website) for proposals to UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. If you’re an artist or an independent curator, this is your chance for a show at the Beall in 2007-08. The Beall was the site of the groovy ALT+CTRL show, for which there’s now a nice website (and some hip panoramas are also online). Of course, timing is tight, but wouldn’t you have started on the proposal around now even if you’d been planning for months?

Here are two word and image gems, great verbally-playful motion pictures that the Internet provides to our home theaters…

Word Disassociation. By Lemon Demon, a.k.a. Neil Cicerega, who has also brought us animutations and ultimate showdowns. Also on Google video. Thanks to Brian Kim Stefans for pointing this one out.

ClikClak. In French and English; click through the intro to get a choice of language for the movie itself. Thanks to Adam Cadre for the link.

In my presentation at E-FEST 2006 (official blog) I showed some ways that an early virtual cave, the interactive fiction Adventure, can – when implemented in an IF system that separates simulation from narration and uses text generation – be varied in narrative ways. But I also got yet another chance to check out the virtual, textual Cave at Brown that has been the locus for 3D literary work by Talan Memmott, John Cayley, William Gillespie, Noah, and many others, in Robert Coover’s cave writing workshops.

More GDC writeups: 21st Century Game Design co-author Chris Bateman, at his blog Only a Game, has posted a nice summary of fellow ihobo developer Ernest Adams’ GDC talk, “A New Vision for Interactive Stories“.

Ernest surveys some of the techniques and issues in developing interactive stories, including observing and reacting to Façade (as we know, he’s a fan). Based on the summary of the talk, it’s more of a broad talk than deep one, touching on the idea of limits in interactive stories (reminding me of Nick’s first GTxA post), suggesting an implicit “credibility budget”. The talk concluded by pointing towards procedurality as a road to progress.

At E-FEST 2006 I understood the main connection between postmodern writing and hypertext. It took being on a panel that included – along with computer scientist Lutz Hamel – George Landow, Stuart Moulthrop, and our own Scott Rettberg. This purported “Game of Fiction” panel was actually a veritable hypertext brainwashing session! I probably should have figured out this connection when I first read Landow’s classic Hypertext, just out in its third edition, or from Scott’s repeated statements of what I now seem to recall as this very point. But I think it was the comment from Robert Coover after the presenters spoke that finally made the Super Hypertext Club click.

• Still waitin’ for that Citizen Kane moment
• From the maker of Disney spin-off games, Desperate Housewives: the videogame. Here’s early screenshots.
• Is Controller Design Killing Creativity in Video Games? (Answer: Yes! We need interfaces that are more than a few buttons and a joystick, i.e., language!)
• Hal’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, from MIT Press. 50% off right now.
• An old link, but worth noting: Warren Spector is developing a Source/Steam title.

I plan to have a few short notes about this year’s E-FEST at Brown, which was a great event. (Update: Note 2, “First I Saw the Surface;” Note 3, “Virtual, Textual Caves.”) You can see some evidence of this in the photos by Brian Kim Stefans and the photos by Scott. I won’t attempt to summarize all the good points made in the panels and all the provocative and compelling e-lit that was shown during two nights of performances, but I do want to recount and rhapsodize upon a few of the many interesting things said and done at this festival.

While we don’t normally write personal blog entries on GTxA, I’ll follow Andrew’s lead and make an exception.

After months of waiting, three weeks ago we finally got to bring our little girl home from Guatemala! Nataly is almost 8 months old. We spent 8 days with her over Christmas; it’s amazing how much she’s already changed since then. She’s doing wonderfully; happy, healthy, already comfortable in her new home. We love being parents…

With my new daughter just home, I skipped GDC this year. Ian gave our joint talk. While I missed catching up with folk at GDC, I loved the week I spent with my daughter.

Daniel Shiffman has been making a series of visits to the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College. His screen-based interactive art installations have been exhibited at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Directors Club of New York, Galapogos Art Space, the Savannah College of Art & Design, and Tisch School for the Arts. He is also a producing director of Page Seventy-Three Productions, a non-for-profit theater company dedicated to producing and developing the works of emerging playwrights.

Articles covering the still-ongoing Game Developers Conference are flowing in: The Birth And Growth Of Independent Game Studios, Zimmerman on Self-Published Games, What’s Next? panel, reactions to Will Wright’s astro-flying lecture (1 2) (who’s on the cover of Wired this month), You Can (Not) Be Serious, What’s Wrong With Serious Games? (written by a fellow PAGDIG member), Peace-oriented Game Design Challenge, GDC: Write Club — as well familiar material from presentations by Juul, Isbister. Update: Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker talking about prototyping Spore.

Like last year, perhaps the most interesting GDC reportage to comment on is the now-annual IGDA rant session (proficiently transcribed again by Alice at Wonderland), organized by Gamelab’s Eric Zimmerman and this year starring ex-Gamelab now area/code developer Frank Lantz, experimental gameplay workshop organizer Jon Blow, ex-XBox evangelist now CAA Seamus Blackley, resident curmudgeon Chris Crawford, and special appearances by Robin Hunicke, Jane Pinckard, Chris Hecker and Jason della Rocca. Reactions below:

I’ve posted a set of photos from the E-Fest. Highlights of the fest included some beautiful interfaces by current Brown e-writing fellow Daniel Howe and next year’s fellow Aya Karapinska, new work by Stuart Moulthrop, an excellent 10 minute presentation on Perec and Beckett by Gale Nelson, a short paper on Memory and Real Time by Wendy Chun, Jim Capenter’s three-laptop poetry generation performance (video clip), and Brian Kim-Stefans’ absurdist sense of humor.

I’ve just returned from the Serious Games Summit 2006 at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Larger than ever, the Summit’s rooms were packed with a diverse crowd of indie and educational game developer folks (as well as some GTxA community! great to meet you!). The GDC had two full days of serious gaming and to their credit, Suzanne Seggerman and Ben Stokes encouraged the community to grow, grow, grow. They held a “birds of a feather” group on “Games for Change” and I was pleased to make new friends in this arena from places as near and far as the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, the University of Denver, RIT, The Art Institute of California-San Diego, among others–all of which have developed gaming curriculua (in fact the latest count shows well over 15 US schools with game-related bachelors and/or masters’ degrees, and growing).