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Though Mr. Wardrip-Fruin will not defend the monster until May, word on the street here at the Brown E-Fest is that the days we’ll be able to speak of Master Wardrip-Fruin are numbered. It’s soon be Doc. One member of Noah’s committee described reading the new media wunderkind’s tome as “the most exciting thing that’s been going on in my life . . . lately.”
Last week I was in Norway, where I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Bergen to Jill Walker and Elin Sjursen‘s students in the Web Design and Aesthetics course. Talan Memmott was also there to give a talk. Talan showed some interesting new e-lit work I hadn’t seen before, including some work that is not yet on the web. Memmott showed work from two different streams of his creative practice, “network phenomonology” works such as his well-known Lexia to Perplexia, and a different “history of art” stream that includes new media interpretations of the lives and works of artists such as René Magritte. Talan’s been working in particular lately in a combinatory vein, and many of his works include both combinatory text and music. Of the newer work he showed, my favorite was “The Hugo Ball,” a recombination of a nonsense poem of 78 unique words by the Dadaist poet. As you mouse over the face of the Hugo Ball, it recombines and speaks the 78 words to you as they flash on the screen and the face “speaks” the words in layers of visemes. It’s a fun, and vaguely creepy, piece. While he was there, Talan was also interviewed for Bergen Student Television. The interview is available online for your viewing pleasure.
Also new from Norway, by way of New York City, is Hanna-Lovise Skartveit’s Take the F-Train, a fun and innovative online documentary about the F-Train in NYC, and by extension, about the population of the great melting pot itself. The piece includes a mixture of drawn characters, video of the train’s interior, and interviews with riders of the F-Train, many of whom are immigrants living in New York. The documentary captures the cosmopolitan nature of America’s largest city. The project is part of a larger Digital Storytelling project funded by Norwegian Radio/TV NRK.
Jim Carpenter’s poetry generation project has surfaced here and there, for instance, at a Slought foundation exhibit and event and at the recent MACHINE series reading at Penn, where Jim read with Loss Pequeño Glazier. But the project has remained rather enigmatic, so those without access to Philadelphia (or to this week’s E-FEST 2006 at Brown, where Jim will be presenting) haven’t gotten to even read much about this poetry generation system.
Now, the Electronic Text Composition project, and its focalizing persona, Erica T. Carter, have a site that describes the project, provides some publication credits (poems generated with the system have been printed in literary magazines), shows off some of the source code, and offers interactive access to the system. Enjoy!
At the current GDC, the First Penguin Award (which is not the first award of this sort and doesn’t have anything to do with Linux) goes to Will Crowther and Don Woods, says the press release.
The two “are credited with pioneering the videogame genre of Role Playing Games (RPGs),” which is one line of descent you could trace, I suppose: via Rogue, via tile-based graphical RPGs of the Ultima sort, etc. Adventure had a more fluent interface that was able to speak in something like English back in 1975, but it lacked many important RPG elements, such as a detailed combat system and the ability to control multiple characters or characters with different abilities. But, presumably the RPG genre still exists, while the same can’t be said for other genres and forms that more obviously grow from Adventure – say, interactive fiction, or “adventure” games more generally, or even action-adventures in fantastic environments.
Francis Hwang was seeking writers for a collaboration back in January: Now, the project has launched. It comes pre-primed with writing, but invites you to stop back and read further as the blog rolls fictionally on.
“Ten-sided” is by Francis Hwang, with Johannes Görannson, Jess Kilby, Tao Lin, Brendon Lloyd, Jessica Penrose, Glenis Stott, John Woods, Taren McCallan-Moore, and why the lucky stiff. The project is a Turbulence commission; the email from Turbulence explains:
At the National Science Foundation Joint Annual Meeting (NSF JAM 2006) , 900 scholars at this moment are meeting to discuss national and research efforts in diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This morning, Sara Martinez Tucker”, head of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, gave an inspiring talk looking at the growth of private funding for disadvantaged students. Martinez Tucker noted that 29% of Americans are receiving a college education, while 63% of new jobs require at least some college education. Numbers in particular science and engineering programs at the University level (such as computer science) are continuing to drop overall, and a drop in terms of the percentages of diverse students is also reported. The scholars presenting today point to the challenges of specific scenarios in equity; indeed, across the board the scholars, scientists, and even Congress people warn that the US is facing in leadership, innovation, and expertise in the coming years as US test scores in these areas also fall. Part of the challenge, noted Martinez Tucker, is context: familial/counseling, financial limitations, and places where diverse students can study in a comfortable environment are all key factors.
Brown University, March 22 – March 24, More info at the official blog
Aya Karpinska * Braxton Soderman * Brian Kim Stefans * Daniel Howe * Edrex Fontanilla * Gale Nelson * George Landow * Ilya Kreymer * Jim Carpenter * Judd Morrissey * Lutz Hamel * Michael Stewart * Mike Magee * Nick Montfort * Nick Musurca * Noah Wardrip-Fruin * Polly Hall * Robert Coover * Robert Kendall * Scott Rettberg * Stuart Moulthrop * Wendy Chun
The Escapist has a new article by journalist and editor Mark Wallace, “The Play’s the Thing“, informing readers about the existence of the academic ludology/narratology debate — that it appears most game scholars are ready to move on from. Members of the IT-Copenhagen gang (Aarseth, Juul, Frasca) are quoted (Espen in fact referring to himself as a narratologist ;-) plus ex-developer Mark Barrett. Wallace (who has commented here at GTxA, skeptical of interactive stories) concludes that it’s “the wrong debate”; regarding game and narrative in interactive entertainment, “one doesn’t exist without the other”.
Congratulations to Jason Devlin, whose IF-Comp-winning Vespers brought him the Best Game XYZZY award and three others, and congratulations to the other XYZZY winners. See the full list of winners; there’s also a transcript of Sunday’s online ceremony.
To celebrate the availability of the First Person paperback, I’m happy to share the table of contents for the sequel that Pat Harrigan and I have edited. The new book, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, is currently in the MIT Press production process (and will hopefully appear on shelves this fall). We’re very pleased with how the new book has come together. It includes leading game designers, innovative computer scientists, writers and artists engaging the playful potential of digital media, and scholars who take games and other “playable” media seriously along computational, representational, performance, and ludic dimensions. Plus three appendixes include alternative RPGs from John Tynes, Greg Costikyan, and James Wallis!
Paging through a few of the many archived versions of the Yahoo! home page on the Internet Archive shows that the Yahoo Web Directory’s rate of disappearance has been pretty steady over time: Feb 1998 … Jan 2001 … Jan 2003 … Jan 2005.
Part of this encrustation of advertising, services, customization, news, and so on around the core function of a site is a general phenomenon I call “portalitis,” one which has afflicted many a page. Portalitis is not always irreversible. Flipping through the archived home pages of Altavista (www.altavista.digital.com through 1998; switched to altavista.com by the beginning of 1999) shows a different progression, toward a busy mess that is trying to provide one-stop shopping for everyone and then back to the Google-like minimalism of the current Altavista page. Whether this improvement in interface led anyone back to search using Altavista is another matter, of course.
Long have people puzzled over the strange system of Dan Shiovitz’s game Bad Machine (available online at Poems that Go.) But the attempt at careful discussion I made in my review of Bad Machine now seems unnecessary, because a page that explains everything has recently come back online.
It’s spring break, so I decided to take a trip to Maryland and hear a talk…
Scott Rettberg’s talk at MITH (University of Maryland). I was pleased to hear Neil Fraistat plug Grand Text Auto in introducing Scott…
Scott uses the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 (eds. Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, Strickland) to discuss the notion of genre in e-lit. There is no established publishing model, economic market. This causes problems with in presenting work in the classroom, assigning work.
This is the last in my series (1 2 3 4) of posts about two story generation systems that were first published about in the mid-1980s: Minstrel and Universe. I think they’re not just interesting in themselves, but also in the lessons they give us for how we might approach story generation today (including interactive story generation). In fact, I think they’re interesting in helping us think about how we might design any system meant to exhibit behaviors we consider “intelligent” — behaviors meant to be interpretable to a human audience as similar to things we do ourselves.
Join us this Thursday March 9 at 7:30pm for a presentation about the development of Façade at my local indie dev hangout, the Portland Area Game Developer Interest Group (PAGDIG).
I’d make a joke about the rain in Portland, but that’s just a myth Portlanders perpetuate to keep too many Californians from moving here. ;-)
As mentioned in the first post of this series (1 2 3), the primary designer of Universe is Michael Lebowitz (also, according to the acknowledgments in Lebowitz’s 1984 and 1987 papers, work by Paula Langer and Doron Shalmon made significant contributions to the project and Susan Rachel Burstein helped develop many of the ideas). The Universe system shares a certain intellectual heritage with Minstrel and Tale-Spin, and it also has another unusual shared feature in common with Tale-Spin. As we see with Tale-Spin‘s “mis-spun tales,” the most famous story attributed to Universe has a somewhat more tenuous connection to the project’s output than one might assume. Here is the story:
There’s a new issue of CIAC’s Electronic Magazine, an online French and English publication of Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal. This Winter 2006 issue is “Hyperlittérature IV: contraintes / Hyperliterature IV: constraints,” and it includes an article by Patrick Ellis on my Ad Verbum (2000) and Neil Hennessy’s Jabber (2001).
February’s Living Game Worlds symposium, held at Georgia Institute of Technology and hosted by the GVU and Ivan Allen College/LCC among others, was a superb thinktank, bubbling forth ideas, strategies, studies, art forms, and communities around computer games.
In my previous two posts (1 2) I gave some background about two story generation systems, Minstrel and Universe, and outlined the basic set of plans and goals used by Minstrel. In this post I’ll discuss the main engine Minstrel uses for creating new stories: transformation and adaptation. As we’ll see, it’s both intriguing and problematic.
Leading IF author Emily Short has released two new games, and Graham Nelson, IF author and creator of the widely-used IF system Inform, has a new IF offering, too. Graham’s piece is entitled The Reliques of Tolti-Aph. Emily’s new games are Damnatio Memoriae (set in the Savoir-Faire universe) and Bronze (a “fractured fairy tale” based on the legend of beauty and the beast). They were all coded in the soon-to-be-released Inform 7, and they come with lavish virtual “feelies” such as PDF manuals, a map, and a walkthrough (for the weak). Among these is Emily’s IF Instruction Manual and similar instructions in the Bronze manual, which will prove very useful for IF newcomers.
As mentioned in my previous post, the first publication about Minstrel appeared in the mid-1980s. The system was brought to completion over the course of a decade, resulting in Turner’s 1994 publication of The Creative Process: A Computer Model of Storytelling and Creativity. Over the first few years of Minstrel‘s development, some of the ideas at its foundation continued to evolve. Particularly, in Schank’s lab the model of dynamic memory and its adaptations was extended into the idea of “Case-Based Reasoning” (CBR). The basic idea of CBR is in some ways quite close to that of scripts: in the main people do not decide what to do in each situation by reasoning from first principles, but rather by drawing on previous knowledge. However, rather than suggesting that each of us has a “restaurant script” and a “sports event script” and so on, case-based reasoning assumes that we remember many cases, and reason from them — much as the learning of previous cases is formalized in legal and business education. (I’m adapting this account from 1989’s Inside Case-Based Reasoning.)
We’ve had quite a bit of writing about literary work using digital computation since the 1990s (e.g., Landow’s Hypertext; Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory; Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck; Aarseth’s Cybertext). But there’s been surprisingly little written about two story generation systems that got their start in the mid-1980s: Minstrel and Universe. They’ve caught my attention recently, so I’m planning to write two or three posts (after this introductory post) about them. I’ll be contrasting them with the best-known story generator, Tale-Spin — which, if memory serves, is written about in all but one of the books mentioned above.
On ifMUD I learned about an elegant and geographically-contextualized real-time system for delivering news headlines.
It’s slick. All it needs now is a PointCast logo … if one is still available.
How to write sinister computer overlord dialouge?
Now get this straight, pal – no one User wrote me. I’m worth a couple million of their man-years! I’m bigger than all those little wimps put together! Humans they can’t even keen their social order in one piece. [Continue …]
No one has lived in the past. No one will live in the future. The present is the only form of life. It is a state of existence which is indestructible. [Continue …]
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