Grand Text Auto

I just stumbled upon “Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction” [PDF] [PS] by Adam Mathes, who got a Library and Information Science Masters recently from UIUC:

I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. … Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. … Much like rare books, older computer programs are in need of conservation if their intellectual material is going to be accessible today and in the future. … a special collections library is well suited to the large task of preserving these works …

The sixth annual Ludum Dare 48-hour Game Programming Competition, aka LD48, starts tomorrow at 10pm US EDT. As of this moment, 21 hours and 36 minutes before competition begins, there are currently 123 entrants, ready to go with their compilers and libraries of choice, and presumably large caches of caffeinated beverages, frozen burritos and power bars.

Latin for “to give free play to“, Ludum Dare (pronounced ‘Lude-um Dar-ay’) “is a ‘mostly from scratch’, timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme”. Voting is almost over for choosing that common theme, which includes ideas such as “repetition”, “kitchen combat”, “goop”, and “that tickly feeling in your stomach (not quite love)”.

If you’re in the mood to see interminable video of Final Fantasy VI being re-enacted by video game consoles (that is, the video game consoles are the characters), check out Sega Fantasy VI (in English). Update: link changed; thanks, DoomRater.

I had never heard of the WonderSwan, the PC-FX, or the Playdia before this. And, I must say, some of the parts I watched were quite touching. Maybe it’s just that sappy music, though.

I spent some time last night over at Gavin Inglis’ Bareword. Scottish writer Inglis is one of the few hypertext authors I’m aware of who has written hypertexts according to the “branching path” model frequently discussed as a structural model but rarely utilized. I was familiar with Inglis’ Same Day Test, which tells the story the day in which its first-person protagonist goes (or doesn’t) for an AIDS test. The reader of SDT is offered choices of the “choose-your-own-adventure” variety. One smart design decision Inglis made with this work was to put all of the links at the bottom of the page rather than in the body of the text, which at the very least encourages the reader to finish one lexia before making a choice and moving on to the next. The story is tightly structured, advancing the reader through the course of the protagonist’s day.

Notes on Defending the Galaxy: The Complete Handbook of VideoGaming
edited by Michael Rubin
written by Michael Rubin, Carl Winefordner, and Sam Welker
illustrations by Rudy Young and Jeff Webber
photographs by Michael Rubin
Gainesville, Florida: Triad Publishing Company
1982
224 pp.

I recently borrowed Defending the Galaxy from Paul Shaffer, who not only is currently the Eniac curator here at Penn, but also happens to have worked for Scott Adams of Adventure International back in the early 1980s as a play-tester.

In a nice list of video game firsts published in the February 1984 issue of Computer Games magazine, Defending the Galaxy is listed as “The first ‘complete’ guide to video gaming (manners, maladies, dress, etc.)” We might take this declaration with a grain of salt, because the list happens to be drawn up by Michael Rubin, the editor of Defending the Galaxy. But it turns out to be an interesting book, for reasons that may not be obvious at a glance.

Hello all, I’m at CHI 2005 and have enjoyed catching up with Georgia Tech, RPI, UWashington, and Oregon colleagues–including GTXTers Michael M and Andrew S!! I’ve found the serious games panel and the social interaction panels to be engaging and relevant. I presented a new paper in the “Social Behaviors” session written with Howe and Nissenbaum on the topic of ‘values in design’– specifically, designing a socially-oriented game while at the same time incorporating and verifying particular values within the game design.

Implementation next to the tower

Originally uploaded by marinella.

The first photos of the Italian translation of Implemenation, from Marinella in Pisa.

A new memorymap group has formed at Flickr. People are annotating satellite maps from Google Maps of places that are important to them. I can see a lot of narrative potential in the form.

Idle Thumbs — a scrappy, well-written games journalism site that I think is getting ever more impressive — has a new piece called Games Beyond ‘Games’, reporting on last February’s Innovation in Games Symposium in the Netherlands. A quote from a struggling indie game developer who presented at the symposium:

[T]here is a market for innovative games, there is a desire to make them, there is a need to do research into them, but the games industry is not the place where this will happen.

And speaking of the Orisinal games, you’ll find a creative review of several of them Idle Thumbs as well.

Mind’s Heart
  by Robert Creeley

Mind’s heart, it must
be that some
truth lies locked
in you.

Or else, lies, all
lies, and no man
true enough to know
the difference.

Poet Robert Creeley died on March 30. Charles Bernstein has recently updated the Creeley page on PennSound and the EPC Creeley page at the University of Buffalo, where this prolific and influential poet taught before recently moving to Brown. The EPC page has links to many obituaries. The main page of Conjunctions is now filled with tributes to Creeley, including one from e-lit writer and Brown student Brian Kim Stefans, who, in his Roger Pellett persona, reworked some of Creeley’s poems.

Maeda Path is a Flash game, with sound, by Jared Tarbell. It’s based on a short online game that John Maeda coded for Shiseido. “This game represents one component of a multipart series studying the astounding work of long time computational artist John Maeda.” Via Elastico.

Matt Kirschenbaum gave a talk today called “‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace:’ Computer Forensics and Electronic Textuality,” at Penn’s History of Material Texts Workshop. (The abstract is online.) He discussed the Department of Defense Clearing and Sanitization Matrix and how the seemingly extreme measures required to destroy digital data contradict the first wave of scholarly writing on the transient, unstable nature of digital text, from “the usual suspects.” He pointed to the luminous spectacle of Tron as one possible inspiration for this early discourse of speed and light.

I somehow just now got word of WRT: Writer Response Theory, a blog o’ blogs, already up and running for a while, that works to foster discussion on ASCII art, blog fiction, chatbots, email fiction, e-poetry, hypertext fiction, and interactive fiction (IF). The site can now be reached from our “Related Blogs” list.

The announcement explains that “WRT is a blogging collective dedicated to the discussion and exploration of digital character art — any art involving electrons and making use of letters, alphanumerics, or other characters in an interesting way. Our primary focus is on active and interactive works, in which users input text and receive textual responses as output.”

Christy Dena, Jeremy Douglass, and Mark Marino (bios below) run this open site. “Everyone who reads this blog is a member and may suggest a thread or a link,” they write. “As long as it pertains to digital letter/character art we will post and pursue it.”

I was recently alerted to Ferry Halim’s Orisinal, which offers pleasant-looking, easy-to-understand Flash games, reminiscient of greeting cards and often featuring happy animals. They’re worth looking at. While I can’t say that I find them very compelling, some people apparently do, from looking at some of the net-wide high scores for these games.

The IF Comp, which takes place in the fall (for those in the Northern Hemisphere), has traditionally been the annual big deal of interactive fiction production and critique. But there’s also a Spring Thing, a competition Adam Cadre ran in 2002 and 2003 and which is back this year, thanks to Greg Boettcher. The games are out for this year’s; you can download them from the IF Archive. The voting period ends May 1.

Our excellent blogging system here at Grand Text Auto is run on WordPress. We love this free and open-source software, but I am deeply disappointed (and I’m sure Michael, Andrew, Scott, and Noah are as well) that the main site for the project, WordPress.org, was recently unmasked as a search engine spamhaus – a huge number of hidden articles were placed there, courtesy of the founding developer, solely to distort or “game” Google for the profit of unscrupulous lawyers and merchants. As a result, Google has dropped the site from its index and – not that it matters, but it’s the thought that counts – we’ve de-linked the main WordPress site from here as well.

It’s been a while since we posted the news in January, so just a quick reminder that the deadline for Turbulence’s juried international net art competition is tomorrow.

This week in Lausanne, Switzerland is EvoMUSART, a workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art. Papers include “Genetic Paint: A Search for Salient Paintings”, “Artificial Life, Death and Epidemics in Evolutionary, Generative Electronic Art”, and “Extra-Music(ologic)al Models for Algorithmic Composition”. Here is the abstract of Jon McCormack’s “Open Problems in Evolutionary Music and Art”, that looks particularly interesting to me:

I’m pretty late in announcing this, but in a few hours (2pm UC Riverside time) there’s an interesting-sounding event featuring two professors: “Do Androids Dream? The Legacy of The Turing Test.” The cross-disciplinary influence of Turing is one topic for Saul Traiger, professor of cognitive science & philosophy, Occidental College, and Stephanie August, professor of computer science, Loyola Marymount University, who are speaking in the Global Interface workshop.

Psy-Geo Provflux 2005 is looking for people to propose, plan, and/or participate in a weekend of interventions, lectures, shows, and other events that encourages others to reinvent their social spaces May 27-29 in Providence, Rhode Island. Looks like it will be a weekend of happenings. Submissions are due April 15th.

Now the world has truly begun to conquer my and Scott’s sticker novel Implementation.

We are delighted to announce that Riccardo Boglione, a scholar of 20th century Italian literature and graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, has translated the first installment of Implementation into Italian. His translation of installment 1 is now available for download and printout onto US Letter or A4 label paper. Riccardo plans to continue translating the novel, releasing one installment a month. (Implementation Italian home page.)

Posts from me will be few and far between for the next month or so, as they have been since GDC — we’re in the final stretch of debugging, audio editing and polishing Façade, and unfortunately I’ll have little mental space or energy left over for blogging until it’s done. (done… what a concept… unimaginable, really…)

I do promise to find the time to finish writing up my impressions of GDC, I just can’t predict when. I’ve made some notes, so I won’t forget it all.

For now, please direct your attention to a new well-written piece by Adam Cadre, who is enjoying the company of another conversational virtual character.

Gamespy reports that Warner Brothers has employed a full-time troupe of 20 actors who will interact live with players of Matrix Online. “These people will assume the roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the stories in ways that only live “actors” can.”

Ken Kahn just spoke at Penn about his system ToonTalk, a Windows programming environment for children (and others) which provides facilities for developing graphical computer games. His talk was “Learning using concrete virtual analogs of powerful abstractions: Lessons from ToonTalk, Playground, and WebLabs” — slides are online in HTML. Khan distinguished the reasons that Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and others might have for arguing for advocating what Michael calls procedural literacy, although he noted that all are clearly allies in looking beyond the current curriculum to try to allow students a better understanding of computational thinking.

Well, it’s been forever since I’ve blogged; the last couple of months have been truly brutal. With Spring “break” upon me (my break involves catching up on all the things I’m ludicrously far behind on), I thought I’d try to sneak in a blog post or two. The big recent events to report on are my trip to GDC and the Living Gameworlds Symposium we hosted at Tech last week.

I didn’t have nearly as good a time at GDC this year as last, mostly due to the horrible cold I came down with the day I flew out. I spent the majority of the conference in an addled daze, finally feeling human the day I flew back. So here follow my fever-crazed impressions of GDC. To cut to the chase:

1. The industry is beginning a phase transition into procedurality (code as content). The transition will take a long time to complete, requiring, as it does, fundamental new skills (procedural literacy, anyone?).
2. Next-gen consoles are going to be even more ludicrously expensive to develop games for (at least the old-fashioned content-shoveling way). AAA games will require teams of 300+ and commensurately large budgets. Therefore console games will be dominated by giant studios making risk-free titles. Maybe procedurality will save us (see point 1).
3. Still lots of grumbling in the trenches about lack of innovation in the game industry and perma-crunch development schedules (see points 1 and 2).
4. The “story” hype-wave is no longer peaking as it was a couple of years ago. Though there were a couple of events about the future of interactive story (including Andrew’s panel), they mostly had the flavor of “we’ll, we haven’t made much progress” or “we don’t know how to make progress”. Much of the “story” stuff at GDC has now been pushed into routine game design forums (writing dialog for characters, creating linear storylines for games, cut-scene design, etc.). The hunger for real interactive story seems to be on the wane.
5. “Everybody’s upgrading, nobody’s downgrading”

Ok, I didn’t mishear the lyrics that severely, but I did want you new media/rock-n-roll scholars to know about Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium, even if you aren’t going to write about the fine piece of electronic literature that features the Boss as one of its main characters. The list of session rubrics includes “Springsteen as Narrative Poet,” “Springsteen and Gender,” and “Springsteen and Critical Theory.” Deadline April 30.