Grand Text Auto

From the call for proposals for one of 4 themes of the next ISEA, in San Jose:

The Interactive City seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone else’s shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games with a global audience, projects for the Interactive City should transform the “new” technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and locative media into experiences that matter. … Interactive City proposals should embrace aspects of the city of San José and/or the surrounding metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area specifically. We are seeking projects that are large in scale, require advanced or special planning and/or permissions.

I’ll try to fit this
in a small space —
folks in Japan are
reading novels on
cellphones, one
little chunk of text
at a time.
(via if:book)

The feedback on my previous post about the show I’m curating at ACMI was a great help. So here’s another post, focusing on a different group of pieces.

Again, I’m framing my thoughts in terms of how pieces will be displayed. Recently I’ve been thinking about text-only work. It seems there are great opportunities here. For example, to show pieces like Eliza in their original context (as they are almost never presented now). As Nick has pointed out in his “Continuous Paper” essay, “Weizenbaum had an IBM 1050 in his office, a print terminal which featured a Selectric typewriter ball.” That’s to say, Eliza wasn’t originally presented on any sort of screen, but rather on a text-only display essentially like a souped-up typewriter. Through ACMI it seems possible that the use of a number of interesting text-only displays could be explored, showing pieces that originally were experienced via those interfaces along with anachronistic pieces.

The big event, interactive fiction’s Oscars, will be held tomorrow (Sunday March 20th) at 4pm EST (9pm GMT), on ifMUD.

I was just home in Chicago for a couple of days, and had a chance to visit the Museum of Science and Industry, which is currently host to Game On, an exhibition on the history, culture, and future of video games. We visited the Museum of Science and Industry quite often when I was a child, both as a family and on class field trips, so it was both gratifying and strange to see the games I played as an adolescent historicized in a museum context. This exhibition, which was previously shown in a slightly different arrangement at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the most extensive exhibition of its kind, certainly more comprehensive than the respectable Digital Play exhibit at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

This exhbition was arranged, for the most part, very intelligently. For one thing, the majority of the exhibit is playable. More than 100 historically important video games are available for play, most in their original platforms, or in the best available emulator. This made me wonder about the curatorial problem of keeping multiple copies of the hardware available and running. I’d imagine that over the six month run of a popular exhibition, they will go through a lot of controllers, for instance, many of which might now be difficult to find. But an exhibition of video games that you could not play would be about as useful as exhibition of video art that you could not watch.

A new group blog called Game Eaters kicks off by serving up writeups of day 1 and 2 of the Living Game Worlds symposium at Georgia Tech, including Ian Bogost comparing videogame communities to soup. Mmm.
(via Ludonauts)

p.s. those writeups of GDC will continue next week… still digesting it all… my plate is overflowing this week…

Recently I was asked if the US military funds commercial games (ie not America’s Army, but are there cases of contracting commercial games)? Does anyone know? Meanwhile, I have been visiting the darpa game development group http://www.dodgamecommunity.com/. Their “articles + research” page might be a helpful to some~.

[Text of my address today to the Atelier-Auteur (the Authorship Workshop) of RTP-DOC.]

Today, I will discuss two categories of digital writing that I know something about, and that I am an author of: electronic literature and blogs. My point in introducing two types of digital writing is to distinguish between them — and between these sorts of digital writing and other sorts entirely — to explain what is special about electronic literature and about blogs and blogging. Both of these rely on traditional notions of an author in some ways, yet challenge those notions in other ways. I believe that by creating electronic literature and by blogging, one can become not only an author but, for lack of a better term, a new media author, a digital author, or an electronic author.

I will address Atelier-Auteur (the Authorship Workshop) of RTP-DOC (“Documents and Content: Creating, Indexing, Browsing”) via videoconference today, at 11:05am EST (Philadelphia) / 5:05pm CET (Paris), on the topic of electronic literature, blogging, and their relationship to authorship. The talk (which, I assure you, will be in English) will be webcast live. You’re welcome to virtually attend, even if you prefer an ouvroir to an atelier. I will post the text of the talk on here as soon as possible afterwards. … Update: The text is now posted.

I spoke to Norm Badler and Stephen Lane’s Virtual Worlds class here at Penn on Monday about storytelling and games. I hope my talk wasn’t too theoretical for this class, which has been busying producing virtual worlds all semester, but I took the angle that it’s important to first distinguish how we want storytelling to serve game design. I did treat the class to the beginning of Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, Grand Theft Auto 2, and Soul Reaver, on Dreamcast and PSX. My notes are below…

The MHTO Occupation Force is pleased to announce the launch of Mystery House Taken Over.

The Mystery House Advance Team — Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, and Emily Short — has reverse engineered Mystery House, the first text-and-graphics adventure game. Members of the Advance Team have reimplemented it in a modern, cross-platform, free language for interactive fiction development, and have fashioned a kit to allow others to easily modify this early game.

Modified versions of Mystery House have been created by the elite Mystery House Occupation Force, consisting of individuals from the interactive fiction, electronic literature, and net art communities:

• Adam Cadre (Varicella, Photopia)
• Daniel Garrido, a.k.a. dhan (Ocaso Mortal)
• Michael Gentry (Little Blue Men, Anchorhead)
• Yune Kyung Lee & Yoon Ha Lee (The Moonlit Tower, Swanglass)
• Nick Montfort (Ad Verbum, Implementation)
• Scott Rettberg (The Unknown, Implementation)
• Dan Shiovitz (Lethe Flow Phoenix, Bad Machine)
• Emily Short (Savoir-Faire, City of Secrets)

I’d like to write up my impressions of GDC this year in a series of smaller posts instead of a single huge one.

One of the comments that came out during the panel discussion Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories is that the game industry has yet to reach its “Citizen Kane moment”. This is the idea or hope that at some point someone will finally create a game that uses the medium in such radically new ways that it uncovers a new grammar of expression, and in the process reaches new artistic heights.

Maybe it’s the lingering effects of GDC on my perception, and I’m really really not intending to make light of a tragedy, but aren’t parts of this horrific news report from Duluth, Georgia of a prisoner who overpowered a guard and killed several people perversely resonant with the simulated and networked age we live in?

In the course of Mr. Nichols’s escape, he hijacked at least three cars and a tow truck in quick succession, boarded the Atlanta commuter train and stole the agent’s truck, officials said. … Mr. Nichols, 33, surrendered after … apparently learned he was surrounded by watching television coverage of the operation.

I’m not suggesting any causal relationship between simulations of violence and real life violence, I’m just noticing how, for me, it’s becoming somehow easier and easier to compare features of the two, or at least to the media representations of the real life violence. It really bothers me that I’m compelled to make this (admittedly simplistic) observation at all.

I’ve just added links to three active blogs of note: The Institute for the Future of Book’s if:book, the Eyebeam reBlog, and the Creative Commons Blog.

Video games based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Well, video game concepts and designs, anyway, by Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux, and Will Wright.

Talking Head David Byrne is going around the country giving lectures on his artistic practice using Microsoft Powerpoint:

I have been working with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation software, as an art medium for a number of years. It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship, or lack thereof) but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the “medium.” I have shown these pieces in galleries and museums and most recently have produced a book with a DVD (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) as means of presenting these curiosities.)

Gary Kasparov, the strongest chess player in the world, champion from 1985-2000, the highest rated player in history, and the one behind the excellent PC chess player/tutor Kasparov’s Gambit, won the Linares Super Chess tournament today despite losing his last game to Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria. Kasparov, age 41, announced that he is retiring from competitive chess.

Kasparov is also the head of Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group that aims to unseat Vladimir Putin as president of Russia.

It looks like Bob Stein has been busy. The founder of the late 80s/early 90s CD-ROM publisher Voyager, he’s moved from Nightkitchen, the e-book development platform his team developed from the mid 90s until earlier in this decade, to The Institute for the Future of the Book, which was founded last year. It looks like many aspects of Nightkitchen will be preserved within the Institute, but moved from a for-profit to a not-for-profit framework. The Institute for the Future of Book has secured generous funding from the Mellon Foundation (a $1.3 million grant), the MacArthur Foundation, and its colocated host institutions, The Annnenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. The mission described on the Institute’s site is “is to play an important role in developing the form and function of books in the digital era.” The Institute will develop tools, including TK4, a new, open source version of expanded book software, will host two symposia next year, and also hosts a pretty cool blog. I notice that Kim White, the author of The Minotaur Project, which was one of the works shortlisted for the 2001 Electronic Literature Award, is one of the Institute for the Future of the Book’s six staff members. This should be an organization worth watching.

As the seasons change, there’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. The essays in this section (Beyond Chat) are by theorist/practitioners who create projects that seek to intervene in our understanding of communication via digital media. The contents include:

• Warren Sack’s essay, What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like? (with responses from Phoebe Sengers and Rebecca Ross)
• Victoria Vesna’s Community of People with No Time: Collaboration Shifts (with a response from Stephanie Strickland), and
• Natalie Jeremijenko’s If things can talk, what do they say? If we can talk to things, what do we say? (with responses from Simon Penny and Lucy Suchman).

My colleague Ken Tompkins recently sent along a link to John Udell’s Walking Tour of Keene. The short video demonstrates how Udell used Google Maps in concert with a bookmarklet to create a walking tour of an area in his hometown that rides on top of the Google Maps UI. Waypoints are marked with GPS data on the Google map and then linked to his content (jpgs and quicktime clips). Udell explains how he did it in a followup post. Other hacks to Google Maps are being posted on a Google Maps Hacking Wiki. Although the current hack is kludgey, it suggests exciting possiblities for location-based narratives that could be delivered in a web browser via the Google Maps interface.

Wonderland has blogged two talks from yesterday’s day 1 of the Serious Games Summit at GDC: Raph Koster on fun and Cory Ondrejka on Second Life. Good stuff.

It’s perhaps not the most high-tech painter AI out there, nor is it quite an AI-assisted content creator as I would envision one, and its “I am an artist” claim is a stretch, but Daria has created a few canvases I found interesting. Reminiscent of Gnoetry, but probably technically simpler, the “distributed system of server components that collectively combine to become an autonomous creative unit” Daria takes your keyword or words, searches the Web or some custom database of related text and imagery (I’m not sure which), parses its found text and selects some of it, selects and filters some part or parts of images, and then composites the text and image fragments into a final picture.

Exocog: A case study of a new genre in story
A research report by Jim Miller describing the process of writing and distributing a story on the Internet not as narrative text, but as a set of Web sites whose content evolved over five weeks.

Situationist International Online
I’ve spent some good hours here recently. The situationists were anticopyright from the beginning, which has made this quite extensive archive of texts from the situationist movement which reached its height in the 1960s possible, including a complete archive of Internationale Situationniste and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

Designer extraordinaire and long-time blogger Jason Kottke has taken the plunge and quit his day job, to blog full-time. Referring to that excellent comics issue of McSweeney’s, that I too greatly enjoyed, Kottke writes,

Chris Ware notes that “in the past decade or so, comics appear to have gained some greater measure of respect, due in no small part to the number of cartoonists who have begun to take the medium seriously”. This is me taking online personal publishing seriously because I feel it deserves as much.

Alright! … but, um… how’s he going to pay his rent?

I’m in the process of curating a show for ACMI, the Australian Center for the Moving Image. The show’s title will be “Playable Fictions” and it strikes me that the GTxA audience would be a great one to ask for feedback on my in-process plans. I’d be happy to hear — via comments or trackbacks — suggestions for particular pieces, categories of work, or exhibition strategies.

ACMI is a relatively new and large museum in Melbourne which, in addition to traditional exhibition spaces, includes theatres, screening rooms, and production facilities. They were one of the partners for DAC 2003, and since that time they’ve opened a number of additional spaces, which will soon include an area designed for the display of games and other software (where my show will be focused). So far they seem very open to ideas, such as having a DVD in the catalog (for accommodating software and digital video), as well as including some work that goes beyond the borders of the exhibition space.