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No, I don’t mean that earth – there’s a new issue of Terra d’IF, Robert Grassi’s Italian interactive fiction zine. I can discern that issue 5 holds reviews of the recent Flamel by Francesco Cordella and the older L’anello di Lucrezia Borgia. For those who, like me, have no Italian, Grassi’s interview with Paul O’Brian is available in English. Two of Grassi’s reviews from earlier issues have been translated into English by Emily Short, too.
Rather than sit in front of the TV for four-plus hours tomorrow, I plan to tape the Superbowl and watch it later, allowing me to fast-forward through those annoying breaks in the action. Through the game, that is. Generally I’ve found Superbowl contests to be mediocre entertainment — it’s the ads that are more intriguing. I’ve gotten into the habit of taping the whole event each year, and usually find a handful of very, very expensive pieces of commercial video art worth watching. The whole viewing process takes about 45 minutes.
Christiane Paul was Lo-fi‘s guest curator for January, and the show she put together is called News Readers. The pieces range from large public artworks to small rectangular applets made with Processing. Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss’s Energie_Passagen (Energy_Passages) “reproduces the linguistic space of the city in form of a data flow. Hundreds of catchwords taken from current newspaper reports appear in a projected ‘information flow’ and are spoken by artificial computer voices. As soon as passers-by select individual words, thematically related networks of terms start to perform in this flow, which can also be experienced as an audiovisual echo.” Ed Burton’s Recent Events “dissolves three texts into a fluid suspension of letter tokens. The dissolved texts are drawn from a live source, updated on the hour, every hour. In their gathering stream, these tokens grow sticky tendrils towards potential neighbours, coagulating to form clots of recovered text.” I’m also pleased to say that my News Reader collaboration with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich is included. (Thanks to Turbulence for the tip and the commission.)
Jason Dyer, an IF author who has the distinction of having placed well in the first IF Comp in 1995, has started a new blog about IF, Renga in Blue. He’s got three posts up already – pretty good for the first day’s work. We’ll look forward to more. You can find the link on here under “Related Blogs,” too.
It’s 2014. Do you know where your New York Times is?
If Suck.com were reanimated, had its sense of humor removed, and made a PBS-history-documentary style Flash animation about Googlezon taking on the New York Times in an ecstasy of customized, micropayment-based, indie-news-making frenzy, it would be this one.
Today’s Times has an interesting article, “When the Sous Chef is an Ink Jet” about Homaro Cantu, a chef in Chicago who serves edible photos and sushi prepared on an inkjet printer. The restaurant serves edible menus. Cantu is also looking into levitating foods and innovative ways to utilize class IV lasers in food preparation. Of course this makes me think of what type of edible story I might like to tell, a novel that you could really sink your teeth into.
The WWW@10 conference looked back on the Web’s first decade – and, of course, inevitably invited thoughts about the next decade. Now, on the conference site, you can see video of heavyweights from different eras offering their thoughts. Ted Nelson, for example, speaks on “The Metaphysics of Structure and the Future of Literature.” Cory Doctorow asks “Web 2.0 = AOL 1.0?” and goes on to explain “how the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to break the Internet – and you’re not invited.”
Doritos has some new ad campaign with some sort of AIM tie-in (I couldn’t stand to spend more than five seconds on their adversite, so I couldn’t exactly tell) and with posters that are written in some dialect of leetspeak or hax0r (one of which I noticed this morning). Or maybe they’re just encoded using some variant of the Prince compression algorithm.
Promoting unhealthy snack foods to the downtrodden, computer-bound population does rather smack of intensively marketing malt liquor in the hood. But, on the other hand, maybe that is a sign that one day, someone will be trying to communicate with a pasty, bespectacled passenger in seat 13C, and I’ll be able to say “oh, stewardess – I speak leet!”
Just a quick note to try to convince you: please please please stop using those “under construction” icons on your home pages! They are stupid, pointless, take up unnecessary bandwidth, and can sometimes be silly. They belong in a museum. At the very least, use an alternative icon that won’t make people bust out with some Village People song. I mean, really – get with the program. And whatever you do, please don’t use an animated GIF.
Our 60-minute fandango on interactive story at the Game Developers Conference this March suddenly promises to be double fine, now that we’ve wrangled Tim Schafer to join the fray. Tim will either speak full throttle about the past, present, and future of adventure games vis-à-vis interactive stories — or just sit back and laugh at us oh-so-serious pontificators and casually plug his new game, which by the way is now available for pre-ordering. Well, hopefully he’ll do a little bit of both.
For those unable to make it, I’ll take notes, and report back here.
“Wannabe game designer and failed programmer” Johnny Pi has a new blog, Design Synthesis. A few quotes from some of his initial posts:
[W]hat remains to be seen is how game developers are going to merge freeform and structure. How can we model a reactive gameworld without creating a picture of anarchy? … I’m interested in the confluence of order and chaos.
This was going to be a comment in today’s discussion on the IF 1893 in The Times, but this is lengthy enough that I’d rather score a new post out of it.
Nick and Scott commented that in today’s market, selling text-based IF has become rare, and that the viability of selling e-lit is questionable. My take is that the market for new forms of e-lit and the like, e.g. interactive drama, is underdeveloped enough that charging money for it may do more to hamper a work’s reach, than to give it away.
Michael and I are facing this issue right now: as we’re close to releasing Facade, now in its final stages of bug fixing and audio editing, we’ve been thinking about the best way(s) to release it. Anyone have any thoughts if it’s a good or bad idea for us to charge for Facade, based on what you know so far about it? What you would pay for it, if anything? Do you think charging for it would hamper its dissemination?
Jeremy Norman’s library of early computer books, including 1411 items, will be auctioned in 250 lots at Christie’s on February 23. The collection includes the typescript of the 1946 business plan for Univac by Eniac creators J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, valued at more than $50,000. I won’t be putting in any bids, but there is a lot of interesting bibliography about this collection available at Norman’s site. Thanks to Stephanie Strickland for the tip about this.
Peter Nepstad’s 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, a historically-grounded interactive fiction mystery written in TADS, may not have very impressive sales when compared to Halo 2. But it did rate an article in today’s New York Times. Here’s the info on 1983 from Baf’s Guide, including a link to free demo of the game.
On Armchair Arcade, Bill Loguidice provides detailed reviews of the Atari Flashback and the Commodore 64 30-in-1, comparing these two recent official entries in the “TV games” category. He finds the controllers on the Flashback (mentioned earlier on here) to work very well, although they aren’t compatible with the original 2600/7800 controllers. He writes that “where the Flashback fails is also where other TV games have failed—the quality of the emulation of the original system’s abilities. … these games are markedly different than their original 7800 and 2600 counterparts.” He notes that the C64-in-a-joystick only contains 30 games if you count fairly creatively. On the other hand, “everything looks and sounds almost exactly like the original, certainly better than any other TV game to date.” Unfortunately, to make up for excelling where the Flashback let us down, where Atari’s system worked well, the C64 30-in-1 has problems: the joystick has too much play in it and “does not accurately register directions.”
If so, turn to page (Clive Thompson), just published in Slate.
If not, turn to page (Rune Klevjer), older, but quite good.
(Unless you just like validating your existing opinions…)
Mostly for Noah. Not many new revelations in the comment thread of the recent Slashdotting of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, although I hadn’t realized that in addition to Olivia Newton-John, Rush recorded a song with the same title.
Eyes on the Screen is a project encouraging you to download and watch Eyes on the Prize, “the most important documentary ever made about the Civil Rights Movement.” As The Globe and Mail explains, the video didn’t air on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and has been unavailable on TV or VHS, and was never released on DVD, because the makers of the documentary could only afford a time-limited license to use the archival footage that appears. So, the group Downhill Battle, working with Common Sense Culture, digitized the 10-part series and has made torrents available so that anyone can download it. (BitTorrent is required, but links and setup instructions are provided; At the moment, parts 1-3 are up.) Wired News calls this an act of civil disobedience – you gotta put something catchy in the lede – but Downhill Battle is more modest, taking the position that informing yourself about United States history by watching footage of historical events is “fair use” of copyrighted material, even if people happen to be singing “Happy Birthday” to Martin Luther King in some of that footage. They call, nevertheless, for a move back to the original purpose of copyright, so that other documentary filmmakers won’t be stifled in the future – and for widespread screenings of Part 1 of Eyes on the Prize on February 8, as part of Black History Month.
It’s not William S. Burroughs’ birthday or anything, but I’m teaching cut-ups tomorrow and thought I’d share:
Ian Wilson has begun a new blog as a forum to discuss ways to advance the state of the art of emotional behavior in virtual characters and interactive experiences. Ian has contributed numerous comments to discussions on GTxA of late, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on this shared pursuit. And his domain name ends in “ai”, which is pretty cool. Added to our blogroll.
One of the PSP games that is positively surprising reviewers is Lumines, a fairly low-budget puzzle/music game by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the creator of Rez and Space Channel 5. Although it isn’t an abstract shooter, this somehwat Tetris-like music machine, with a constantly shifting background image, sounds like it may offer a bit succor those who mourn for Unity – maybe enough to last until the Yak is back on track with his next game. I don’t own a PSP or this game (needless to say), but take a look at the review of the Japanese release of Lumines on GamerFeed and the preview on Gamespot to learn more about it. Also, check out the recent interview with Mizuguchi on Tokyopia. (Cortesia de Elastico.)
A Review of A Theory of Fun for Game Design
written and illustrated by Raph Koster
Paraglyph Press
2004
244 pp.
$22.99
In an illustrated essay that is somewhere between a meditation and a manifesto, Raph Koster works to justify games to a general audience by characterizing them as learning experiences that can be tuned to challenge us in new ways. The book, based on a 2003 talk at the Austin Game Conference, is, unfortunately, short on real argument; Koster has thought out his positions in the book, but he usually neither backs up the claims he makes with much discussion nor follows through to investigate their implications. It’s interesting, though, that Koster has tried to make A Theory of Fun for Game Design itself a playful learning system, by juxtaposing text with diagrammatic or cartoon sorts of discussion, for example, and by providing copious endnotes with digressive comments and references. On the recto there are some gems: a nice chart showing the evolution of the 2-D shooter, drawings of game patterns for some of those shooters, and amusing cartoons in which teens brag about, among other things, beating the last level of Ulysses.
My recent attempts to get some work done have been accompanied by music from the The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC), a huge supply of files for the Commodore 64’s Sound Interface Device (SID) and apparently the largest archive of chiptunes. The SID, designed by Bob Yannes in 1981, “redefined the concept of sound in personal computers,” or so Byte Magazine claimed in 1995, naming it one of the 20 most important chips in history. The archive offers music from games and from the scene. Read on for how you can listen (on a non-C-64 computer) and for a few suggested tunes…
Ian has started blogging his experience at the Slamdance Game Competition. Sounds like he’s having a great time. His first post is a reflection on the question “What is an indie game?”, fueled by his conversation with The Behemoth, the studio that created Alien Hominid.
Last year the SLS (Society for Literature and Science) changed its name to acknowledge the longstanding involvement of the arts. The organization has hosted many presentations related to digital media at its past conferences, as you can see from the program of their 2003 conference and their 2004 conference. Now, the SLSA invites paper abstracts (150 words) and panel proposals, due May 1, for…
(Read on for the CFP)
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