Grand Text Auto

For the second year in a row, June appears to be an excellent month for conferences. In addition to AIIDE and DiGRA, add Chris Crawford‘s annual to your list. And this June they all share some common geography — the North American west coast, where I just moved to, coincidentally, so I hope make it to all three. :-)

Here is the CFP (Call For Phronts?), and registration information.

In the latest IGDA Ivory Tower column, two University of Florida doctoral students call for an interdisciplinary approach to game studies – specifically, connecting children’s literature studies and video game studies. The authors are prolific digital media scholar Laurie Taylor and Cathlena Martin, who works with children’s literature and digital media.

I think they should go for it. A strong research result that comes from children’s lit + video game studies is exactly what would persuade me of the value of this combination.

Their proposal doesn’t seem to offer the clearest scenario showing the value of interdisciplinarity, though…

I recently wrote a paper (draft) that builds on previous posts on GTxA on procedural literacy (1 2). It argues that New Media scholars and practitioners must be procedurally literate (which includes knowing how to program), and that games (and game-like artifacts), because of their fundamentally procedural nature, can serve as ideal objects around which to organize a New Media-centric introduction to Computer Science. I welcome any comments on the draft.

There’s a new Interactive Fiction FAQ for those new the puzzly pleasures of these programs that are games, potential narratives, and worlds. Some of us put it together recently on ifwiki, which Dave Cornelson has installed as a resource (and collaborative writing space) for the IF community. The IF FAQ is similar in purpose to Roger Firth’s Ifaq, but it’s meant to immediately offer a few more practical answers than that document or the welcome page for those new to the IF community, which is useful, but more focused on how to be a member of the IF community. Hopefully, it will complement Roger’s nicely designed FAQ, which answers questions with helpful links, by being a bit less superbrief but not too verbose. The IF FAQ’s “How can I download and play IF?” section is probably my favorite, as it includes a table of interpreters to help people quickly find an appropraite IF interpreter for their platform. (This task always seemed to me like it must be particularly daunting for those unfamiliar with the maze of interpreters available, even though lots of interpreters are centrally available at the IF Archive.) The “live” (and editable) version of the IF FAQ is available at ifwiki; the version 1.0 snapshot (which is available to everyone under a Creative Commons license) is what I’ve posted at nickm.com.

As Jill pointed out not too long ago, Donna Leishman recently completed a practice-based PhD program, developing The Possession of Christian Shaw as part of that work. Her dissertation, “Creating Screen-Based Multiple State Environments: Investigating Systems of Confutation,” is now online, too. Visually, interactively, and in terms of its relationship to a grim tale, her new artwork shares some some of the features of Donna’s earlier The Bloody Chamber and Red Riding Hood, building upon the idiom of those pieces in strange and elaborate ways. In a change from the previous peices, the grim tale of Possession is not from a fabular tradition, as will be explained at the end to the assiduous interactor.

Johanna Drucker described Implementation in this way during the “Ubu meets Gertrude (Towards A Post-textual Avant-garde)” event featuring Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, from the December 28th event at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. The full audio archive is now online. Johanna and Christian are smart, darn smart. Nick and I are sort of B- smart, but we did write the stickers.

In 1965, French artist Ben Vautier devised the provocative piece of mail art called “Postman’s Choice.” It was a postcard with lines on both sides, made to be addressed to two different destinations and then stamped on both sides. With no return address included, the letter carrier gets to choose who gets the postcard. While the postman may ring twice, he only gets to choose once, in this case. Of course, the postman might be clever enough, or the person sending the card might be such an obvious mail experimenter, that the postal system can take the third option.

Why hasn’t an email version of this project been devised? I have a few ideas about that…

Craig Robinson wondered What If…, and then drew some charts.

The first chart represents the imagined potential of his life up to the present, and the second chart is the imagined potential of his life from the present forward.

I found these charts more satisfying than the similar but different chart exercise I conducted a while ago. Carl would surely agree.

A research fellow at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Ireland comments on the Lab’s permanent shutdown, which was announced last week. The MLE was originally launched in 2000, initially funded by the Irish Government, with a plan to transition over time to corporate funding.

However, dot.com times are gone, and companies are reluctant to invest into endeavors where the return on investment is not clear. … I believe that Negroponte’s vision of conducting research cannot work out in times of short-term renevue expectations.

The comments and trackbacks include additional links to others’ obituaries.

Whither research of cool stuff…

For a limited time only (less than a month from now) you can download Lisbeth Klastrup‘s dissertation, Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds: Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story. The abstract explains that it “introduces and examines persistent online worlds (game worlds, social worlds, commercial chat worlds and educational worlds) as important cultural net-based phenomena” and “presents a number of concepts, definitions and analytic tools to be applied in the development of a poetics of virtual worlds, ‘poetics’ here understood as a systematic approach to examining the rules and aesthetic functions of virtual world systems.” It documents her lenghty quest for “EverQuestness,” the essence of the virtual world EverQuest. Also, there’s a section for “Worlds” on page 367 of the bibliography, which you don’t see every day.

Hey this is a cool project: Grafedia is attempting to write a hypertext on the streets of New York. All it takes is a picture cellfone and some magic chalk. Like the Yellow Arrow project, the idea of this project is that people mark things as significant in the physical world, and then to remark them in cyberspace. Grafedia encourages users to upload images, audio and video. To make Grafedia, you simply write a word (with a blue underline) somewhere in the world, and then email a corresponding media file to (that word)@grafedia.net. This makes me want to get one of them newfangled mobile phone things with video capabilities. Via Turbulence.

Justin Hall’s having a breakdown. I saw it on today’s installment of Justin’s Links.

opinion ahead — watch the video first before reading

Thanks to teh Dashslot Games, I learned that EA is looking into starting a Sims TV show.

One of the ideas is an interactive show that would “let viewers control the actions of the characters,” but of course, they have backup plans in case the interactive TV thing doesn’t work out. Here are a few of the concepts being thrown around…

I’m settling into Portland, Oregon now, after moving here a couple of weeks ago from Boston. Between the move and switching to working full-time on finishing Facade for the next two months, I haven’t had much time to blog, but I’ll toss out a quick post here, grinding that familiar axe… (and finally busting Nick’s 10-in-a-row postravagnza! ;)

For all the bemoaning that goes on about the lack of variety of interactive entertainment, and even more so about the slow progress in increasing the amount of agency in such games — criticisms I’ve made many times, and regularly hear others making — I want to suggest that the root cause of it all may be less blameworthy, and at the same time more troublesome, than some believe.

I heard an interesting talk today by Penn film scholar Peter Decherney, author of the soon-to-be-released Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. He spoke about the topic of his next book, which he’s just stared on: Who Owns the Movies? A Cultural History of Film Copyright. Peter is also teaching a course on Copyright and Culture this semester, with lots of good Lessigian, Vaidhyanathanian, and Stallmanic stuff on the syllabus.

We knew that putting stickers on stuff could get you in trouble with the law, and that sticker literature is subversive and charged by the context it appears in, but those folks down in Cobb County went way beyond what we did with Implementation. They were so radical in their sticker writing – back in 2002, no less – that they’ve just managed to get a federal judge to write an analysis of their work. (On Slashdot, there was much rejoicing.) It’s bad enough that Georgia Tech is such an innovative place when it comes to digital media, but you’d think that those of us in other states might at least be able to develop the most controversial and groundbreaking sticker literature…

A Review of Narrative across Media
edited by Marie-Laure Ryan
University of Nebraska Press
2004
422 pp.
$35.00

This collection of essays, framed by Marie-Laure Ryan’s clear explanations of narratology and its application to different media, is an indispensable resource for those interested in how narrative and digital media interrelate. Without ever making the assertion that narratology will offer the dominant or controlling means of understanding video games or other computer works, the essays included explain how the approaches of narratology can work across different media to inform many different sorts of investigations. Ryan’s writing – the overall introduction, and introduction to each of the five sections, and an article on narrative in digital media – makes the volume particularly useful to the narratology newcomer and to those interested in digital media.

The Graduate Humanities Forum here at the University of Pennsylvania will be hosting an interdisciplinary conference on Collecting the Unconscious: Reflections on Sleep and Dreams on March 3-4, 2005. Princeton history professor Christine Stansell will keynote. This year, we invite applications from grad students at other universities: just supply a 200-word abstract by January 20. New media topics aren’t highlighted by the call for papers, it’s true, but takes on digital dreaming should be welcome at this gathering. The list of topics includes nightmares; nocturnes; dreams and the subversive discursive; dream poetics; prophecy, divination, or the oracular dream; and “brain in a vat”: from Descartes to The Matrix. For one thing, I bet there are some creative new media works about this sleep and dream stuff…

A post on ifMUD alerted me to the slim but intriguing public book selection that the California Digital Library has made freely available for online reading. Personally, my interest in this history-heavy, literature-heavy selection was piqued by The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley and by Christopher Beach’s book ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. I was about ready to start reading one of these, in fact…

I’ve been thinking a bit of the recent Macworld keynote and its slew of announcements, and of Apple’s lawsuit against Apple information site Think Secret, a lawsuit which lines the bad-boy corporation, “rip mix burn” Apple, up against the EFF.

After this latest salvo, will the sjuzet need a health pack?

Espen Aarseth declares on the first page of “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse,” his article in Narrative across Media: “The thought that these complex media [MMORPGs] can be understood by any existing media theory, such as narratology, which was developed for a totally different genre, grows more unlikely with every stage of the ongoing computer evolution.” I found this statement both potentially misleading and slightly amusing…

I finally finished reading Jesper Juul’s dissertation, “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.” It’s a great treatise on video games, devoting a lot of discussion to earlier forms of games, from sports to board and card games. While Jesper is a bit apologetic about this in his conclusion, I think it’s quite necessary to attend to the history of games and to games of other, non-computer forms. I’ve mentioned to Espen before that I find his strong focus on video games (to the exclusion of earlier games) a bit problematic, especially when you consider that there are computer chess games and computer simulations of sports games. I think Jesper’s work, along with Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, will begin to address the issue of how computer games fit into the millennia-long tradition of games. Of course, there is plenty more to say about the matter, but it’s good that several scholars have started to pick up on the relationship between computer games and “classical” games.

Looks like Natalie Bookchin’s speaking on January 25 at the next Global Interface UCR Mellon Workshop. Bookchin (creator of “The Intruder,” Metapet, and, with Jackie Stevens, agoraXchange) “will examine debates about the life and death of net art,” and she’ll apparently attempt to resurrect it, a surprise for the many of us who didn’t know it had died, and an even bigger surprise for the huge number of others who never knew net art was alive to begin with. I think the period in between “net” and “art” may have finally died, though, and it certainly deserves a eulogy.

A puzzling republication and tribute to literary semi-madman Harry Stephen Keeler can now be found at Spineless Books. Keeler, an arcane mystery writer, wrote a treatise describing how to construct the sort of elaborate plots that he used in his print novels. It was called ” The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction,” and William Gillespie has just published it in a new edition, online. Gillespie also presents a graphical bibliography of Keeler, an illustrated explication of Keeler’s theories and their applicability to hypertext writing, and a brief illustrated guide to writing like Keeler.

Intellectual property in the context of games and new media is one of our regular themes here at GTxA (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9). So I was particularly struck by the IP concerns raised in More than Human, an article appearing in CIO Magazine (“The Resource for Information Executives”). The article matter-of-factly explores the corporate implications of transhumanism, particularly for Chief Information Officers. As corporate employees enhance their bodies and minds, there will be the need to adjust digital rights management policies.

When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing a contractually limited form of amnesia.