Grand Text Auto

In my previous post on writing Fable I outlined some of the work that the Lionhead writers (lead by James Leach) undertook while crafting the game’s story and the lines delivered by the more than 200 speaking characters in that story. But the story is only part of Fable. There’s also a sizable virtual world — and it not only provides a setting for the story, and a sandbox to play in when not concentrating on the story, but also another means of controlling some of the characters in the story. This means that the two types of writing that are discussed in these posts can both provide lines for the same speaker, and that in some cases the logic of the story and the logic of the world are connected via characters, widening the possibilities of Fable. More on this below.

First, however, let’s take a look at the writing of Fable‘s world.

The last votes from Iowa have been counted, and the 2004 IF Comp results have been released. Paul O’Brien’s Luminous Horizon, part of his Earth and Sky series, is the big winner. In second is Blue Chairs by Chris Klimas; third place goes to All Things Devours by half sick of shadows. 174 judges rated the games in this year’s competition. The whole slew of games is still available as a single download from the IF Comp site, and the traditional comp reviews are now being disgorged upon the traditional USENET newsgroup. (Update: zarf’s reviews and Dan Shiovitz’s reviews were posted early on and have been placed on the Web, too, so I’m adding links to them. Do check out the newsgroup if you’re interested in reading more.)

The new issue of Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art is now available, and is a great collection for those with an interest in electronic media and writing. Titled “Text and Language,” this issue’s DVD includes full-screen video of projects such as Text Rain and Screen. Each piece also has a commentary track by a noted curator (e.g., George Fifield for Text Rain, Christiane Paul for Screen). An issue of Aspect can be viewed in a computer or in a stand-alone DVD player.

Just what I needed after hearing that my PowerBook hasn’t even been sent to Apple yet (after a week) and that it will take up to 10 business days to be repaired and returned.

My friend Swarat came to the IF Walkthroughs reading and must have liked it, since he wrote a column about interactive fiction in The Statesman for a few 100,000 of his readers in Calcutta.

On another obliquely self-promotional note, if you’re still puzzled about how Scott and I claim to have written a novel on stickers, I really encourage you to watch the video of Scott reading from Implementation in Bergen. Scott mentioned it already, but it’s worth repeating that there is video there from the rest of the Digital Og Sosial conference there, too. Such documentation is a real boon to us landlubbers here in the states.

I talked with Mark Napier earlier this year at Eyebeam about the new work he was doing. Now he’s posting some of it on his website. It’s remarkable. Check out King Kong Revisited (and then perhaps some related demos and source code). I want to play art games with this sort of attention to graphics, to visual innovation.

Co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center Randy Pausch spent last spring in residence at the headquarters and major production branch of the world’s most successful game company, Electronic Arts Redwood Shores, and wrote up an informative document “useful to academics interested in how to prepare students for EA.” It’s also a good peek into the corporate culture of EA. The writeup paints EA as a pretty great place to work, which from my understanding of EA as a whole has a lot of truth to it, although this season’s heavy crunch time has been overly brutal in many’s opinion. (Pausch writes that 40% of CMU ETC grads get hired at EA, plus 10 summer interns per year.)

Whether you’re in academia or industry, I recommend reading the document, I think everyone can gain some additional insight from it. In case you’re pressed for time, here’s a few interesting quotes that stood out to me. (Any comments from me are in parentheses.) From Pausch’s document:

It immediately became clear to me that neither EA nor academia have any real understanding of how the other operates.

Cory Doctorow’s talk was one of the highlights of the Digital Og Sosial Conference yesterday in Bergen. The talk is available as a Quicktime video. I encourage you to watch the video for yourself, but here are some notes for readers who prefer text. Doctorow made a case that the audience of the conference, primarily librarians, authors, and archivists, ought to take an active interest in the doings of technology and entertainment consortiums looking to enforce copyright and patent laws and to create new ones. When it comes to technology, Doctorow argued, consortiums have a nasty habit of turning features into bugs, of disabling rather than enabling new technologies, and of doing everything they can to take control of technologies (such as the general purpose computer) away from the people who purchase them. Doctorow, on his way to a WIPO meeting where he will represent the EFF, joked that the WIPO in Geneva is for copyright what Mordor in Lord of the Rings is for evil in Middleearth.

Howdy from the Digital Og Sosial Conference in rainy Bergen, Norway. It’s been a good conference so far, even though I can’t completely understand the Norwegian language discussion. Talks in the conference have ranged from moblogging to wikis to digital libraries to electronic literature. Tonight was particularly enjoyable. I had fun reading on Implementation on a program with Norwegian e-lit artists Anne Bang-Steinsvik and Morten Skogly, both of whom have authored quite beautiful multimedia pieces. The conference organizers have also done a great job of archiving the event. Quicktime videos of most of the talks, including Howard Rheingold, Torill Mortensen, Danah Boyd, Lisbeth Klaustrup and yerz truly are online on the conference videoblog.

UC Riverside isn’t the only place discussing GTA: San Andreas. This last Monday, in the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech, we held a group play-session and discussion of the game (part of the Game Night series we’ve started in the lab). At our next Game Night we’re discussing Fable: we want to compare two recent, large open-world games back-to-back.

The discussion left me feeling disappointed with San Andreas. With all the positive reviews, I had expectations for an even higher-agency GTA III experience. While there are some hilights (the rhetoric of poverty implied in only being able to eat crappy fast food, the character-appropriate accessorizing, the gang reputation system), I actually felt like I had less agency in this game than in previous installments. The fundamental gameplay is almost identical to GTA III: now the game is just really really big, with a simple RPG stats system attached.

There have been AAAI workshops on interactive entertainment for years, but now we finally have AAAI’s First Conference on AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), to be held June 1-3, 2005 in Marina del Rey (Los Angeles), CA. Abstracts and papers are due January 23 and 25, respectively. There will also be a demonstration track and exhibit space.

The conference is targeted at both industry and academia, and encourages work that spans both research and commercialization. Invited speakers for this first AIIDE are Chris Crawford (recent post), EA co-founder and CCO Bing Gordon, Sony researcher Craig Reynolds, AI checkers guru Jonathan Schaeffer, and the perennial Will Wright of Maxis.

Recent activity that needs linking to:

• The fifth Game Design Workshop was held in Seattle a few weeks ago, a private gathering of 25 or so prominent game designers and writers, focused on story. Attendees that briefly described the workshop on their blogs include Ron Gilbert (which includes a comment by almost-attendee Scott Miller), Lee Sheldon, and Greg Costikyan, who was inspired to write a new essay on “games as the cultural complexification of play”.
• The November issue of Game Developer includes an article called “Writesizing” by Stephen Jacobs of RIT, which asks “what’s the difference between game writing and game designing?” and how do games “need to evolve to establish a professional standard of writing”?

An anonymous “EA Spouse” writes an impassionated plea for better quality of life for game developers, describing how his/her spouse has had to work such insane hours for months on end to finish a product, that it’s upended their lives. The 400+ comments include several other very unhappy spouses and developers speaking up, several of them bitter EA employees. A parallel discussion ensues at Slashdot Games. IGDA’s Jason Della Rocca (Reality Panic) has been addressing this Quality of Life issue lately.

Those crazy kids at UC Riverside are already hosting a talk about GTA: San Andreas, having made the game available last week for students to play.

I’ve started to get quite annoyed by something I’m thinking of as the “numerist fallacy.” It seems to come up mostly in discussions with humanists and artists who are interested in software but haven’t been involved in much software development.

Its most ridiculous form is the idea that, because digital information is stored as ones and zeros, computers somehow inherently introduce binarism (black and white thinking) into situations where they are used. Luckily, this is somewhat rare. More common is the idea that somehow, if one wants to consider something like the structure of a digital archive deeply — in order to enable more informed critique — one should get down to the numerical nature of the archive and understand how the numbers are being manipulated.

Chris Crawford’s long awaited book on interactive story, in which he finally reveals his secrets and hard-won lessons learned from slaving for years to build the Erasmatron, is now out and available from New Riders. (For more on the Erasmatron, go here and scroll down for essays.)

Chris considers it “the most important book I have ever written”, and describes his goals for the book on the back-cover blurb:

There’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. This section, “Hypertexts and Interactives,” includes essays by:

• hypertext publishers, editors, and researchers Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco (discussing hypertext fiction and describing “two exotic hypertext systems, tools suitable for hypertext narrative but dramatically unlike the tools currently in use”),
• hypertext poet and theorist Stephanie Strickland (who, through the move captured in her title, “intends to install the stenographer, and not her employer, as the crucial creative/receptive presence in digital art”), and

In 2003 I visited the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was amazing. A collection of remarkable writers and editors and students in a beautiful, fascinating environment. While I was there I talked about The New Media Reader, and Robert Coover and I did a reading/presentation of writing for digital media.

Next summer I’ll be back at SLS, this time to offer a workshop. Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollman, and a bunch of other exciting writers will be there, and so will editors from Fence, The New York Review of Books, and Faber & Faber. Read on for my course description, and for information on a contest that awards free airfare, accommodations, and full tuition to SLS.

A reminder that paper abstracts for DiGRA’s June conference in Vancouver are due November 30, as well as indie game entries to the first Slamdance Independent Game Competition, in January in Park City, Utah, due November 29.

The website is now live for the 2005 Game Developers Conference, to be held in early March in San Francisco. The variety and quality of presentations and panels are as superb as ever (see last year’s list, post-conference impressions).

Here are this year’s sessions that should be of particular interest to GTxA folk:

In my effort to avoid doomist thoughts given the week’s events, I attended the nyc acm siggraph (future participants ?) panel presentations at Pratt Manhattan. Amit Pitaru ‘s talk was noteworthy. Trained as a pianist, he never intended to write software, but he does now, spending time between writing his own tools and using them. He demonstrated a beautiful 3D drawing tool, and in general the set of tools he develops is amazing! I highly recommend checking out his work, pretty inspirational. A nice summary and more links can be found here. While he does not argue that his work is political, I can see how his very specific ideas about how tools are created for specific needs could be applied as an activist software design strategy. Its heartening to see someone rethinking the tools they use so clearly and articulately, stripping away commercial concerns and just plain irrelevant interfaces. . .

Hello, world. Check out this map of presidential votes cast by county before you imagine that America is mostly Jesusland. (Red is all Bush, Blue is all Kerry, and purple is in between.) And if someone, such as Dick Cheney, tells you that George W. Bush got the largest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history – which is true – you can tell them that John Kerry got the second largest number of votes in history, and that more people voted against an incumbent president than ever before in our country’s history. Yes, Bush was finally elected – but not by much.

I’m suddenly inspired to make one of those new political video games. In it, you click on young apathetic voters lazing on their couches to get off their butts and vote. You click to dial phone numbers to call friends who normally wouldn’t vote in an election, and manage to get them to vote too. At a cafe and dinner table you are seated in front of family and friends who normally vote for their pocketbook, and you click as fast as you can to express your passion to vote for the larger issues.

The Subtle Technologies Festival will take place May 26-May 29, 2005, in Toronto Canada. Symposium submissions are due January 15th, 2005. This year, in addition to the usual diverse program, there is a special session celebrating the “World Year in Physics”; artists and scientists who investigate physics in their work (for scientists, presumably something different than standard disciplinary physics?), are encouraged to apply.

Recognized internationally as a unique forum that encourages new insights and collaborations between artists and scientists, Subtle Technologies challenges physicists, geneticists, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, architects, dancers, media artists and musicians to contemplate how art and science act upon one another and reshape perspectives.

All eight installments of Implementation are now available to the world. But access to Implementation within the United States is restricted. If you are eligible to vote in the US today, you may download the final installment only after you vote. Enforcement is done using the honor system, although we aren’t kidding about the restriction.

Scott and I have been working on sticker lit for a year and a half. We’ve been disseminating the installments of Implementation since January. We are very glad to have completed the last installment of the first serialized sticker novel. Thanks to the Kelly Writers House for hosting the first reading of our sticker novel. Thanks to Rob Wittig for contributing some texts. And, thanks to everyone who participated by reading, putting up stickers, and sending us photographs, particularly Hanna and Jill.