Grand Text Auto

Idle Thumbs go to work and give us a great rant and follow-on discussion about the overabundance of violence in videogames — the problem not being that such games lead to violent behavior, but that they are inhibiting forward progress in game design.

Have you ever tried to convince your mom, spouse, etc. that video games aren’t violent? You might mention Tetris, or The Sims, but after that you’re left with nothing but a wishy-washy sentence or two about “potential” and “endless possibilities” without a shred of concrete evidence in the form of a real gamer’s game to back you up. Why is that?

New mainframe Zork for Z-machine. And the IF Hitchhiker’s Guide returning with illustrations. And IF in seemingly unlikely languages, see below…

As you would expect, the art installations were done very well throughout the venues of ISEA 2004. The conference made a statement about the vitality of electronic arts by the sheer immensity of the event itself. There was so much art in so many different venues on the Silja Opera, in Tallinn, and in Helsinki, that it would have simply been impossible to see it all during the conference, particularly if one also intended to catch a panel or two. I caught the principal exhibitions in Tallinn and the Kiasma exhibition in Helsinki, but I missed several shows at smaller venues and a bunch of site-specific work scattered around the two cities. The ISEA catalog is a full-length book, and it would take a work of that length to comprehensively discuss the art at ISEA. I can offer only a glimpse of what was on display at the conference in these notes.

I’ve been fascinated by the 18th-century French Enlightenment project, teleported into contemporary times and grafted onto the Web, that is Wikipedia. Although my contributions have been limited to a few minor and pedantic edits, I’ve not only looked up entries, but have also read some of the very involved discussions behind the articles. They can be quite interesting. What a crazy and fascinating plan: sum up the world’s knowledge by having anyone who wants edit or add anything at any point in time; keep the revision histories public; let controversy resolve itself through public discussion; keep a neutral point of view. And require that contributions be unencumbered by traditional intellectual property claims, available to all under the GNU Free Documentation License.

About a month ago the Guardian online newspaper began its own blog on games. Today’s post asks, how important is story to games? (via Klastrup’s Cataclysms)

FILE, an electronic art and game festival in Brazil has now made their online digital magazine FILE SCRIPT available. Relevant to our recent discussion of Simon Penny’s ISEA talk on behavioral or generative art, FILE SCRIPT has an interesting article on meta-art, first describing telecommunication and telewriting experiments as a kind of meta-art (the artist is constructing, not a work, but a context in which art “happens”), and then moving on to extend the term meta-artist to include “…computational systems or softwares that attain quasi-autonomy in making their design decisions or that may even be designed to evolve in complexity as they learn through experience in their sign-processing endeavors.” The article looks at several image generation (including Aaron) and poetry generation systems.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has issued a threatening legal notice to a person who mirrors the Interactive Fiction Archive because a person at this organization is painfully and pitifully laboring under the mistaken belief that a file named “Doom3.zip” (a 114KB file, uploaded almost 5 years ago) is an unauthorized copy of a game created by some company they represent. May these and similar bounty hunters all go the way of Boba Fett.

I’ve always loved non-fantasy comics; I never got into fantasy or superhero ones for some reason. I spent a lot of time reading MAD magazine as a kid, usually in my room while eating cookies pilfered from the kitchen pantry. My dad, who grew up in Coney Island’s housing projects, had collected MAD as a kid and later gave his tattered collection to me, where it promptly became even more tattered, along with any new issues he’d just finished reading. (The phrase “The Spy Who Glubbed Me” still sticks in my head.) But more than the movie parodies and the folding back cover, I was drawn to Dave Berg’s dysfunctional ‘The Lighter Side’, Al Jaffee’s inventive artwork, Don Martin’s onomatopoeic panels, the surreal ‘Spy vs Spy’ (and later the computer game), and of course those little cartoons in the margins by Sergio Aragones. Blecch!

Slamdance, an alternative film festival to Sundance held annually in late January in Park City, Utah, also now includes an Independent Games Competition. There are two $5000 prizes to be awarded, Jury and Audience. Early deadline is Oct 1, final deadline Nov 14.

Thanks to the New Jersey Humanities Council, this fall, a maelstrom of electronic literature activity is descending on the Atlantic City area, with The Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. There will be three panel events in the next three months. On September 24th, two of the best-known authors of hypertext fiction, Talan Memmott and William Gillespie will present their work and discuss electronic fiction. Both are or have been graduate fellows in creative writing at Brown University, and both have been recipients of the trAce/AltX award for new media writing. Each is also known for publishing activities in the electronic media. Memmott is the editor of the Beehive hypermedia journal, and Gillespie the publisher of Spineless Books. The second event will feature two of the best-known critics of new media. On October 15th, Grand Text Auto’s own Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the co-editors of The New Media Reader published by MIT Press, will give presentations on the history of new media. Montfort is the author of Twisty Little Passages, the first book-length study of interactive fiction, and Wardrip-Fruin is the editor of First Person a book about interactive drama. (But of course you knew that). The final event, on November 19th, will feature Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson, the co-editors of the leading new media poetry journal Poems That Go. All these events are free and open to the public. This fall the very full Stockton event calendar will also include visits from novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, poet Sharon Olds, and filmmaker Michael Moore. I’m psyched.

Since ISEA has been a theme not only in GTxA but in various lists, blogs, etc, I thought I’d add this. As noted by other drivers @ GTxA, the art and science distinction is still a discussion point even within a field developed from this assumption. I think that has more to do with the institutionalized spaces in which many ISEA participants work, and not an inherent difficulty in the topics or fields. But the important question is, how can this be addressed?

I was pleased by the reception of Façade at ISEA. There was pretty much someone playing it all the time, and often a line waiting to play.

Michael is interviewed pretty extensively in a long Gamespot article on academics and computer games. The illustrated piece, unfortunately broken up into 18 ad-revenue-generating pages, is built around discussions with Michael as well as Janet Murray, Gonzalo Frasca, Christopher Lowood, and Paul D. Miller. Andrew’s mentioned in discussion of Façade; Grand Text Auto gets a special plug. Plenty of topics are taken on in the piece, from newsgaming to Army gaming to machinima to Janey Murray’s fated and fateful encounter with Mad Dog McCree.

Thanks to Ian for pointing the way to this bonanza.

This post was jointly written by Michael and Noah.

ISEA was a remarkable concentration of people bringing together technology and the arts. But there was an odd fixation, in many of the discussions, on the notion of “art/sci collaborations.” It seems that many who spoke at ISEA think of “artist” and “scientist” as exclusive categories — inhabitants of each unable to even glimpse far within the culture of the other, much less participate in both cultures. Significant work is needed, we were told, to find better ways for these vastly different beings to communicate and collaborate, so that the work of art/sci can move forward.

What makes this puzzling is that much of the foundational work for the ISEA community was created by people like Myron Krueger — people who worked on both the scientific and artistic aspects of their projects. People who saw these aspects as inextricably entwined (or “deeply intertwingled”) rather than as the separate territory of deeply different types of people.

Andre Lamothe, author of several game programming books that I’ve found handy, has launched XGameStation: as Slashdot describes, it’s “a retro level hardware platform, similar to the old Atari and NES systems, designed to teach enthusiasts and students the elements of console hardware design and effective low level programming skills.” Wow! Cool.

Two bloggers independently come up with a great idea at the same time — someone should make a game that explores the meaning of games themselves, a la McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Must be something in the water.

Gamespot’s got a new essay on games as worthy of academic study.

Thanks to one of the Implementation authors who is an intrepid and prolific digital photographer (not me), I’ve just loaded up a new Baltic update to the Implementation site. The more than 100 new photos occupy huge tracts of disk (15MB) and picture bits of Implementation on the Baltic Sea and in Helsinki (where sticker art seems not too uncommon), Stockholm, and Tallinn. There’s even one site from Amsterdam that is pictured. This update follows fast upon the sizable and diverse “Pour la France” update supplied by yet another anonymous photographer and project participant. And we have some more photos waiting to be processed, too…

One for location-based buffs, via Howard Rheingold et al., a list of urban mobile games.

I meant to post this a few days ago when I initially read it — our antimodal friend Brandon Rickman, a frequent GTxA commenter, has written a couple of posts (1 2) about SIGGRAPH from two weeks ago. Sounds like as we feared, SIGGRAPH’s appeal has dwindled a bit when compared to previous recent years, particularly the art gallery and panel sessions.

Looks like The Handbook of Computer Game Studies, edited by Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, is due out from MIT Press in January 2005. Both of the editors are from the University of Utrecht; The broad and nearly 500-page collection includes articles on video game prehistory, psychological research, video games vs. film and literature, and cultural connections. The contributor list includes several usual suspects (Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Katie Salen, Sherry Turkle, Mark J. P. Wolf, Eric Zimmerman), a few less usual but well-known suspects (e.g., Justin Hall), and numerous other names I’m not familiar with — presumably some of those are coming from the psychological, film, or “prehistorical” angles.

The Tallinn portion of the ISEA conference was focused on wearable computing. Although I didn’t attend many of the panel sessions on this topic, my general impression from the keynote, from the exhibition, and from the runway of the fashion show at Club Bon Bon in Estonia is that wearable computing has a long way to go. It seems that as a culture, we have not yet worked out how (or if) we want computers to function in our clothing. Another problem with wearable computing is that the majority of current funding for the technology comes from either a) the military-industrial complex or b) the fashion industry. This makes sense, but the sources of funding seem to constrict the imagination of designers in a variety of ways. The military wants wearable computing that will make for better soldiers, that will make for safer military service and better killing machines. The fashion industry is by its nature interested in disposable objects, in making things that serve an aesthetic purpose of limited duration.

CNN is running a story on the upcoming October issue of Playboy, which will feature a photospread on the Women of Gaming — that is the virtual characters. Perhaps it won’t be too long before all of Playboy’s photospreads are CGI. The story also covers a slough of recent adults-only games, and discusses potential industry concerns that “female characters appearing topless could reinforce the outdated stereotype of gamers as shut-in losers who lack any sort of social skills.” It also notes, however that the gaming demographic is now generally older than it used to be, with the average gamer a crusty 29 years old, and the average game buyer 36 years old, making it a good match for Playboy’s (33 year-old median) demographic.

Have you seen Kaena: The Prophesy yet? Caught it at the Red Vic cooperatively owned theatre in San Francisco. Like her colleague Dr. Aki Ross of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Kaena is another youthful virtual heroine meant to save a people and a planet from absolute annhilation. While crawling around on the most lovely-rendered branch-architecture-world I’ve seen since the short “Cathedral” at SIGGRAPH 2003, Kaena practically bursts her high tech bodysuits in virtual exuberance crawling around her planet Axis. MANY moments of homage to Oshii’sGhost in the Shell as well… Sometimes feeling like a mod, sometimes Matrix like, and oddly, sometimes Jungle-Book inspired character animation styles clash in the weirdest pop culture mix I’ve seen on the big screen. Is this what EuroDisney feels like?
Unusual bonus: As the character learns more in the film, her breasts appear to grow. Talk about innovative character stats interface design…?

Bash.org is a fascinating record of IRC, occasionally containing amusing real quotes from conversations that aren’t staged especially for the sake of Bash.org.

For extra credit, develop a computational literary project that takes as input the URL of a specific Bash.org conversation, such as this one, and produces as output a 20th-century-style newspaper item relating the conversation, using some random journalistic variations, such as this one:

In a development that has disturbed many in the community, online communication occurred late yesterday. Using the IRC channel #leetchat, a user identified only as Zybl0re said “get up.” “get on up,” he continued, adding, “get up,” and then “get on up.” “and DANCE,” said an individual using the name phxl|paper.

hi all, delighted to be here. Lots to write about incl. new artwork, activist design, programming, and gender… I promise sarcasm and whimsey to boot. For starters, I send along the RAPUNSEL url, http://www.rapunsel.org. This is a collaborative project to teach middle school girls to program. More soon!

We’re scooting over to make room for a visiting driver, Mary Flanagan. Mary’s work ranges from games research to media projects to being a professor in NYC — you can read more in her GTxA bio (rollover her name above) or at her site. And check out the pages of Mary’s tiltfactor lab (with which — full disclosure — I’m affiliated). We’re looking forward to having Mary’s energetic, thoughtful, and thought-provoking voice added to the GTxA mix!