Grand Text Auto

My s.o. Tania and I recently returned from a great 10 days of touring a series of northern Atlantic and Baltic cities — Reykjavik (capital of Iceland), Helsinki, Mariehamn (on the Finnish island Åland) and Stockholm. I’d never been north of Berlin, so it was educational for me as well as enjoyable. In the middle of the trip we spent two days on the ISEA ferry cruise on the Baltic Sea, hanging out with Noah, Jill, Scott, Michael, Ken Perlin and others. Traveling along the coast of Sweden through a channel of hundreds of little islands with teeny houses on them, some smaller than a typical American suburban lot size, was quite beautiful and memorable.

Michael and I exhibited Façade in a little room just off a smoky casino in the middle of the ship. It was played about 100 times, from which we have the traces to analyze, serving as another helpful user test. Feedback from players was generally positive, if a bit muted. Simon Penny had some good suggestions for us. One guy played it over and over for a couple of hours, perhaps trying to figure out how it worked, or trying to get it to behave the way he wanted it to.

I deliberately missed the rest of the conference; that’s alright, I’ve always found the appetizer to be the tastiest part of a meal anyhow.

I had a great time talking with Roberto Simanowski earlier this year — our conversation ranging over topics of art, writing, digital media education, and more — and the resulting interview has just been published at Dichtung Digital. The new issue looks like a good one, and I’m particularly pleased to see John Cayley’s Overboard on the table of contents. The only blemish appears to be a review of First Person that gets many simple facts wrong — starting on the very first line, with Pat’s name. (As of this writing, the reviewer has him as “Herrigan” rather than “Harrigan.”)

For the next few days, you’re invited to submit information about your favorite video game to the beta site of The Museum of Video Game Ontology (moVGO), which Kim Marie will launch at movgo.org in September. Or you can at least go admire the submission form.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: “Control and Freedom: On Interactivity as a Software Effect”

Asked to address one of ISEA’s sins: Our tendency is to take work at interface value. To appreciate work because of its novelty, rather than the actual experience of work.

User-friendly interfaces conflate control with freedom. A version of freedom is emerging within politics, society, and computing that isn’t opposed to control. As in gated communities.

Scott will be hosting a reading of three IF works by Emily Short, myself, Dan Ravipinto, and Star Foster. The program is called “Interactive Fiction Walkthroughs” and will take place at the Kelly Writers House on October 27. There’s more information on this IF reading online.

An advantage of not being physically present at ISEA 2004 is my excellent Internet access. Here is the text of the talk Scott should have just delievered on my behalf, “Continuous Paper: Print interfaces and early computer writing.” Hopefully we’ll hear from the away team soon about how the panel (with Noah, Michael, and Jill) went. I hope Scott didn’t crack up the fifth time he had to say “Wumpus.”

We just finished the panel with Michael, Nick/Scott, Jill, and yours truly. Now the keynote for ISEA’s “Histories of the New” thread: Shuddhabrata Sengupta on “The Remains of Tomorrows Past: Speculations on the Antiquity of New Media Practice in South Asia”

Starts with a reading of Kipling’s “The Deep Sea Cables.” (He’s happy to claim Kipling as a fellow South Asia, with a fascination with new media.) We are forced to occupy an eye of the storm called “the new” while waiting to be the ground for tomorrow’s mushrooms. The Remains of Tomorrows Past” — the things that appeared yesterday as though they might credibly grow into a tomorrow. Those that do are indebted to those that do not.

Well, the GTxA crew has certainly been enjoying ISEA. Personally, I’d say this is one of the most ambitious and interesting gatherings I’ve ever attended. But it hasn’t been terribly easy to blog — until now, in Helsinki. Now I’m writing notes about a panel on “Curating and Preserving New Media Art.”

Steve Dietz. Two core principles for curating new media art. (1) Like curating any art, but different. (2) The most interesting potential is how it might change the practice of curating.

Sure, I’m not off drinking Grand Text Auto‘s FY 2004 revenues on a cruise ship in the Baltic Sea, but I did get to catch up with Mike Maguire today in Philadelphia and talk about palindromes. Poe, Nabokov, and Cortázar liked ’em. They play an important role in children’s literature. Mike and I pondered whether nontrivial infinite palindromes can exist; perhaps if the sequence is biinfinite and a first and last element are always defined, as in 123123 … 1230321 … 321321? Mike showed me his very impressive palindrome notebook and told me about his tree-search method of composition. I told him some about how William Gillespie and I composed 2002, too, although that process seemed far less interesting and principled. (Well, of course it had the same principle in one sense.) Collaboratively writing palindromes with someone who can cull your sense from nonsense does seem to have the advantage of preventing linguistic insanity, however, an occupational risk among palindrome composers. Mike hardly seems in need of such measures, however, since — in contrast to 2002 — his poems, such as “Same Nice Cinemas,” are among the most lucid texts in the English language.

“A Bad Machine Made of Words,” my review of Dan Shiovitz’s Bad Machine, is now up at trAce.

Andrew Stern, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas, and Scott Rettberg raise a toast to Nick Montfort while onboard the ISEA Silja Opera “Interfacing Sound” Cruise in Mariehamn Harbor, Finland. Analysis of said event to follow, later.

Brendan Desilets points to the new home of his valuable and long-standing site on interactive fiction and pedagogy, Teaching and Learning with IF. He writes on that site that he has, “Since 1985 … introduced about five hundred kids, aged eleven through fourteen, to interactive fiction. Most of them like it. In fact, it is the most popular form of literature with most.” Desilets, who teaches middle school in Massachusetts, is author of the article “Interactive Fiction vs. the Pause That Distresses: How Computer-Based Literature Interrupts the Reading Process Without Stopping the Fun.” Among the many resources on his site are suggestions for teachers about how they can help students write IF; an easy-to-run Windows IF kit for teachers, along with instructions on how to do further downloading; and a study showing significant improvement in students’ planning of their writing after interaction with IF.

Fight Club, the video game, is coming from Vivendi for the major platforms. There’s a video trailer promoting the game already online, and the online forums about it are already filling up with comments to the tune of “this is a travesty!” “it’s just supposed to be a game, you’re not supposed to think about it” and “hey, exactly the sort of mindless consumer product that Fight Club is all about.” Via Elastico.

While I plan to do a bit more updating of the notes from day 1 and day 2 (using material I wrote up at the conference), I’ll be making separate posts about the sessions in which I spoke. (As you might imagine, I didn’t take too many notes during these.) I’m writing this from Helsinki, where I’ve found an open wireless connection that will let me web surf, but not email (unfortunately). I’m here for ISEA 2004 — as are Michael, Andrew, and Scott. Hopefully we’ll continue to find access and do some posting about this conference as well.

Back to Hypertext, on Wednesday I was part of the hypertext readings. These kicked off with Rob Kendall, who did a reading/divination with a new (or maybe still in-process) piece called Soothcircuits. His two questions from the audience were “Which of the next sessions should I attend?” and “Is there a path to peace?” — both of which he handled with aplomb. Soothcircuits is on the web somewhere, for those who want to do their own “readings,” but I haven’t been able to find the URL. (If someone has it, could they post it in the comments?)

After mention of the game on ifMUD, I finally got around to playing “The Anti-Bush Video Game,” a.k.a. “Bushgame,” by Starvingeyes. Michael Erard aptly characterized it in The New York Times as mixing “gruesome humor and a grab bag of pop-culture references with a detailed (if pedantic) presentation on tax issues and budget policy.” (This article also discussed Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost’s work; it isn’t still online, but discussion of it can be found at Ludology.org and Water Cooler Games.) The game has a nice look to it and works pretty smoothly. I can’t say it was an enjoyable play experience for me, though, with repetitive, one-track platform action and cut scenes that make the experience about as exciting as the bastard child of Math Blaster and infomercials. But there’s certainly some originality in the dogged storyline of this Flash-based piece. I didn’t guess from the article just how utterly outrageous the game is — as if it were crafted not just to attract attention but to attract lawsuits — so I’ve included a spoiler-filled list of some of the details in the next segment of the post.

At the beginning of the week I finished the report “Discovering Communities through Information Structure and Dynamics,” (pdf) a review of some recent research that provides insight into how the existence of, and structure of, computer-mediated communications can be used to learn about online communities. I gave a presentation on this topic on Monday, finishing my last preliminary exam. With my other requirements done, I now have only my dissertation to complete — of course, I need to begin it first, but if I can manage two years of focused research work, that could earn me a Ph.D.

I presented this morning, and so couldn’t blog — but here’s a start at the afternoon. There will be more filling in, of both pages, I hope, before I fly to Helsinki tomorrow.

“Saving Private Hypertext” by Marshall and Golovchinsky. (Obviously, related to Acid-Free Bits and the ELO PAD project.) Starts with an image of the contents of Uncle Buddy’s — she can’t read the floppies, or even play the audio tapes, so all she can do is read the documentation. Then she saw that the web version of Forward Anywhere had a problem. She went to look at it, had a hard time reading her own code, and then finally discovered that the directory was protected by a password she’d forgotten.

I’m having some trouble getting online at the conference, but will be trying to blog a bit at ACM Hypertext 2004. (Right now I can’t get email, but I’m able to web browse/post.) Anyway, here are some notes from yesterday (which I’ll be updating a couple times after this first posting).

Doug Engelbart’s keynote: “Facilitating the Evolution of our Collective IQ: What Universities and Professional Societies Can Do.” He’s got more slides than he can get through, but Jim Whitehead says the slides can go online. Doug says he’s presenting a challenge to this community. His 1951 lifetime goal: “As much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.” Not office automation, but human augmentation. An example of the kinds of problems that Doug wants to help people solve are the large-scale, urgent ones that the AC/UNU Millennium Project identifies.

J. Robinson Wheeler has written a nice article about creating IF, Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF. The article does a good job of explaining how the convention of a static “room description” has morphed to become a more interesting and fluid part of the narrative discourse in some more recent works of IF. Sure, using the framework of narratology could have made the discussion clearer and taken it a bit farther, but Rob’s awareness of how things fit together at the word, sentence, paragraph, and game level, and his close look at the way scene descriptions work in several important games, results in a very helpful essay. (The main flaw, I think, being Rob’s reliance on his own IF writing to supply “bad” examples; the nitpicking isn’t so helpful and the bits he cites are seldom that bad.) The article describes an aspect of IF authorship that may seem to correspond to bits of game design of other sorts — point-and-click graphical adventures: drawing the backdrops, first-person shooters and platform games: designing the levels. Upon closer inspection, scene description involves a lot of things that has no clear analog in graphical computer games, because the text that describes a scene ends up fitting into an overall, verbal narration, sometimes doing other sorts of narrative, literary, and gaming work at the same time. Update: I thought I’d get away with just plugging Rob’s article, but no — lengthy addendum below, in comments, about narratology and IF.

Unfortunately, the one bit of news I’ve gotten so far regarding the ACM Hypertext conference — which I’m not attending this year; GTxA is well-represented there by Noah, however — is from Andruid Kerne, who works with computing and collage and who I know from when he was doing his PhD at NYU. Andruid, now on the faculty of Texas A&M, describes how he was asked to change the content of a politically charged work that was accepted for presentation as a demo. Specifically, his hypermedia collage, available online, includes a linked photograph, published in The New York Times, of nude Iraqi prisoners being made to simulate fellatio. A linked photograph of President Bush, who seems to be staring right at the act, is juxtaposed.

On August 2nd The Third Place Gallery launched its new Game Art gallery. From August 2nd to September 30th the gallery is open to submission of any piece of art which is inspired by the world of electronic games

The judges will pick out art pieces for exhibitions in their personal galleries; one work in each category will receive a grand prize of €2000.

Gaming Hacks has been announced by O’Reilly: a full descrption of the book is also online. Although the title may suggest it’s all about mods — and it does seem rich in discussion of these, from instructions for doing hardware mods of consoles and controllers to suggestions for twiddling your save game files — it also contains information about building games from scratch, including tips from Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin about how to write text adventures.

I’ll supply a real review if and when I break down and buy the book after it’s out in October … or if O’Reilly sends Grand Text Auto a review copy, of course…

In Dance Voldo Dance, my favorite Soul Caliber character, Voldo, dances to Nelly’s Hot in Heer. Since word of this video has already been circulating around the blogosphere for a couple of weeks, I’ve been resisting posting about it here. But I enjoyed the video so much that I decided a “me too” post was fine. All moves in this video are in-game; no programming or game hacking is involved. While there’s alot of Machinima being produced these days, most of it is narrative; I enjoyed the pure dance performance of this piece of Machinima, a performance enabled by Voldo’s freaky double-jointed moves and enhanced by his S&M attire. While Dance Voldo Dance was carefully choreographed, I can imagine a new fighting game performance form in which two or more players improvise to music in real-time, perhaps done as a competition with the audience serving as judges.

The program for this year’s Software Art and Cultures Conference is now online. The meeting will be August 23-24 at Århus University in Denmark, and is free to the public. Talks include “Code as Performative Speech Act”, “An Exploration of the Visual Mind of the Software Artist”, “Software Art and Political Implications in Algorithms”, “Legos for a Meta-Theory of Meta-Artforms”, as well as an accompanying art exhibition, including “dot_matrix_synth” and “Hardware Orchestra”.

Just after the conference is the 3-day Runme Dorkbot City Camp, including the Read_Me Code Poetry Slam and an Outdoor computing session, and sessions such as “Algorithmic appreciation”, “Conceptual software” and “Appropriation and plagiarism”.

Pat and I have been officially informed by MIT Press that Sizirak Publishing Co. of Seoul (web presence apparently coming soon) will be publishing a Korean edition of First Person. It’s great that the ideas will be getting out into wider circulation!

We’ve also been offered the opportunity to review the translation before publication. Unfortunately, neither of us would be able to do this on our own. Any thoughts on whose command of the language and the subject matter might be up to the task?