Grand Text Auto

Howard Rheingold writes in The Virtual Community (p. 77) that the first large mailing list on ARPANET was SF-LOVERS, for discussions about science fiction. A 1987 USENET post from the moderator of the list seems to be the best source on when the list started — around 1975. At that point, fewer than 100 hosts were online. It was nice of ARPA to allow users to put its network to literary uses then, almost 30 years ago.

I wasn’t looking for it, but today I tripped over an old e-mail and fell into MadInkBeard, a new blog to “discuss the idea of formal constraints (mostly in writing, but also in other media) as well as offer explanations and examples of various constraints”. From there I wrestled my way out and into constrained.org, “a community site for short stories that adhere to various literary constraint”, where I was trapped for a while, eventually escaping to endless limitations.

Penn’s Masters in Computer Graphics and Game Technology is starting in the Fall, and a course in game design and development has been proposed as part of it. I hope it comes through, as I’d love to take it or sit in on it.

On ifMUD I learned of another new degree program, Champlain College’s Bachelors in Electronic Game & Interactive Development. The curriculum includes game-specific courses throughout the four years, including four courses on game design, an interactive storytelling course with two prerequisites, a course on game history and playability testing, a senior thesis and a senior team project.

A gentle reminder — abstracts for presenting lectures, roundtables, panels and tutorials at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco instead of San Jose this time around, are due July 23, a week from Friday.

Here’s a writeup of the 2004 conference, from just a few months ago.

This is the first question for a national research agenda that is proposed by a new NEA report:

How does literature, particularly serious literary work, compete with the Internet, popular entertainment, and other increased demands on leisure time?

As someone who writes and reads serious literary work on the Internet, this question seems to be staring up at me from a puddle of its own drool. It would make about as much sense as attempting to determine how libraries compete with serious literary work.

The editors of Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology are seeking abstracts for contributions to the book. The deadline is November 1, 2004.

Nisar Keshvani, Editor-in-Chief of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, passes along this call for papers: LEA Special Issue: New Media Poetry and Poetics

Guest Editor: Tim Peterson

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that deal with New Media Poetry and Poetics. This category includes multimedia digital works(image/text/sound) as examined through the lens of “writing,” specifically any of those concerns central to poetry rather than narrative or prose: reader as active participant in the “ergodic” sense, the use of stochastic methods and chance procedures, and the complex relations between the author, reader, and computer-as-writer/reader which evolve from that interaction. Modes of work that foreground the digital medium (such as “codework”) are also welcome. We would particularly like to emphasize the “poetics” of new media writing as well, that is, the point where aesthetics intersects with politics to create dynamic attempts at social change.

Steve Ince, a 2004 Game Developers Choice Award nominee for Excellence in Writing, shares his thoughts on writing for games in a GIGnews article, “My Fingers are Blistered and Bleeding“.

Always interested in what might be helpful for independent game developers (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9), I thought I’d pass along the following from Slashdot Games: the IGDA has started a special interest group for indie developers — those “interested in pursuing game development and distribution outside the standard channels as presented by the mainstream industry today.” So far, there’s a mailing list, a link to a FAQ about indie developers, a great page of links to engines, tools, etc., and the beginnings of a collection of helpful articles. I’ll add it to our list of resources links.

In “Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic,” the Times reports on a video game being developed at the University of Southern California’s School of Engineering as a tool for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic. The game also uses AI, giving characters such as patrons of a Lebanese cafe “arousal levels” to let soldiers in training see if their use of Arabic and non-verbal cues is effective or not. I think this type of military video game sounds much more useful (and less bigbrotherishly frightening) than first-person shooter recruiting games designed to turn mall rats into soldiers.

A new installment of First Person — Critical Simulation — is live at electronic book review. It includes essays by Simon Penny, Gonzalo Frasca, and Phoebe Sengers — as well as responses by folks like N. Katherine Hayles, Mizuko Ito, and GTxA’s own Michael Mateas. This section takes up questions of simulation which have also been of concern in essays posted earlier (such as Espen Aarseth’s) but these essays foreground ethical and political concerns. Gonzalo Frasca’s contribution, for example, is his well-known “Videogames of the Oppressed” which (as the title suggests) engages with the work of Augusto Boal.

An initial summary of the goings-on at the fifth Phrontisterion conference on Interactive Storytelling is now online, written by its organizer. Chris reports that the attendees will soon write up their impressions as well, to be compiled into a new group blog.

A highlight of the conference was the discussion of several new books, notably Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, in which Chris offers many pages of wisdom gained from years of experience working towards building a grand vision of what interactive stories could be. Chris considers this the most important book he’s ever written; my initial quick-read of the manuscript can testify to this. More on this excellent new resource in a future post.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to visit the eternal city this fall, here’s your opportunity. October 21-22 at the University of Roma Tre, the Department of Linguistics is running a two-day colloquium on writing and new media. The three areas of focus will be:

• Orality, Writing, Memory
• Writing and the Professions
• Writing and New Media

Critic and novelist Tom LeClair recently published a novel Passing On. While the novel itself is a print novel, in part about a company that takes the dying on trips when they have no one to assist them, LeClair also recently published a Web site, Terminal Tours, which is purportedly the site for the fictional company featured in the novel. I include the link here because I think it’s an interesting example of one modest way that authors can use the Web to extend a fictional universe beyond the bound artifact. Some of the stories and testimonials are also quite funny.

Designer Rick Valicenti and friends are up to some fun letter-play at Playground ’04. Twelve typographers have accepted Valicenti’s “invitation to create an alphabet of 26 characters illuminated not to start a sentence, but to begin a thought.” The project in some ways reminds me of Paul Chan’s conceptual fonts in Alternumerics. My favorite of the Play fonts released so far is Anthony Angelos’s Watch. Each of the letters includes a caricature meant to represent a feeling or phobia.

Glancing at the home page of the NYTimes, I spied a new article about election-year political videogames — featuring Ian Bogost and his till-now-under-wraps, about-to-be-released game, Opinions! The article reports that Ian, who as GTxA readers know was co-developer of the Howard Dean campaign game, was hired two months ago by the Democratic National Convention to create a game “for the Democratic convention committee. … In Opinions, the player performs an action in each of six minigames simultaneously, seeking to achieve a balance among them. Actions in the minigames, each corresponding to a domestic or international policy topic, affect the ease of playing in the other minigames.” Sounds cool!

There’s an email interview with me just up at E-Boredom, a low-gloss site covering movies, comics, and the Nintendo Entertainment System, none of which I discuss in my interview. I hope they still liked talking to me.

I think I look kinda fetching right under that cheap Web hosting ad banner.

trAce Online Writing Centre, which has served as one of the most important organizations in new media writing since 1996, has put forth a call for abstracts for a planned book, intended to complement the trAce website. Essays are invited both about the evolution of the trAce community and about the individual and collaborative creative projects published by trAce. Abstracts are due in October and the volume is planned for publication in 2007.

Three upcoming conferences explore interactive narrative and characters from an AI perspective.

Update 7/7/04 (Andrew): A fourth has been added at the end of this message.

A special track on artificial intelligence in music and art will be part of the 18th international FLAIRS conference in Clearwater Beach, Florida, May 16-18, 2005. They invite original and unpublished contributions on AI applications in the analysis, composition, generation, interpretation, performance, evaluation, classification, and data mining of artifacts from various creative endeavors and fields, such as visual art, graphics, video, music, sounds, architecture, design of physical artifacts, sculpture, literature, poetry, etc. Besides being published in the FLAIRS proceedings, a selection of papers from this track will appear in a special issue on “AI Tools in Music and Art” to appear in the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT). The submission deadline is October 15th, 2004.

A EUSAI2004 Workshop on Life-Like Robots in Ambient Intelligent Environments will be held November 8th, 2004, in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Whereas previous work focussed on the social aspect of robots and life-like virtual characters, this workshop wants to explore the field of interactive life-like robots that are situated in an ambient intelligent environment. Questions to be investigated includ:

• How is life-likeness created?
• What software architecture is needed?
• Will the user feel more comfortable in the presence of a life-like robot, than in the situation of a machine-like robot?
• In what ways does a life-like robot interact with its Ambient Intelligent environment?

Marc Boehlen and I explored some of these issues with Office Plant #1. It’s nice to see a whole workshop organized around this theme. Submissions are due September 10th, 2004.

I recently returned from TIDSE 2004 (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment). Here’s the first part of my trip report from this conference.

Norman Badler (keynote)
Norman Badler opened the conference with a keynote titled Embodied Agents and Meaningful Motion. He began by describing the gulf between the world of computer graphics and the world of artificial intelligence, noting that virtual humans must integrate techniques from both fields in order to support compelling interactions between real and virtual people. He described his own work on the EMOTE motion quality model, based on Laban motion analysis, that provides a parameterized model that procedurally modifies the affective quality of humanoid motion, given 8 high-level parameters. The best part of the talk was his list of the myths that many virtual humans researchers are guilty of believing (he noted that he didn’t mean to single out any one researcher, and that he himself has been guilty of believing many of these).

New media artworks that aren’t digitally distributable are near-invisible until they have good, accessible documentation. Screen — a collaborative project I helped create in Brown’s virtual reality “Cave” — just became visible today.

Now, in addition to the interview mentioned by Nick, the feature at The Iowa Review Web includes both a Screen overview video and a document of the entire piece. Michelle Higa‘s work on the second of these is so artful that I think of it as a single-channel video artwork in its own right, rather than simply documentation.

It’s been making the rounds after an upgrade: Dennis Jerz blogged about the program written, and text produced, by Peter Norvig at Google. (Norvig is co-author of the excellent textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.) Norvig claims that his generated text, currently 17,259 words in length, is “the longest palindromic sentence ever created.”

Well … 0wn3d. Here is a palindromic sentence that is 40,000 words long.

I’m happy to say that the Ludology section of First Person is now live at electronic book review. What is ludology? That question is part of what this section aims to address.

The term was brought into computer game studies by Gonzalo Frasca, who is well known for his thinking about connecting games with politics and the wider culture. But the term is now used, at least by some, to identify a type of game studies that emphasizes formal aspects of games — at times seeming to bracket off nearly all concern with anything beyond the mechanisms of gameplay.

And get your script on, too. You could call it version 2.0, or you might think of it as Grand Text Auto: Advice City, or you might just say “ooo – shiny!” Whatever the case, there have been some changes. It’s been slightly more than a year since we’ve been online, and now we’ve driven Movable Type off into the ocean and are riding in a tripped-out 2004 WordPress, complete with redesign. Sure, the radio stations are the same, but now, all of our templates are compliant, even if our thinking about digital media isn’t.

Nick and I are pleased to announce the publication of a new pamphlet we’ve written, Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature. AFB is the first publication of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project. While we wrote most of the text of the pamphlet, Nick and I are very much building on the work of the last couple of years by the participants in PAD.