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“Ready or not games are in the gallery.” For a week starting today on the empyre listserv is ‘game to game’, a discussion of game art. Panelists include games and media theorist Melanie Swalwell; Rebecca Cannon, curator of selectparks.net; artists Anita Johnston and Troy Innocent; and moderated by Helen Stuckey.
My post-lunch stop by my office led me to miss one panel of Knowledge Held Hostage, but I returned for a discussion of some proposals for change. I’ll point out here, above the fold, that in questions a sinister piece of pending legislation was mentioned: The Induce Act. Now on to the panels…
Today I’m at a conference at Penn called Knowledge Held Hostage: Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age. As you might guess, the conference was not about scholars hoarding rights from corporations. I found it interesting that the opposition between scholarly and corporate rights was encoded in the subtitle, as wasn’t the case in Copyright and the Networked Computer. On the one hand, that leaves out artistic, political, and other rights; on the other, it sets up an institutional opponent for corporations – one that has some societal power and is at least somewhat formidable, if the other opponents you’re contemplating are, for instance, Negativland and a Norwegian teenage hacker.
Sure, you can get Neural – an Italian magazine about “hacktivism, e-music, and new media art” – online, in English. (Or in Italian, of course. With appropriate illustrations and short bits of text laden with technical terms, the Italian stories end up being almost as comprehensible as menus – or more so, if you already know what the story is about.) But there’s something about the printed English magazine that evokes those enthusiastic publications of a decade ago: the early Wired and its predecessors, bOING bOING and Mondo 2000 (“The only magazine with an expiration date in its title.” -Bruce Sterling). This is a spread from the February issue, picturing a “flower installation” in Croatia. While it isn’t hot off the press, I keep finding things to like about it and the news on the Neural site.
The 3rd European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art, EvoMUSART 2005, will be held March 30 – April 1 2005, in Lausanne, Switzerland. EvoMUSART focuses on the use of evolutionary techniques (genetic algorithms, genetic programming) for generative music and art. Submissions are due November 5, 2004. Topics of interest include:
Bloom and Daedalus wandered through Dublin 100 years ago today, albeit in a Dublin with ontological status different from the one some of us know. For those who haven’t read Joyce’s epic novel and won’t have time to read it all today, there’s always the online classic, Ulysses for Dummies.
The second DiGRA conference will be held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in one year’s time, from June 17 to 20, 2005. The conference is titled “Changing Views: Worlds in Play”. An excerpt from the press release:
The goal of this conference is to facilitate a richer and more comprehensive grasp of the present and future capabilities and applications of digital games by inviting and supporting work which demonstrates the values, means and ends of ‘changing views’ in and on digital games and games research. This work necessarily embraces interdisciplinarity and internationalism, and is, in sum, work which bridges between and across worlds in play.
For great justice, a new version of the Zag Glulx interpreter is now available. Zag is written in Java and has done a lot to ease this Mac user’s Glulx woes. It’ll let you run large, multimedia IF pieces such as Narcolepsy and Lock & Key (found on Adam’s IF Page), City of Secrets, and El extraño caso de Randolph Dwight.
The 2004 IF Art Show is now online, with several works, including pieces by Jacqueline A. Lott, Dave J. Malaguti, and Yoon Ha Lee. Marnie Parker’s IF Art Shows (this is the sixth) use something of a visual art or gallery metaphor, but they don’t feature visual art – at least not prominently. The usual text-based format for interactive fiction is the norm, with pieces that are less extensive and riddle-like than usual. As with the IF Competition, a contest, rather than a magazine issue or the like, is used as an organizing theme.
You called yourself “ESCAPER.” The oddly compelling miniature Flash adventure Crimson Room was mentioned on here back in February. Now Toshimitsu Takagi’s sequel, Viridian Room, is out. I haven’t done more than fiddle with it, as is the case with another game that Josh Kellar pointed me to, this one by Jan Albartus: The Mystery of Time and Space. Branko Collin on rec.arts.int-fiction linked to what is certainly the most visually appealing and easily clicked through adventure of this sort, a promotional game for The Polyphonic Spree’s new album: Quest for the Rest. It’s by Amanita Design. (The image here is from Quest for the Rest.) It looks like adventure games and interactive fiction may have a rich life ahead of them in advertising, given this and Burger King’s IF-style online video puppet. But it’s certainly the case that Flash is being used for some interesting little online graphical adventures.
Update (6/12): A detailed review of The Mystery of Time and Space follows…
Update (6/12): There’s a more extensive Flash adventure by Amanita Design: Samorost.
A NYTimes article appears today about “small, simple, fast and fun” games, many of them from independent developers. The games described include Grow, recently mentioned on GTxA, and IGF prize winner Oasis. Plus, a link to Little Fluffy, which I’ve added to our resources links list. Check out their “Top 20” page.
FILE, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica (Electronic Language International Festival), will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from November 22nd to December 12th, 2004. Submissions are due June 15. FILE will consist of four simultaneous events:
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues got to proclaim their new invention, the World Wide Web, with a poster at the ACM Hypertext conference. This year it could be you! The 2004 conference will be in sunny Santa Cruz; the poster and demo deadline is this Friday, June 11.
A new issue of The Iowa Review Web is just out, and this quarter’s featured artist section features our very own Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who is interviewed by Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker, with comments from Josh Carroll and Robert Coover.
Also in the new issue are interviews with Jay David Bolter and Amy Sara Carroll; a review of Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala; and poems by Denisa Comanescu, Rebecca Makkai, and Stephen Dunn.
Dunn and Rettberg both … if Grand Text Auto doesn’t carjack The Iowa Review Web, it looks like Stockton College will.
Prompted in part by the all-encompassing “game canon” lists that were provided a while ago (specifically, the ones by Greg Costikyan and by Jesper Juul and Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen), I’ve listed a dozen games for one specific early console – the Atari VCS (a.k.a. the Atari 2600) – which I think would be extremely useful for modern-day scholars of console games to play and study. Without giving anything like a full review of these cartridges, I’ve tried to briefly explain why each is worth considering.
This is one I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. What happens when you take a writer, who is editor-in-chief for a gaming magazine, and put a Ted Nelson book in her hands? You get a combination of three perspectives that we’re accustomed to only seeing pairwise: Storytronics.
Katherine Phelps is the author, and while she was pretty early to the party with Storytronics (1998/99) you still don’t see many references to her work. It’s a pity, because things like her Story Shapes for Digital Media offer some of the same example-driven help out of the “Choose your own adventure” box that I also admire in Narrative as Virtual Reality. With Andrew Pam (who is also behind Xanadu Australia) she’s been running the literary website Glass Wings for a decade, as of this March. (You might remember reading about them in this Salon article).
A couple of weeks ago I received the sad news that my friend Steve Kurtz’s wife Hope had passed away in her sleep. This personal tragedy was compounded by the bizarre twist that, when police and medical workers arrived in response to Steve’s call, they saw some of the biological equipment in his home studio that Steve uses for biotech art performances with the Critical Art Ensemble. Hyped up on “War on Terror” fervor, they called in the Feds to investigate a potential bioterrorism case. While this was shocking, and certainly added insane stress to an already emotionally intense situation (Steve was even denied access to his wife’s body for awhile), I assumed that the bioterrorism case would blow over, as investigators discovered the ridiculous mistake they’d made. But, as many GTxA readers may already know, in the last few days the situation has grown ever more Kafkaesque, prompting me to make this public post on what was initially a private tragedy. Steve is now being brought before a Grand Jury on bioterrorism charges. Other artists have been called in to testify, including my friends Paul Vanouse and Beatriz (Shani) da Costa. Below I’ve included the text of a CAE defense fund press release.
Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’…
I’ve added two relatively new blogs to our blogroll: particle stream, “a space for outlandish thoughts about fiction and games”, by Julian Kücklich of Germany, and particleblog by Tadhg Kelly of the UK (also a Ludonaut), who has coined the term insyn, “the idea that the things that you play with on your playstation or xbox can actually have substance and not be just about cheap thrills”.
Recently Tadhg had continued to expand on his conception of interactive reflective art, and Julian is currently reading and critiquing First Person. Both sites are worth your regular attention.
Previously at GTxA we’ve discussed the issue of whether media artists and theorists should program (1 2 3 4), mentioned Mary Flanagan’s and Ken Perlin’s new procedural literacy project, and generally championed the idea that new media artists, game designers and theorists, media and software studies theorists, and generally anyone involved in cultural production on, in or around a computer, should know how to program. Of course people have been talking about the importance of procedural literacy for awhile, with Seymour Papert describing his work with teaching children to program in Logo in the 1980 book Mindstorms, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg describing procedural environments in which everyone, including children, can build their own simulations in the 1977 paper Personal Dynamic Media, and Ted Nelson crying in the wilderness that “you can and must understand computers NOW” (including programming) in his 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines. But a couple of months ago Mark Guzdial turned me onto an even earlier argument for universal procedural literacy, one given by A. J. Perlis in a talk at a symposium held at M.I.T. in 1961 to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and published in the collection Management and the Computer of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.), MIT Press. The symposium consisted of 8 talks, with two discussants responding to each talk, and was attended by such luminaries as C. P. Snow, J. W. Forrester, Herb Simon, J. McCarthy, and A. J. Perlis. Perlis’ talk, The Computer in the University, focused on the role the computer should play in a university education.
CGAIDE 2004, the International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education, will be held at the Microsoft campus in Reading, UK, November 8-10 2004. The conference aims to bring together academics and game developers interested in AI and games, with special session topics on areas such as intelligent agents, learning and adaptation in games, and neural networks in games, as well sessions on game art and education for game design and development. Submissions are due July 30, 2004.
The next few months in NYC offer several events that GTxA readers might find worth the trip. Now that I live within driving distance I’m hoping to make it to some or all of these.
For Ars Electronica’s 25th anniversary, exhibited from May 21 through July 18 will be Digital Avant-Garde, featuring “outstanding media art projects from the past twenty-five years as well as inspiring new developments from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and artist-in-residence program”, plus additional symposia, artist talks, screenings, and workshops.
July June 15 papers are due for the workshop Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, previously posted about here. It will be held October 15 at Columbia University.
July 21-23 is the huge yearly international Autonomous Agents conference. This year it happens to be in NYC, also at Columbia. Looking through the list of hundreds of papers and posters, I’ve culled out ones with a believable agent / interactive story bent:
Congrats to the winning authors of trAce’s New Media Article competition.
Review category – “A Bad Machine Made of Words” by Nick Montfort
Opinion category – “Are cell phones new media? Hybrid communities and collective authorship” by Adriana de Souza e Silva
Process category – “Writing 4 Cyberformance” by Karla Ptacek & Helen Varley Jamieson
Editor’s Choice Award – “Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs” by Kate Baggott
Honourable Mention – “Postcards From Writing” by Sally Pryor
Continuing the theme of AI systems that use language: here’s a new paper by Rob Zubek at Northwestern, who has been thinking hard about how to make robust, richly interactive conversational characters. His PhD research is focused on building an architecture for structuring conversations as vast collections of reactions to player input, arranged in hierarchies, that compete to understand and respond to the player. Multiple possible threads of conversation all are listening simultaneously to what the player says at any time, and they each update their local probabilities of where they believe they are in the conversation. Assuming enough content is authored, this allows the conversation to have a variety of believable responses at any time, at varying levels of coherence. Thus the system can fail gracefully and perhaps move the conversation forward when the system has trouble understanding the player, or doesn’t have a good response.
The Futurefarmers collective has released the online game Antiwargame. Like the controversial September 12 (GTxA discussion: 1 2), Antiwargame explores the politics of the war on terror via a game simulation. In Antiwargame you take actions such as setting your budget, sending troops overseas and manipulating the media, with the goal of maintaining a popularity high enough to remain president.
Via Rhizome
Update: More on the simulation rhetoric operating in Antiwargame can be found in the comments.
This year the Prix Ars Electronica honored two projects that have helped to make vast amounts of human knowledge available and legally accessible. Wikipedia, the free, community-built encyclopedia, was awarded the Golden Nica for Digital Communities. Creative Commons won the Golden Nica for Net Vision.
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