Grand Text Auto

As I mentioned here before, Noah and I will be speaking today at Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling. Our talks are 4-5pm in Gallery 6 of the UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd at Westwood Blvd, where, as we learned when we walked by yesterday, Janeane Garofalo was speaking the night before.

Noah’s to speak on “Playable Media, Textual Instruments;” my talk will be “Figuring Interactive Fiction.”

June is shaping up to be a great month for discussing interactive story with like-minded folks. Chris Crawford still has room available at his intimate Phrontisterion conference (now in its 5th year), June 26-27 just outside gorgeous Jacksonville, Oregon. You can even camp on his property, I believe. Expected attendees this year include Gordon Walton, Justin Hall and Celia Pearce. Email Chris for more info.

Marek Bronstring, editor-in-chief of Adventure Gamers, writes about his experience playing Facade at the Independent Games Festival last month. (thanks to Walter for the link)

By the way, we added a few sample screenshots of Facade on interactivestory.net — scroll down past the project description to see them.

The last few weeks have seen several articles and presentations about games as movies, or Hollywood directors interested in games — a NYTimes article, reactions on Slashdot Games, Ludology.org and Terra Nova, a GDC presentation by Neil Young (designer of Majestic, now head of Maxis) about producing the successful Return of the King game for EA:

According to Young, the key to the success of the games lies in the understanding that these titles were not simply mass appeal games, but also mass entertainment experiences. Gameplay — the mechanics of game design — can certainly make or break a game, Young said, but on a broader level, the widespread success of a title depends equally on how broadly engaging a title is in terms of its general entertainment value.

In other words, does it have a movie tie-in. So it was refreshing (and ego-stroking) to find this article in the Calgary free weekly paper, FFWD:

Twisty Little Passages was slashdotted.

I have to admit, the conversation in comments there is different than I’d expect. I keep looking for “In Soviet Russia, the interactive fiction PLAYS YOU!”

Now, to interrupt your regularly scheduled discussion of games (and other things) for a brief dip into evolutionary game theory (EGT), a field that looks at how different strategies can fare against each other, and against themselves, when they repeatedly play games in the von Neumann/Nash sense – and a comment on how game theory relates to game studies.

Ben Packer and I took the nicely implemented JPrison appplet for running EGT games, developed by Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Lille, and added a simple, but somewhat flexible, programming language to it: STRANGE, a STRategy lANGuagE. Today in Michael Kearns’ Networked Life class, we had four groups compete to devise strategies under different conditions…

In “Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally” (archive), New York Times reporter Adam Baer covers e-mail fictions including Intimacies by Eric Brown and Rob Wittig’s Blue Company 2002 and interviews e-lit experts including Rob, Thom Swiss and GTA’s Noah Wardrip-Fruin. People interested in Blue Company *begin shameless plug* might also like its sort-of sequel Kind of Blue.

Nick posted a while back about issue 1 of Chaise. Now the deadline nears for submissions for Chaise issue 2.

CHAISE Magazine is the way things ought to be. It’s a biannual bite-sized showcase of cutting-edge artwork, distributed free of charge…

William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Rob Wittig
Reporting from Notre Dame University
&Now Conference April 5-6, 2004

W: Compared to the Holocaust Conference going on up in Massachusetts this weekend, I think &Now was an especially fun place to be. The presenters were freaks for the most part, freaks and Lydia Davis, from the fringes of word art. Those who write and have other people publish books of stories or poems were probably in the minority. There was abundant electronica, collaborative text-collage performance, multimedia performance fiction, text-image-sound, and even a critic.

The bot bachelors of Mark Marino and Alan Laser follow in Eliza‘s footsteps and provide amusement for those who browse on Windows with cookies turned on. (These aren’t my own turn-ons, and I’ve only chatted these bots up briefly on a borrowed computer, but doing much beyond a Web page that is accessbile can be difficult – that’s another discussion, anyway.) This offering sits on the site of full-featured Bunk Magazine, a periodical that seems to sit somewhere in between Salon and Albino Black Sheep.

GDC has inspired one lengthy discussion on GTxA so far, perhaps we can get another one going. As I mentioned earlier, the presentation of this year’s Indie Game Jam was a highlight of the conference for me and others (Robin’s writeup, more 1 2 3 4). I love the idea of a group of experienced practitioners getting together in a single location for a few days (pics 1 2 3 4), set loose with a shared, novel, expressive development platform, to quickly jam out an array of little interactive works, ending with an group exhibition shortly thereafter.

This got some of us thinking about doing our own version of a Game Jam. I recall Michael was immediately thinking about the idea of doing a similar event at his new Experimental Game Lab.

Wandering around SOMA a few hours before I flew home to Boston, Noah and I had a bit of time to think about the concept of a Jam. We thought, what would a Jam of electronic writers look like?

I’m on the program committee for the workshop Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, to be held at the 12th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in New York next October (details below). If you are interested in multimedia story systems, particularly systems that employ AI models of story and character, please consider attending!

The 1st ACM Workshop on
STORY REPRESENTATION, MECHANISM AND CONTEXT
In conjunction with the 12th ACM International Conference on Multimedia
October 15, 2004
Columbia University
New York, New York, USA
Papers due: June 15, 2004
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2004
Camera-ready papers due: August 1, 2004

A week ago at the List Gallery in Cambridge, as part of the Son et Lumiere group show, I saw a great installation that incorporated massive amounts of electronic text. The piece was called Listening Post, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. Apparently it’s been touring, so some of you may have already seen it. Their site describes it better than I can; be sure to click on Image Gallery. And here’s a NYTimes review of it.

Via jill/txt, a new Guardian article about the concept and writing of blog fiction.

Hmm, after reading the article, it turns out I was fooled on April 1st after all…

Google’s new free email service, Gmail, offers users 1GB of free storage, in return for ads that appear in your email. Not just any ads, though — the Gmail system scans the text of the email you’re sending, to choose customized, targeted ads based on the content of what you’re writing about.

This is bound to spook some people out — the idea that someone, some thing, is secretly reading and deciding things about your private email. However Google downplays this:

“It’s not that Google is peeking… It’s computers doing processing.”

I’ve just started experimenting with txtkit. One begins reading by typing searches into a Mac’s terminal window. Then the machine’s desktop is replaced by an OpenGL-rendered representation of a collaborative reading space. Matching sentences unfurl vertically when selected, against a background of a slowly-rotating spirograph-like structure that represents the cluster of search results. And then the visualizations that connect with the readings of others kick in. Have any GTxA readers experimented with this? What do you think?

Current texts available for collaborative reading include a selection by Lev Manovich, a selection by project originator Hans Ulrich Reck, and Lawrence Lessig’s new book (another benefit of free culture). Here is some material culled from the project web pages:

WWW @ 10 is an “interdisciplinary conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade.” WWW @ 10 abstracts are due April 15th. Scheduled speakers include Ted Nelson and Cory Doctorow — Jill and I are on the Program Committee (so send in stuff we’ll like!).

I had a great time at the GDC last week. The positive buzz around Façade led me to consider once again the issue of whether the phrase “game research” makes sense. To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn’t believe in “game research”. You’re either working on a shippable product, or you’re bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can’t be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will? To put a finer point on it, how do I fund the next Façade?

I just came across The Cultural Gutter, “updated Thursday at noon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. The geeky triumvirate of science-fiction, comics and videogames forms the core… they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms.”

Past articles I found interesting include “Is It Possible To Have Too Much Fun?“, “Professor Zork“, “The Romance of Indie Games” and “Too Damn Talky“.

GameCritics.com’s “Caught in the Web” column reviews Gonzalo Frasca’s Kabul Kaboom!, Sept 12 and Gonzalo and Ian Bogost’s Howard Dean for Iowa Game. And Ian is this month’s Ivory Tower columnist with an essay titled “The Muse of the Video Game,” about academia-industry collaboration and why game developers should be as familiar with the humanities as they are with pixel shaders.

I’m at 040404 today, a “Colloquium on New Media and the Unfolding of New Structures in Old Spaces” at UC Berkeley.

Upcoming talks include: Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley — Peer Pressure: Bodygames and Collective Telepresence; Warren Sack and Michael Dale, UC Santa Cruz — Drawing by Derive; and Jane McGonigal — Avant-Game: Flexible Structures through Site-specific Play.

More to come in the “extended” version of this entry.

Those GTxA readers in New York City should consider attending the seminar:

Playdate #1: War Games and Game Wars
Friday 9th April 1-3pm Wolff Conference Room
The New School 65 5th avenue (at 14th st)
Free. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Ed Halter will present War Games: Digital Gaming and Military Culture, and Alex Galloway will present Social Realism in Gaming. Perhaps someone who attends the talks can post something about them here.

Via Rhizome.

Continue reading for more detail about the two talks.

ALT+CTRL is a festival of independent and alternative games coming this fall from the Cal-(IT)² Game Culture & Technology Lab and the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine. The deadline for submissions is June 1, so there’s a bit of time yet. It’s also possible to become a sponsor of the event, if you’re of the right sort of profile. The announcement says:

What an interactive fiction news day! Dan Shiovitz has announced a new interactive fiction development system that is really really easy to use and produces code with a very small footprint – for instance, one byte long. Check out Snap.

In the category of “this is not an April Fools joke”, Quake has been ported to the Inform interactive fiction language. As the IF Quake page describes it:

In IF Quake, you walk through the exact same levels you do in the graphical version of the game, only instead of circle-strafing and firing at your enemies, you type commands like “ATTACK GRUNT WITH SHOTGUN”.

Thanks to Slashdot for announcing this.