Grand Text Auto

Chaim Gingold wrote this month’s IGDA Ivory Tower column.

Game developers and academics, by engaging one another, can help both of their practices mature. But what does it mean to have conversations with one another? If we’re going to play together, what are the rules of the game, and what are the motivations of its players?

In case you were wondering about my life as a computer and information science Ph.D. student at Penn, I’ve put some information about my research, teaching, and studies online.

The Joint Work reading at the Kelly Writers House went wonderfully. As promised, the four of us read from 2002, Implementation, and The Unknown. There was a great turnout, the technologies involved worked smoothly (eh, the problem with the wireless mike didn’t really matter), and readers and read-to alike seemed to have great fun. Thanks to Jen Snead for introducing us and to her and the others at the Writers House for hosting us.

I’m happy to announce the creation of the Experimental Game Lab, a new video game research lab I’ve founded at Georgia Tech. The EGL’s mission is to serve as an interdisciplinary meeting place, supporting work at the intersection of art, technology and culture, in which faculty and students work together to create the future of gaming. The lab has been active since early last fall, though we’re just now giving the lab a public face.

Thanks to Terra Nova for linking to today’s Associated Press article about game studies, including quotes from the usual suspects.

The article will probably get printed in many local papers around the country. For example, here’s the article printed in Bixoli Mississipi’s local paper, the Sun Herald.

Save yourself the price of admission to GDC — a new “Legends of the Game Industry” Speaker Series is being hosted by The Art Institute of California – San Francisco. The first talk in the series, by Will Wright, will be held at 7pm on Feb 25, free and open to all Bay Area students, game industry professionals and the general public. (via Gamasutra)

The speaker schedule for Form, Culture, & Video Game Criticism, a one day conference being held at Princeton on March 6th, has been announced. Looks like a good lineup, and includes our own Nick Montfort as well as frequent GTxA commentor Dennis Jerz. I couldn’t find a website with the conference schedule, so I include the full program below.

Implementation installment 1 is available to everyone on the Web now, in US Letter and A4 sizes. And the first reading of Implementation will occur Saturday, along with a reading of 2002 and The Unknown, at the Philadelphia event Joint Work…

E-FEST 2004
Readings, Symposia, Performances
February 17-19

Brown University Program in Literary Arts will present E-Fest 2004, a celebration of electronic literary art February 17-19. The program will feature readings by John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, Talan Memmott, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Brian Kim Stefans, Aya Karpinska, Alan Sondheim and more.

The program will open with an overview of electronic writing activities at Brown University, including readings by Talan Memmott and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, with a special performance by Thalia Field and Jamie Jewett. Wednesday’s program includes panels and discussions with artists and theorists in the field including George Landow, Roberto Simanowski, and Alan Sondheim. An evening reading will feature John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, Brian Kim Stefans, and Aya Karpinksa. Thursday will feature artist demos and the introduction of new books on digital media. [Including Nick’s Twisty Little Passages.]

The Christian Science Monitor has a great new article posing the question, “How should people treat creatures that seem ever more emotional with each step forward in robotic technology, but who really have no feelings?” The article briefly touches on many facets of this question. One quote that sticks out is from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA):

The turn toward having robotic animals in place of real animals is a step in the right direction… It shows a person’s recognition that they aren’t up to the commitment of caring for a real animal. Practically speaking, from PETA’s perspective, it really doesn’t matter what you do to a tin object.

On GTxA we recently touched on the issue of abusing virtual characters and the topic of blurring / fusing of fiction and reality with virtual characters.

New Products:

Tamagotchi keychain pet is back: Using infrared portals, the new Tamagotchi Plus will be able to mingle, chat and date, marry and have babies with other Tamagotchis. The original version sold 40M units. (via Slashdot Games)

Singles! Flirt Up Your Life! is shipping soon. Pick two characters to live together from a cast of twelve, and using a Sims-like interface try to coax them to get it on. Includes nudity and romantic erotic situations but no pornography. (full index of screenshots) (via GameGirlAdvance)

One of my students forwarded a link to this episode of Strongbad answering his email, in which he humorously riffs on classic games. His treatment of text adventures is particularly relevant given the historical context of the “this is not a game” comment that Noah describes below; one can imagine that this is pretty much what the hypertext folks thought interactive fiction was like. Make sure your sound is on.

“This is not a game” is what some hypertext fiction authors began to say of their work in the late 1980s. As Stuart Moulthrop notes in our interview at The Iowa Review Web, they said this to differentiate themselves from the work coming out of the interactive fiction community, and the comparison wasn’t meant to be neutral.

“This is not a game” is a slogan of alternate reality gaming. As Jane McGonigal tells us in her “‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play” (pdf, html) gameness is denied in these experiences that are made up of elements found on far-flung web servers, on voicemail systems, and even on bathroom walls. For the Cloudmakers — formed to solve the mysteries of The Beast, the promotional game for the movie A.I. — this denial may have been a vital ingredient in the belief of some players that their group was also suited to solving the mysteries of the September 11th attacks.

Charles Herold of the NYTimes gives an unusually positive review of the recently released Deus Ex sequel, an action/role-playing hybrid science fiction game, which “wants every player to have a unique experience.”

Invisible War is a wildly ambitious game, a serious attempt to shape the video game into something far grander and more complex than it has been until now. It is largely successful. The story, which is filled with compelling details and takes several ingenious twists, has many clever ideas.

He goes on to describe some its flaws, such as occasionally low-believablity AI, but overall the review is glowing. (Positive but more tempered reviews from gamer-oriented sites can be found here and here, for example.)

The International Digital Media and Arts Association is holding their conference March 12 – 14 in Orlando. The iDMAa conference explores issues relevent for faculty and administrators of digital media and digital arts programs, particularly focusing on curriculum development, directions for research and creative work, resources (e.g. laboratories, external sponsors), and faculty development.

A reminder of Friday’s symposium at Stanford (which we originally posted about last October): Story Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer Games. Includes a panel “The Big Picture: Do Games Need Stories?” with Haden Blackman of LucasArts, Sheldon Pacotti of Ion Storm, and Will Wright of Maxis/EA.

The symposium is part of the larger Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences: Storytelling and Computer Games project at the Stanford Humanities Lab, and in conjuction with the “Bang the Machine” exhibit at Yerba Buena in San Francisco.

The Moves Institute of the Naval Postgraduate School has created a booklet describing the philosophy, history and implementation of their army recruitment game America’s Army, (mentioned here previously 1 2 3 4) for the Bang the Machine exhibit at the Yerba Buena Arts center in San Francisco. The booklet is available online.

In December, while visiting family in Nevada, I went to the Nevada Art Museum in Reno. My favorite piece was East of Fallon, Highway 50, Nevada by Joseph DeLappe, a new media artist at University of Nevada, Reno.

Today being Groundhog Day in U.S. (and elsewhere?) reminds me how the movie Groundhog Day suggests a model for how interactive stories could work. Rather than write up my own essay on the topic however, I’ll link to others who have already discussed this, found via Google:

A discussion on rec.arts.int-fiction, found in Stephen van Egmond’s / Magnus Olsson’s archive
Discussed in Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck
An essay from the website TransparencyNow
“The Five Stages of Writing for Interactive” by game designer Noah Fahlstein
A mention by Dennis Jerz in “IF, literature and…”
Our Let’s do it again discussion last August

This just happened, but it seems worth mentioning anyway: Digital Independence 2004 “is a conference that unites innovators in film, video, games, music, technology, media policy and the arts… How have affordable technologies leveled the playing field and empowered independents? What new visions and voices are emerging? How will the conflicts over open source, copyright, mass media rulings, and digital standards impact independent work? How are indies changing technology—and how is technology changing indies?”

Panelists included the Howard Rheingold, executive director of Creative Commons Glenn Brown, IGF and GDC organizers, the chair of Intel’s art and entertainment research committee, and many more.

Here’s a new article highlighting some of the issues involved with creating virtual humans, including a mention of the “Uncanny Valley” phenomenon.

This is an issue for robotic and on-screen animated characters alike. We were faced with avoiding the creepiness factor when making Babyz; we did so by keeping the characters cartoony enough. But it was an issue during the design, that we focus tested. Similarly, Facade is rendered in an illustrative style. Of course more abstract faces and bodies have the advantage of being easier to implement — a double-win.

The submission deadline for TIDSE 2004 (mentioned here previously) has been extended to February 15.

Who knows what happened here? An honest error? Most likely, but it’s funnier to think that even “prominent” newspapers might give in to the urge to intentionally feed the wrong page title/headline to Google News once in a while, in an attempt to get some extra bang for their advertising buck. Of course, such an attempt could go horribly arwy…

Cannibal who fried victim in garlic is cleared of murder
Guardian – 2 hours ago
He arrived laughing and joking. Just over two hours later Armin Meiwes, the self-confessed German cannibal who killed and ate another man, left a stunned courtroom scarcely able to believe his luck.
A German Court Convicts Internet Cannibal of Manslaughter New York Times
Bag a family holiday to the Magic Kingdom The Sun