Grand Text Auto

trAce‘s Digital Writer-in-Residence and recent commenter on grandtextauto, Tim Wright, has a new article of interest called Blog Fiction.

… it would seem natural for the world of the blog to become a fertile ground for new forms of digital storytelling and the development of new independent authentic fictional voices. Strange then that there are only a handful of writers out there currently experimenting with the idea of the fictional blog. …

If you’re an aspiring game designer, this looks to be a good opportunity for getting your hands dirty with creating your own game. Actually I’d imagine this would appeal both to people trying to break into the game industry, as well as experienced designers. Even if you don’t win, it’s a platform to get real experience designing and building a game — which looks good on the resume. (via GameDev.net)

Peter Norvig, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach fame (the most commonly used intro to AI textbook), has created a Powerpoint presentation for Lincoln’s Gettysburgh Address. This work is in the tradition of Powerpoint art, generally critiquing the Powerpoint communication style, pursued by artists such as Michael Lewy and David Byrne.

Upon entering the warehouse, you need to go:

N, N, E, N, S, SW, U, N, W, U, W, W, W, U, NW, N, NW, S, E, W, W, W, N, W.

Now you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. A skeleton, probably the remains of a luckless consumer, lies here. Beside the skeleton is a rusty SKARPT high-quality steel knife with hard plastic handle and a shopping cart. Search the body. Take the IKEA GIFT CARD (still has $43 on it).

I know there are plenty of you who need the rest of the walkthrough. (Thanks to ifMUD’s ctate.)

The Yak has fed us some additional screenshots of the in-development Unity, screenshots I mentioned in a comment ealier, but since I couldn’t include an image in the comment … here:

A nice, short, and to-the-point interview with the Yak (a.k.a. Jeff Minter) is on GameSpy. Elsewhere someone noted that “Jeff hates people saying its like REZ.” Just to clarify my earlier post: I didn’t say it was like Rez! I said it was (going to be) better!

A month ago I finally had a chance to go to Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. While wandering through this mechanical arcade, I found myself comparing these turn-of-the-century machines with contemporary game genres, looking for commonalities in design approaches and player/viewer experiences. A number of distinct machine types were immediately apparent.

Fortune Telling Machines
The classic in this genre is the gypsy or old crone who waves her hands over a crystal ball before dispensing a fortune, though many other forms, such as the Love Meter and Career Meter are on exhibit. Fortune telling programs have certainly been popular in computing; I remember many horoscope programs being sold for the TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari 800 (the first few computers I used). And there are more contemporary efforts, such as classic Mac program Synchronicity, by Paul O’Brien, the “father of interactive divination”. Interestingly, a number of the responses to project 1 in my class last fall involved horoscope or fortune telling programs. All such systems, whether implemented in gears or code, harness brute randomness to create a (more or less) engaging experience. Even when the systems involve some amount of interaction, such as grasping the levers at a specific time on the Love Meter, or sensing the exact timing of keystrokes in Synchronicity, these interactions are mediated by highly random processes, inducing almost no agency. So how do such systems elicit any sort of engagement at all? They work by giving ambiguous responses that can be interpreted by individuals in the contexts of their own lives; by having the responses relate to important life themes, such as love or career, these systems effectively push most of the sense-making onto the human participant instead of into the system. The participant does all the work of reading meaning into a random process.

Tim Wright, one of the developers of Online Caroline, poses a question that I think deserves a new discussion thread. With his permission, here’s his post:

Being partially responsible for this thread I thought I’d better chip in. When I talked about people stepping over the line I was thinking of behaviour such as:

a/A soldier in the British Army sending pictures of himself in full uniform, and then offering to kill Caroline’s boyfriend for her. Seriously.

Four bloggers interested in academic discussion of video games have launched Ludonauts: Exploring the Videogame, which is to be updated thrice weekly. It looks promising!

They’ve taken on some interesting topics, like genre in video games. This post begins with a casual discussion of how it is hard to classify certain films into genres; I wish there had been some discussion of what exactly genre means (some literary and film theorists have certainly thought about this a lot), and what genres of non-computer games there are (this would be a good hint as to how the term can be meaningful for video games).

Our making, not telling terminology debate is a reflection of a larger issue, often framed as game vs. story or ludology vs. narratology, but I’d rather frame it as high-agency vs. low-or-no-agency. Let me quickly state, I’m not saying I don’t like stories or experiences without agency — I love them! I consume tons of books and movies and comics and music — but they’re not the new form I and many others are envisioning here… I think “gamers” or “ludologists” often have a distaste for interactive stories in their current forms not because interactive stories are not “games” per se, and not even because they’re often text-based instead of visual, but because the interactive stories built to date don’t have much agency. I feel the same way. (Go here for more on story vs. game.)

Sorry to possibly set off yet another terminology debate — I’m really tired of them — but does it bother other people as much it bothers me to hear the term “digital storytelling” or worse, the oxymoron “interactive storytelling”?

If you assume a primary pleasure of interactive experiences is agency, as I do, then the suffix “-telling” should be avoided. I’m interested in experiences in which the player is collaborating with the system to help make, to co-create, to have meaningful affect on the story, not be told a story.

Noah and I will be speaking at the next UC system graduate conference, narr@tive: Digital Storytelling, as will UC faculty Kate Hayles and Rita Rayey. The conference is at UCLA and will end with a reading of student work at the Hammer Museum. The call for paper abstracts and electronic literature is out – deadline, March 1. Although the site doesn’t mention the date of the conference, I beleive it will take place April 22 and 23.

In a recent discussion about interactive works that try to fuse fiction and reality, the lead writer for Online Caroline mentioned how it can be disturbing if players step over the line when interacting with a virtual character who is supposed to be real and have real feelings.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to somewhat fully fleshed-out and reactive virtual characters, the first thing players (or at least males) usually try to do is push it to its limits, to try to break it, to see how far things can go — e.g., behave badly or cruelly, swear, act lewdly or inappropriately, flirt excessively, etc. So, for an experience in which a virtual character is supposed to be real, when players act inappropriately, I could see how it would seem more disturbing.

… that Jesper (“The Ludologist”, and frequent commenter on GTxA) has successfully defended his PhD, at the IT University of Copenhagen. His dissertation is entitled, “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds“.

Congrats!

Cosign 2004: Computational Semiotics, will be held at the University of Split, Croatia, September 14-16, 2004.

The creation and interpretation of meaning in interactive digital media requires the manipulation of signs and/or pre-existing structures of meaning. The focus of COSIGN is the way in which meaning can be created by, encoded in, understood by, or produced through, the computer. As such, it is of interest to computer scientists, digital artists and designers, HCI and AI practitioners, and a broad range of other critics, theorists and researchers.

The full call for participation is available here. The submission date for papers and artworks is April 29; the submission date for posters and demonstrations is May 24th. The programme and proceedings of the COSIGN 2001, COSIGN 2002 and COSIGN 2003 conferences are all available online.

Continuing our Spanish trend: There’s a new issue of the newsletter of SPAC (Sociedad para la Preservación de las Aventuras Conversacionales / Society for the Preservation of Interactive Fiction) just out. (Disable JavaScript before visiting the Spanish SPAC #33 or the hosting company’s ads will obliterate the content.) The issue includes an interview with me which is available in English on my site.

For San Francisco Bay Area GTxA readers, there are two public presentations of the National Academies of Science report, Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity on Jan. 22 and 23. This report, authored by an all-star committee of artists and scientists, explores the ways in which information technology and art mutually inform each other, describing promising areas of interdisciplinary art/CS work, and proposing models to foster such interdisciplinary work.

This report was previously mentioned in a GTxA discussion of the artist/programmer debate.

The book Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature, edited by Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens, offers close readings of work by Mark Amerika, Darren Aronofsky, M.D. Coverley, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Rick Pryll, Geoff Ryman and Stephanie Strickland. The editors contrast their aims with hypertext theory of the 80s and 90s that saw hypertextuality as a literal realization of poststructuralist thought. Instead of abstract theorizing, their book seeks to identify interesting points and problematics through detailed, concrete engagement with specific works.

An article by José Luis de Vicente in the January 9 El Mundo takes on some important issues with virtual worlds (focusing on MMORPGs) and describes some of the ways in which what goes on in them is real. Here’s the original article in Spanish, or you can see how well the Google translation reads. Here are some highlights that I translated:

I was very pleased to note that the first two English reviews of Twisty Little Passages were posted online yesterday. One of these reviews is from an IF author, editor of the SPAG Newsletter, and longtime, active member of the IF community, Paul O’Brian. The other, entitled “Wor(l)d Games,” is from Matt Kirchenbaum, assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of the forthcoming book Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality (MIT Press, 2005).

The new issue of Six Billion is titled “Veterans of Foreign Wars.” Six Billion is an online magazine that “showcases narrative journalism’s many forms — text, photography, sound, film/video, illustration, and interactive — in a single, versatile medium.” The new issue includes:

• BETTY MORRIS’ dispatches from late-1930s Europe, on the brink of “the great war”
• A film by Cambodian director RITHY PANH that confronts Khmer Rouge agents of torture
• WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN’s portrait of the war on immigration at the U.S.-Mexican border
• A radio-documentary of disaster in Afghanistan by SCOTT CARRIER
• And more …

Ken Perlin, a longtime pioneer of computer graphics and interactive virtual characters at NYU, has 77 “pages of his sketchbook” online at the Whitney Artport — an extensive collection of the inspiring interactive graphical applets Ken has written over the years. He’s the January installment of the rotating-monthly Gate Pages (which also recently featured GTxA’s Noah). (via Rhizome NetArtNews)

Also still at the Artport since about a year ago, is the amazing software art group show CODeDOC — more really great stuff. (Leading me to discover CODeDOC II, part of last September’s Ars Electronica.)

At GTxA we tend to focus on the non-non-fiction uses of new media, but this is worth noting. The competition for unpublished new media articles. The deadline is April 30th.

Yesterday I attended Jan Rune Holmevik’s dissertation defense at the University of Bergen. While I haven’t yet had a chance to read it in its entirety, from attending his defense, I can report that his dissertation, TraceBack: MOO, Open Source, and the Humanities, includes a great historical overview of the open source movement, as well as a history of LinguaMOO and the development of Encore. His dissertation in Humanistic Informatics also included a program, the Encore MOO system that he and Cynthia Haynes developed. In conjunction with his successful defense, he also released Encore 4.0, which is is distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Gratulerer Jan Rune!

Find out.

You can look at the pages Google determines to be “related” in a new way using Google Browser from TouchGraph. Well, a fairly new way – the system has been out for a while and it or its cousins (Amazon Browser, LiveJournal Browser) have been mentioned here and there, but my advisor, Michael Kearns, showed it to me today since it’s one of the tools we’ll be using in a new undergraduate class this semester, “Networked Life.”