Grand Text Auto

Brutal, bloody images, racist messages, and the suggestion that anyone who creates video games dealing with unpleasant aspects of life should be strangled. It’s all packaged in the local TV news.

Apparently in early November someone named Difenderfer said, speaking of Grand Theft Auto, that “My mission in the game is to kill the Haitians!” Sure, there is confusion about whether Difenderfer is a character in the game or is an outraged yet addicted “viewer” who wasn’t willing to appear on camera. But the basic point is still clear: People shouldn’t be using their television sets to play video games! How can the local TV news and our country’s advertising apparatus defecate down our throats if we’re busy using the TV to expore a rich, simulated word that critiques American culture?

Whilst in Texas recently, I read Jill Walker’s Dr. art. thesis, “Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World.” One important issue it tackled was one that I noted, but didn’t try to tackle, many years ago. It’s the question of what it means when a “real” action in the world (such as your really sending an email addressed to Online Caroline) is also to be an action in a fictional world (given that Online Caroline is not a real person, you have sent an email in the fictional world, too).

Chris Crawford recently announced Phrontisterion 5, his fifth annual conference on interactive storytelling, to be held June 26 and 27, 2004, at his home in southern Oregon. Chris says:

This is a most unconventional conference, concentrating on discussion rather than presentation. There will be no lectures or panel discussions; all the attendees (only 30 will be invited) sit in a circle under the towering fir trees and compare thoughts in a structured format.

Phrontisterion offers a unique opportunity to delve deeply into the issues surrounding interactive storytelling with some of the best minds in the world. If you are interested, please contact me by email and I shall provide you with the details.

Well, the Open Directory did create a category for this, so in fairness, they had to create a category for this.

An indie-oriented game site, GameTunnel, has posted its suggestions for the top ten independent games of 2003. (via Slashdot Games)

Interestingly, only one of these games was a finalist in either the 2002, 2003 or 2004 Independent Games Festival. I wonder if this is because these games just aren’t entered in the IGF, or the IGF and GameTunnel have pretty different criteria for the “best” indie games? I’m guessing GameTunnel favors popularity and fun, and IGF favors more radical designs and experimentation.

I just ran across Sent, which is being billed as “the first major exhibition of phonecam art in the United States.” The exhibition will include contributions both by amateurs and by invited professional artists and celebs, including Weird Al Yankovic.

Ludologist Jesper Juul has posted the abstract of this Ph.D. disseration. In the dissertation, he presents a theory of video games, argues that comptuers have special affinity for game-playing, and pits the rules of video games against the simulated, fictional worlds in which they take place. To develop his approach he has drawn upon “literary theory, film theory, computer science, sciences of complexity, economic game theory, game design literature, and some psychology.”

The defense is January 16. Jesper, good luck! The abstract certain has whet my appetite; I’m looking forward to reading the whole document when it’s available.

Each month on the empyre email discussion list — “an arena for the discussion of media arts practice” — a new set of people are invited to lead the discussion, and this month we have Jill Scott and two GTxA’ers, Nick and Noah. The topic: “Nova Media Storia: Histories and Characters”.

Is new media a field? Does it have a history? What history? And, how does it matter?

Those new to empyre may enjoy perusing the past guests and extensive archives.

Artist and frequent GTxA commenter Brandon Rickman has begun a new (or refurbished an old) blog called antimodal, that kicks off with a critique of Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play. Added to the blogroll.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Tempest 2000 — an excellent game that, along with the movie Tron, certainly was an inspiration for Rez. So I thought I’d check out what the designer of this game, the Yak (a.k.a. Jeff Minter), has been up to. As it turns out, this programmer of true cult classics, whose company is named Llamasoft, is collaborating with Peter Molyneux (Black & White) of Lionhead Studios on a GameCube puzzle-shooter.

Hey everybody, a new issue of Game Studies is out, squeezed in under the wire as their second issue for 2003. The articles include:

“On Virtual Economies”, by Edward Castronova
“Sim Sin City – Some thoughts about Grand Theft Auto 3”, by Gonzalo Frasca
“‘I Lose, Therefore I Think’ – A Search for Contemplation amid Wars of Push-Button Glare”, by Shuen-shing Lee
“When Seams Fall Apart- Video Game Space and the Player”, by Laurie Taylor
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown – Interactivity and signification in Head Over Heels”, by Jan Van Looy

(via Ludology.org)

Jill’s recent post on “linktheft” and the fact that I’ve recently read one of the PageRank papers got me thinking about links. Blog spam by those seeking more PageRank has become a real annoyance. We’ve be slogged by spam as well; some other bloggers have taken rather extreme measures in response. I re-read Jill’s paper Links and Power and also looked at some of the descriptions of PageRank online to make sure I understood the article by Larry Page et al. Here are a few observations…

Every year the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) holds a big yearly conference, this year in San Jose from July 25-29. One of the workshops this time around is “Challenges in Game AI“. Submissions are due March 12 for short papers in areas including AI methodologies, AI and game design, or case studies, including topics such as architectures, action planning, decision-making, multiple agent coordination, dynamic gameplay generation, learning, natural language interaction, characters, emotion, interface standards, and tools.

AAAI also holds symposia in the spring and sometimes in the fall; this spring, March 22-24 at Stanford, includes “Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text“.

Adam Cadre’s new interactive fiction, Narcolepsy, (top item on the page) is just out and seems at first taste to be curiously strong, magically delicious, etc. Although also named after an affliction, this piece isn’t as intricately puzzling as Adam’s Varicella. Exploration and alternate (and ontologically inconsistent) plot progression is more the idea in Narcolepsy.

While continuing the tradition of car accidents in ergodic literature and computer games, Cadre’s latest is, among other things, a rollicking and wacky conflation of aspects of Galatea, Patchwork Girl, The Manchurian Candidate, etc. I won’t give away which aspects.

At NYU I worked with the Improv folks, and I’ve remained interested in responsive animated characters. (After all, we couldn’t have projects like Facade without them.) This year’s meeting of the UK’s Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB) is themed Motion, Emotion and Cognition. Included within it is a symposium on “Language Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters.” The abstract submission deadline is nearly upon us — 9 January, 2004. I haven’t found a copy of the CFP online, so I’ll post a copy of the email CFP here.

This just in — Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca have just released a new political game commissioned by the Howard Dean for America presidential campaign!

In “The Howard Dean for Iowa Game“, you try your best to help Dean win the Iowa Caucus. You run around trying to get as many people as possible to notice your “Howard Dean” sign, and to knock as many doors as you can. I especially enjoyed trying to hand out as many leaflets as I could to harried passers-by. Made me feel for the people who try to do this out in the cold in real life.

Today has been some kind of day for new articles…

The future of adventure games is the topic of a series of smart essays by Marek Bronstring of Adventure Gamers (now added to our resources links list). Looks like a really interesting and informative read.

And Gamespot interviews Will Wright about The Sims 2. Advances from The Sims 1 include giving the player control over the camera, and greatly increasing the fidelity of the graphics, animation and probably behavior. I must say the screenshots look *amazing*. It looks scarily good to me. (Start here and keep clicking “previous”) For some perspective on gamers’ dissatisfaction with The Sims 1, read the comments on Slashdot Games.

Further reinforcing the point about the need for new kinds of content in interactive entertainment is a new Salon.com article by gamegirladvance‘s Jane Pinckard, “Video gaming and its discontents“. (Click on “free day pass” to read the article for free.)

… I just want what every gamer wants — smarter games. More meaningful games. Games that relate to other people. That relate to other things. Games that push me off the screen and off the couch. …

I remember this from when I moved to New York in 1994. One of the first new media people I met, I think it was Adrianne Wortzel, introduced me to If Monks Had Macs — a wild collection of HyperCard experiments and more. Now I see Matt Neuburg’s note in TidBits that If Monks is back:

I recently downloaded the demo of ToySight, software that uses the mac’s iSight camera to integrate object and motion control into a variety of videogames and “toys.” The demo includes “Freefall,” a game in which you stand in front of the camera with arms extended as your avatar falls through the clouds, trying to collect balloons and land on target, and “Laser Harp,” a toy harp in which you pluck strings that appear in front of your image. It might just be the gee-whiz factor, but I see a lot of potential for this kind of cam-based interaction (admittedly not enough to buy the package, but I looking forward to playing more of the games with my friend’s daughter when she gets it). I wonder what kind of electronic literature we might dream up for this form of interaction? Maybe something like Noah et al’s Talking Cure could soon be coming to a laptop near you.

A NYTimes magazine cover story about the interactive entertainment industry, profiling the CEO of Atari, ends with the author’s account of reluctantly picking up the gamepad and giving Max Payne a try.

The whole scenario strikes me (especially after he dies a few more times) as silly and ponderous and overly bloodthirsty, and yet there’s something there — a curious tension between control and no-control — that seems worth feeling solely on the grounds that, over a lifetime of novels and plays and movies and songs and paintings, I’ve never felt it before. The form is miles ahead of the content, and as long as the gold rush is on, it’ll probably stay that way. But, as in the first days of television or radio or the movies, the form is the whole thrill, and it’s more than thrill enough.

Here’s one for the Cybertext Yearbook 2004 – IF author and novelist Adam Cadre has taken up a somewhat offhand comment that Espen Aarseth made in his chapter on Deadine, which he dubbed the “Autistic Detective Agency.” He writes that not only does the player character in IF have to behave like an autist, but that IF itself “is geared towards the preferences of the autist.”

Adam’s bloglike Calendar features more interesting fare, often essay-length.

I’ve completed my article “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction” after about two years of having drafts of the article available online. (The last round of changes was rather minor.) It is a more thorough look at a topic covered briefly in chapter one of Twisty Little Passages – how narratology can inform a formal theory of interactive fiction, one that isn’t restricted to the narrative aspect of the form. Thanks to the many who commented on and criticized the piece, helping me to revise it.

Hanna made the mistake of mentioning the Killer Instinct exhibition to me before she blogged about it herself. It’s at the New Museum, and features pieces created by these artists who work with computer games, including 8-bit modder Cory Arcangel (mentioned before on here) and first-person appropriationist Eddo Stern (also mentioned). Perhaps in January I’ll get to see the exhibit.

Word Circuits (now added to our resource links list) has published a collection of seven short papers that “eschew general musings on the nature of electronic literature and instead dive right into a detailed close reading, filled with examples and quotations, perhaps even screen shots, of the text at hand.” The readings are polished versions of student papers from Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Digital Studies graduate course at the University of Maryland. The works dissected include ones by mez, geniwate, Diane Greco and GTxA’s own Scott Rettberg (who has his own blog by the way, with extra goodies he doesn’t post on this group blog).