Grand Text Auto

AGNI, a literary magazine I worked for when I was at Boston University, is now publishing some material exclusively online. (The magazine’s logo, incidentally, is a flying monkey.) AGNI was founded by Askold Melnyczuk, who ran the magazine for 30 years, but it has taken wing online under its new editor, none other than the famous book reviewer and famous book elegiast Sven Birkerts, who wrote in introducing the website:

Had you given me the crystal ball ten years ago, when I was putting out anti-technology jeremiads one after the next, I would have thought about going into the next room with my service revolver and doing what used to be called “the right thing.”

More multiplayer madness coming at you… A new article about social gaming by Shannon Appelcline on Skotos.net. Lots (er, tons) of articles to be found there.

I’ve yet to play any Skotos games/stories (see the FAQ’s for what it is). Their flagship games, “multiplayer prose roleplaying games,” sound interesting. How much does this community overlap with the text-adventure IF community?

Particularly impressive-sounding are the authoring tools for non-programmers. “A cornerstone of the Skotos community is the ability to create your own games. Our goal is to make it easy and intuitive for game designers and story tellers to share the ideas that live in their heads.” Can anyone share for us their experience creating and playing these games / stories?

Gamespot gives “Real Life” a whopping 9.6 rating out of 10, and an Editor’s Choice Award!
;-) (via the PowerPill)

So you’re an artist, and you work with new media, and you want to go to graduate school. If you’re a composer, you go to an electronic music program. If you’re an installation artist, you go to an electronic art program. But what if you’re a writer?

As far as I know, there’s only one writing program in the world that offers a yearly fellowship in electronic writing — Brown’s. And this year the deadline for application has been moved up to December 15th. Anyone who wants to throw their hat in the ring had better get movin’.

Today in Toulouse is day one of the two-day 2nd Int’l Conference on Virtual Storytelling (the 1st one having been held in Avignon, so it appears to be a French affair ;-) Michael and I would love to be there of course, but we’ve each travelled to Europe twice this year for conferences and have to draw the line somewhere… We did help review papers though. Nicolas Szilas, a regular commenter here on GTxA and presenter at ICVS, will hopefully be writing up a conference summary for us.

The above post on ICVS gives me the excuse to highlight three new academic researchers / projects that seem very interesting: procedural literacy, stealth learning, and computational (proto)ethics…

The results are in from the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition! The collaborative work Slouching Towards Bedlam by Star Foster and Daniel Ravipinto took top honors. In second place was Michael Coyne’s Risorgimento Represso, then Quintin Stone’s Scavenger, then Daniel Freas’s The Erudition Chamber, and then Aaron A. Reed ‘s Gourmet. And many of the 25 other entries are worth playing. For those who didn’t get to play during the Comp, you can still download all the games in one file.

The current Scandanavian-focused issue of dichtung-digital has several new articles that should be of interest to the grandtextauto crowd, such as The Elements of Simulation in Digital Games by Äkin Jarvinen, Paradigms of Interaction: Conceptions and Misconceptions of the Field Today by Lisbeth Klastrup, Is There a Place for Digital Literature in the Information Society? by Raine Koskimaa, and The Geography of a Non-place by Torill Mortensen. Genießen Sie die Papiere.

Jill pulls an interesting quote from one of the papers.

A week and a half ago I went to Copyright and the Networked Computer. Noah was there too. There were lots of lawyers.

I enjoyed and learned from the presentations and questions and from many of my conversations with lawyers, computer scientists, and others. It was nice that some people appreciated the public domain and appropriationist art (and that all art is appropriationist to some extent), but hearing from staffers on “both sides” of the issue in the House of Representatives left me feeling unwell. The framework of the discussion simply seemed wrong. So I’ll leave the trip report duties to Noah and post something polemic instead.

This Friday at the Eyebeam gallery in Chelsea, NYC, is the opening of Beta Launch: Artists in Residence Part2, which includes Shadow, “an interactive installation that projects a disembodied, autonomous, human shadow on the ground. This apparently living, intelligent shadow attempts to merge itself with the viewer’s real shadow. When this occurs, the invisible figure, implied by the virtual shadow, inhabits the viewer’s own personal space.”

This is the kind of interactive art I really like, and wish there were more of. I strongly believe that there are so many interesting art pieces one can do with realtime autonomous characters in a gallery space — this is a frontier just waiting to be pioneered. For example, Simon Penny’s Petit Mal (1995), and Mark Bohlen and Michael Mateas’ Office Plant #1 (1998). Works likes these are both compelling conceptually and entertaining to experience.

A NYTimes article by James Gleick discusses new innovations in artificially intelligent houses. “Our technolust and Luddite impulses have rarely been so provoked — and at the same time and in the same people.”

Last August in Leipzig, Germany was apparently the world’s first symphony concert to feature music from popular Western and Japanese videogame soundtracks, including Final Fantasy, Battlefield 1942, and Zelda Wind Walker. Andy Brick conducted the Czech National Orchestra. (via Game Developer Magazine)

Lawmeme reports that Second Life, an avatar game discussed in recent posts, has made a decision to let player-characters keep the intellectual property rights they create. Players, for instance, have the right to sell movie rights for their character. See Participant Content under the Second Life terms of service agreement. Of course, the player also grants Second Life nonexclusive rights to the content, but nevertheless, this is a fascinating decision with regard to virtual property. I think it also has some interesting implications regarding the idea that games can be a creative environment, in which players actually make new “works” that could have some economic value.

I haven’t yet had the chance to write a reaction to Randy Littlejohn’s impassioned article about interactive drama on Gamasutra from two weeks ago (requires free registration); I hope to post something next week. However I just discovered a discussion board hidden within Gamasutra called “Letters to the Editor“, where a lively debate about the article has already been going on. :-)

Actually it’s best to start reading the discussion starting from an October 3 letter that responds to Craig Lindley’s excellent game taxonomy article (that I had linked to in the midst of the Frasca fracas we had about a month back), and then work your way up through the next 17 or so “letters”.

No time for a full report on this conference or even on the last one that I went to, but, speaking of narrative intelligence and America’s Army, one program awaiting funding from the DoD is called “Episodic Memory” and seeks researchers who take something of an NI approach to memory and experience. There have been many interesting things at this DARPA/IPTO Cognitive Systems conference, which announces another big AI push, the presentation on this program by Doug Gage is one thing that stood out as being of to Grand Text Auto folks. Since many of us know already why, in general, it can be helpful to think of memory as being organized into narrative, I’ll instead mention the specific military uses that Gage discussed:

Janet Murray is announcing a new PhD program in Digital Media at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Applications are due Feb 1.

I must say, it looks pretty tempting… great people, warm weather, land of soul food… I’d want to go there if I were looking to get a degree.

Just discovered a discussion that occurred a few weeks ago over at buzzcut about the lack of emotion in games, similar to the discussion we had recently here about the lack of games that address the “human condition”. Buzzcut is written by David Thomas, who also writes for DenverPost.com. Reading his blog I just discovered he was at LevelUp (here’s his pics), but I didn’t happen to meet him. It always sucks when you later realize you wish you’d met somebody in person when you had the chance.

I’ve given myself an hour to writeup my impressions from the LevelUp conference, which will be a challenge because it was a busy 3 days. I’ll give some highlights, anyway. (Here’s a WSJ article previewing the conference. And here’s some pics courtesy of Reality Panic.)

It was an energetic event in a pleasant city called Utrecht, at that town’s University, about 10 miles south of Amsterdam. The city center had pretty canals lined with restaurants, cafes and shops, an clean and efficient train and bus system, and lots of well-dressed people on bicycles. Our weather was pretty warm, making our 20 minute walk to and from the hostel enjoyable.

I arrived at 7am local time (1am body time) on an “overnight” flight from Boston, and the conference started at 9am — and I made it on time! (Just a wee bit tired, but the sunlight shining through the large windows of the Rem Koolhaas building where the conference was held helped keep me awake.) Everyone was surprised at how many attendees there were — about 500 in total, perhaps 20% American, and overall probably half students (grad and undergrad) from northern Europe. The lobby was lined with GameCube, PlayStation and XBox game consoles, so games and gamers were always in your peripheral vision as you chatted between sessions.

Terra Nova links to a personal account of a first kiss in the virtual world, There. It’s both sweet and disturbing to me. (Mostly because everybody looks like J.Crew models, but I know you can create less perfect-looking avatars. Which suddendly reminds me of the new reality show Average Joe I was just watching last weekend. I knew I wasn’t crazy when I alluded to just such a connection…)

(And I’m further unsettled (and intrigued) by the link in the Terra Nova post’s comments to Seducity.com… I didn’t know such a site existed yet! Wow… see you there… gulp?)

This is probably old news to most of you, but I just heard about the US Army’s latest recruiting tool, America’s Army. The army spent $4.5 million to develop the game, and is reporting that it has been wildly successful. In a Chicago Tribune story, the game’s project director, Col. Casey Wardynski, reported that on the night of Oct. 28 alone, “1.3 million games got played . . . At six minutes a game, that’s 150,000 hours of game play, where kids were virtually inside the Army.” Wardynski praises the game as a cost-effective recruiting tool. The game takes kids from basic and special forces training to virtual battlefield operations.

I guess it’s one way to keep those body bags filled.

What’s next? The CIA could be at work on America’s Effective Intelligence: Mission One — Learn to Translate Arabic. Maybe the State Department is working on America’s Diplomats: Mission One — A Nonviolent Solution.

Nah. Where’s the fun in that?

Game designers and academics Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca have begun a new blog called Water Cooler Games that “explores the emerging field of games [that] want to do more than simply being fun: they want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions. This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment.” I’ve added it to our blogroll.

I’ll be curious for a discussion that talks about the fine line between persuasion and propaganda, vis-a-vis political games…

On the blog Gonzalo mentions that his political commentary game Sept 12 (discussed recently here on GTxA) has now gotten over 100,000 unique hits.

Poet Jason Nelson visited Stockton last week to give a reading and to visit with my New Media Studies students. Nelson is the hyperkinetic wizard behind heliozoa.com and a future project that hovers around technology culture called Secret Technology. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals including Beehive (Brown University), Boomerang (UK), Epitome (Madrid), 3rdbed (NYC), Nowculture, Blue Moon Review and others. In addition his work has been featured in art galleries worldwide.

There’s an extensive new article about interactive drama on Gamasutra called Agitating for Dramatic Change, by a game designer named Randy Littlejohn. It looks like a really great read — addressing in detail many of the issues we talk about here on grandtextauto. In fact he goes into detail about our interactive drama project, Facade, more so than any other paper to date not written by us.

If you haven’t registered with Gamasutra yet (for free), this article is surely worth the effort!

I somehow managed to pause halfway through Narrative Intelligence, edited by Grand Text Auto‘s own Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers, and mentioned on here before. After losing track of the book for a while, I’ve finally finished reading it. Even knowing something of the breadth of inquiry undertaken by those in narrative intelligence, it’s a rich and surprisingly diverse collection. Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium 1999 are supplemented with other selections important to narrative intelligence research. One effect of the collection is to make me sorry that I missed the NI symposia and the active days of the NI group at MIT. But I’m glad this book is still around as a contribution to the academic discourse, and I hope future work will build on the insights in it.

NI researchers all share a concern with intelligence (human and computer) and with the use of narrative to organize events, but the field (if “field” is the best word for it) encompasses many different concepts and approaches, as Michael and Pheobe explain in their introduction. This means that people are more likely than usual to find a few essays to be gems and to find that others are of no use. In my case – as my interests seem to be pretty in keeping with the “typical” set of NI interests, assuming there is such a thing – I found something to redeem each of the articles, although it wasn’t always what I expected. For instance, an essay that didn’t provide me with any insight into the expected topics of computing and narrative (one about the design of a documentary about a band) offered helpful discussion on topics I didn’t expect to read about, such as the consistent ways that youth culture expresses itself within a mainstream culture.

Four months ago I expressed interest in trying the new Star Wars Galaxies mmorpg. Although I’m not a fan of rpg’s, the idea of an online Star Wars universe has so much appeal that even a cynical non-gamer like me was ready to give it a try. I’ve been so busy lately that I hadn’t had a chance to try it yet — and now, unfortunately, it seems my delay may have been for the best. As of late there have been a few writeups about SWG‘s many problems, echoing what seem to be design problems with today’s mmorpgs in general. I think these critiques are very instructive not just for mmorpg design but as case studies of the challenges of interactive-experience genre innovation.