Grand Text Auto

They seem to be coming fast and furious… this one in Sydney in February: IE2004: Australian Workshop on Interactive Entertainment. Most appealing is that the first eight topics of interest in the call for papers are AI & narrative / interactive drama / believable agent -oriented topics. (via Game-Culture)

Also, there will be a mini-symposium in the afternoon just after the Level Up conference ends, called FLUX: Game Industry in Transition; reserve your seat. Sadly my flight home leaves a few hours beforehand, so I’ll miss out.

From November 12 through March 28, Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center will have an exhibition called Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences: Storytelling and Computer Games. “The exhibition derives from research of the How They Got Game Project at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, a project seeking a path-finding narrative for the historical and critical appreciation of computer and video games. … A free conference on Friday, February 6, entitled ‘Story Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer Games,’ presents speakers from the industry and academia, addressing aspects of the role of narrative in computer games,” including Warren Spector, and Haden Blackman of LucasArts. (via GamesNetwork)

I find interactive drama to be a fascinating topic. It’s a fairly undefined and unproven thing, which makes it a lot of fun to think about, and attempt to build. Frustrating and humbling, too, of course.

Here’s a few rambling thoughts on the topic (many not new), partly motivated by a short essay about reality television that I recently came across while surfing.

While I’ve thought and read about interactive drama a lot (but am always finding more!), and with Michael have come up with an approach to it, a question I keep asking myself is: what exactly do you *do* in an interactive drama? What is it exactly? How does it operate, on a design / structural level?

The extensive list of presentations for March’s Game Developers Conference in San Jose is now online, and it looks as stimulating as ever! If you’ve never been to a GDC before, this looks like a great year to make the trip. There are a lot of talks to look through, so I took the time to pull out abstract excerpts of the ones I imagine would have particular interest to the GTxA crowd. Note there are a couple of presentations that specifically address issues of game research.

This conference has been getting better over time. It’s still definitely an industry conference (versus, say, the brand new Level Up, an academic one); GDC consistently and primarily offers hard-nosed, practical advice and information on building better games. But in recent years it seems to be trying to include more theoretical, experimental thinking and research. Cool.

I just discovered the online journal Image and Narrative via Jan Baetens’s review of The New Media Reader. Image and Narrative is described as “a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term” and its current issue includes essays with titles like “Comic strips and constrained writing” (which hits a couple of my interest buttons right there).

I got to spend my long weekend up at Brown University, where I met up with numerous digital media folks in literature and the arts, including several of my collaborators: Rachel, Noah, and William. I also got to talk with Robert Coover and Talan Memmott and see some of the work they (and Noah, and William, and others at Brown) have been doing in the TCASCV, where they’ve been bringing literature into virtual reality in the Cave Writing project.

I saw Screen (by Noah and other collaborators) finally, which I’ve seen documentation of but hadn’t gotten to experience. I also saw a dynamic word lattice that was part of Talan’s in-progress project and heard about William’s in-progress museum of words to rotate and manipulate. An A.R. Ammons poem has been used as the framework and text for one complete, elaborate piece; a piece called Hypertable provided a setting for several shorter works that incorporated texts in different ways, one of which is pictured here.

112 games have been entered in 2004’s Independent Games Festival. Some dozen or so finalists will be chosen by a jury to compete at the Game Developers Conference in March in San Jose. The games’ development times range from 3 days to 8 years. Most seem like smallish web-based games, and I don’t see as many genre-busting works as I’d like, but I’m excited by the ~50% increase in the number of entries from last year.

Also, last weekend was the 2nd annual Independent Games Conference, sponsored by GarageGames. Looking at the schedule, it appears to have been a low-budget version of the expensive Game Developers Conference, with a few independent-games-oriented sessions thrown in the mix.

On nettime Mark Stahlman writes:

As the fellow who “coined” the term NEW MEDIA (circa 1990, in preparation for the America Online IPO, whereupon Steve Case awarded me this email address), I have often been asked — So what the HECK is (er, are) New Media, anyway?

I couldn’t help but answer:

“Simulations and games, in many forms and for many subjects, are among the most recent innovations in instructional technique. Some are hardly ‘new media,’ however, because they are as simple and familiar as card or board games.” (p.93)

– James A. Robinson, “Simulation and Games.” In _The New Media and Education_, edited by Peter H. Rossi and Bruce J. Biddle. Aldine Publishing, Chicago, 1966.
http://www.getcited.org/pub/101220511

Then I realized that GTxA folks might be interested in the rest of this chapter’s introductory paragraph:

Greg Costikyan posts a strong, unhappy reaction to newsgaming.com‘s Sept 12. I was glad to read zang.org’s balanced reaction to Greg’s post. (Mind you, Greg is someone who lives a block from Ground Zero in NYC, who saw the towers fall.)

Without getting into the politics (other than to say I find Sept 12 to be a useful, thought-provoking piece, and exciting new genre for games), I’m not sure why Greg and some of his commenters are so vitriolically opposed to calling Sept 12 a simulation. Greg writes, at the height of his vehemence,

But to call this a “simulation,” as the creators do, is fucking obscene. Simulation of what? Where’s the research? What systems are simulated?

I just moved to Boston, and a few days ago happened to walk by Brookline Booksmith, noticing a sign that said Adrienne Eisen will be reading from her new book, called Making Scenes. I thought, huh, Adrienne Eisen, the hypertext writer, has a print book?

I’ve been a fan of Adrienne’s work since her first web-based hyperfiction, Six Sex Scenes, came out about 7 years ago now. We’d had some email discussions in the past — she’s a Petz fan — but we hadn’t met in person, so that was fun.

Here’s a quick link to Noah’s blog where he mentions his newly received copy of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s new book, Rules of Play. I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on it, especially after seeing their presentation at GDC last March.

I must say, between Rules of Play, The New Media Reader, Narrative Intelligence, The Art of Interactive Design, and the upcoming First Person and Twisty Little Passages (and the others I’m surely forgetting), this has been quite a year for meaty new books.

Recently, we drivers have been discussing how to make the things we write on Grand Text Auto available under a Creative Commons license. I believe we all agree that things we write for the blog (and photos we take and images we create for the blog) should be available under the Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license. However, checking the checkbox and putting that license statement on the main page would suggest that we’re licensing content to which we don’t own the rights. That’s why I chose to indicate individually that particular entries by me are licensed. It’s clunky, but a broader, incorrect offer of a license throws those legitimately licensed items into suspicion.

The annual international Vida (Life) competition, now in its fifth year, seeks “electronic art projects employing techniques such as digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, computer viruses, embodied artificial intelligence, avatars, virtual ecosystems, and interfaces between software, hardware and biomass.” Entries due Oct 31.

On the site you can peruse the past four years of winners and honorable mentions — some very cool stuff. (I was happy when Scott Draves, recipient of Vida 2001’s first prize for his piece Electric Sheep, contributed his thoughts to our Artist Programmer discussion last June.)

Mark Bernstein is asking (again), in the twenty-plus years that games have been around, what do they teach us about ourselves, e.g., about personal relationships, sexuality, the human condition?

The answer is: very little. But come on, this is obvious. (It’s true, some think we’re already there, but have thankfully come to their senses.) Over the years several have lamented publicly about this, e.g., Chris Crawford, Greg Costikyan, Brenda Laurel, Ernest Adams, and various articles; more recently Frasca, me, Michael, to name just a few. Michael and I use this as our motivation for developing Facade.

Poems that Go made the move to Wisconsin successfully; the new issue on literary games has just been published. Congrats to Ingrid and Megan on finishing up this intriguing Fall 2003 issue. It has some recent pieces that are already often discussed along with what are probably the first Poems that Go publications involving Java (used to interpet a work written in TADS, actually) and CGI scripts. More important than the technological diversity is the wide range of approaches to literature and game that are represented.

Gonzalo Frasca and a bunch of fellow ludatics have just launched Newsgaming.com! Yes, they just launched it, although the announcement on Gonzalo’s Ludology.com has already been followed by blog posts at game girl advance and from Jill. Well, at least we beat Slashdot to this story – as wasn’t the case with the IF Comp news!

More on this after I kill a few more terrorists and/or civilians and play a few more IF Comp games.

The games are out for IF Comp 2003, as of yesterday. Download, enjoy, vote.

I went to Postmasters in New York yesterday with Rachel and saw a very nice exhibit of new media art. The pieces were by Eddo Stern, an artist who was born in Tel Aviv and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He’s the founder of c-level and seems to be rather steeped in hacker and gaming culture.

War, religion, and the American military were themes that ran through the five pieces on exhibit. Formally and in terms of genre and technique, there were two sorts of pieces. The first sort, pictured above (full size image) were large objects that integrated desktop computers, flat panel screens, moving parts, and hexagonal tiling to make computer hardware itself into a video game structure. The second sort was represented by Vietnam Romance, a piece of video art created entirely from recordings of video games (often first-person shooters), with a soundtrack made from MIDI files that people have offered online.

Which is to say, the artworks consisted of case mods and machinima!

On Thursday I went to a great poetry reading at the Kelly Writers House, an event that also served as a welcome. Charles Bernstein was reading; he has recently joined the faculty here at Penn. He is undertaking a project, PENNsound, to create a large, free archive of digital recordings of poets reading poetry. He’s working with Al Filreis and others here at Penn on this venture. Bernstein has written a very nice manifesto for the project, which requires that the per-poem recordings be available in a format that is as useful and non-proprietary as possible, that they be of high enough quality, and that they be indexed and carry bibliographic information with them. The manifesto auspiciously begins “It must be free.”

I’m always interested in cheap and easy (well, at a minimum, cheap) ways to develop your own graphical stories / games / worlds. We need to see more do-it-yourself independent game development — a lot more!

Now available on SourceForge: “Game development company Cat Mother Ltd. (www.catmother.com) has now closed its offices, but in their last meeting the company board decided to publish all company source code as open source. Also large part of the content is published. Published material includes fully playable prototype of a 3rd person action/adventure game and commercial quality in-house 3D-engine (C++/DirectX9). The source code is published under BSD license and the content is published under GPL license. All material can be downloaded from catmother.sourceforge.net.” (via Flipcode and Slashdot)

Scott and I almost got into a bar fight Sunday when discussing the MLA and Chicago Manual of Style bibliographic format for electronic resources.

I find it absolutely silly to require that every electronic resource bear a publication and access date in its bibliographic entry. If I cite an article from an online magazine that was published in May 1998, and I know quite well that the article hasn’t changed since then, there is no reason I should include the date that I looked at it. Doing so adds unnecessary clutter, blurring and obfuscating the publication date of the resource, and simply provides a form of surveillance of scholars and their Web-reading habits. (Do you mostly read on the weekends? Right before your article is due?) Yes, in some cases (malleable blog entries, works like The Unknown) it does make sense to note both when you think something was published and when you accesses it, but that shouldn’t apply to everything on the Web. If someone cites my undergraduate thesis or a dated item on my Web site, they know perfectly well when it was published, as much as they know when the usual book was published by looking at the copyright page.

Call for entries for art and performance “which blurs the boundaries between online game space [The Sims Online] and the real world galleries of the Yerba Buena Center” in San Francisco. “What art can be within the constraints and rules of an online game?” Due Oct 31.

Also, a call for submissions for a book addressing the questions, “Can videogame art play with ideas or is it just meant to be played? Can a commercial computer game be art? Can art be playable? These issues and others are to be explored in a special edition of Anomalie: Computer Games and Art: Intersections and Interactions.” Due Nov 21.

Just to followup on my earlier post on intellectual property: The EFF has launched a campaign to encourage the WIPO to reconsider its opposition to open source and collaborative approaches (actually, even worse, its US Patent and Trade Office-led refusal to even discuss open source and collaborative models). If you disagree with this decision, you can express your opinion by sending a letter to the USPTO through the EFF.

Back home in Chicago a few weeks ago, I played Girlfriends with my niece Kayley. Maybe Disney isn’t all bad. Kayley’s four and half years old. The experience of playing this game, designed for girls six years old and up (sure she’s an overacheiver) was interesting for several reasons — not just because my goddaughter is always a pleasure, a giggling joke-telling, nonstop kinetic force of nature. It got me thinking about literacy, and about how computers are influencing the way that the current generation of post-toddlers are learning to read and write. Kayley, for instance, can’t yet read. They’ll cover that next year, probably. But she can install a Windows program (in this case the Girlfriends CD-ROM), can distinguish the Next button from the Previous button, and can agree to an End-User License. With no coaching at all, she was able to install the program, and to complain about the fact that she’d already installed it, but that the Windows box was buggy, and that the password interface was a big pain.

Check out a new group blog that discusses “the rapidly emerging synthetic worlds of cyberspace” — MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds, and other realms of emergent collective reality. Today’s post, “Golems and Community,” raises the question, “do smarter bots make for better virtual communities?”

I’ve added Terra Nova to our list of links — it looks to be a blog worth regular visits. (via The Ludologist)