Grand Text Auto

I just whacked down a bit of the trAce Web site to my iBook’s hard disk in violation of the DMCA. Then Sid and I went down to the White Dog and read Scott Rettberg’s Kind of Blue, an email novel in the vein of, and following up on, Rob Wittig’s Blue Company. Damn.

If you read all the subject lines one after another they make this sort of INSANE FUCKING POEM that is like the chapter titles of If on a winter’s night a traveller assumed into heaven or something. (The word “fuck” occurs only 45 times in the 105 email messages that make up Kind of Blue, by the way.) Reading KOB in one sitting made the summer of ’02 rush back to me like a frozen margarita, slightly hurting the roof of my mouth. It’s all there: the fallout from 9/11, that season’s stage of the economic slump, the Enron scandal, Rettberg’s desperate struggle to avoid working on his dissertation, male fantasies of getting lesbians to “jump the fence.” It sounds too good to be true but YES even if you weren’t lucky enough to be one of the original recipients of this email novel, you can read it all, right now, or at least during your next three or four lunch breaks. It only takes about two hours. You can see how much is left because the links turn kind of purple as you go. If you use wget to download it you can even read it offline, in the tub. Or in a bar.

Still on the road, in Amsterdam I picked up a copy of Christiane Paul’s new Digital Art. As far as I know, this is the only current book dedicated to a discussion and survey of digital art — rather than broader topics like “art and technology” or “information arts.” It’s essential reading, and not simply because it’s a source of information not coherently collected elsewhere. Paul (who curates new media art for the Whitney Museum and edits Intelligent Agent) also brings a deep understanding of the field to the book’s organization and selection of work. The one complaint I’m sure some will have is that the book is rather slight (a little over 200 pages), and therefor far from comprehensive. Also, as part of the Thames and Hudson “World of Art” series it inherits a certain picturebook character. But it will serve admirably as an introduction for students and also hold some new information or insights for most of us in the field. (I, for example, found the short discussion of Charles Csuri’s work more helpful than those I’ve read in the past.) I’m certain Digital Art will be a touchstone of the field for years to come.

I just came across a nice article by David Kennerly, an MMOG producer and designer, called “Fun is Fine: Toward a Philosophy of Game Design”. It was published in June on Joystick101.org.

I think his suggestions are applicable to IF, interactive drama, etc., not just game-games.

Scott Rettberg, e-lit practitioner and theorist and co-founder of the ELO, now has his PhD dissertation online, “Destination Unknown: Experiments in The Network Novel.” It’s on my reading list; I’ve only had a chance to skim through it so far. It begins with a nice introduction to electronic literature and its history over the last two decades. The chapters delve into the nature of links and networks in the context of literature, e-books, and the pleasures, challenges and frustrations of reading and writing hypertext fiction. He does an interesting analysis of how people read The Unknown, a hypertext novel he co-wrote, based on the log files that record when and how often each page in the hypertext was accessed. He concludes with a chapter about possible future directions for e-lit, including a discussion of Facade.

I just played Dead Reckoning, the interactive fiction (IF) Nick recently translated. Playing this IF reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, the relationship between interaction and agency. Before continuing, let me provide a preliminary definition of these terms in the context of new media. By “interaction” I mean the act of physically manipulating an input device (e.g. wiggling a mouse, moving in front of a camera, etc.) and eliciting a response (e.g. an image changes on a screen, motors turn on and off, etc.). Interaction is an abstract concept, saying nothing about the character of the relationship between input and elicited response, just that there is some relationship between them. Agency is a phenomenal category, describing what it feels like as a player/interactor to be empowered to take whatever actions you want and get a sensible response. That is, an experience is productive of a sense of agency if it supports the interactor in forming intentions (based on what’s happening, the interactor can think of something they want to do), taking action with respect to these intentions (there is a way to express the action the interactor wants to take), and interpreting the response in terms of the intention (the system’s response makes sense with respect to the intention). Given these definitions, the question that interests me is whether the sole function of interaction is to produce a sense of agency, or whether interaction can yield other, equally interesting phenomenal experiences.

I saw <ALT> Digital Media at the Amercian Museum of the Moving Image the other day. It’s a great space for interacting with and appreciating visual works. Unfortunately, the MOMI’s big video game exhibition is no longer up, and about half the pieces in this smaller exhibition (installed on two PCs) were down, but there were several pieces to enjoy, including Cory Archangel’s I Shot Andy Warhol, the stimulating commercial videogame Rez, and two Potent Objects from a series by Camille Utterback and Adam Chapman.

I’ve just recently completed a translation of Olvido Mortal, an award-winning Spanish interactive fiction work. (You can try it on the Web should you not want to download it.) It was a rather involved process to carry across into English both its langauge and its workings, even though this piece is quite short and the author, Andrés Viedma Peláez, had written and coded clearly. But I found it a rewarding experience, and I’m glad to help share one of the gems of Spanish interactive fiction with the English-speaking world.

The program for the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling is now online. It will be held in Toulouse, France from November 20-21.

Unfortunately we had to decide to not submit Facade for presentation at ICVS this time around, because we had just traveled to Europe only last March to present Facade at TIDSE in Darmstadt, Germany (why are there two conferences in Europe about interactive story within a few hundred miles of each other, within the same year? TIDSE and ICVS should merge, don’t you think?) Also, we hope to demo Facade at the LevelUp gamefair in Utrecht, Netherlands only a few weeks beforehand, so it just makes it logistically insane to also attend ICVS. Oh well.

Eric Dybsand, a long-time contributor to the AI scene at the Game Developers Conference, just published an informative series of Gamasutra articles about new AI middleware (i.e., code libraries and toolsets) for games. It seems that in the last year or two, several companies have released libraries/toolsets that put together common AI algorithms and techniques into a single package, intended to be easily integrated into a game. The articles take a detailed look at AI.implant, DirectIA, Renderware AI, and SimBionic. A conclusion article summarizes it all. (By the way, whatever happened to Motion Factory?)

Eric concludes with the following:

The first issue of GameGirlAdvance‘s new zine is out, called Play. Looks like fun!

A week or so ago I had a nice chat with Jay Bolter about the function of New Media theory. Just to be clear, since “New Media” is a very squishy category, what we were talking about is computer-based work. Our discussion raised a number of questions that I would love to hear comments on.

1. What’s theory for?
For me, theory is for making. Theoretical frameworks are contingent constructions that inform the creation of artifacts. Jay sensibly points out that theory can be purely descriptive – a “purely descriptive” theory presumably doesn’t directly inform an artifact, though perhaps it provides a background against which design occurs. This got me thinking more generally about what role new media theory plays in the work of new media artists. When I think about my own work and that of my colleagues at Georgia Tech, my own work is informed much more by science and technology studies than by new media theory, Sha Xin Wei’s work is informed by performance studies, phenomenology and mathematical theory, and Diane Gromala’s work is informed by phenomenology and theories of subjectivity. So here are at least three new media artists who practices aren’t strongly informed by new media theory. When working on specific pieces, I often construct temporary, contingent theoretical structures to inform that particular piece, but the theoretical construction is in some sense part of the craft practice of making the piece. What do other artists and media theorists feel about the relationship between theory and making?

In some ways I hesitate to discuss Hipster Bingo, even in its exciting randomized form, because it is only superficially computer-based and is a pseudo-game. People don’t really play it – I don’t think. It’s more like some sort of gristly, low-quality blog fodder rather than being an interesting work of art or literature or gaming. But it’s a somewhat interesting mockery of a game, nonetheless, and it’s going to give me an excuse to briefly go off (in different directions) about irony and the use of computers in social situations.

But first, let me invite responses from anyone who has actually played (rather than just ironically admired) this “game.” Please, if you’ve printed out a bingo card for use, or sat wirelessly in Verb or Alt (or your local equivalent) covering your laptop’s monitor with “Stickies” notes as you spot those people who seem to have stepped out of Vice magazine, let me know about it. How was Hipster Bingo’s gameplay? I want to read the review.

A bit of exciting project news… We’ve just cast two writer / director / performers to be the voices for Grace and Trip, the two computer characters in our interactive drama Facade. We have been fortunate to find two talented members of the Chicago-based experimental / interactive theater group, The Neo-Futurists, Chloe Johnston and Andy Bayiates.

For the past few years Chloe and Andy have been members of the Neo-Futurists’ long-running signature show, Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. If you’re ever in Chicago, be sure to see it, it’s an ever-changing, inventive, searingly honest and, of course, funny, sixty minutes of experimental theater. Chloe and Andy have also written, produced and performed other plays with the Neo-Futurists.

The post Responsive Narratives (and its comments) raises the question of whether there lies anything in between brute force authoring approaches and building a human-level AI. This question is important not just for interactive drama, but for Expressive AI (AI-based art and entertainment) in general. In a brute force authoring approach, the artist lovingly hand-crafts material (e.g. animation, text, images, etc.) for every possible context, for all possible interactions. In the AI-complete approach, the artist somehow describes their intention at a very high level (e.g. the high-level motivations of characters), and the system auto-magically grounds this high-level description with concrete representations for different contexts (e.g. generated animation, generated text, generated images) and for all possible interactions. There are good reasons to seek a middle ground besides the current technical impossibility of AI-complete approaches.

Surfing around I came across a new book to be published this Fall, called “Tomorrow’s Stories: How Responsive Narratives Will Change Storytelling”. The author is Andrew Glassner, perhaps best known as the creator and editor of the Graphics Gems book series on computer graphics. According to his bio, he’s also written a novel, directed a short animated film, and designed some interactive fiction / game prototypes. I heard Glassner opine on the “Future of Fiction” panel Noah co-organized at SIGGRAPH 2000, and remember him as thoughtful and articulate.

His forthcoming book “addresses the fundamentals of how and why successful games and stories work. It is the first book to give a reader a practical understanding of both the structure of story and the structure of participatory gaming. This knowledge helps the reader see why and how today’s models of interactive fiction succeed and fail, and provides a foundation for developing new storytelling art forms that harmoniously integrate interaction and narrative.”

He sees limitations in branching narrative / hypertext approaches. “These ideas, and their cousins, have been tried time and again in the marketplace but have yet to achieve mainstream success. There are some very good, specific reasons for this lack of success, and those reasons can be found by going back to the basics of what stories and games are, and how they work.”

Perhaps it’s obvious to say, but the arcade still had it all over any other public context when it comes to interface innovation. Except perhaps the more elaborate setups at science museums and in interactive art installations.

For example, it may not be obvious in my last post, but the interface for that game is a real drum, not the tap pads of DDR or of the Western-style drum games. The drum in this game can make a range of sounds as players hit it on the main surface, on the rim, with different degrees of pressure, and so on. The way you play the drum makes a difference both on the level of music and on the level of gameplay. That’s why I stopped to take a picture of it.

I also stopped to take a picture of this direct-manipulation coffee cup (the text on it reads “Drink me. Drive me.”). The cup is part of a network racing game of a pretty standard sort — except for the interface.

This fine story from CNN relates some findings from a study, done under the auspices of the Pew Internet & American Life Project by Steve Jones at UIC. Jones found that gaming didn’t gnaw away at work or social activities, but coexisted with them, as gamers multi-tasked; it appeared to be a social activity itself, and not as male-dominated as it has been made out to be.

… and where am I? Yes, Scott McCloud has completed a “mature” new comic called The Right Number, and placed a smidgen of it online for free. The rest can be bought for $0.25 (after you buy a $3 debit card.) It’s a interesting-looking piece which I’ll read as soon as I run out of free things on the Web to read.

I do appreciate McCloud putting his mouth where my money is; as an advocate of micropayments, who sees such a system as important for supporting independent creative types, he’s doing well to attempt to get this process going. Coming from micro-cost comic culture, the system does seem to make sense in some ways. But like Noah, I’m not going to get behind such a system until there are ways to provide free public access, the sort of access that libraries now provide for our antiquated book medium.

Wandering around Shibuya, and into the big Sega arcade, I found people playing a traditional Japanese version of the drumming version of Dance Dance Revolution.

Later, outside the train station, a group of kids were playing bongo drums. The crowd cleared a circle around them so another group of kids could take turns pop lock dancing to the beat. My first experience with hippy/hip-hop fusion. I’m liking being back in Tokyo.

Lately I’ve been wondering how authors of non-linear interactive experiences develop their designs. Specifically, before coding, what are the ways people describe, represent, write down, their designs? Creating a written description of a system gets particularly tricky when the system’s behavior is more complex than what a state machine or graph can represent.

My friend Martín Hadis has just written and coded up a new site on the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges. (Martín is coeditor of Borges Profesor, a collection of Borges’s lectures on English literature.) The new site is available in Spanish and English, offers not only bibliographical information but also a Web directory and suggestions on how to begin reading Borges’s stories and poems – and it should continue to grow in the future, hopefully to incorporate more information about Borges’s influence in the digital realm.

Second Life, “a rapidly growing and constantly changing 3D online society, shaped entirely by its residents”, officially started on Monday. Read the press release here. Free 5 day memberships are available; beyond that, it’s $15 / month.

I’ve yet to experience Second Life, but from what I’ve read, I’m pretty excited by this online world. For my taste, I’m much more interested in “real life” style online worlds, such as Second Life or There.com, versus fantasy online worlds such as Everquest. (Although, the screenshots of Second Life and There do seem a bit like “J.Crew” world to me. And, I have to admit, Star Wars Galaxies, which launches tomorrow, has some strong appeal. Hard to beat that brand I guess.)

The program for the 1st international digital games research conference, LEVEL UP, this November in the Netherlands, is now online. It’s quite a program.

Harold’s post inspired me to post on what I see as the modes or genres of AI-based art. The modes described here are not mutually exclusive; a single piece may simultaneously explore multiple modes or genres. I would love to hear any comments describing a new mode (with an example) or an alternative categorization scheme.

In typing up a recent comment to add to the neverending thread on the category “Games in Virtual Environments” I realized that I know very little about which traditional games are played in different cultures. Well, not very little, perhaps – but I don’t exactly know what I do and don’t know about this. Certainly, I’m aware that lots of people will know what chess is, and that all sorts of consumer products (games included) have made their way to other markets, but I think I have a much better sense of what literature and art is known cross-culturally than I do when it comes to non-computer games.

After a discussion with some friends about spelling bees (which seem to have originated in America), we realized that this sort of contest would be absolutely absurd in Japan, where words are spelled exactly as they are pronounced. In crossword puzzles there are plenty of national differences; sources indicate that we find “American, cryptic, quick, freeform, coded, French-style and clues-in-squares crosswords.” But it isn’t only within language games that we can find these sorts of variations.