Grand Text Auto

On Monday (November 2) at 6pm in MIT’s room 14E-310,

The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing will present a talk by

Mary Flanagan

author of Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009)

Mary Flanagan is the creator of [giantJoystick], and author of [theHouse] among other digital writing works. She is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth, where she directs Tiltfactor, a lab focused on the design of activists and socially-conscious software.

Writer, publisher, and collaborator of mine William Gillespie just read (yesterday afternoon) an extraordinary piece here at the &Now festival in Buffalo. The multimedia piece is Morpheus Biblionaut, which he created with Travis Alber of Bookglutton.com. Gillespie pulls out the stops for this tale of an American astronaut and poet who returns to earth to find almost no radio activity, except, perhaps, for one signal. Plug in, isolate yourself for a space of time, and read this one!

I presented right after on ppg256, my series of poetry generators.

Delightfully, the current issue of AI Magazine (Volume 30, number 3, Fall 2009) is on computational creativity. The number offers articles on the field overall; the history of workshops on the topic; computer models of creativity; and creative systems to generate music, stories and their tellings, moves of chess, and humor. The last article is computer-generated in high Hofstadter style.

Pablo Gervás’s contribution, “Computational Approaches to Storytelling and Creativity,” provides a clear introduction to the concept of creativity and the history of the term, analyzes the relevant features that storytelling systems can work upon, gives an outline of work in computational creativity so far, and continues with a capsule summary of several important storytelling systems. The last one of these is my system nn, which I renamed “Curveship” as I started focusing on a public release of the software.

Once again, Purple Blurb offers readings and presentations on digital writing by practitioners of digital writing. All events are at MIT in room 14E-310, Mondays at 6pm. All events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and Humanistic Studies.

September 14 — Noah Wardrip-Fruin is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009), co-creator of Screen (among other works of digital writing), and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[As I wrote on netpoetic.com:] My latest Perl Poetry Generator in 256 Characters, ppg256-4, is my first one created specifically for a gallery setting. Although shown here in my office, it’s now on display at the Axiom Gallery for New and Experimental Media in Boston in the show Pulling Back the Curtain, which runs through September 27.

Since 2007, I have been developing Perl poetry generators that are 256 characters long. These programs constitute the ppg256 series. They are simply 256 characters of Perl code; they use no external data sources, online or local, and they do not make use of any special libraries or invoke any other programs. Here’s the code for ppg256-4:

[As I wrote on netpoetic.com:] Adam Parrish recently taught a class at NYU in the ITP program: Digital Writing with Python. I was very interested to learn about it and to see documentation of the final reading/performance, with some links to students’ blog entries about their projects. Here at MIT, I teach a class called The Word Made Digital in which students do poetry, fiction, and less classifiable writing projects using Python and other systems and languages. And, I know that Daniel Howe has taught the RISD and Brown class Advanced Programming for Digital Art and Literature.

The first issue of the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, from earlier this year, sports a nice article by Alf Seegert, “Doing there’ vs. ‘being there’: performing presence in interactive fiction.” In it, Seegert sharpens the existing discussion of reader-response theory and IF to explain how IF may need to balance between boredom and overstrain and how the writerly role allows for new sorts of presence. He then conducts some good discussions of Jon Ingold’s All Roads (highlighting how the body of the player character is indicated) and Paul O’Brian’s Luminous Horizon (looking particularly at the subjective narration).

“I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed.”

– H. P. Lovecraft, “The Nameless City”

Gregory Weir, who fashioned the very nice piece The Majesty of Colors, has a new game with levels built out of existing texts, including “The Nameless City.” The new platformer is called Silent Conversation, a title taken from poet Walter Savage Landor’s description of reading.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship.

I was recently asked to elaborate on the difference between nn (the research system I developed during my dissertation work at the University of Pennsylvania) and Curveship.

The most important difference is that nn is a research system that I used for making some advances related to computer science, computational linguistics, and narratology. The system was developed to prove certain points; it was used only by yours truly to implement narrative and text generation ideas and to run demos.

This is the third in a series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship.

Before I start descending into detail, I’ll explain why I think Curveship is a big deal.

Curveship does the usual work of an interactive fiction system when it comes to simulating a world: There are discrete rooms that make up the fiction’s locations, actors can inhabit and wander around these rooms, and things can sit in them, be taken and carried off or otherwise moved around. Items can change state, so that a lamp, for instance, can be turned on and off. Items can go into or onto other items, if they allow it. None of this is surprising; plenty of interactive fiction development systems already do all of it very well.

This is the second in a series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship. In writing about Curveship in any detail, I’ll have to use terms such as action, event, and order, which sound ordinary but are used in a special way in the system. Furthermore, I’ll have to use terms such as focalization and narratee, which do not sound ordinary, but have a meaning within narratology (a.k.a. narrative theory) and are important to the way Curveship works. I’m going to define a few of these terms – some I’ll save for later. Rather than sort them alphabetically, I’ll group them by how they figure in the system.

I was very interested to learn that Adam Parrish, whose own Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) masters project was “New Interfaces for Textual Expression,” is now teaching Digital Writing with Python at NYU’s ITP. The course is concluding; Parrish and his students will mount a final performance on August 5 at 7pm. Parrish eschewed powerful, cryptic Perl for clarity of Python in this course on creating text machines, as I did in putting together The Word Made Digital, which I’ll be teaching again this Fall. His reading list overlaps with mine a bit and includes a nice article on appropriation in writing – I may just rip that right off. I won’t manage to be in New York to hear students read their programs’ output, but I hope the conclusion to the class goes well and that I’ll be able to read and run some things that will give me a sense of the event.

This is the first of a planned series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship. Curveship is an interactive fiction development system that provides a model of a physical world, and its workings, as do existing state-of-the-art IF systems (such as Inform 6, Inform 7, TADS 2, and TADS 3). It will not have as many libraries, and will have no multimedia features, when it is released, but it will provide another significant capability: it will allow IF authors to write programs that manipulate the telling of the story (the way actions are represented and items are described) as easily as the state of the IF world can now be changed. While existing IF systems allow for the simulation of a character who can move around and change the state of the world, Curveship provides for control over the narrator, who can tell as if present at the events or as if looking back on them, who can tell events out of order, creating flashbacks or narrating what happens by category, and who can focalize any character, not just a fixed PC or a hard-coded series of them, to tell the story from the perspective of that character’s knowledge and perceptions.

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Previously, Pookie and JR had only ever met at parties.
For the first few nights, Pookie and JR keep to their corners.
JR changes Pookie’s water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
JR cooks slowly, foraging in this strange kitchen.
Tonight’s dinner puts one withered leek out of its misery.
JR hasn’t been sleeping much lately.
Pookie keeps his thoughts to himself.
To be continued…

The First International Conference on Computational Creativity will be taking place in Portugal on January 7-9 2010. ICCC-X will follow on a decade of smaller-scale workshops and symposia. The call for papers lists the deadline of September 21 for papers, and promises:

The conference will include traditional paper presentations, will showcase the application of computational creativity to the sciences, creative industries and arts, and will incorporate a “show and tell” session, which will be devoted to demonstrations of computational systems exhibiting behaviour which would be deemed creative in humans.

Keith Stuart’s provocative article in The Guardian plugs modern-day interactive fiction and suggests that novelists should be more involved in the making of video games, as they have been in the past. The article is on the right track. There is certainly reason for video game companies to license, or, less frequently, collaborate with those who make movies. But there are lots of things that games can do, and novelists could bring interesting perspectives, skills, and art to games – even they aren’t text-based interactive fiction. Of course, the right match has to be made and the writer has to be persuaded that video games are serious enough. I suggest Ubisoft grab Paul Auster, a dizzying writer. If he didn’t mind the association that come with writing and co-directing the movie Smoke, video games should be no problem.