Grand Text Auto

The Electronic Literature Organization has just announced a new project, the Electronic Literature Collection.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature intended for individual, library, and classroom use — and will be open to interactive fiction, interactive drama, literary games, and other forms of interest to GTxA folks. The publication will be made available both on the Web and as a packaged, cross-platform disc, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others. The Collection will feature a variety of electronic literature in many forms and genres — a broad selection of quality work. This will include new work that has been selected by editors as well as notable electronic literature from the past.

WSU Vancouver, in the Portland area of the Pacific Northwest, has a program in “Digital Technology and Culture, a liberal arts-based curriculum exploring relationships between technology and meaning-making both in historical and contemporary contexts.” They’re seeking an assistant or asssociate professor. See below for details…

If you haven’t yet, be sure to participate in this chatbot research survey that ends in one week! The research is being conducted by Mark Marino, who blogs by night at WRT. Also, check out his latest post on i.plot, an interesting program he and I saw demoed at last July’s Siggraph.

Jim Whitehead, whose email this summer kicked off a thought-provoking GTxA thread on game curricula, has sent me another interesting message. He writes because the Computer Science Dept. at UC Santa Cruz has been given the authority to hire a tenure-track faculty member (assistant professor) whose research interests lie in computer games. His question:

I was hoping you might have some insight on where we could advertise this position. We’re frankly a bit stumped on how to find a gaming-interested person who has strong technical research credentials.

This is a version of my Elective Affinities talk “How Stella Got Her Text Back: Trajectories of Word and Image in Creative Computing” given on September 26, 2005, at the University of Pennsylvania.

All Your Base Rhapsody: Demonstrating that, despite what you might believe from watching Highlander, not every media experience is enhanced by a Queen soundtrack.

Oct 26-27th, the first annual Game Writers Conference will be held in Austin TX. A former Human Code person, (where many a fab person worked), Susan O’Connor, is the chair of this year’s conf. It’s going to be a great chance for writers to meet face-to-face…for writers from other disciplines to find out what game writing is all about…for devs who want to make more engaging games…and for students who want to meet the writer of Half-Life 2!!

This month’s conversation on the empyre mailing list will be on the topic “Digital Writing.” The guests will include digital authors and commentators Bill Seaman, Brigid McLeer, Friedrich Block, Giselle Beiguelman, and Sue Thomas. Nick and I were guests on the empyre list in January 2004 and found it a thoughtful and engaged community.

Many thanks to Rinku for pointing out Chris Crawford’s nice commentary on industry studies of video game demographics. Readers who care about this issue at all will want to read his article, but the gist of it is that the industry talk of a closing gender gap and a shift to older gamers has no basis in scientific studies; it is just public relations output from video game companies.

As you all probably know, the Second Life environment created by Linden Labs is an amazing example of social environment, game, meeting place, and cultural phenomena. Linden Labs have been at the forefront of intellectual property debates in online environments, because users own their own content in SL. Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs is giving a talk entitled “Building a World with Digital Atoms” October 7th in NYC at 11:30am, 251 Mercer Street room 109. The talk is open and is sponsored by NYU’s Dept of Computer Science and the Tiltfactor lab at Hunter College. Please join us!

>GET GAMESThe 36 interactive fiction pieces that were entered in the 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp 2005) have been released. Download away! New this year are BitTorrents of the entries and the necessary interpreters.

For newcomers to the Comp: Judging in this competition is done by the public, so while you can wait around and see who the winners are, if you’re interested in IF, you should certainly download the games and take a look. Anyone who plays at least five games may vote, as explained on the page on judging games. Info about past Comps is available at the Comp site and on IF Wiki. Thanks to Stephen Granade of BrassLantern.org for once again organizing the Comp.

Last night at the Slought Foundation I saw two very interesting pieces for computer-controlled human face, by Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha of the IAAA (Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam). The two did a piece involving face interface which opened the 1997 Ars Electronica Festival.

A Strategy Guide for Studying the Grand Theft Auto Series: An Edited Collection of Essays

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 15, 2005

The present call for papers is for chapter length essays (5,000-7,500 words) that address one or more games in the Grand Theft Auto series…

1up has posted an extensive post-mortem about the recently-released, cinematic Indigo Prophecy, aka Fahrenheit. The post-mortem is written by the game’s writer/director David Cage. I haven’t played Indigo Prophecy yet, but definitely plan to.

Clearly Cage and his Quantic Dream team have design goals in line with what some of us at GTxA proselytize and develop, as several people at various conferences who were following Quantic Dream had hinted to us over the past couple of years. Cage writes:

I like to call this game an “Interactive Drama”, which in my mind suggests the fact that the player acts and interacts in a narrative and emotional experience.

Cool, good to see that descriptor being used more, and it seems appropriate for this piece. That said, while they had the people-power of a team of 80 in production for 2 years on it, I see the project’s biggest obstacle as interface: their design was constrained by needing to run on console machines, where the controller is only a few buttons and two analog sticks. I.e., interactive drama with an action title’s interface mechanics. The post-mortem vaguely describes how Cage came to some sort of Dance-Dance-Revolution-like interface design, which to me seems like an odd match for interactive drama, but was perhaps the best one could come up with under those constraints. (Never mind the CPU constraints of console machines, for AI purposes.) I’ll have to play it to understand the interface better; I assume for dialog they necessarily went for menu-based dialogs, which while almost universal in games is also quite limited, of course.

About narrative structure, Cage describes his concept of “rubber band stories”:

This morning I was just hopping over to Greg Costikyan’s site to grab a link from a recent post of his about game industry revenues, to bolster a comment I was making here about Chris Crawford, and to my surprise found that Greg’s friendly blue palette was replaced by a revolutionary red! (Well, hot pink.) The reason?

Game industry veterans Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson announced today that they are joining forces to launch Manifesto Games, a new venture to build a strong and viable independent game industry. Its site will offer independently-developed games for sale via direct download–a single place where fans of offbeat and niche games can find “the best of the rest,” the games that the retail channel doesn’t think worth carrying. Three types of games will be offered: truly independent, original content from creators without publisher funding; the best PC games from smaller PC game publishers, including games in existing genres like wargames, flight sims, and graphic adventures; and niche MMOs. … Manifesto expects to begin carrying original content by early 2006.

The above is from Manifesto’s press release. And, Greg is sort of “open sourcing” the process of running the startup.

It’s Banned Books Week, and the American Library Association released the annual most challenged books list for last year. A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict library materials on the basis of the objections of a person or group. The most challenged books of 2004 were:

1. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoint, being unsuited to age group and violence
2. “Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, offensive language and violence
3. “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy and political viewpoint

As reported and described by The Ludologist, Aki Järvinen’s card game about making games, called GameGame, is now available! He had hinted about this at last June’s DiGRA, and now it’s ready to play.

You’ll need to print out and cut up the cards, and read the rules, before you can game your own game. The website describes it as “Ludology meets Understanding Comics”.

Good deal! I haven’t meta game this cool in a while. ha ha. what a card.

Neuvo-games journalism siteThe Escapist (now with beer ads!) has posted a fresh interview with Chris Crawford.

The man known as the Dean of American Game Design toils alone, unfunded and underappreciated, in a forest in Oregon. He has renounced games; or perhaps, one might say, games have renounced him.

Who is Chris Crawford, and why does he toil alone?

(Readers of GTxA will recall that Chris has told us why, which spawned further discussion (1 2). Also read about our visit last June to Chris’ annual gathering.)

Relax, open a cold one (or a carton of milk), and enjoy the article.

I just heard a very interesting panel at the Elective Affinities conference that is going on here at Penn. Benjamin Harvey from Mississippi State University spoke first about Virgina Woolf and her relationship to the British Library reading room, which was renovated early in the 20th century so that it was lined with famous authors’ names – a register that was lacking in novelists and was also all male, although many users of the reading room were female, and a majority were by the 1930s. After that, Penn’s own Fernando Pereira – he’s the head of the computer and information science department – spoke about using statistical natural language processing to identify topics. It was quite a voyage out from the material nature of the library to its abstract existence as a document collection, and provocative.

I’m continuing my live blogging of Games For Health.

Chris Foster
Baltimore Business and Economic Development

Invests in life science industry. Spends most of the talk on the wellness crises facing the nation and the world.
Mentions that there would be a $165 billion a year savings from moving to an electronic, unified health care record; “how can we not afford to do that, given that we have a crisis of cost in health care?”

I made that fortuitous discovery that Busted, a novel by Emma Harrison – surely not this Emma Harrison? – is now online. And it’s a hypertext, because the definitions of the SAT words that appear in the novel – one of the SAT Vocabulary Novel Series – are all linked. Yes, you no longer have to use readymade books to study for the SAT.

Thought I’d do some live blogging from Games for Health in Baltimore.

Steven Downs
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Talked about why the foundation is interested in funding games for Health. They fund it under their “emerging health care applications” umbrella – he noted that the irony is that games are not “emerging”, they’re already here.

Wednesday, I decided to take advantage of the non-devastated condition of the mid-Atlantic. I hopped on a train and took a spur-of-the-moment trip down to Baltimore to hear Ian Bogost (of Water Cooler Games and Georgia Tech) give a talk at the University of Baltimore, a talk that was hosted by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s Information Arts and Technology program. The full title of Ian’s talk was “Designing for Reproach: Videogames and Consumer Advocacy.”

I want to mention first off that Ian busted out demos of two new games, premiering Disaffected! — a slick, isomorphic anti-Kinkos game in which you have to drive disgruntled employees, service obedient and exasperated customers, and sort through all sorts of stacks of papers — and Airport Insecurity, a game for mobile phones. Ian talked about some ideas that are discussed in his book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, which is coming in the spring from MIT Press; he has another book in the works about rhetoric and gaming.

Some notes on the talk follow.

On artificial.dk you’ll find an excellent interview with artist and curator Marius Watz about the current state of generative art, and an upcoming show Watz is organizing called Generator.x.

Generator.x is a framework for thinking about generative practices and creative uses of code, whether applied to art or design. We have identified some key subjects: Generative aesthetics, process-based design, performative software and tools by artists for artists. By inviting leading practitioners in the field I hope to introduce the field to newcomers, as well as provide a platform for new discourse. … The Generator.x exhibition is divided into two sections: ‘Code as Material’ and ‘Code as Method’. …

The interview talks at length about a tension between the software art and generative art scenes, and a bit of musing about future possibilities for the field — “Generative art describes a strategy for artistic practice, not a style or genre of work”.

About his own work, an example pictured at left, Watz says,

Some game / literature links I’ve been collecting over the past few weeks have reached enough critical mass to warrant a post.

Aleks Krotoski, contributer to the Guardian games blog, imagines games that “take their inspiration from novels, pulp fiction, high-brow literature and other variations of the written word”. She muses about several books she’d love to see turned into games, ranging from Jane Austen to Philip K. Dick.

Speaking of which, what would your grandmother like to play? Robin Hunicke moderated a panel on this topic at the recent GDC Europe, in the same format as Eric Zimmerman’s Game Design Challenge at GDC North America, including (who else?) the game designer of Katamari Damacy. Not your grandmother’s game, indeed.