Grand Text Auto

Speaking of women and games — we can’t get a hold of it here in the US, but Newsweek International (Europe, Asia, the Middle East) has a new issue on the Future of Entertainment. The issue includes an article called “Videogames for Girls” that may discuss Façade, we’re not sure.

If any non-Americans out there have a copy, please let us know what the article says, thanks! We’ll try to get a hold of a couple of copies this week somehow.

Hopefully this means they’re going crazy over Façade is Riyadh right now.

Time to award another Loebner prize — an annual formal instantiation of the Turing Test, now in its 15th year. This year’s final four contestants are:
ALICE Silver Edition, botmaster Richard Wallace et al (previous winner in 2004, 2001, 2000)
Eugene Goostman, botmaster Vladimir Veselov
Jabberwacky, botmaster Rollo Carpenter
Toni, botmaster Steven Watkins

The contest will be held this Sunday from 10am to 4pm, at 220 W. 98th St #2B, New York, NY (is that someone’s apartment?). Assuming no contestant makes it beyond the Bronze medal stage (none have in the past, I believe), $3000 will be awarded; however the $25,000 Silver Medal “will be at risk” this year, according to the rules explaining the scoring system.

Telltale Games‘ first installment of their 3D adventure game adaptation of the comic Bone is now available for Windows, as a free demo and $20 full game. I just played the free demo — it’s pretty cool, and well produced. The menu-based conversational interface (one of several modes of interface in the game) was well done, considering the constraints of that format. Worth checking out, even if you’re not an adventure game aficionado.

IAWIS/AIERTI 7th International Conference on Word & Image Studies:
Elective Affinities
Philadelphia, 23-27 September, 2005

Those within range of Philly might particularly want to look into attending Words on Screen: Hierarchies of Text and Picture in Cyberculture (I’ll be presenting “How Stella Got Her Text Back” in that session) and and VVV-on-line: Verbal-Visual-Vocal Poetries in Hyperspace I, II, and III, a series of sessions put together by Charles Bernstein. The full announcement is below…

The Chicago-based experimental theater group The Neo-Futurists just opened a new show called Daredevils! The company’s “first-ever live stunt show” explores “the seemingly ever-present male desire to engage in feats of physical risk” using “a combination of task-based performance and individual narratives on the themes of personal decision-making, the nature of risk, and what it means to be a daredevil.”

Andy Bayiates, the voice of Trip in Façade, is one of the Daredevil team, sporting a black jumpsuit adorned with patches from his stuntman sponsors, NASCAR-style, including a big blue one with white lettering from InteractiveStory.net. Andy’s physical stunts in the show include eating the hottest curry in Chicago every performance.

See below for a close-up of the patch.

Did you know that Milwaukee was an early adopter in the free wifi movement, wiring downtown parks as public hotspots (modeled after the Long Beach free zone)? During my recent trip to the city known historically for beer and brats, the Violent Femmes, Liberace, MacArthur, and yours truly, I was surprised about the current urban-tech makeover the place is undergoing. Its almost a little Seattle. I had no problems finding free wifi in cafes, my hotel, and even the classic old school diners had wifi in their gardens. A healthy independent music scene, a plethora of used bookstores, great second hand shopping, and several local coffee roasters have turned my seventies rustbelt childhood home into a hip, albeit short on pretention, kind of town.

The trAce Online Writing Centre has announced a call for papers for a new issue of Convergence called “An End to the New? Re-assessing the claims for New Media Writing(s)“.

This special edition will seek to re-assess the claims made for these forms over the last decade, to challenge the dominant ideologies and terminologies of this maturing field, and to provide a critical re-evaluation of new media writing(s) in all its forms. [This includes] re-assessments of the claims made for hypertext, new media or digital writing(s) over the past decade.

Sounds interesting! Submissions are due January 30.

Proud Americans will recall the other great corporate innovation of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell: Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater, where one room featured a band of mechanical animal automata and others housed a resplendent array of video games, not to mention that great cash cow, skee ball. International readers and nostalgic Americans alike can find copious information online about the history of Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater and Showbiz Pizza Place. Curious readers can learn about the different stage configurations and the transition from a band of robot entertainers to a single animatronic rat/mouse supported by video screens; they can even read reviews of shows. Those who remain puzzled after reviewing these documents may need to study this nation’s cultural context further.

Via an IGDA newsletter I just discovered the website and schedule for the first annual Game Writers Conference — a two-day event dedicated to the art and craft of game writing, October 26-27, co-located with the annual Austin Games Conference focused on MMOGs and mobile games, and the Women’s Game Conference on women in the computer and video game industry.

Confirmed presentations for the Game Writers Conference include Mark Laidlaw of Valve presenting “Gaming the Narrative”, Clint Hocking giving a case study for writers about the production of Splinter Cell, and a talk called “The Writer/Designer Tag Team” from the developers of Gears of War.

If you need a quick break from the onslaught of the new semester, or if you’re looking for an excuse to look at something besides the news, check out Kybernekyia: A Hypervortext of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI. It’s interesting as “a pedantic experiment” and can teach most readers a bit about the Cantos and about their author, even if it may not directly show the way to new scholarly and creative possibilities. If you’re really looking for a way to pound the Cantos into shape and make it new, check out a different neo-vorticist offering, Young-Hae Chang’s already-classic Dakota.

I’m investigating the work of poet Jackson Mac Low among others influenced by algorithmic and computational processes, and found his “Young Turtle Asymmetries” poems online; these are generated by chance operations and are “nonstanzaic” poems of which the printed formats are notations for solo or group performances. The scores are the best part! Mac Low’s son Mordecai has an interesting article looking at his father’s poetry, noting that Mac Low’s approach to poetry was related to scientific and technical problem solving methods.

Hi all, its difficult to dwell on digital games and art in the middle of such an immense disaster. The part-15.org group is coordinating to get some communications infrastructure back to the region. This is one of several link to donate time, equipment, $ or supplies.

Second, here’s a short article about blogging through Katrina , and a damage blog including a site to track missing persons. Humid City is a network for survivors.

Thanks to Jo-Anne Green (of Turbulence) for a pointer to an unusual net-literature competition. Sponsored by Literaturhaus Stuttgart, the 1st Bachelors’ Prize for Net-Literature is “aimed at making the sterile bachelors’ machine fertile and is calling for entries in a productive net-literature competition.” The site goes on to say: “In accordance with the nature of the venture, participation is restricted to men.” The winner will receive 2000 euros, and the deadline is September 30th. Only web addresses can be submitted.

From this article on the Fossil / ABACUS Palm PDA watch, on the blog for Make magazine.

CGAMES, the 7th international conference on computer games, will be held November 28-30 in Angoulême, France. CGAMES follows on CGAIDE 2004, a conference focusing on game AI, design, and education. See below for the full description of the call for papers. Submission deadline is September 30th. The timing is perfect for combining this with a trip to DAC.

Lisbeth Klastrup is a visiting scholar here this semester. It’s great to have her be a member of the game research community at Tech for awhile (she’s actually been her for three weeks already, but better late than never in welcoming her…). As an ethnographic self-study project, she’s moblogging her life while she’s here, to get a sense of what moblogging feels like. So far her moblog posts have a melancholy feel, focusing on breakdowns in the physical and social infrastructure in Atlanta. Of course, adjusting to living in a new country is bound to make one feel a bit melancholy. I look forward to seeing Atlanta through her eyes via her moblog. I’ll have to have her visit my neighborhood so she can record impressions. Welcome Lisbeth!

The call for papers is up for ACE 2006 – Agent Construction and Emotions:
Modeling the Cognitive Antecedents and Consequences of Emotion. This is the latest in a series of workshops on modeling emotions in autonomous agents.

While this topic is obviously relevant to anyone building autonomous characters, there’s an interesting tension between functionalist models of emotion that are concerned with how emotion serves as an internal resource for guiding decision making (emotions make us more rational), and computational models of emotion for believable characters that must respond to and convey emotion.

Atlanta-based Kaneva has a beta release of their Kaneva Game Platform. What makes this different from the myriad other modding frameworks and game engines out there, is that this engine supports the creation of MMO games, hosted on the Kaneva website. Currently the engine seems targeted at supporting FPS and RPG style games. According to their licensing faq, you can use the engine for free to create your game, and host the game for development purposes (up to five simultaneous players) on Kaneva’s servers. You can self-host games for free, with up to 30 simultaneous players, but can’t charge for your game. Or you can get a commercial license to host your MMO on Kaneva’s servers; you decide how much to charge for your game, Kaneva runs the infrastructure and billing. The royalties the developer gets on the net revenues slide from 50% – 70%, depending on the monthly net (this handy table lets you fantasize about how much money you’d receive in royalties a month on a $10.00 monthly subscription). It’s an interesting model, requiring no upfront cost to license the engine, reasonable royalties on the subscription income, and no investment in billing or server infrastructure. This should allow indy developers to get into the MMO market relatively risk free…

Over at Tea Leaves Peter Berger has done a really nice interview with game designer David Mullich. While the preface to the interview and Mullich’s discussion of Heroes IV is interesting, a particular treat for me was the discussion of Mullich’s famous Apple II game, The Prisoner, in the second half of the interview, which covers how the game was programmed in Applesoft BASIC, how permission to refer to the The Prisoner TV series was “secured,” and how playtesting was done. (Spoiler warning – after the playtester question!)

There’s a new article on interactive fiction in The Escapist, a recently-minted publication that I mentioned earlier. The piece is by Allen Varney, and is called “READ GAME.”

There were protests, but none of the violence that had been expected, as the last books left the former Undergraduate Library at the University of Texas. The facility, housed in the Flawn Academic Center, opened in 1963 and was the campus’s first open-shelf library for undergraduates. The removal completes the planned disengagement.

The presence of the Undergraduate Library, or UGL, was always regarded as a “bone in the throat” by computer-savvy academics, as the staffing and machinery necessary for circulation and restocking got in the way of computer labs (such as the Student Microcomputer Facility or “Smurf,” the first large-scale undergraduate lab) and facilities for computing research (such as the Computer Writing and Research Lab), which was relegated to the basement with the undergraduate literary magazine.

They’ve had vending machines that dispense cigarettes for a while, but one that dispenses Cigarettes? Indeed, bibliophiles can now discreetely partake of French letters at convenient automatic dispensers. There are certainly precedents, but many found it newsworthy that Maxi-Livres has rolled out five book vending machines in Paris. The machines have only 25 best-sellers; there’s no print-on-demand press nestled inside.

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy in Shandy Hall, Coxwold, York, in the 18th Century. The innovative nonlinear novel is often cited by contemporary new media writers as an influence on their creative practice. It was recently announced that Shandy Hall will now house Asterisk*, a center for the study and development of narrative. Rather than simply developing the site as a museum dedicated to Sterne’s life and works, the center will be dedicated to innovation in both old and particularly new work. Asterisk* will support residencies for artists, “we envisage that these residencies will take forward current practice in a variety of narrative engagements: with diverse media, non linearity, digression, interactivity and audience participation, particularly (though not exclusively) where these intersect with technology.” The center will also commission new works, host exhibitions and performances, lectures and events, and a web forum. Last year hypertext author Deena Larsen completed a short hypertext, Shandean Ambles, during a three-day residency at the site. Asterisk* is now accepting applications for two three-week residencies this fall, one intended for a new media artist and the second for a writer with minimal technical background interested in integrating new media into his or her practice. Asterisk* also intends to gather an extensive library of innovative interactive literature at Shandy Hall.

The somewhat surly NYTimes new media critic Sarah Boxer (if you recall, she wrote a pretty harsh review of the last Boston Cyberarts Festival) has been browsing web comics lately, and she’s concerned.

The comics that use digital technology to break out of their frozen boxes are really more like animated cartoons. And those that don’t are just like the old, pre-digital ones, without the allure of the printed page and with a few added headaches for reader and creator alike.

The designers of the 8-room Tressants Hotel in Menorca, Spain, designed each room to be representative of one of the conceptual cities described by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities.