Grand Text Auto

Every night for 1001 nights, Barbara Campbell is performing a short text-based work via web video. Her project 1001 Nights Cast is structured around the frame of tale of Scheherazade and 1001 nights. Participants contribute stories through the following procedure: each morning Campbell wakes and scans the headlines for a short phrase to use as a prompt. She then creates a watercolor image of the text of the prompt, which she posts to the site. Reader participants then respond to the prompt, writing story 1001 words or less in length. Each night Campbell reviews the day’s submissions and adapts one for performance, or, if she’s received no suitable submissions, generates a text by other means, such as a Google search. The stories are preserved in on the site as a text archive, though the video performance occurs only live, at a scheduled time published on the site. As of August 15th, fifty-seven nights into the project, it seems to be going well. Thirty-four different authors have contributed stories. The stories don’t seem to be interwoven into each other outside of the frame tale, so each story stands on it own. Although the editing process is expedited, the 1001 word length, longer than a short short but shorter than a typical short story, is conducive to concise stories with a well-honed sense of economy.

Given the enormous influence of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature on studies of elit, it’s no surprise that people new to the field have asked me, from time to time, to clarify for them what Aarseth’s neologisms “ergodic” and “cybertext” mean. I’ve been happily supplying people with my understandings of what the terms mean, and have only in the last week or so begun to realize that I was probably wrong in my explanation — every time.

I’ve been telling people some variation of this: ergodic literature requires the reader to undertake “non-trivial” effort in order to traverse the text, and cybertext is the kind of text one reads ergodically. Two sides of the same coin. And I’d point them to this paragraph (p. 1-2):

The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in the head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that various concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path.” In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

Calling all indie gamemakers: entries for the 2nd Annual Independent Games Competition at Slamdance are due October 24 for a modest $40 fee, or submit by Sept 30 to save $10. The competition, held in January in Park City, Utah alongside the Slamdance and Sundance film festivals, includes a category for student work. Check out last year’s finalists and winners.

In the past at other festivals there’s been some contention over what “indie” means; here are Slamdance’s rules this year:

Developer(s) cannot have sponsorship money exceeding $25,000.

Games published or distributed for profit before the final deadline of October 24, 2005 are ineligible.

Innovative and unusual formats, such as interactive fiction and drama, are encouraged to apply. Games must display interactivity, and be in an electronic format to be considered for the competition.

That last paragraph… hmm…

Here’s the full press release.

A recent New York Times article describes a new Pentagon research project in which 15 researchers are being trained at the American Film Institute on how to write sellable Hollywood screenplays. The reason?

Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?

Alison Mealey is creating procedural visual art using Unreal. She sets up custom maps, has AI bots play against each other on the map, logging each bot’s (x,y) location once a second, and then uses Processing to render the log file as an image. Thanks to Jose for the pointer.

Clive Thompson, that squid-loving journalist who often writes about games, collision detection blogger and sometimes GTxA commenter, has a well-written new piece in last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine called “The XBox Auteurs“. Be sure to read it before it expires to the archive. The article spends most of its time profiling Rooster Teeth, a group of machinima-makers in Austin who have been producing the ongoing Halo-shot series, Red vs. Blue; read the FAQ here. Clive really likes…

…the idea that faceless, anonymous soldiers in a video game have interior lives. It’s a ”Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” conceit; ”Red vs. Blue” is what the game characters talk about when we’re not around to play with them. As it turns out, they’re a bunch of neurotics straight out of ”Seinfeld.” One recruit reveals that he chain-smokes inside his airtight armor; a sergeant tells a soldier his battle instructions are to ”scream like a woman.” And, in a sardonic gloss on the game’s endless carnage, none of the soldiers have the vaguest clue why they’re fighting.

In rather disturbing news, CNN reports that a South Korean man died after playing “online battle simulation games” for 50 hours in a Taegu cybercafe, almost non-stop.

On a happier note, Abdner Ashman broke the Ms. Pac Man record last year, getting through 141 screens and scoring 921,360 points. Twin Galaxies has finally approved the record and posted an extensive writeup of the game along with a board-by-board recap. There is some very interesting and detailed description of Ms. Pac Man in there, along with the wonderful sports-like commentary:

“Jamie Kane is the new online adventure from bbc.co.uk. It’s part game, part drama, part murder mystery…” The alternate reality game went live this weekend. You know, for kids. Mysteriously, some people have not been able to sign up for it. Unmysteriously, I’m not likely to have the time to try, but I’d be interested to know if anyone checks it out and wants to share their reaction – particularly those in the UK who can benefit from the mobile-phone-based aspects and the full alternation of reality.

Did you know that every time you launch an alternate reality game, God kills some luckless sucker?

It’s been five weeks since we released Façade, and we are hard at work at recuperating. :-) Those last few months of development work were brutal, and we’re still feeling fried, like when you cross the finish line after running a marathon and you’re bent over trying to catch your breath (not that either of us have actually run a real marathon to know what that truly feels like). That it’s summer right now is good timing, it makes our recharging more sun-filled. It’s nice to get our lives back after so long.

Here’s a “thank you” again to those who helped out during the project, from beta testers and demo assistants, to blog commenters and well-wishers offering moral support, to those proselytizing interactive drama to the non-believers, and for everyone patient enough to keep their vaporware-radar and hype-o-meters at bay during the past few years.

Thank you to those who have already donated a few bucks or euros to the project. If you enjoyed Façade (or hated it) and haven’t tossed an electronic tip our way, it’s never too late! We’re continuing to add juicy secrets to the invaluable “Behind the Façade” guide /cook’s tour — this all can be yours for a mere $5 donation. “A must-have for the interactive drama enthusiast.”

The release has been pretty smooth — we’ve just passed the 100,000 downloads mark!

The page for Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary, by BBS Documentary creator and cantankerous Grand Text Auto commenter Jason Scott of textfiles.com, is now live. Production is planned for 2006.

(Since my title for this post is ten times more obscure than my usual obscure jokes, I’ll mention that the text adventure Mystery Mansion, originally programmed in the 1970s for the HP-1000, would tell you that you had successfully taken some item by saying “YOUR BOOTY NOW CONTAINS THE [ITEM],” as you can see depicted in lovely computer graphics on the premier Mystery Mansion page.)

I’ve never made it to one of the E-Poetry festivals, but I’ve heard great things from those who’ve attended. This is a bad travel year for me, but I’m very tempted…

E-Poetry 2005: An International Digital Poetry Festival

London: Wednesday, 28 September – Saturday, 1 October 2005

E-Poetry 2005 is both a conference and festival, dedicated to showcasing the best talent in digital poetry and poetics from around the world. E-Poetry combines a high-level academic conference and workshop (examining growing trends in this young art form) with a festival of the latest and most exciting work from both established and new practitioners.

There’s a new research study beginning today about chatbots, surveying people who have played with them or other conversational agents (Façade counts!), as well as those who build them.

Subject: Seeking chatbot study participants
Calling all: Chatbot Users and Chatbot Makers
If you have used or have built chatbots, or conversational agents, please participate in my online study of these research communities and their priorities. I am looking to get a sense of who make bots, who use them, and in what ways. The questions will only take a few minutes to answer, but participants can return to participate in ongoing discussions.
To participate, go to: http://wrt.ucr.edu/wordpress/chatbot-survey/
The study will begin August 8 and continue until October 15.
This is a confidential study. Please see the site for information about privacy and participation.
Mark Marino, Ph.D. Candidate, UCR., mmarino @ WriterResponseTheory.org

Alan Liu has finished many months of work on a report that will help to keep electronic literature working for readers, scholars, students, and authors in the future. The result is Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature, which outlines two main approaches to keeping e-lit functioning over the years, across changes in platform. While the responsibility of putting it all together fell to Alan, the report is an outcome of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s PAD (Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination) project and is co-authored by David Durand, Nick Montfort, Merrilee Proffitt, Liam R. E. Quin, Jean-Hugues Réty, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. There’s an announcement on the ELO site; of course, please check out Born-Again Bits itself, and feel free to comment here about it.

Over at Game/AI there’s a discussion among game AI developers about strategies for innovation, and the need for AI implementers and game designers to work much more closely together. Good stuff!

Because sometimes the scheme that works for baf’s guide is not enough: M.D. Dollahite offers IFMES (Interactive Fiction Metadata Element Set), derived from the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and invites comments on this proposal. The plan is to use this system to create a Mozilla-based IF organizer application, one that is already in development and sounds similar to the “iFiction” front-end that Andrew Hunter’s Zoom interpreter provides on the Mac. For compatibility with the Semantic Web and to foster the re-use of work, Dollahite has offered this proposal for an open metadata standard, rather than just making up something ad hoc to suit a particular program.

Christopher Strachey is rightly viewed as a pioneer of modern computing. He’s not usually, however, viewed as the creator of the first work of digital literature. Research toward my submission for DAC, however, has lead me to believe that he was — and that his initial digital literature project was also, quite probably, the first piece of digital art. I’d be quite interested to hear any thoughts (or refutations) from GTxA readers.

To begin with, however, I should explain that when I use the terms “digital literature” and “digital art” I mean something in particular by them.

Of course, a phrase like “digital literature” could refer to finger-oriented literature (fingers are “digits”) or numerically-displayed literature (numbers are “digits”) — but I mean “digital” in relation to computers, specifically as it appears in phrases such as “stored program digital computer.” I mean literary work that requires the digital computation performed by laptops, desktops, servers, cellphones, game consoles, interactive environments, or any of the other computers that surround us. I think that’s what most of us mean.

Starting Monday (August 1) the Alternate Reality Gaming Network will host a group read of The Daughters of Freya. You can sign up on the site for The Daughters of Freya, at a price of $4 USD.

I read a “review copy” of The Daughters of Freya and found it an interesting experience. DoF isn’t usually performed for its readers simultaneously, as are email narratives such as Blue Company. Instead, usually any individual who signs up starts getting messages shortly after registering, which might make it seem more like Online Caroline in its approach. But — unlike Online Caroline in which you seem to be getting normal email messages from Caroline, with normal headers, today’s date, etc. — DoF doesn’t actually create a correspondence between the messages you receive and the messages characters send. A single message you receive might contain several messages from different characters, and the dates of the messages are driven by the story (which, in my reading, took place during a different time of year than my reading).

The result made me realize that there were more types of email narratives than I’d considered. DoF wasn’t trying to create the feeling of corresponding via email with a fictional character, nor of voyeuristically listening in on the email correspondence of others. Instead, it was using email to (a) change the context of reading and (b) build suspense.

Thanks to a tip from Mark at WRT for pointing out Haberdashery — a new text created in a collaborative jam by the writing collective Millenium. It’s published in the summer issue of Bunk Magazine and created using the network-based simultaneous collaborative writing tool SubEthaEdit.

And here’s another potentially interesting deadline…

Deadline Extended to: August 15th, 2005
Judges: Annie Finch, Sabina Murray, Alexandra Tolstoy, Talan Memmott, David Hall, and DJ Spooky

Drunken Boat, http://www.drunkenboat.com, international online journal for the arts, announces its First Annual Panliterary Awards in Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Web-Art, Photo/Video, Sound. Submit up to three works, either via email to panlitawards@drunkenboat.com or via physical mail to: Drunken Boat, 119 Main St., Chester, CT 06412. A $15 entry fee must accompany all submissions, either via check or money order, else submitted electronically at: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db7/donate.html. Winners in all categories will be featured in a subsequent issue of Drunken Boat, and will be invited to perform at future multimedia events and performances. All other entries will be considered for publication.

Future Play – July 31
http://www.futureplay.org/

ISEA – Aug 1 (some submissions, others later or past)
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/calls.html

GDC – Aug 1
http://www.cmpevents.com/GD06/a.asp?option=N&V=1

DAC – Aug 8
http://www.itu.dk/DAC2005/

On game development: Adventure Developers has an extensive four part series on the state and future of adventure games. Via Game Brains, a fascinating and torturous series of diary entries from an indie game studio with a truly awesome game prototype that everyone agrees is amazing, yet they can’t get a publishing deal. At the Cultural Gutter, an interview with some of the folks at 42 Entertainment who say, “[Alternative Reality Games] are the sound of the 21st century. They sound like what today feels like.” Finally, recent GTxA commenter Borut Pfeifer writes an inspiring Gamasutra article The Rise of the Auteur & the Return of Indie Development (“there are a number of factors coming together over the next five to ten years that will change the nature of indie game development”).

The Gamasutra column “The Designer’s Notebook” by Ernest Adams just came out with a knock-down fabulous review of Façade. Wow!

It’s particularly nice how Ernest discusses the distinction between drama and game, and how he breaks out the various design and technology fronts that the project pushes on.

And he didn’t even tease us again for requiring installation to the c: drive! :-)

Watching and reading from some compelling multimedia poetry collections has gotten me thinking about their different approaches. The two Poetry in Motion CD-ROMs espouse a very different view of poetry and its place in culture than does An Invitation to Poetry, and this difference seems more interesting than the differences in interface, format, and publication dates.

Now, I say “very different,” but of course even the most radically different poets actually agree on a lot when it comes to language and poetry: it should be pleasing in its sound, its meaning, and the interplay between these; in general a poem manifests itself on the page, in the voice, and in the mind. It should work to do things that the newspaper does not. If you’re going to throw open the doors to every possible perspective on language and include, say, Joseph Goebbels, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Rove, then we’d have to say that poets are all pretty much allies – it would hardly be worth noting the differences even between poets of very different stripes, such as Derek Walcott and Amiri Baraka.

But, from a standpoint within poetry, these collections of texts and videos are indeed quite different. The poets documented by Ron Mann posit an image of poet as performer, physically present and supplying the expert voice that is uniquely qualified to utter the poem. Pinsky and Dietz, on the other hand, actually don’t even include the poets in their videos.

Tonight at 10pm EST on the videogame channel G4 is the premiere of a Cinematech episode called “Who’s Afraid of Interactive Drama?“, featuring Façade.

Are there any tech-savvy volunteers out there able to record and make a Quicktime movie of the show? (I don’t pay enough money per month to Comcast to get access to G4; plus, it’d be nice to have a digitized version of the episode for the archives.) Any help would be much appreciated!

Acting on a tip from Stephanie Strickland, I’ve been reading Florian Cramer’s Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, a PDF book that is an impressively broad compendium of creative uses of code, stretching back deep into pre-computer times. It’s well worth checking out for those interested in the history of computational art.

Near the beginning, though, Cramer repeats a confusion that I’ve seen hinted at elsewhere. Although it doesn’t end up being important to the book, this point confuses clarity with obscurity and secrecy, so I thought I’d take the excuse to pick this nit before the infestation becomes more widespread:

As speculative codes, Egyptian hieroglyphs (in their two different historical readings), the Voynich Manuscript and Travis Dane’s CD-ROM render “code” ambiguous between its traditional meaning of a cryptographic code, i.e. a rule for transforming symbols into other symbols, and code in its computational meaning of a transformation rule for symbols into action. Ever since computer programmers referred to written algorithmic machine instructions as “code” and programming as “coding,” “code” not only refers to cryptographic codes, but to what makes up software … (p. 9)