Grand Text Auto

Here are quick pointers to two literary pieces I’m currently playing. Stuart Moulthrop’s Marginal Effects: A Disorder of Attention is now online at Tekka (and available to non-subscribers). This was presented, in its first version, at DAC 2001’s A Night at the Cybertexts. Along with John Cayley’s Instrumental (also presented there) this was one of the first pieces that got me thinking about “instrumental texts” — texts which can be played, but aren’t quite games. Meanwhile, Robert Coover offers his Chicago Cryptogram — which can’t be manipulated, but can be played and won. It’s online at the site for the new “twice-yearly print journal of politics, literature, and culture” n+1.

MP4 video, 0:34, 1MB

Everyone’s talking about The Gates, and the first thing they say is that everyone’s talking about The Gates. Tonight at my neighborhood coffeehouse/bar, a loud man behind me discusses the project and the use of the word “saffron.” At a party in Philadelphia last night, a Bulgarian woman, claiming Christo for Bulgaria, says that she’s seen the piece. On the train back from New York before that, a women in line in the café car explains that although she was skeptical at first, she found a metaphor for the decisions we make life, the way that we must make decisive choices that put us on one path or another. She says it made her cry.

The next International Conference on Virtual Storytelling will be held November 30 to December 2, 2005 in Strasbourg, France. Submissions are due May 27. See our trip report from 2003’s ICVS.

Janet Murray is already lined up to be one of the keynote speakers; two more are to be announced.

(Uh oh, speaking of scheduling conflicts — ICVS overlaps with Digital Arts and Culture, a few hundred miles to the north in Copenhagen! Hmm, maybe a flight to Paris, a train to Strasbourg, a commuter jet to Copenhagen…)

By the way, if I butchered that French, please blame it on Lycos.

Mobile PC has just released “The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time,” a 5-part article: ( 1 2 3 4 5 ). I think gadget #37 is a device that annoyingly splits a Web page into five parts.

Grafik Dynamo by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett feeds images from LiveJournal into a comic strip generator, juxtaposing them with curious captions, speech, and thought bubbles. (Quite apropos of the discussion about computer-generated comics that we had on here…) Although the resulting comics aren’t exactly Love and Rockets, the system is interesting. Framing disparate images from LiveJournal as art and as part of a narrative is effective and amusing. Crawling for images, rather than texts, makes for an interesting twist on projects such as Microsoft Comic Chat – not to mention another Turbulence commission, News Reader, by Noah et al. I do think that there’s still interesting work to be done that engages the meanings of images and texts. The non-automated site Exploding Dog provides proof of how effective such interplay can be in a project on the net.

The 6th Digital Arts and Culture Conference will take place at the IT University in Copenhagen on December 1-3, 2005. “Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice” is the tag line for this conference. Deadline: August 8. You can read about the history of DAC and the organization of the current conference; also, see the CFP.

Head over to Central Park West this Thursday to check out some innovative art — yes, that, but also a presentation at the American Musuem of Natural History comprised of folks from Amorphic Robot Works and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. “Three artist-programmers, each of whom specializes in building robots, show and tell how they make machines that mimic humans and create art.” (via NYTimes)

William Gillespie (co-author with me of 2002: A Palindrome Story) and Mike Maguire (Drawn Inward) were in town yesterday to lead the “2/12” Palindrome Workshop at the Kelly Writers House – two workshops and a reading, actually. One group of 8th-grade students and another group from the Writers House community wrote reversible language, discovering some interesting things about literary composition. While people have written palindromes in classes before, this was the first stand-alone event we know of that was dedicated to palindrome writing. Scott made it into town for the writing games, too. Some of the word- and line-palindromes we drafted are online.

What really rounded off the day was the palindromic feast prepared by Adrienne Mishkin and volunteers from the Kelly Writers House’s Exquisite Corps. There was “go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog” and Doc Evil’s live cod. I should emphasize the desserts – yes, stressed desserts: Emily Ek key lime and a fruit salad with no lemon, no melon. Red ice cider and face decaf were provided, too. I might be able to coax Scott into providing a photo or two here at some point…

Update, Feb 17: See below the fold for two details from the feast.

The University of Iowa just announced its partnership with the ELO. (That’s the Electronic Literature Organization, an organization from the 1990s to facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media – not to be confused with any light or heavy electric orchestras from the 1970s and 1980s.) The partnership is thanks to Thom Swiss, a professor of English and the Rhetoric of Inquiry at Iowa who is the new president of the organization. The ELO is based at UCLA; this partnership initiates a new form of the organization, where different campuses will be able to participate as “nodes,” helping the ELO reach its goals in different ways.

An article in today’s NYTimes about the success of the World of Warcraft MMPORPG ends on a curious note. After describing how the developers have endowed, and continue to endow, their virtual world with a rich history, culture and environmental design, we get this quote from Blizzard’s VP of creative development, Chris Metzen:

You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon? … It has to be the story. We want you to care about these places and things so that, in addition to the adrenaline and the rewards of addictive gameplay, you have an emotional investment in the world. And that’s what makes a great game.

The schedule and registration information for the Living Game Worlds Symposium at Georgia Tech is now available. This is the symposium in honor of Will Wright that I mentioned earlier.

Not all playable computational media is graphical. In fact, some of the most popular early computer games were entirely textual. Games like Adventure and Zork were even at times played on teletypes, with the interaction recorded on scrolling reams of paper, rather than on terminals with screens. (Of course, an excellent tracing of the history of this textual interactive fiction can be found in Nick’s Twisty Little Passages.)

But when we think of playing with computers, we generally think of graphical experiences, those that follow in the tradition of Spacewar! rather than Adventure. Created on the PDP-1 at MIT in the first years of the 1960s, Spacewar! was the first modern video game. Two players each had a custom-made controller, which they used to control the flight of a virtual spacecraft on the PDP-1’s CRT. The spacecraft were pulled toward the star at the center of the screen by simulated gravity, and could fire projectiles at one another. A spacecraft hit by the central star or a projectile would be damaged. These are still among the central logics of graphical gaming today — the ability to move graphical objects that on some level represent the player, the ability to fire projectiles, a simulation of some form of physics, and “collision detection” when one thing runs into another. These logics aren’t only the basis for play in experiences such as Half-Life, but also (leaving aside projectiles) in pieces such as Text Rain.

We’re accustomed to seeing successful combinations of graphical logics and game rules repackaged repeatedly. Games such as Pac-Man and Tetris have had many authorized and unauthorized versions “skinned” with different surface graphics and different graphical arrangements, but with the essential logics of graphical movement and gameplay preserved. Such combinations, within a larger range of variation, are also the basis for our identifications of game genres such as “side-scrollers” and “first-person shooters.”

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands… is a dead shark.

— Woody Allen’s Annie Hall

The latest postmortem article online at Gamasutra (postmortem indeed) is an informative writeup of an ambitious student project at Full Sail game design school. A group of six took on the challenge of the Love Story panel from GDC 2004, to create some sort of love story game. Their concept was interesting, their art was good, team morale was high, women dug it — only they hadn’t figured out what players actually do in the game…

No, I don’t mean that earth – there’s a new issue of Terra d’IF, Robert Grassi’s Italian interactive fiction zine. I can discern that issue 5 holds reviews of the recent Flamel by Francesco Cordella and the older L’anello di Lucrezia Borgia. For those who, like me, have no Italian, Grassi’s interview with Paul O’Brian is available in English. Two of Grassi’s reviews from earlier issues have been translated into English by Emily Short, too.

Rather than sit in front of the TV for four-plus hours tomorrow, I plan to tape the Superbowl and watch it later, allowing me to fast-forward through those annoying breaks in the action. Through the game, that is. Generally I’ve found Superbowl contests to be mediocre entertainment — it’s the ads that are more intriguing. I’ve gotten into the habit of taping the whole event each year, and usually find a handful of very, very expensive pieces of commercial video art worth watching. The whole viewing process takes about 45 minutes.

Christiane Paul was Lo-fi‘s guest curator for January, and the show she put together is called News Readers. The pieces range from large public artworks to small rectangular applets made with Processing. Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss’s Energie_Passagen (Energy_Passages) “reproduces the linguistic space of the city in form of a data flow. Hundreds of catchwords taken from current newspaper reports appear in a projected ‘information flow’ and are spoken by artificial computer voices. As soon as passers-by select individual words, thematically related networks of terms start to perform in this flow, which can also be experienced as an audiovisual echo.” Ed Burton’s Recent Events “dissolves three texts into a fluid suspension of letter tokens. The dissolved texts are drawn from a live source, updated on the hour, every hour. In their gathering stream, these tokens grow sticky tendrils towards potential neighbours, coagulating to form clots of recovered text.” I’m also pleased to say that my News Reader collaboration with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich is included. (Thanks to Turbulence for the tip and the commission.)

Jason Dyer, an IF author who has the distinction of having placed well in the first IF Comp in 1995, has started a new blog about IF, Renga in Blue. He’s got three posts up already – pretty good for the first day’s work. We’ll look forward to more. You can find the link on here under “Related Blogs,” too.

It’s 2014. Do you know where your New York Times is?

If Suck.com were reanimated, had its sense of humor removed, and made a PBS-history-documentary style Flash animation about Googlezon taking on the New York Times in an ecstasy of customized, micropayment-based, indie-news-making frenzy, it would be this one.

Today’s Times has an interesting article, “When the Sous Chef is an Ink Jet” about Homaro Cantu, a chef in Chicago who serves edible photos and sushi prepared on an inkjet printer. The restaurant serves edible menus. Cantu is also looking into levitating foods and innovative ways to utilize class IV lasers in food preparation. Of course this makes me think of what type of edible story I might like to tell, a novel that you could really sink your teeth into.

The WWW@10 conference looked back on the Web’s first decade – and, of course, inevitably invited thoughts about the next decade. Now, on the conference site, you can see video of heavyweights from different eras offering their thoughts. Ted Nelson, for example, speaks on “The Metaphysics of Structure and the Future of Literature.” Cory Doctorow asks “Web 2.0 = AOL 1.0?” and goes on to explain “how the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to break the Internet – and you’re not invited.”

Doritos has some new ad campaign with some sort of AIM tie-in (I couldn’t stand to spend more than five seconds on their adversite, so I couldn’t exactly tell) and with posters that are written in some dialect of leetspeak or hax0r (one of which I noticed this morning). Or maybe they’re just encoded using some variant of the Prince compression algorithm.

Promoting unhealthy snack foods to the downtrodden, computer-bound population does rather smack of intensively marketing malt liquor in the hood. But, on the other hand, maybe that is a sign that one day, someone will be trying to communicate with a pasty, bespectacled passenger in seat 13C, and I’ll be able to say “oh, stewardess – I speak leet!”

Just a quick note to try to convince you: please please please stop using those “under construction” icons on your home pages! They are stupid, pointless, take up unnecessary bandwidth, and can sometimes be silly. They belong in a museum. At the very least, use an alternative icon that won’t make people bust out with some Village People song. I mean, really – get with the program. And whatever you do, please don’t use an animated GIF.

Our 60-minute fandango on interactive story at the Game Developers Conference this March suddenly promises to be double fine, now that we’ve wrangled Tim Schafer to join the fray. Tim will either speak full throttle about the past, present, and future of adventure games vis-à-vis interactive stories — or just sit back and laugh at us oh-so-serious pontificators and casually plug his new game, which by the way is now available for pre-ordering. Well, hopefully he’ll do a little bit of both.

For those unable to make it, I’ll take notes, and report back here.

“Wannabe game designer and failed programmer” Johnny Pi has a new blog, Design Synthesis. A few quotes from some of his initial posts:

[W]hat remains to be seen is how game developers are going to merge freeform and structure. How can we model a reactive gameworld without creating a picture of anarchy? … I’m interested in the confluence of order and chaos.

This was going to be a comment in today’s discussion on the IF 1893 in The Times, but this is lengthy enough that I’d rather score a new post out of it.

Nick and Scott commented that in today’s market, selling text-based IF has become rare, and that the viability of selling e-lit is questionable. My take is that the market for new forms of e-lit and the like, e.g. interactive drama, is underdeveloped enough that charging money for it may do more to hamper a work’s reach, than to give it away.

Michael and I are facing this issue right now: as we’re close to releasing Facade, now in its final stages of bug fixing and audio editing, we’ve been thinking about the best way(s) to release it. Anyone have any thoughts if it’s a good or bad idea for us to charge for Facade, based on what you know so far about it? What you would pay for it, if anything? Do you think charging for it would hamper its dissemination?