Grand Text Auto

Here’s an article with a few factoids re: women gamers from cnn.

Also folks, I want to remind you that if you are near NYC this weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun), the fabulous ARTBOTS show is coming! The Third Annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show will take place on September 17, 18, & 19 from noon to 6:00pm @126th Street & Amsterdam Avenue. I was a curator of the show along with Mark Tribe and Douglas Irving Repetto of Columbia U, and I can promise that there are some amazing pieces in the show!!

Speaking of NPR, I just learned from one of my favorite radio news sources about some UK research which found that those who keep personal diaries are ruining their health.

[R]egular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness. Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

“We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off,” says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all,” she adds.

Today’s edition of The World (a BBC, PRI, and WGBH co-production) includes a story on newsgaming (wma), especially September 12th. There’s a nice bit of interview with Gonzalo, and also a couple comments from yours truly.

Alex McLean recently published Hacking Perl in Nightclubs at perl.com. Alex is a musician who performs electronic music by hacking music generation perl code live in a front of the audience. He’s also one of the founders, along with Nick Collins, of the Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming.

Why does Alex do perl programming performances? He says:

However, when running my Perl scripts during a performance I grew to feel as if I wasn’t really performing — I was running software I’d written earlier, so to some extent the performance was pre-prepared. I could tweak parameters and so on, but the underlying structure was dictated by my software. So what’s the alternative?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve moved toward writing software live, in front of an audience. If a programmer is onstage, then they should program!

Ecotonoa, a NEC project, allows Web visitors to build onto a virtual tree by adding their own short messages, the most popular of which seems to be “smoke bowls.” Thanks to Ryan on ifMUD for the tip.

Via Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s coin-op (just added to the GTxA blogroll), Yellow Arrow is a sticker art/collaboratively authored viral narrative project. Project participants post a yellow sticker pointing to something they think is important in the urban landscape, and then send a short email description to the yellowarrow.org server via their phone. Each sticker has an individual ID. When other users encounter the sticker in the public space, they then can send an email to yellowarrow.org to retrieve the description the tagger left behind.

Sure, we don’t have a fancy logo, but the nickm.com Video Game Research Facility does its part to advance the field of game studies. Thanks to the Dreamcast, there’s access to the original versions of Jet Grind Radio, Rez, Shenmue, and other fine blockbuster commercial games, not to mention the latest and most advanced wave of homebrew console games. The Atari Jaguar (upper right) turns out to not be good for much except Tempest 2000, although there are several other cartridges available, should any scholars at nickm.com want to investigate how console game development can go horribly awry. The VGRF also features a Sony Playstation (bottom middle) for some 32-bit tomb raiding and for light-gun-enabled alien-killing. The Apple //c, seen directly beneath the authentic mid-1980s video output device, offers access to some 1980s home computer video gaming. Finally, the Atari 2600 Jr. (bottom left, atop the most frequently-accessed cartridges) provides a essential platform for historical research, particularly given the ready supply of controllers (trackball for Centipede and Missile Command, two pairs of paddles for four-player Warlords) and the library of more than 100 carts. It also offers a good way to negotiate power relationships with visiting scholars.

Via Brandon, a wicked cool word tool: WORDCOUNT

is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Grand (1804) Text (1339) Auto (17171), fer instance.

The Atari Flashback is slated to be released in November for $45, IGN reports. The story, and discussion, is on Slashdot, too. The Flashback seems hardware-compatible with the Atari 7800, a system that ran most Atari 2600/VCS cartridges, too. I’m excited because it’s a low-cost, plug-into-the-TV system that allows two people to play at once. (This experience was precluded by the all-in-a-joystick Atari VCS systems that have been released so far.) The 20 games for 2600 and 7800 that are installed in the Flashback include many standouts, and one game that was never released, Saboteur. However, it doesn’t look like it will accept cartridges, a disappointment for those who have cartridges sitting around or are planning to acquire them. And of course that would dash the hopes of those of us who want new cartridges to be made — but it turns out, those new Atari VCS games are in development, and don’t depend on the launch of the Flashback.

I’ve been talking quite a bit recently (e.g., in the Dichtung Digital interview) about the idea of playing (with) text — specifically, about textual play that operates via logics that are more linguistic than they are graphical. Not detecting collisions with graphical words, but, for example, interactively moving along chains of words that exist in bodies of text.

My first experiment in this direction — conceived and created with collaborators Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich — has just been released. Regime Change is the first of two “textual instruments” that were commissioned by Turbulence. We’ll be releasing the second, News Reader, later this month.

PBS (public broadcasting in the U.S.) has created a television documentary called “The Video Game Revolution“, premiering tomorrow night at 8pm (check your local listings for dates and times in your area). The program description says the documentary will examine the history of games, interview famous game developers, profile game players, and conclude with the future of gaming.

Along with the documentary is an impressive companion website, with four sections: History of Gaming, Inside the Games, Impact of Gaming, and The Arcade. Each section has a variety of interviews, articles, graphics, videoclips, and downloads.

Andrew pointed to a followup conversation about academia vs. industry on GameGirlAdvance, following up on the GameSpot article on the topic. In GGA comments, gman wrote: “I don’t agree that academics can teach us ‘how we can make them [games] better’. I don’t think they’ve done it in any other entertainment.” Mark replied, “Without being too agressive, I’d say that your opinion IS uninformed.”

I have to side with Mark on this one. Looking at interactive fiction and the novel particularly, I’ve tried to explore the relationship of academia to “industry” (or, “the creative process”) below…

Robert Pinsky’s recent poem “Pixel,” celebrating the 50th anniversary of the picture element, is really worth a read, despite the inability of Wired to properly typeset poems online. (You can read this edition decently if your monitor has about 1600 pixels of horizontal resolution; otherwise, the “printer-friendly” page — you need to scroll down 1/3 of the way — is better.) After you get past the initial shock of the beginning of the poem (“Porn on the web: …”) you may be able to appreciate the project of it: to set up the digital arts as an inevitable extension of the past, to explain the different, complementary drives of artist and engineer to allow new and powerful sorts of expression; to connect even pornography with classical, traditional art.

Idle Thumbs go to work and give us a great rant and follow-on discussion about the overabundance of violence in videogames — the problem not being that such games lead to violent behavior, but that they are inhibiting forward progress in game design.

Have you ever tried to convince your mom, spouse, etc. that video games aren’t violent? You might mention Tetris, or The Sims, but after that you’re left with nothing but a wishy-washy sentence or two about “potential” and “endless possibilities” without a shred of concrete evidence in the form of a real gamer’s game to back you up. Why is that?

New mainframe Zork for Z-machine. And the IF Hitchhiker’s Guide returning with illustrations. And IF in seemingly unlikely languages, see below…

As you would expect, the art installations were done very well throughout the venues of ISEA 2004. The conference made a statement about the vitality of electronic arts by the sheer immensity of the event itself. There was so much art in so many different venues on the Silja Opera, in Tallinn, and in Helsinki, that it would have simply been impossible to see it all during the conference, particularly if one also intended to catch a panel or two. I caught the principal exhibitions in Tallinn and the Kiasma exhibition in Helsinki, but I missed several shows at smaller venues and a bunch of site-specific work scattered around the two cities. The ISEA catalog is a full-length book, and it would take a work of that length to comprehensively discuss the art at ISEA. I can offer only a glimpse of what was on display at the conference in these notes.

I’ve been fascinated by the 18th-century French Enlightenment project, teleported into contemporary times and grafted onto the Web, that is Wikipedia. Although my contributions have been limited to a few minor and pedantic edits, I’ve not only looked up entries, but have also read some of the very involved discussions behind the articles. They can be quite interesting. What a crazy and fascinating plan: sum up the world’s knowledge by having anyone who wants edit or add anything at any point in time; keep the revision histories public; let controversy resolve itself through public discussion; keep a neutral point of view. And require that contributions be unencumbered by traditional intellectual property claims, available to all under the GNU Free Documentation License.

About a month ago the Guardian online newspaper began its own blog on games. Today’s post asks, how important is story to games? (via Klastrup’s Cataclysms)

FILE, an electronic art and game festival in Brazil has now made their online digital magazine FILE SCRIPT available. Relevant to our recent discussion of Simon Penny’s ISEA talk on behavioral or generative art, FILE SCRIPT has an interesting article on meta-art, first describing telecommunication and telewriting experiments as a kind of meta-art (the artist is constructing, not a work, but a context in which art “happens”), and then moving on to extend the term meta-artist to include “…computational systems or softwares that attain quasi-autonomy in making their design decisions or that may even be designed to evolve in complexity as they learn through experience in their sign-processing endeavors.” The article looks at several image generation (including Aaron) and poetry generation systems.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has issued a threatening legal notice to a person who mirrors the Interactive Fiction Archive because a person at this organization is painfully and pitifully laboring under the mistaken belief that a file named “Doom3.zip” (a 114KB file, uploaded almost 5 years ago) is an unauthorized copy of a game created by some company they represent. May these and similar bounty hunters all go the way of Boba Fett.

I’ve always loved non-fantasy comics; I never got into fantasy or superhero ones for some reason. I spent a lot of time reading MAD magazine as a kid, usually in my room while eating cookies pilfered from the kitchen pantry. My dad, who grew up in Coney Island’s housing projects, had collected MAD as a kid and later gave his tattered collection to me, where it promptly became even more tattered, along with any new issues he’d just finished reading. (The phrase “The Spy Who Glubbed Me” still sticks in my head.) But more than the movie parodies and the folding back cover, I was drawn to Dave Berg’s dysfunctional ‘The Lighter Side’, Al Jaffee’s inventive artwork, Don Martin’s onomatopoeic panels, the surreal ‘Spy vs Spy’ (and later the computer game), and of course those little cartoons in the margins by Sergio Aragones. Blecch!

Slamdance, an alternative film festival to Sundance held annually in late January in Park City, Utah, also now includes an Independent Games Competition. There are two $5000 prizes to be awarded, Jury and Audience. Early deadline is Oct 1, final deadline Nov 14.

Thanks to the New Jersey Humanities Council, this fall, a maelstrom of electronic literature activity is descending on the Atlantic City area, with The Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. There will be three panel events in the next three months. On September 24th, two of the best-known authors of hypertext fiction, Talan Memmott and William Gillespie will present their work and discuss electronic fiction. Both are or have been graduate fellows in creative writing at Brown University, and both have been recipients of the trAce/AltX award for new media writing. Each is also known for publishing activities in the electronic media. Memmott is the editor of the Beehive hypermedia journal, and Gillespie the publisher of Spineless Books. The second event will feature two of the best-known critics of new media. On October 15th, Grand Text Auto’s own Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the co-editors of The New Media Reader published by MIT Press, will give presentations on the history of new media. Montfort is the author of Twisty Little Passages, the first book-length study of interactive fiction, and Wardrip-Fruin is the editor of First Person a book about interactive drama. (But of course you knew that). The final event, on November 19th, will feature Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson, the co-editors of the leading new media poetry journal Poems That Go. All these events are free and open to the public. This fall the very full Stockton event calendar will also include visits from novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, poet Sharon Olds, and filmmaker Michael Moore. I’m psyched.

Since ISEA has been a theme not only in GTxA but in various lists, blogs, etc, I thought I’d add this. As noted by other drivers @ GTxA, the art and science distinction is still a discussion point even within a field developed from this assumption. I think that has more to do with the institutionalized spaces in which many ISEA participants work, and not an inherent difficulty in the topics or fields. But the important question is, how can this be addressed?

I was pleased by the reception of Façade at ISEA. There was pretty much someone playing it all the time, and often a line waiting to play.