Grand Text Auto

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues got to proclaim their new invention, the World Wide Web, with a poster at the ACM Hypertext conference. This year it could be you! The 2004 conference will be in sunny Santa Cruz; the poster and demo deadline is this Friday, June 11.

A new issue of The Iowa Review Web is just out, and this quarter’s featured artist section features our very own Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who is interviewed by Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker, with comments from Josh Carroll and Robert Coover.

Also in the new issue are interviews with Jay David Bolter and Amy Sara Carroll; a review of Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala; and poems by Denisa Comanescu, Rebecca Makkai, and Stephen Dunn.

Dunn and Rettberg both … if Grand Text Auto doesn’t carjack The Iowa Review Web, it looks like Stockton College will.

Prompted in part by the all-encompassing “game canon” lists that were provided a while ago (specifically, the ones by Greg Costikyan and by Jesper Juul and Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen), I’ve listed a dozen games for one specific early console – the Atari VCS (a.k.a. the Atari 2600) – which I think would be extremely useful for modern-day scholars of console games to play and study. Without giving anything like a full review of these cartridges, I’ve tried to briefly explain why each is worth considering.

About the List · The 12 Cartridges

This is one I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. What happens when you take a writer, who is editor-in-chief for a gaming magazine, and put a Ted Nelson book in her hands? You get a combination of three perspectives that we’re accustomed to only seeing pairwise: Storytronics.

Katherine Phelps is the author, and while she was pretty early to the party with Storytronics (1998/99) you still don’t see many references to her work. It’s a pity, because things like her Story Shapes for Digital Media offer some of the same example-driven help out of the “Choose your own adventure” box that I also admire in Narrative as Virtual Reality. With Andrew Pam (who is also behind Xanadu Australia) she’s been running the literary website Glass Wings for a decade, as of this March. (You might remember reading about them in this Salon article).

A couple of weeks ago I received the sad news that my friend Steve Kurtz’s wife Hope had passed away in her sleep. This personal tragedy was compounded by the bizarre twist that, when police and medical workers arrived in response to Steve’s call, they saw some of the biological equipment in his home studio that Steve uses for biotech art performances with the Critical Art Ensemble. Hyped up on “War on Terror” fervor, they called in the Feds to investigate a potential bioterrorism case. While this was shocking, and certainly added insane stress to an already emotionally intense situation (Steve was even denied access to his wife’s body for awhile), I assumed that the bioterrorism case would blow over, as investigators discovered the ridiculous mistake they’d made. But, as many GTxA readers may already know, in the last few days the situation has grown ever more Kafkaesque, prompting me to make this public post on what was initially a private tragedy. Steve is now being brought before a Grand Jury on bioterrorism charges. Other artists have been called in to testify, including my friends Paul Vanouse and Beatriz (Shani) da Costa. Below I’ve included the text of a CAE defense fund press release.

Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’…

I’ve added two relatively new blogs to our blogroll: particle stream, “a space for outlandish thoughts about fiction and games”, by Julian Kücklich of Germany, and particleblog by Tadhg Kelly of the UK (also a Ludonaut), who has coined the term insyn, “the idea that the things that you play with on your playstation or xbox can actually have substance and not be just about cheap thrills”.

Recently Tadhg had continued to expand on his conception of interactive reflective art, and Julian is currently reading and critiquing First Person. Both sites are worth your regular attention.

Previously at GTxA we’ve discussed the issue of whether media artists and theorists should program (1 2 3 4), mentioned Mary Flanagan’s and Ken Perlin’s new procedural literacy project, and generally championed the idea that new media artists, game designers and theorists, media and software studies theorists, and generally anyone involved in cultural production on, in or around a computer, should know how to program. Of course people have been talking about the importance of procedural literacy for awhile, with Seymour Papert describing his work with teaching children to program in Logo in the 1980 book Mindstorms, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg describing procedural environments in which everyone, including children, can build their own simulations in the 1977 paper Personal Dynamic Media, and Ted Nelson crying in the wilderness that “you can and must understand computers NOW” (including programming) in his 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines. But a couple of months ago Mark Guzdial turned me onto an even earlier argument for universal procedural literacy, one given by A. J. Perlis in a talk at a symposium held at M.I.T. in 1961 to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and published in the collection Management and the Computer of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.), MIT Press. The symposium consisted of 8 talks, with two discussants responding to each talk, and was attended by such luminaries as C. P. Snow, J. W. Forrester, Herb Simon, J. McCarthy, and A. J. Perlis. Perlis’ talk, The Computer in the University, focused on the role the computer should play in a university education.

CGAIDE 2004, the International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education, will be held at the Microsoft campus in Reading, UK, November 8-10 2004. The conference aims to bring together academics and game developers interested in AI and games, with special session topics on areas such as intelligent agents, learning and adaptation in games, and neural networks in games, as well sessions on game art and education for game design and development. Submissions are due July 30, 2004.

The next few months in NYC offer several events that GTxA readers might find worth the trip. Now that I live within driving distance I’m hoping to make it to some or all of these.

For Ars Electronica’s 25th anniversary, exhibited from May 21 through July 18 will be Digital Avant-Garde, featuring “outstanding media art projects from the past twenty-five years as well as inspiring new developments from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and artist-in-residence program”, plus additional symposia, artist talks, screenings, and workshops.

July June 15 papers are due for the workshop Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, previously posted about here. It will be held October 15 at Columbia University.

July 21-23 is the huge yearly international Autonomous Agents conference. This year it happens to be in NYC, also at Columbia. Looking through the list of hundreds of papers and posters, I’ve culled out ones with a believable agent / interactive story bent:

Congrats to the winning authors of trAce’s New Media Article competition.

Review category – “A Bad Machine Made of Words” by Nick Montfort
Opinion category – “Are cell phones new media? Hybrid communities and collective authorship” by Adriana de Souza e Silva
Process category – “Writing 4 Cyberformance” by Karla Ptacek & Helen Varley Jamieson
Editor’s Choice Award – “Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs” by Kate Baggott
Honourable Mention – “Postcards From Writing” by Sally Pryor

Continuing the theme of AI systems that use language: here’s a new paper by Rob Zubek at Northwestern, who has been thinking hard about how to make robust, richly interactive conversational characters. His PhD research is focused on building an architecture for structuring conversations as vast collections of reactions to player input, arranged in hierarchies, that compete to understand and respond to the player. Multiple possible threads of conversation all are listening simultaneously to what the player says at any time, and they each update their local probabilities of where they believe they are in the conversation. Assuming enough content is authored, this allows the conversation to have a variety of believable responses at any time, at varying levels of coherence. Thus the system can fail gracefully and perhaps move the conversation forward when the system has trouble understanding the player, or doesn’t have a good response.

The Futurefarmers collective has released the online game Antiwargame. Like the controversial September 12 (GTxA discussion: 1 2), Antiwargame explores the politics of the war on terror via a game simulation. In Antiwargame you take actions such as setting your budget, sending troops overseas and manipulating the media, with the goal of maintaining a popularity high enough to remain president.

Via Rhizome

Update: More on the simulation rhetoric operating in Antiwargame can be found in the comments.

This year the Prix Ars Electronica honored two projects that have helped to make vast amounts of human knowledge available and legally accessible. Wikipedia, the free, community-built encyclopedia, was awarded the Golden Nica for Digital Communities. Creative Commons won the Golden Nica for Net Vision.

The 2004 Turbulence Competition results have been announced: five project proposals for net.art were awarded $5000 each.

Even interactive fiction is in da (mystery) house, and on the list: One of the winners is a project I proposed with Dan Shiovitz and Emily Short. Thanks to Noah for reminding us about the deadline for this contest.

There’s a new interactive fiction blog y uno de estos blogs sobre relatos interactivos tambien. The site IFLibrary.Com has just relaunched, today, as a (currently empty) locus for interactive fiction bloggers – let Dave Cornelson know if you’d like a blog there. Meanwhile, Al-Khwarizmi, dhan, and JSJ have started a Spanish-language blog on the topic, using the title “Relatos Interactivos” (interactive stories) rather than “Ficción Interactiva” (interactive fiction) or “Aventuras Conversacionales” (conversational adventures) – but welcoming, with Borgesian allusions, all with an interest in the form, whatever they call it.

I’m working on a short paper for ACM Hypertext 2004, which will be at UC Santa Cruz this August (and where Matt Webb and I will be offering a tutorial on blogging). The short papers deadline is the 28th of this month. The working title of my paper is “What Hypertext Is” and my goal is to provide a 2-page answer to the old chestnut “What is Hypertext?” I want to give a much, much better answer than you find in many places — such as the current everything2 entry, which begins: “Hypertext is nothing more than the inclusion of links within a body of text.”

I’m including a draft below, and would definitely appreciate comments. I can’t make it any longer, but I could substitute, clarify, reconsider, etc. Here’s a preview:

We can now, based on our examination of Nelson’s texts, provide a relatively concise definition of hypertext appropriate for a world familiar with the Web: “Hypertext is a term coined by Ted Nelson for textually-focused forms of hypermedia (new media that branch or perform on request). Examples include the link-based ‘discrete hypertext’ (of which the Web is one example) and the level-of-detail-based ‘stretchtext.'”

Traditional methods for combating spam on blogs – for instance, obfuscating links and thus decreasing the PageRank and usefulness of blogs, using censorship methods known as blacklists – are a disservice to public communication, albeit often in ways that are minor at first. If these are used exclusively, they will eventually lead to the ruin of the Internet as a public space and a public conversation.

Instead, we should encourage technical and legal measures that actively counterattack spammers and assailants of blogs. Spambots – here I refer to the sorts of programs that communicate on IRC to coordinate the defacement and destruction of blogs – attempt to turn channels of public communication and conversation against themselves. Spambots should themselves be sabotaged so that they are made to perform useful tasks, at the very least, notifying end users and network administrators that their computers have been compromised, but perhaps also implementing DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks on rogue, spamming machines. Additionally, spammers should certainly be publicly identified and then ostracized, bankrupted, and in some cases physically incarcerated, but there are powerful technical methods that could be available to us, too, and it’s worthwhile to spur on the development of these.

The problem with comment spam is not that blogs link to things or that blogs allow unconstrained communication by commenters online; the problem is the abuse of blogs as a channel of communication and the attempts of spammers to destroy the blog as a popular forum and to render the Internet a wasteland of speech. The appropriate response is not to cripple blogs, but to target abusers and the abuse and attacks they visit on our new communication systems and conversational spaces.

The 7th annual Subtle Technologies Festival of art and science takes place at the University of Toronto from May 27th to May 30th. “Subtle Technologies’ mandate is to blur the boundaries between art and science, presenting symposia, exhibitions and performances that juxtapose cutting-edge artistic endeavours and scientific exploration.” In addition to the symposium, there will be a performance and workshop by Pamela Z in partnership with Deep Wireless Festival and InterAccess Media Arts Centre. InterAccess will also host an installation, “Infrasense” by Robert Saucier and KIT. DeLeon White Gallery is hosting an installation, Champions of Entropy #3, by Brandon Vickerd. The full schedule of presentations, performances and installations is available on the website.

The submission deadline for the Computational Creativity Workshop at the 7th European Conference in Cased-Based Reasoning has been extended to May 17th. We have often discussed how AI-based approaches to interactive media can support a level of generativity, and thus support a depth and breadth of interaction, not possible with non-AI approaches. For AI-based art and entertainment, the AI subfield of Computational Creativity is particularly relevant as it explicitly focuses on systems that generate novel configurations out of raw material given to the system. Such systems could be used to generate novel character behaviors, story pieces, text, visual imagery, etc. in response to interaction.

In the ewriting world, the “artifactual” tradition is made up of work that presents itself as fictional digital artifacts. So, for example, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse is a 1993 work presented as a box of items inherited from your uncle — floppy disks with “his” files, audio tapes of “his” recordings, etc. Email narratives and blog fictions (which have both gotten some press attention of late) are artifactual uses of the network. And now we have a game that’s an artifactual use of the console.

Lifeline (Wired News, GameSpot) is a relatively new game that transforms a console, controller, microphone, and television into, well, a console, controller, microphone, and television. You’re a survivor of a space station catastrophe, trapped in the old security station, and using your controllable display to guide another survivor through the steps needed for those who remain to keep living. You guide the other survivor by talking with her over your microphone.

I’ve been enjoying two relatively-new blogs from cool folks: Michelle Higa and Jenny Cool. Also, Jonathan Phillips (who I saw at 040404 and Nick and I saw at Digital Narr@tive) is a busy guy, as two of his collaborative projects show — in the last month the Scale journal has had a new issue and a new call, and the open source SVG editor Inkscape has had a new release. And the speakers for Incubation3 have been announced, including Ted Nelson and Mark Amerika. Finally, don’t forget that the ALT+CTRL deadline is June 1, and May 28 is the short papers deadline for Hypertext 2004 (where the keynote speaker will be Doug Engelbart).

I thought Slashdot’s story must have been posted on April 1 mod Something, but no – the original reality-based Web site, the Web’s first soap opera, is back: The Spot.

Well, people will have something to do now that Friends is over. And maybe this will fetch something on eBay.

Update: Why not read a recent article about Web-soap phenomenon The Spot? In a popular Web daily?

Harry Mathews did a wonderful reading last night at Penn at the exhibit Composing. I got to introduce Harry. There was a great turnout, which included – besides the usual suspects from around campus and the friends of the library – Fernando Pereira, the chair of the computer and information science department; Scott, who came in from New Jersey despite grades being due today; Marie Chaix, Harry’s wife; artist Trevor Winkfield, who also was publisher of Harry’s first book, The Ring; and Tina Packer, founder and artistic director of Shakespeare and Co.

This Spring I taught Interactive Narrative. In this class, through a mixture of readings and projects, we survey the landscape of interactive narrative, examining the theoretical issues, debates and design issues that arise around different conceptions of interactive narrative. As I’ve discussed previously, the class is organized around technical genres (e.g. interactive fiction, author-based story generation, interactive drama), where a technical genre consists of a community of practice (history of work and criticism) organized around specific computational and design commitments.

The class is heavily project-based – 6 weeks of the class are spent in two 3 week design cycles, including in-class critique, in which students design and implement an interactive narrative. For these projects, students are free to explore/invent any form that interests them, as long as they can articulate in what sense it is interactive and (harder) in what sense it is narrative. We actually look at works along four design dimensions, in terms of interactivity, narrativity, segmentation and representation (as I discussed earlier).

I do spend some time in the class exploring the ludology/narratology debate.

First Person has just made its online debut, with the Cyberdrama section appearing on electronic book review this week. The material online includes essays by Janet Murray, Ken Perlin, and GTxA’s own Michael Mateas, as well as response material from Espen Aarseth, Bryan Loyall, Will Wright, Victoria Vesna, Gonzalo Frasca, Brenda Laurel, and the essayists.

One reason that Pat Harrigan (my First Person coeditor) and I are excited to be working with ebr is that they’ve been quite successful at growing meaningful academic exchanges around their past publishing projects. Of course, the blogsphere has some interesting tools as well (as our recent thread on narratology and game studies demonstrates) but ebr creates a space for somewhat less rapid-fire dialogues, which grow into shapes different both from those that develop in glacial print publication and in hyperheated comment threads. I hear that Jane McGonigal and Mark Barrett are already working on responses to Cyberdrama. Hopefully some GTxA readers will decide to jump in as well!