Grand Text Auto

A week ago at the List Gallery in Cambridge, as part of the Son et Lumiere group show, I saw a great installation that incorporated massive amounts of electronic text. The piece was called Listening Post, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. Apparently it’s been touring, so some of you may have already seen it. Their site describes it better than I can; be sure to click on Image Gallery. And here’s a NYTimes review of it.

Via jill/txt, a new Guardian article about the concept and writing of blog fiction.

Hmm, after reading the article, it turns out I was fooled on April 1st after all…

Google’s new free email service, Gmail, offers users 1GB of free storage, in return for ads that appear in your email. Not just any ads, though — the Gmail system scans the text of the email you’re sending, to choose customized, targeted ads based on the content of what you’re writing about.

This is bound to spook some people out — the idea that someone, some thing, is secretly reading and deciding things about your private email. However Google downplays this:

“It’s not that Google is peeking… It’s computers doing processing.”

I’ve just started experimenting with txtkit. One begins reading by typing searches into a Mac’s terminal window. Then the machine’s desktop is replaced by an OpenGL-rendered representation of a collaborative reading space. Matching sentences unfurl vertically when selected, against a background of a slowly-rotating spirograph-like structure that represents the cluster of search results. And then the visualizations that connect with the readings of others kick in. Have any GTxA readers experimented with this? What do you think?

Current texts available for collaborative reading include a selection by Lev Manovich, a selection by project originator Hans Ulrich Reck, and Lawrence Lessig’s new book (another benefit of free culture). Here is some material culled from the project web pages:

WWW @ 10 is an “interdisciplinary conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade.” WWW @ 10 abstracts are due April 15th. Scheduled speakers include Ted Nelson and Cory Doctorow — Jill and I are on the Program Committee (so send in stuff we’ll like!).

I had a great time at the GDC last week. The positive buzz around Façade led me to consider once again the issue of whether the phrase “game research” makes sense. To cut to the chase:

• The game industry currently doesn’t believe in “game research”. You’re either working on a shippable product, or you’re bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation.
• There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can’t be invented through a sequence of incremental, shippable products.
• Academia currently has no funding mechanism (and potentially, no tenure mechanism) to support research inventing new game genres (research that often, along the way, involves solving some hard, first class technical problems).

So neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore these hard to reach regions in design space. Who will? To put a finer point on it, how do I fund the next Façade?

I just came across The Cultural Gutter, “updated Thursday at noon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. The geeky triumvirate of science-fiction, comics and videogames forms the core… they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms.”

Past articles I found interesting include “Is It Possible To Have Too Much Fun?“, “Professor Zork“, “The Romance of Indie Games” and “Too Damn Talky“.

GameCritics.com’s “Caught in the Web” column reviews Gonzalo Frasca’s Kabul Kaboom!, Sept 12 and Gonzalo and Ian Bogost’s Howard Dean for Iowa Game. And Ian is this month’s Ivory Tower columnist with an essay titled “The Muse of the Video Game,” about academia-industry collaboration and why game developers should be as familiar with the humanities as they are with pixel shaders.

I’m at 040404 today, a “Colloquium on New Media and the Unfolding of New Structures in Old Spaces” at UC Berkeley.

Upcoming talks include: Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley — Peer Pressure: Bodygames and Collective Telepresence; Warren Sack and Michael Dale, UC Santa Cruz — Drawing by Derive; and Jane McGonigal — Avant-Game: Flexible Structures through Site-specific Play.

More to come in the “extended” version of this entry.

Those GTxA readers in New York City should consider attending the seminar:

Playdate #1: War Games and Game Wars
Friday 9th April 1-3pm Wolff Conference Room
The New School 65 5th avenue (at 14th st)
Free. All welcome. Lunch provided.

Ed Halter will present War Games: Digital Gaming and Military Culture, and Alex Galloway will present Social Realism in Gaming. Perhaps someone who attends the talks can post something about them here.

Via Rhizome.

Continue reading for more detail about the two talks.

ALT+CTRL is a festival of independent and alternative games coming this fall from the Cal-(IT)² Game Culture & Technology Lab and the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine. The deadline for submissions is June 1, so there’s a bit of time yet. It’s also possible to become a sponsor of the event, if you’re of the right sort of profile. The announcement says:

What an interactive fiction news day! Dan Shiovitz has announced a new interactive fiction development system that is really really easy to use and produces code with a very small footprint – for instance, one byte long. Check out Snap.

In the category of “this is not an April Fools joke”, Quake has been ported to the Inform interactive fiction language. As the IF Quake page describes it:

In IF Quake, you walk through the exact same levels you do in the graphical version of the game, only instead of circle-strafing and firing at your enemies, you type commands like “ATTACK GRUNT WITH SHOTGUN”.

Thanks to Slashdot for announcing this.

Rob Wittig and friends have a new blog — no foolin’!

Rob and I briefly crossed paths by way of Scott’s e-lit dinners in Chicago, before Rob moved to Duluth where he now teaches at the University of Minnesota. But I believe he and Scott and Nick and Noah go way back.

I’ll add robwit.net to our blogroll.

Next month Sony, Philips and E-Ink will be releasing the first digital paper electronic book in Japan, called “Librié” (see big pic). Its resolution is 170 dpi (newspaper quality), can download up to 500 book-length texts from a PC, has a little keyboard, and costs $375. The display only draws on battery power when text is refreshed. (via join-the-dots)

Can it run hypertexts, and if so, will e-lit finally pass the bathtub test?

A new issue of IJIGS is out, with articles by Jesper Juul, Magy Seif El Nasr and others. To read the articles, you need to click “register for free access to the papers”.

Once again GDC didn’t let me down. Here are some highlights; pictures will be added over time as they filter in.

First I’ll talk about our presentations, get that out the way, and then talk about the rest of the conference itself.

Here’s an impassioned article on GameTunnel about this year’s Independent Games Festival at GDC. The article is titled, “A Dark Day in Indie Gaming”.

Several of us have thoughts to share on this — will write some later tonight, in the comments…

Update: read more thoughts on it at WCG, antimodal, USC, GameZone… And a discussion on Slashdot Games, including a response from a developer of the IGF grand prize winner, Savage.

I went to a meeting of the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group at GDC. The organizers began to talk about the white paper published by the group late last year. And they were met with blank stares. Finally, the question was asked — who there had read the white paper? Only a few hands. Who there had heard of the white paper? The same few hands. Then the meeting’s moderator told us — these were hands of the people who wrote the white paper.

A proper post with substantial information about the goings-on at this year’s Game Developers Conference will have to wait until I’m back home on Monday (or maybe Noah or Michael will get a chance to post something first). Until then, just a few quick comments, and then some pictures.

GDC is consistently satisfying, my favorite conference. It’s the sheer volume of talented and creative and intelligent people sharing their work and ideas and good will that makes it so pleasurable.

Facade didn’t win any prizes at the IGF. Disappointing for sure, but made up for by the smiling and laughing crowds that surrounded the Facade kiosk the whole 3 days. Facade also caught the eye of a few uber-designers, who gave us some invaluable feedback.

Here’s some pictures, mostly of people (little of the conference events themselves, sorry). We’ll post more pictures here in a few days.

The deadline for the Turbulence juried international net.art competition is March 31st. They’ll be giving 5 commissions of $5k each, and they’re looking for:

Projects that experiment with new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity and engage the user as an active participant. Collaborations may be between visual artists, sound artists, programmers, scientists, and others. Proposed works may include the use of wireless devices such as cell phones and palm pilots to access and add to the experience of the net.art work.

The Flash game Grow has been sweeping through the blogosphere for a couple of months now – it recently hit the IDT program at Tech, distracting people for a week of addictive play. When you first start playing, the placement of objects on the sphere and their transformations seem random – there’s no reason to prefer placing one object before another. Discovering the internal logic that governs the transformations of the initially abstract elements is the primary addictive pull of the game.

Excerpts from the announcement of this year’s Digital Storytelling Festival (mentioned previously 1 2, book):

The 7th annual Digital Storytelling Festival will be held June 10-12, 2004 in the majestic and storied surroundings of Sedona Arizona. The Festival will convene once again to inspire, educate, invigorate and galvanize the Digital Storytelling Community.

Digital Storytelling, the use of digital technology to create media-rich stories that impart meaning appeals and has become a much recognized solution in the areas of education and training, entertainment and creative design, personal and legacy storytelling, community building and corporate identity through branding and marketing. The Digital Storytelling Festival is considered the premiere arena for showcasing and discussing these solutions and applications.

Er, I just spent way too much time playing gameLab’s puzzler WorldBuilder, available on the Lego site. I did stop doing the bonus goals after a while, at least, and managed to forego playing past world one…

I guess my excuse is that, since I don’t have my Atari Lynx handy, I can’t play Crystal Mines II or Chip’s Challenge. WorldBuilder isn’t too shabby, though.

Joe Tabbi spoke here at the Institute for Cognitive Science on Wednesday and did a great deal to help me (and, I think, the cognitive science researchers in attendance) understand what a cogntivie approach to literary criticism is, and, more broadly, how different disciplines can learn from each other. The talk was part of the IRCS/Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Brain and Language series.