Grand Text Auto

… that Jesper (“The Ludologist”, and frequent commenter on GTxA) has successfully defended his PhD, at the IT University of Copenhagen. His dissertation is entitled, “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds“.

Congrats!

Cosign 2004: Computational Semiotics, will be held at the University of Split, Croatia, September 14-16, 2004.

The creation and interpretation of meaning in interactive digital media requires the manipulation of signs and/or pre-existing structures of meaning. The focus of COSIGN is the way in which meaning can be created by, encoded in, understood by, or produced through, the computer. As such, it is of interest to computer scientists, digital artists and designers, HCI and AI practitioners, and a broad range of other critics, theorists and researchers.

The full call for participation is available here. The submission date for papers and artworks is April 29; the submission date for posters and demonstrations is May 24th. The programme and proceedings of the COSIGN 2001, COSIGN 2002 and COSIGN 2003 conferences are all available online.

Continuing our Spanish trend: There’s a new issue of the newsletter of SPAC (Sociedad para la Preservación de las Aventuras Conversacionales / Society for the Preservation of Interactive Fiction) just out. (Disable JavaScript before visiting the Spanish SPAC #33 or the hosting company’s ads will obliterate the content.) The issue includes an interview with me which is available in English on my site.

For San Francisco Bay Area GTxA readers, there are two public presentations of the National Academies of Science report, Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity on Jan. 22 and 23. This report, authored by an all-star committee of artists and scientists, explores the ways in which information technology and art mutually inform each other, describing promising areas of interdisciplinary art/CS work, and proposing models to foster such interdisciplinary work.

This report was previously mentioned in a GTxA discussion of the artist/programmer debate.

The book Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature, edited by Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens, offers close readings of work by Mark Amerika, Darren Aronofsky, M.D. Coverley, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Rick Pryll, Geoff Ryman and Stephanie Strickland. The editors contrast their aims with hypertext theory of the 80s and 90s that saw hypertextuality as a literal realization of poststructuralist thought. Instead of abstract theorizing, their book seeks to identify interesting points and problematics through detailed, concrete engagement with specific works.

An article by José Luis de Vicente in the January 9 El Mundo takes on some important issues with virtual worlds (focusing on MMORPGs) and describes some of the ways in which what goes on in them is real. Here’s the original article in Spanish, or you can see how well the Google translation reads. Here are some highlights that I translated:

I was very pleased to note that the first two English reviews of Twisty Little Passages were posted online yesterday. One of these reviews is from an IF author, editor of the SPAG Newsletter, and longtime, active member of the IF community, Paul O’Brian. The other, entitled “Wor(l)d Games,” is from Matt Kirchenbaum, assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of the forthcoming book Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality (MIT Press, 2005).

The new issue of Six Billion is titled “Veterans of Foreign Wars.” Six Billion is an online magazine that “showcases narrative journalism’s many forms — text, photography, sound, film/video, illustration, and interactive — in a single, versatile medium.” The new issue includes:

• BETTY MORRIS’ dispatches from late-1930s Europe, on the brink of “the great war”
• A film by Cambodian director RITHY PANH that confronts Khmer Rouge agents of torture
• WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN’s portrait of the war on immigration at the U.S.-Mexican border
• A radio-documentary of disaster in Afghanistan by SCOTT CARRIER
• And more …

Ken Perlin, a longtime pioneer of computer graphics and interactive virtual characters at NYU, has 77 “pages of his sketchbook” online at the Whitney Artport — an extensive collection of the inspiring interactive graphical applets Ken has written over the years. He’s the January installment of the rotating-monthly Gate Pages (which also recently featured GTxA’s Noah). (via Rhizome NetArtNews)

Also still at the Artport since about a year ago, is the amazing software art group show CODeDOC — more really great stuff. (Leading me to discover CODeDOC II, part of last September’s Ars Electronica.)

At GTxA we tend to focus on the non-non-fiction uses of new media, but this is worth noting. The competition for unpublished new media articles. The deadline is April 30th.

Yesterday I attended Jan Rune Holmevik’s dissertation defense at the University of Bergen. While I haven’t yet had a chance to read it in its entirety, from attending his defense, I can report that his dissertation, TraceBack: MOO, Open Source, and the Humanities, includes a great historical overview of the open source movement, as well as a history of LinguaMOO and the development of Encore. His dissertation in Humanistic Informatics also included a program, the Encore MOO system that he and Cynthia Haynes developed. In conjunction with his successful defense, he also released Encore 4.0, which is is distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Gratulerer Jan Rune!

Find out.

You can look at the pages Google determines to be “related” in a new way using Google Browser from TouchGraph. Well, a fairly new way – the system has been out for a while and it or its cousins (Amazon Browser, LiveJournal Browser) have been mentioned here and there, but my advisor, Michael Kearns, showed it to me today since it’s one of the tools we’ll be using in a new undergraduate class this semester, “Networked Life.”

Brutal, bloody images, racist messages, and the suggestion that anyone who creates video games dealing with unpleasant aspects of life should be strangled. It’s all packaged in the local TV news.

Apparently in early November someone named Difenderfer said, speaking of Grand Theft Auto, that “My mission in the game is to kill the Haitians!” Sure, there is confusion about whether Difenderfer is a character in the game or is an outraged yet addicted “viewer” who wasn’t willing to appear on camera. But the basic point is still clear: People shouldn’t be using their television sets to play video games! How can the local TV news and our country’s advertising apparatus defecate down our throats if we’re busy using the TV to expore a rich, simulated word that critiques American culture?

Whilst in Texas recently, I read Jill Walker’s Dr. art. thesis, “Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World.” One important issue it tackled was one that I noted, but didn’t try to tackle, many years ago. It’s the question of what it means when a “real” action in the world (such as your really sending an email addressed to Online Caroline) is also to be an action in a fictional world (given that Online Caroline is not a real person, you have sent an email in the fictional world, too).

Chris Crawford recently announced Phrontisterion 5, his fifth annual conference on interactive storytelling, to be held June 26 and 27, 2004, at his home in southern Oregon. Chris says:

This is a most unconventional conference, concentrating on discussion rather than presentation. There will be no lectures or panel discussions; all the attendees (only 30 will be invited) sit in a circle under the towering fir trees and compare thoughts in a structured format.

Phrontisterion offers a unique opportunity to delve deeply into the issues surrounding interactive storytelling with some of the best minds in the world. If you are interested, please contact me by email and I shall provide you with the details.

Well, the Open Directory did create a category for this, so in fairness, they had to create a category for this.

An indie-oriented game site, GameTunnel, has posted its suggestions for the top ten independent games of 2003. (via Slashdot Games)

Interestingly, only one of these games was a finalist in either the 2002, 2003 or 2004 Independent Games Festival. I wonder if this is because these games just aren’t entered in the IGF, or the IGF and GameTunnel have pretty different criteria for the “best” indie games? I’m guessing GameTunnel favors popularity and fun, and IGF favors more radical designs and experimentation.

I just ran across Sent, which is being billed as “the first major exhibition of phonecam art in the United States.” The exhibition will include contributions both by amateurs and by invited professional artists and celebs, including Weird Al Yankovic.

Ludologist Jesper Juul has posted the abstract of this Ph.D. disseration. In the dissertation, he presents a theory of video games, argues that comptuers have special affinity for game-playing, and pits the rules of video games against the simulated, fictional worlds in which they take place. To develop his approach he has drawn upon “literary theory, film theory, computer science, sciences of complexity, economic game theory, game design literature, and some psychology.”

The defense is January 16. Jesper, good luck! The abstract certain has whet my appetite; I’m looking forward to reading the whole document when it’s available.

Each month on the empyre email discussion list — “an arena for the discussion of media arts practice” — a new set of people are invited to lead the discussion, and this month we have Jill Scott and two GTxA’ers, Nick and Noah. The topic: “Nova Media Storia: Histories and Characters”.

Is new media a field? Does it have a history? What history? And, how does it matter?

Those new to empyre may enjoy perusing the past guests and extensive archives.

Artist and frequent GTxA commenter Brandon Rickman has begun a new (or refurbished an old) blog called antimodal, that kicks off with a critique of Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play. Added to the blogroll.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Tempest 2000 — an excellent game that, along with the movie Tron, certainly was an inspiration for Rez. So I thought I’d check out what the designer of this game, the Yak (a.k.a. Jeff Minter), has been up to. As it turns out, this programmer of true cult classics, whose company is named Llamasoft, is collaborating with Peter Molyneux (Black & White) of Lionhead Studios on a GameCube puzzle-shooter.

Hey everybody, a new issue of Game Studies is out, squeezed in under the wire as their second issue for 2003. The articles include:

“On Virtual Economies”, by Edward Castronova
“Sim Sin City – Some thoughts about Grand Theft Auto 3”, by Gonzalo Frasca
“‘I Lose, Therefore I Think’ – A Search for Contemplation amid Wars of Push-Button Glare”, by Shuen-shing Lee
“When Seams Fall Apart- Video Game Space and the Player”, by Laurie Taylor
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown – Interactivity and signification in Head Over Heels”, by Jan Van Looy

(via Ludology.org)

Jill’s recent post on “linktheft” and the fact that I’ve recently read one of the PageRank papers got me thinking about links. Blog spam by those seeking more PageRank has become a real annoyance. We’ve be slogged by spam as well; some other bloggers have taken rather extreme measures in response. I re-read Jill’s paper Links and Power and also looked at some of the descriptions of PageRank online to make sure I understood the article by Larry Page et al. Here are a few observations…