Grand Text Auto

Anders Nilsen’s
latest Drawn & Quarterly publication is a formidable follow-up to Big Questions. The accordion book holds the human stories of forgotten (and current) gods, told in text and striking silhouettes.

Long ago (well, at the end of 2012) I was asked by .Cent magazine, a free-to-read, nicely designed online multimedia publication out of London, for a few comments about my work and my approach to electronic literature. Amazingly, having recently unearthed my responses, I find that they are still relevant! You can read my answers and the rest of the issue in its full splendor, but, very belatedly, I’ll offer my response here as well:

The latest technical report (or “Trope Report”) to issue from the Trope Tank is TROPE-14-01, “New Novel Machines: Nanowatt and World Clock“ by Nick Montfort:

(My Philosoraptor question for the day…)

Check out Tully Hansen’s riff on one of the poems from bpNichpol’s First Screening – authentic or not …

Our lab director Mary Flanagan and her long time collaborator Helen Nissenbaum are proud to announce the release of Values at Play in Digital Games, just published by MIT Press! The book starts from the idea that human principles, or values, are already embedded in any game. They then present a practical framework for not only identifying values in games, but guiding designers to design for values in their work.

Inspired by the Value-Sensitive Design community and critical technical practice proponents, the authors started this values-centered game design movement with the Values at Play project, which features a curriculum, video interviews with designers, free design tools, and more.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) was recently awarded a $449,641 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to research and test new means of using crowdsourcing and gaming to support the enrichment of some 40 million documents from the BHL. We are excited to announce that as part of this grant, Tiltfactor has been selected by BHL consortium member, the Missouri Botanical Garden, as the designer to develop games to aid in the verification of transcribed field notes and other documents in BHL’s vast collection!

We have great news for Tiltfactor fans in the UK! Our games Buffalo and Awkward Moment are finally shipping to the UK with the online retail partner Uncommon Goods!

The games are incredibly popular! Thanks, fans, for making it all happen!! Now, along with our new games (hush hush!) and nifty research, getting our games to the Continent is our next priority. We receive many many requests for games, including Grow a Game, all across Europe, and we know shipping is a real bear. We’re hoping to make this easier soon!

If you’ve been looking for my latest book, #!, and are looking to buy it online, check isbn.nu. At the moment of posting, it’s available from three sellers, one on pre-order. Barnes & Noble is the bookseller with the lowest price and fastest delivery; Amazon.com offers to get it to you 3-4 weeks later.

In Cambridge, I have yet to see the book on shelves, but I know copies are at least on order (if not readied for purchase) at the MIT Press Bookstore and the Harvard Bookstore. And, Grolier Poetry Book Shop also had a few copies.

Clocks are great machines to design, at least from my perspective as a designer of software machines. My classes have had unusual clock design as an exercise; time-telling systems are not interactive, provide a lot of freedom to the designer, and yet require programmers to develop general functions that work for any time of the day. I know that Michael Mateas and Paolo Pedercini have students program clocks, too. I’ve appreciated software clocks by John Maeda and others, and it’s nice to have a clock as a standard example in Processing.

I can no longer keep myself from commenting on the Facebook “emotional manipulation” study. Alas. Here are several points.

• Do you want your money back?
• Don’t we only know about this study done on 689,003 people because it was written up and reported on in a prestigious journal?
• Could it be that other studies might have been done, or might be going on right now, or might happen in the future, and we might know nothing about them because their results will be kept as proprietary information?

…is really excellent. Anyone interested in Harry’s work, or, more broadly, the Oulipo, should read it. Thanks, of course, to Barbara Henning for doing the interview and EOAGH for publishing it.

Tiltfactor researcher Geoff recently represented the lab (and the Metadata Games project in particular) at the 2014 Human Computation Roadmap Summit, held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, from June 18-20. This 2.5 day workshop, which brought together a diverse array of scholars, researchers, and industry representatives from the field of human computation, focused on identifying key success stories and laying out potential future research directions concerning the use of various facets of human computation (including systems such as crowdsourcing platforms, social networks, and online games) for the betterment of society. In addition to utilizing a number of unique and creative approaches to trigger thought and discussion (e.g., an illuminating conversation with scientist and author David Brin centering on the value of science fiction in highlighting future horizons for human computation), the summit gave participants the opportunity to form smaller working groups to devise and iteratively refine a set of detailed research roadmaps for the potential employment of human computation to address a particular social cause or issue.

The New York Times has an article (online today, in print tomorrow) entitled “Text Games in a New Era of Stories,” about ye olde interactive fiction and new-fangled manifestations of it, including Ms. Porpentine’s Howling Dogs and Ms. Short’s Blood & Laurels.

(Okay, it must be admitted that even The New York Times didn’t refer to the author of Howling Dogs as “Ms. Porpentine.”)

Exciting news for Polish-readers (and, I think, others): The new issue of Techsty, number 9, is out. You might think that a “Techsty” is just a place where infopigs like me live, but it’s actually a long-running site (since 2001) on digital literature, with an esteemed journal that has been published since 2003.

Everything you need to know to print out and bind a copy of Left Cartridge, a zine documenting the Learning Games Initiative, is online.

Crazy idea? Of course. And yet Zach Whalen has been doing it, quite successfully, on Tumblr. For instance, here’s his brand-aware version of Brion Gysin’s permutation poem:

And his speedrun of Lexia to Perplexia:

Not to mention the excellent staticy CRTs, captured from films and TV, not to mention the exquisite and worth-the-trip Zen for GIF.

Martin Schemitsch (a.k.a. Martinland) has compiled and released a disk to accompany our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, one that’s full of BASIC and assembly programs. These include the programs in the book and the later, more compact versions of our demo thread. The disk was just released at Commodore-Treffen Graz $14, and of course the disk image is available for download. It’s a nice companion to the 10 PRINT book and a Commodore 64 emulator, although, as you can see, it also works perfectly well on a vintage Commodore 64.

Following up the excellent ELO conference, Mark Sample offers a post on “Closed Bots and Green Bots” which divides bots in a very compelling, interesting, and productive way.

The Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University has shared a video of the lecture I gave there on May 1st, 2014 “An Emerging Canon? Mapping a Field through Database Visualization.” The talk covers the ELMCIP project and offers a summary of the paper I published this month in the electronic book review: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/exploding

Video documentation excerpt of June 17, 2014 CAVE2 performance of Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project. Performance at University of Illinois Chicago, Electronic Visualization Lab.

Earlier this month Tiltfactor game designer Max Seidman represented the lab at the annual Games for Health conference in Boston. The conference is exactly what it sounds like: a place where game experts, health professionals, and health stakeholders come together to share innovations in improving health and health care through games, as well as to be inspired to make further breakthroughs!

My new book of programs/poems, #! (pronounced “Shebang”), has just been published by Counterpath.

Read all about it on the press’s page for #!.

The book consists of poetic programs and their outputs. The programs in the book are all free software, and in case you don’t want to type them in, the longer ones are all available in my “code” directory.

I hope you’ll get a copy at your local independent bookseller.

My new book of programs/poems, #! (pronounced “Shebang”), has just been published by Counterpath.

Read all about it on the press’s page for #!.

The book consists of poetic programs and their outputs. The programs in the book are all free software, and in case you don’t want to type them in, the longer ones are all available in my “code” directory.

I hope you’ll get a copy at your local independent bookseller.

A special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG) is now out — I mention it because I was one of the editors, and the issue deals with computational narrative and games.

Here’s the link to the computational narrative and games issue. It was edited by Ian Horswill, Nick Montfort and Michael Young. And here’s what is in it:

Guest Editorial
Horswill, I.D; Montfort, N; Young, R.M
p 92-96

Social Story Worlds With Comme il Faut
McCoy, J. ; Treanor, M. ; Samuel, B. ; Reed, A.A. ; Mateas, M. ; Wardrip-Fruin, N.

p 97-112

Versu—A Simulationist Storytelling System
Evans, R. ; Short, E.
p 113-130