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Thanks to past GTxA hosts: the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
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There’s a nice article by Illya Szilak, with a discussion/reporting by Melinda White, about the Library of Congress Electronic Literature Showcase. This ran April 3-5; I was down there to read from Ad Verbum and Taroko Gorge and to speak about electronic literature’s history with libraries on the last day of the event and exhibit. And it was an excellent exhibit.
Thanks to Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara, the Trope Tank has a new technical report, TROPE-13-01: “Electronic Literature for All: Performance in Exhibits and Public Readings.”
This report covers readings of interactive fiction done by the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, the Boston area IF group, and the exhibit Games by the Book, discussed previously on here. But there is much more detail in this report about how these attempts managed to share computational works (works that are both games and e-lit) with the public. If you are interested in outreach and presentations of this sort, please take a look.
In 2013, my wife was part of the Atakan campaign for rector at UIB. When the opposition in a debate accused Team Atakan of knowing nothing about digitalization, Jill started up an “Atakan Meme” facebook page. I wanted to do what I could to help the campaign.
On May 10th, at the Computer History Museum, UC Santa Cruz will host some of the world’s most exciting thinkers on interactive storytelling for Inventing the Future of Games 2013. Rather than focus on yesterday’s tips and tricks, our focus is on how the future of interactive storytelling is being invented now. There will be talks, panels, discussion, and live demonstrations — including, I am excited to share, the first-ever public demonstration of a major, not-yet-announced interactive storytelling technology being developed by UC Santa Cruz and multiple partner organizations.
The Tiltfactor team is off next week to THREE exciting events! First is our RePlay Health Game at the Society of General Internal Medicine on Friday April 26, 2013, from 3-4:30pm. Our team (Max and Geoff, with special guest star Dr. Pat Lee) will be playing our sport to help reconsider health care delivery initiatives with doctors from around the globe! Next, our research team (Cote and Geoff) will be presenting at the annual American Educational Research Association meeting in San Francisco. The conference theme is “Education and Poverty” and the team will be presenting our paper, “Poverty, Parity, and Play? The Possibility of ‘Unlearning’ Inhibiting Gender Biases through Games.”
We are pleased to announce that EIS co-director Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and myself, Eric Kaltman, along with Christy Caldwell at UCSC Library and Henry Lowood of Stanford University Library, have been awarded an NEH Digital Start Up Grant aimed at investigating archival and preservation methods for digital software and games! The grant covers the development of an initial archival methodology focused on the preservation of computer games created for academic research. We have chosen UCSC’s Prom Week as the case object for our investigation, and are extremely honored to be helping further archival research with an EIS created game. The project will focus not only on the game object itself, but also on its development process. Our hope is to enumerate, categorize and potentially archive all relevant secondary documentation along with Prom Week to gain a greater understanding of the requirements for preserving the process and creation of digital games.
18 Cadence is a new piece of electronic literature that’s almost definitely not a game, something less than a book, and explores a rarely tackled corner of interactivity in interactive narrative: the choices and decisions of how to tell a story, what bits to include, what to leave out, how to arrange them. It’s available for free on the web or as an iPad app.
Since the news has apparently reached a certain social network (of which I am not a member), I’ll mention on here that with a minimum of fuss and no prior announcement, Flourish Klink and I got married today.
A challenge that arose was writing wedding vows that captured that essential and positive semantics of the traditional statements, but which acknowledged that two people can be, in some ways, opposites, looking at things from different directions while also agreeing to live as partners and to make the same commitment to one another.
The following is the third in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Here, interns Andrea and Viviana briefly describe their prototyping process for designing a competitive multi-player mobile game:
Our team was assigned with the task of creating a mobile, multiplayer metadata collection game that incorporates elements of fast paced competition and “one upping” your competitor. The catch is that we had to turn what worked as a competitive synchronous game into an asynchronous game. How would we enable players to form an exciting attachment to the game and be competitive with each other as each player interacted with the game over varying time spans? What would make players come back and play another round?
This week at the annual Game Developer’s Conference Education Summit, Tiltfactor Director Mary Flanagan has been called out to a ‘Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch,’ where leading game design instructors battle it out by revealing secrets to their game design teaching, their design philosophies, and pedagogical quirks. Speakers include yours truly (Mary), USC Interactive Media Division chair and Game Innovation Lab director Tracy Fullerton, UC Santa Cruz Expressive Intelligence Studio co-director and Expressive Processing author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Rules of Play and the Game Design Reader co-author and NYU Game Center professor Eric Zimmerman. The program will be MC’d by designer Justin Hall! Don’t miss it — the session ID is 823443.
This past week Tiltfactor sent a few versions of our Handwashing game to Haiti. Late last year, the former Minister of Health of Rwanda, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, requested that we try and come up with a solution, in the form of a game, to help encourage children to wash their hands more. Both in the United States and abroad, washing your hands is one of the most important ways to avoid getting sick, but too many children don’t do it. So, we are trying to help!
We hope that our testing in Haiti will reveal which of the various different illustration options (seen above) they prefer!
The following is the second in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Below, interns Alannah and Rebecca briefly describe their process for designing a tag verification digital game:
One classic downfall deserves another: Hitler reacting to the cancellation of Google Reader.
The University of California, Santa Cruz is hiring a new Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. This is someone who works full time helping students and faculty do interesting projects, thinks about the future technical direction of the program (and has a budget to purchase technical items worth investigating), helps people figure out how to exhibit and distribute their work, and manages the DANM spaces in the Digital Arts Research Center (including a black box theater, a white box gallery, a rapid prototyping lab, etc). The starting salary range is $57,500-$80,500 and review of applications begins March 20th. Please help spread the word, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!
Nick, a game design intern, and I teamed up for this term’s metadata game design challenge. Our assignment was to create a game designed to collect metadata to be associated with audio files, in order to make these files more accessible and retrievable via search engines. For this task, Nick and I (mostly Nick) designed a “Words-with-Friends”-style smart phone game, called Lost In Transmission, in which players are presented with segments from two sound clips: 1 “solution clip” (for our initial prototype of the game, we used the audio from an old school Chevrolet commercial) and 1 trash clip (for our prototype, the audio from an old coffee commercial). These clips were chopped into segments, scrambled, and divided randomly among players. By assigning tags to their segments, sharing them with each other, and collaborating to differentiate the “solution clip” from the “trash clip” and place the “solution clip” segments in the proper order, players work to accomplish the tagging required for providing accurate, quality metadata.
I send you, dear readers, the press release from Mark Saltveit
(palindromist, editor of The Palindromist, and stand-up comic) about yesterday’s award ceremonies, complete with amusing references to me – and I send my congratulations to Aric Maddux and the other winners!
Palindromes Win at SymmyS Awards
Shock as First-time Writer Takes Grand Prize With Serious Message On Pill Addiction; Discovered Via Tweet
PORTLAND, OR – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 11, 2013.
Aric Maddux of Indianapolis, Indiana won the Grand Prize for Best Palindrome at
the 2012 SymmyS Awards Sunday night with the first palindrome he ever wrote.
His winning entry, a rare “word-unit palindrome,” was a dark warning about the
dangers of prescription pill addiction:
This winter’s Winter Anthology, a collection of contemporary literature informed by history and older art, 21st century science and philosophy, and the ending of print culture, is now out.
This is volume three, and contains work by Joanna Howard, Andrew Zawacki, Andrew Grace, Ryan Flaherty, Srikanth Reddy, Ponç Pons, Lee Posna
Louis Armand, Dan Beachy-Quick, Steven Toussaint, and Nick Montfort & Stephanie Strickland.
I’m delighted to have our poetry generator “Sea and Spar Between” published in this context.
By Nick Montfort and William Gillespie. Illustrated by Shelley Jackson. Designed by Ingrid Ankerson. (24 pp., acknowledged by the Oulipo as the longest literary palindrome.) Spineless Books, 2002. $16.
By Nick Montfort. Edition of 80. 4 pp. No Press, Calgary, Canada, 2013. $2.50.
In New York, Saint Mark’s Bookshop has copies of these two books for sale; in Cambridge, MA, they are available from the MIT Press Bookstore. 2002 is also available from the publisher, Spineless Books, and other online and local bookstores. I believe that No Press is out of copies of The First M Numbers.
Poet Michael Leong “tagged” me, not by spray-painting me or by assigning me a folksonomical string, but by sending me the following template of interview questions. This process is part of the project “The Next Big Thing,” in which people answer robotic, monomaniacal questions about recent or forthcoming books. I was supposed to post this on Wednesday, apparently, so it’s a good thing that I can set the date arbitrarily on my blog posts.
What is the working title of the book?
All the Way for the Win.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Decades of intense poetic engagement with the English language.
Amodern has just launched, and it’s not asexy…
Announcing the launch of AMODERN:
A new peer-reviewed, open access scholarly journal devoted to the
study of media, culture, and poetics.Issue 1: The Future of the Scholarly Journal
Editorial
Scott Pound“We Have Never Done It That Way Before”
an interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick by Michael Nardone“Towards Philology in a a New Key”
an interview with Jerome J. McGann by Scott Pound“Scholarly Publishing: Micro Units and the Macro Scale”
Johanna Drucker“The Grammatization of Scholarship”
Benjamin J. Robertson
At UC Santa Cruz we are about to launch (pending final approvals) a new year-long (12 month) MS degree focused on combining technical and design innovation — to create novel possibilities for the games of today, to enable new types of games, and to explore a wide variety of next-generation playable experiences. The degree will admit students who have a background in computer science and knowledge of games. Target students include industry professionals seeking new knowledge (e.g., advanced AI techniques) and/or wanting to experience new roles (e.g., engineers seeking a move into design) as well as talented recent undergraduates who have completed technically-focused game degrees. The application deadline for this year is March 15th. The degree will be offered through our Silicon Valley campus and will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program.
Adventure chooses you. Here are two recently declassified Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style stories from the Eastern Bloc, part of the “You Will Select A Decision” series which was written in 1987 in Russian, translated to English, but intercepted by the CIA before its influence could reach our shores. Thanks to Brendan Patrick Hennessy and the magic of Twine, both 1 – Small Child In Woods and the romp through American history 2 – Cow Farming Activities on the Former West are now available at the “You Will Select A Decision” site. Thanks to Stuart Moulthrop for the tip.
Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College is seeking applications for a postdoctoral research position in Learning Sciences and Assessment for the 2013-2014 academic year. The postdoctoral researcher will be affiliated with Tiltfactor Laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org), the leading group in values-conscious game design and research, which is led by Dr. Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Professor of Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth.
A journalist just asked me if there were any famous authors involved with electronic literature.
I could have dropped a few names, but instead I wrote:
There are, but revolutions in literature do not happen because famous people start using new technologies. They happen because of innovation that comes from young people, new authors, and new readers. Think about important literary movements – how many of them were started when already-famous authors changed their behavior?
Maybe some of you can think of counterexamples in which literary movements were started by already-established literary figures. If so, I’ll stand corrected.
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