Grand Text Auto

Yes we have Purple Blurb! The first event is in less than a week – sorry for the short notice; I hope you locals can join us. Here are the details:

As filmmaker Brett Neveu explains in his video about Christmas Bytes, he’s aiming to make the resonant Christmas movie for our (or at least my) generation, when the coveted item was not an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, but rather the Atari Video Computer System.

Ian Bogost and I donated a signed copy of Racing the Beam to the campaign, and there are a raft of other 80s-related enticements. For instance, I tend the judge the wisdom of my actions by whether anonymous San Francisco band The Residents are doing the same, and in this case, I am pleased to say that they also have contributed CDs — and are lined up to do the original soundtrack for the film.

The tickets are now diamonds!

Ian Horswill, Michael Young and I are editing a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG), and your submissions are invited — until October 5, 2011. We have extended the deadline two weeks.

Specifically:

The T-CIAIG Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games solicits papers on all topics related to narrative in computational media and of relevance to games, including but not limited to:

• Storytelling systems
• Story generation
• Drama management
• Interactive fiction
• Story presentation, including performance, lighting, staging, music and camera control

As mentioned here before, Ian Horswill, Michael Young and I are editing a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG), and your submissions are invited. Specifically:

The T-CIAIG Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games solicits papers on all topics related to narrative in computational media and of relevance to games, including but not limited to:

• Storytelling systems
• Story generation
• Drama management
• Interactive fiction
• Story presentation, including performance, lighting, staging, music and camera control
• Dialog generation
• Authoring tools
• Human-subject evaluations of systems

As mentioned here before, Ian Horswill, Michael Young and I are editing a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG), and your submissions are invited. Specifically:

The T-CIAIG Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games solicits papers on all topics related to narrative in computational media and of relevance to games, including but not limited to:

• Storytelling systems
• Story generation
• Drama management
• Interactive fiction
• Story presentation, including performance, lighting, staging, music and camera control
• Dialog generation
• Authoring tools
• Human-subject evaluations of systems

Today was the official opening of the new Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth, the new home of Tiltfactor! Thanks to the Black Family, the other donors, and everyone who made “Black Arts” become a reality! Also, a shout out to everyone who stopped by the lab and played some games with us. More pics on our facebook page. Rockin!

Modeling health system dynamics with a game of tag about zombies? Sounds impossible, but the Tiltfactor team experimented with just such a wacky game on the Dartmouth Green! The human team runs away from the zombies, because if they get tagged then they have to change teams. Meanwhile, the humans can choose to call in one type of specialist per round: either the soldiers to stun the zombies (you can’t kill them, duh), the medics to heal tagged humans, or the scientists to turn the zombies back into humans.

Games by the Book
Videogame Adaptations of Literary Works in the Hayden Library

The Hayden Library (in MIT’s Building 14) is hosting an interactive exhibition starting on September 7th. Visitors to the second floor will be able to play four videogames that are adapted from literary works, from Sophocles and Shakespeare to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Douglas Adams. The exhibit explores the range of approaches taken to create video games of literary works, The result is often whimsical, turning the worlds of these stories into spaces to be explored, often transforming them according video game conventions.

Lady Gaga is the larval stage of Yo-Landi Vi$$er. The previous, embryonic stage: Katy Perry.

Right after getting back from the crazy awesome that is Gen Con, the Tiltfactor team went into packing mode, as we are moving into a new building! Two years in the making, the Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth College is a state-of-the-art facility that, along with the Hopkins Center and the Hood Museum, will serve as an intellectual and cultural hub in Dartmouth’s new Arts District.

The Black Family Visual Arts Center official dedication is Friday September 14. We are very excited about enjoying the new space while we further our research and games development.

Next week, among the redwoods of the UC Santa Cruz campus, we will host the Media Systems gathering. It will be the first joint activity of the NSF, NEH, and NEA — and we are also sponsored by both Microsoft Studios and Microsoft Research.

Some might wonder what such disparate funders, not to mention the people they are bringing together from different fields, could possibly have to say to each other. In ten years I predict we’ll ask, instead, “What took so long?”

Implementation has stuck, and it’s now bound as a book. It’s a beautifully designed full-color hardback that documents this project about the war on terror, allowing the reader to view photographs showing where the novel manifested itself while also reading the entire text of the novel.

Greetings from GenCon! Our booth is a fantastic success and we’re thankful to all of the many GenCon attendees who have stopped by to play and those who not only play but pick up their own copies of ZOMBIEPOX (sold out), Buffalo (nearing extinction too) and Awkward Moment!

Bonnie Barber’s new piece on recent lab projects, including our National Endowment for the Humanities funding, our booth at GenCon, and my involvement in a White House consortium on games, is now online on Dartmouth Now. In the quick article I discuss the promise for games for change and social impact to make a difference.

What a busy summer at the Tiltfactor Laboratory! As we have been preparing for GenCon and working on our games, we also spent some time at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH hosting a Gamecrafting Workshop for local youth.

We had a wonderful week getting to know our campers and helping them design games! On Monday, campers played games such as Awkward Moment™ and Battleship to learn about games and what makes a game fun. On Tuesday, campers incorporated the game design ideas they learned from Dr. Flanagan and the Tilt staff to create the first prototypes of their games.

“Rough Cuts: Media and Design in Process,” a set of “middle-state artifacts” curated by Kari Kraus, has just been presented as part of The New Everyday, a project at MediaCommons.

My contribution is a printout of “Taroko Gorge” in the original Klingon Python. I also offer some discussion of this printed page, representing one phase of a poetry generator that has been reworked and plundered more than a dozen times.

Among several notable new articles in ebr (electronic book review), please find “Shuffle Literature and the Hand of Fate” by Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort:

Zuzana Husárová and Nick Montfort up the ante for experimental writing by examining the category of “shuffle literature.” What is shuffle literature? Simply put: books that are meant to be shuffled. Using formal reading of narrative and themes, but also a material reading of construction and production, Husárová and Montfort show that there are many writing practices and readerly strategies associated with this diverse category of literature.

Alternate (actually, rejected) titles for the famous journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, recently revealed in Jacket2.

I don’t know about you, but Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’s cutting room floor is often better than what ends up stuffed into my projector.

For instance, I see that Rhizome, which wound up being used, is on the list.

Maybe the next interactive fiction journal could be called Inventory.

And, I think Salad is still a great title – maybe even a better one today. It’s a dish best served cold.

These are unedited search queries, all recorded in this sequence and all from the same “anonymized” user, on the evening of 2006-04-07. They were found in the user-ct-test-collection-03.txt, one of the leaked AOL search query files from 2006.

jaimiewantsahondacivic
www.iwantahondacivic.com
jaimiedeservessomethingthistime
mickisselfish.com
www.selfishhusbands.com
hondacivicshondacivicshondacivics
iwantahondacivic.com
hondacivicforjaimie
jaimiewantsahondacivicplease
if you love me then please buy me a civic

News of a strange new social network, Monolyth, reaches us from December of this year and from Chris McDowall.

To sate the great appetites of the system, which will only publish messages at least 140,000 characters long (and will abbreviate longer ones), authors turn to unusual techniques.

One of these is generating massive texts using modified versions of Taroko Gorge, one of which is included in the blog post.

Ian Horswill, Michael Young and I are editing a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG), and your submissions are invited. Specifically:

The T-CIAIG Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games solicits papers on all topics related to narrative in computational media and of relevance to games, including but not limited to:

• Storytelling systems
• Story generation
• Drama management
• Interactive fiction
• Story presentation, including performance, lighting, staging, music and camera control
• Dialog generation
• Authoring tools
• Human-subject evaluations of systems

For Immediate Release
Contact: info @ maryflanagan.com

August 1, 2012 (Hanover, NH) – Tiltfactor Laboratory proudly presents two new games: buffalo™ and Awkward Moment™. buffalo is a card game of quick wits and zany combinations that requires players to flex their recollection muscles. In each round, players race to make matches using cards listing noun and adjective descriptors. The first to shout out the name of a real person or fictional character who matches the descriptors on two or more word cards, claims the matched cards, and flips over a new noun/adjective pair. When the deck runs out, the player who collected the most cards wins.

(pdf version)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
contact -at- tiltfactor -dot- org
(603) 646-1007

July 31, 2012 (Hanover, NH) – The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced that Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan is one of seven award recipients in the endowment’s inaugural Digital Humanities Implementation Grant program. The Digital Humanities Implementation grants “support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field.”

It’s not bigger and longer than Star Wars, but it is more uncut: “Death of the Author [Psycho Shower Scene RECON]“ by Dick Whyte. This, somewhat like the later famous Star Wars video, is a “reconstruction of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene from Psycho using amateur YouTube remakes.” 57 of them.

If you got that and you’re ready to increase the avant-garde, see also “John Cage – 4’33″ [May ’68 Comeback Special RECON]“ and “Andy Warhols Eat A Hamburger [38 Scenes From YouTube RECON].” All from 2010, but recalled here for your enjoyment.