Grand Text Auto

Well this year’s Indiecade, the coolest international festival of independent games, has drawn to a close. The fest attracts small independent game makers and a handful of artists to play, discuss, eat, watch, and play some more. It is a hands-on, grassroots group who comes. Some of my favorite games included the whimsical Hohokum, a line drawing vector based game; Ordnungswissenschaft, a game that integrates stacking blocks in the real world into that of the virtual. Interesting little games also included The Witch; Way, a game that features two player capacity but each as a different point of view, and Halycon, a musical toy and matching game.

A group of sonic and code explorers has been discovering excellent super-short C programs that, piped to an 8-bit audio device, generate music. Here’s the first video and a second video with sounds and code.

Here’s the code for one example, “Lost in Space,” from video #2:


main(t){
for(t=0;;t++)putchar(
((t*(t>>8|t>>9)&46&t>>8))^(t&t>>13|t< <6)
);}

If you are also a righteous Ubuntu user, you can paste that into a file (let’s call it “lost_in_space.c”) and compile it with:

% gcc lost_in_space.c -o lost_in_space

Then, pipe it (or pretend to pipe it, using padsp, since recent versions of Ubuntu don’t have /dev/dsp) to your audio device using:

In the Mass Effect series, you get all the intensity of a first-person shooter combined with a sprawling space-opera plot arc. And, the games have another aspect as well: As pan-galactic dating sims.

In the first two games, your customizable human, Commander Shepherd, who is the same paragon or renegade badass whether he’s black or white, male or female, can get it on with select characters. However, even though this is the way-far future sort of world in which there’s no problem with romance between beings from different planets, she or he can basically have only heterosexual relationships.

maybe make some change, my new interactive story , does not have achievements, leaderboards, or co-op play. Many definitions of “game” might exclude it. Underneath the multimedia components it’s a parser-based interactive fiction, but there’s no space to explore, no objects to take. It’s inspired by a true story about war crimes in Afghanistan. It’s not exactly what most people would call “fun.”

Normally I only mention events that I’m attending or organizing, but I want to announce this Boston-area event even though I’ll be in Chicago and won’t be able to attend.

It’s called Dangerous Readings, and is sponsored by Eastgate Systems. Check out the page to see how you can participate.

There’s nothing really special about this map-looking thing, other than that you can’t get from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner in less than 42 steps (I looks to take 56 or so). What is special here is how quickly we’re going to develop a flexible, style-ready generator for it. Set the clock for 50 lines-of-code, and let’s get started.

That’s right, we’re going to write this map generator right here in the blog post. If you want to follow along at home, download Clingo (a state-of-the-art answer set solver) and fire up your favorite text editor.

The 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition games! They’re out. Go get ‘em.

I’m in Montréal at Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games Concordia University. I’ll be offering some remarks, entitled “Deinventing the Wheel,” about language and interaction. That will be on the next panel, which focuses on Mass Effect 2.

I won’t elaborate right now, but the current panel, which includes the Tale of Tales folks, made me think about the relationship between Passage, Tao, and The Graveyard.

The Foundations of Digital Games conference, which covers research on a broad range of computer game topics, will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA from May 29-June 1, 2012. Magy Seif El-Nasr (Northeastern Univ.) is the conference General Chair, while Mia Consalvo (Concordia Univ.) and Steve Feiner (Columbia Univ.) are the Program Co-Chairs.

The conference will feature workshops immediately before the main conference, along with paper and poster presentations. As in past years, a doctoral consortium will provide a venue for new researchers to highlight their work. The call for papers is out, with full papers due December 19, 2011. Workshop proposals are due October 17, 2011.

In his just-released “Argot Ogre, OK!” Andrew Plotkin presents mash-ups and remixes of (almost) all the “Taroko Gorge” remixes to date (and of course the original “Taroko Gorge”), producing such poignant lines as “LAWN DARTS linger” along with single-source remixes and some different stanza shapes. Anyone interested in this thread of poetry generation projects should check it out and should certainly “view source.” Or don’t, if you don’t want to discover more about the secret of the monkey.

The Tiltfactor team got wind of a grant proposal being approved during GenCon last month, and last week we had our first brainstorming session on different types of games ideas we’re considering.

The goal is to explore the issues and the interpretation of gender, stereotype, and implicit bias. We will be working with middle school-aged girls around the country, thanks to Karen Peterson in association with the National Girls Collaborative Project, a group whose projects involve over 5 million girls. Belinda Gutierrez, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also joined us in our meeting and helped us bounce around ideas. And a big uberthanks to Dr. Jolene Jesse from the National Science Foundation for taking part in our kickoff meeting and being so supportive of our ideas!

The Tiltfactor team was busy at DiGRA 2011. Thursday September 15th, I presented (with  Jonathan Belman)  our paper on the design approach behind POX: Save the People. Friday September 16th, Jonathan Belman shared our latest paper on our Grow-A-Game cards, “Grow-A-Game: A Tool for Values Conscious Design and Analysis of Digital Games,” with audience members on Friday. Read the essays now!

Digra2011-PreventingPox-FlanaganEtAl-Paper

Digra2011 – GrowAGameTool-BelmanNissenbaumFlanaganDiamond
See below for full citations on these articles!

I’ll be following up with written thoughts, but here are a few video highlights courtesy of the Utrecht School of the Arts.

Illustration: Alexis Demetriades

Chris Lewis, a member of the Software Introspection Lab at UC Santa Cruz has his game testing work profiled in Science Notes 2011, in the article “Fixing Glitchy Games” by Donna Hesterman.

Games increasingly have emergent properties brought about by the complex interactions between the player, AI-driven non-player characters, level geometry and items in the game world. Except for the player, all of these have become more complex in the latest generation of AAA titles, leading to an exponential increase in potential interactions. Lewis states it well:

COMPUTER world hacked Mitnick

Digital being apprehended and N.C., It wasn’t five years in prison,

vid-like “A video friend)

Ghost in wizardry

Hacker attuned

recounts are one engineering”

cat-and-computer-to willingly provide

the online con his unknowing targets

What’s happening in Salzburg in September, you ask?

The Salzburg Global Seminar Session #468
Innovating for Value in Health Care Delivery:
Better cross-border learning, smarter adaptation and adoption

Salzburg Global Seminars, a non-profit organization that holds seminars on a variety of worldwide obstacles for humanity, was established in 1947, shortly after World War II in an effort to unite international leaders to solve issues of global concern.

Tiltfactor‘s Mary Flanagan will be giving a keynote at this year’s Digital Games Research Association Conference. “After Leveling Up in the Netherlands (2003), Changing Views in Canada (2005), Situated Play in Japan (2007) and Breaking New Ground in England (2009) the 5th DiGRA Conference returns to the Netherlands for THINK DESIGN PLAY. ” Tiltfactor’s Jonathan Belman is also presenting our new Grow a Game study, and we are co-presenting on our recent POX: Save the People study. We are also participating in the “Building a Game Lab 2.0: Surviving and Thriving” panel,  and a game scholar rant. Check out the schedule and come along if you are near Utrecht!

I keep hearing about this Believer article about palindromes – actually, it’s mostly an article exposing a particular palindromist to readers’ chortles. The article signals no awareness of the palindrome as a literary form, but I appreciate it pointing me to Mr. Duncan’s “A Greenward Palindrome,” written for my local eco-boutique and charming in its topicality.

A community of practice is a set of people who do the same type of work (writing, art, game development, etc.) and who are at least aware of one another and have some interaction with one another. Poets constitute a community of practice, for instance, or at least several significantly interlocking communities of practice. Poets are aware that there are other poets. They read each others’ work. Sometimes they hate one another, which shows that they care.

an event to welcome the Electronic Literature Organization to MIT
and to introduce the ELO to the MIT community
an open house / open mic / open mouse
featuring 5-7 minute presentations and readings
by a host of electronic literature authors (perhaps including you)

[LOCATION] The 6th floor of Fumihiko Maki’s new Media Lab building
in the large multipurpose room (E14-674)

[DATE & TIME] Monday September 19
5:30pm Kickoff, signup for open mic/open mouse begins
6:30pm Open mic/open mouse readings & presentations

an event in the Purple Blurb series
sponsored by Angus N. MacDonald Fund
and the Council for the Arts at MIT

Congrats to Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf), interactive fiction author and active member of our local People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, on the release of his first iPad app: My Secret Hideout. It’s not IF per se, but an interactive narrative toy – or, as Zarf says, “It’s an interactive toy… or rather poem… or artwork… It’s an interactive textual art generator set in a treehouse!” It has no score, possibly because life doesn’t work that way.

Check out Zarf’s page on My Secret Hideout for further details. Or, visit the App Store to nab it.

At MIT TechTV, there’s a new 5-minute video about me and my work, featuring Ad Verbum, Curveship, Taroko Gorge, the ppg256 series and (as examples of really cool things that have been done with computers and that are worth our attention) some productions by others from the demoscene.

Also see the excellent video covering the work of my colleague Fox Harrell and his Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab. Harrell describes his projects, reads from one of them, and discusses his concept of “phantasmal media.” That term provides the title for a book he’s completing for the MIT Press.

Steve McLaughlin interviewed me using the medium of audio recording and has posted the result, along with a photo of me in my office, at Jacket2. In this interview for “Into the Field,” I read from and discuss my book of poems Riddle & Bind and some other curious work.

Today is the last chance to get POX at the preorder discount! So order today if you want to buy POX for $21.95, because tomorrow it will cost $25!

Tomorrow if you have ‘liked’ our facebook page, then you’ll have a chance to win a free POX game and Tilt T-shirt! So if you haven’t done so yet, ‘like’ Tiltfactor right now!

We weathered the storm without mishap — and even had some leftovers! Now, the group is gearing up for a fruitful fall production period. Thanks to everyone who pitched in to make sure Tilt folks stayed safe. Our hearts go out to those whose homes and businesses have been destroyed by the flooding; the team wants you to know that we care and carry thoughts for you. We find ourselves very grateful that the lab, Dartmouth campus, and nearby surrounds went untouched.

What was the first work of digital literature, or digital art? What was the first video game — the first computer game played with graphical display? These are the sorts of questions that come up when we start rummaging around in the pasts of fields, thinking about the boundaries, and thinking about trajectories that might have been.

I offer my thoughts on these questions — one answer considered, one initial and speculative — in the new book Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka.