Grand Text Auto

First, as of this writing: I’m at the GAMBIT Summer Summit here at MIT, which runs today and is being streamed live. Do check it out if video game research interests you.

A few days ago, I was at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Bordeaux. On July 1 I presented the first conference paper on Curveship since the system has been released as free software. The paper is “Curveship’s Automatic Narrative Style,” which sums up or at least mentions many of the research results while documenting the practicalities of the system and using the current terminology of the release version.

By Parker Phinney

This spring, I worked as a Dartmouth Digital Studies Fellow on the Usable Images project and the MetadataGames project.
The Problem=====
Several United States Federal agencies maintain repositories of public domain images. These repositories have thousands of images with practical uses. For example, a health sciences professor creating a textbook to share for free on line is greatly helped by the public domain (free of copyright restrictions) images available for free on the Center for Disease Control’s website, which range from photographs of disease symptoms, to microscope slides, and beyond.

 h            d d     k x  v  d r k y  p  s b a  b  a  n  i  k  d   u  u 
v   r  c q  i  e  z   j s s  v h   t l  i  r k k n  k       n n     m    
         z b    q   b   k x  m  d u  z f  s  g p u z v y       v m  f   s
  i  u  p  p z   r n t  k f   b h v  q l  x w h x  f  x    c i w     v f 
k h   l  a i      o q  s z n z  u n c l    w      d     a  d a  m j  b e 
 m  n b q o u o e  n   s    r b o j     b  q q t q s   f n i  f     u  l 

Concrete Perl

a set of four concrete poems realized as 32-character
Perl programs

by Nick Montfort

• All the Names of God
• Alphabet Expanding
• ASCII Hegemony
• Letterformed Terrain

You can download the linked Perl files and/or simply copy and paste the following four lines, which correspond to the four titles above:

• perl -e '{print"a"x++$...$"x$.,$,=_;redo}'
• perl -e '{print$,=$"x($.+=.01),a..z;redo}'
• perl -e '{print" ".chr for 32..126;redo}'
• perl -e '{print$",$_=(a..z)[rand$=];redo}'

Digital Art Panel: Photo Courtesy of Marcin Ramocki

The weekend event of the year: the first Woodstock Digital Media Festival in Woodstock Vermont! The morning started the proceedings with two parallel panels: one on digital art (with discussants Christiane Paul, gallerists from Postmasters, Marcin Ramocki, and Mary Flanagan), and the other on digital media journalism, commerce, and nonprofits. Both were packed last Saturday!

The evening ended with a bang (or, a MOO?) at a working farm almost on midsummer’s night. Nullsleep played tunes that reverberated the classic post and beam renovated barn.

I went by to OLPC (One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit that has created and deployed worldwide the green laptop for kids) yesterday for some discussion of narrative interfaces. I explained the basics of Curveship and what was interesting about it from my perspective, mentioning that one could hook the narrating engine up to something other than an interactive fiction world. I also found out that others had some of their own, very interesting, ideas.

Chris Ball, for instance, showed a proof-of-concept where he hooked up the simulated world of Curveship’s Cloak of Darkness, the classic simulated example world, to a graphical display and a graphical system for inputting commands:

Streetmapping art and various psychogeographic events have taken hold of the imagination of artists and participants over the past decade, in part due to a reaction (ranging from delight to dismay) to advances in geographic information systems and the proliferation of on-demand, amazingly detailed maps such as Google maps, and due to an interest in re-politicizing the growing number of corporately owned and controlled spaces in urban life.

The artists, business people, and open source mappers assembling in a quaint Vermont town on Saturday June 18th for the first Woodstock Digital Media Festival provide a range of projects to satisfy those curious about how we understand space through experiencing and making maps.

Adam Smith (also of EIS) and I are organizing a new workshop to be co-located with AIIDE 2011 on the intersection of AI and game design. Game AI usually refers to controlling interesting agents in a game world, but this workshop is focused on how AI can assist during the game design process itself. Our belief is that bringing concerns from design studies, computational creativity, and game production into contact with AI can result in a radically new and productive view of AI in games.

Tiltfactor is going to Gen Con this year! Held in Indianapolis, Indiana August 4-7, 2011, Gen Con is “the original, longest running, best attended, gaming convention in the world.”

We will have an exhibit booth, demoing our latest game, the 2nd Edition of POX: Save the People, as well as a couple of other surprises. More details to come as we get nearer to Gen Con.

The Tiltfatory is cranking on the 2nd Edition of POX. 2nd Edition includes minor tweaks to the game board, cards, and the game instructions. If all goes well, we hope to have POX 2nd Edition game sets available by late August. What’s so awesome is that we are already getting pre-orders for the 2nd Edition. MUCHO THANKS!

Pre-Order now at a discounted price, now through 7/25!

Pre-Order POX 2nd Edition set

Ian Bogost and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested authors – ones that would be great to write about. These are a few platforms or families of platforms that seem to us to have interesting technical aspects, diverse and important historical connections, a good amount of worthwhile cultural production, and a number of adherents:

A new issue of Game Studies, the pioneering open-access journal that deals with computer and video games, is out. Of particular note – to me, at least – is that among this issues eight book reviews are two reviews of the book I wrote with Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam.

The two reviews are “Hackers, History, and Game Design: What Racing the Beam Is Not” by José P. Zagal and “The fun is back!” by Lars Konzack.

Thanks to Carlos León, there is now a Spanish version, “Los Dos,” of my simple but (I think) provocative story generator “The Two.” The system was previously translated into French as “Les Deux” by Serge Bouchardon.

Stop by and check them out; all three are available in JavaScript versions that run right away in a browser. For those who are interested, the original Klingon, er, Python, is also available for each of the three languages.

A recent talk by Jonathan Belman spurred interest across Canada! Go Values at Play! You can read some of this published material in our article on empathy. Jonathan is continuing this work in his dissertation.

McDowell, Adam. “How High Is Your Empathy Score? The National Post. 3 June 2011. Available at: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/03/how-high-is-your-empathy-score/

Davin Heckman will be joining us at the University of Bergen in August as our 2011-2012 Fulbright scholar in Digital Culture. Applications are now open for the 2012-2013 position. The deadline for applications is August 1, 2011.

I’m at the intriguing and very sucessful third 2011 symposium of TILTS, the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies. (Interestingly, TILTS can be spelled using only letter from “The X-Files.”) I might have written more about the event, but my computer has been identified by automated UT-Austin systems as being a rooted Windows machine (although it’s not a Windows machine at all) and is banned from the network. Desite my radio silence, though, the symposium has certainly been a space of lively discussion of digital media work, computational linguistics and its application to humanistic inquiry, and the representation of technology in media.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote presentation at the 2011 Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011) conference (part of the pleasure being the location, Waikiki beach in Hawaii). My slides are available in pdf (1.3M) and ppt (13.5M).

In a time when women are increasingly prominent in fields such as medicine, law and business, why are there so few women scientists and engineers? The situation in Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology fields has prompted a variety of investigations into how we might best attract women and girls to more technical fields, especially computer science. Today, I was on a panel at the annual NCWIT conference (National Center for Women & Information Technology) with Mitch Resnick, of the MIT Media Lab and known for the innovative programming software program Scratch, and fellow panelists: Kevin Clark and Tobi Saulnier. The panel provoked an interesting discussion with the audience, and I want to continue my thoughts a bit further here.

The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit sequel by Valve, you are changing the space without necessarily adding or subtracting from it. You’re using what’s already there, but rearranging it; repurposing it. Relying on a complex process of disambiguation to carry through your novel contribution to the whole of spoken or written utterances (as you learn in English grammar classes).

The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in of the natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit sequel by valve, you are changing the space without necessarily adding or subtracting from it. You’re using what’s already there, but rearranging it; repurposing it. Relying on a complex process of disambiguation to carry through your novel contribution to the whole of spoken or written utterances (as you learn in English grammar classes).

[This is a review of, or summary of, or comment on on The X-Files – the complete, nine-season television series and the two movies – written under constraint.]

The title files, the X-Files, exist. His fief.

His silliest, fishiest thesis: Lithe, sexless elitist “eels” exist. These sliest eels flit. These eels felt his sis. Eels flee. Exit sis. She left: Exile.

She, steel theist, feels little. Little else lifts life.

His fetish: Elfish feet? He, slitless, sexless, sees little fetishist sex, feels less.

She sifts the lifeless: filth, shit. She lifts the sheet: The stiff. She sees his teeth, hefts his testis. The fifth stiff, the sixth stiff…

Charles Bernstein just gave the keynote-like presentation at E-Poetry. (Actually, he used PowerPoint.) I’m providing a few notes, feebly extending in my subjective way some of his oral and photographic/digital presentation for those of you in the information super-blogosphere.

He started by mentioning the UB Poetics Program and its engagement with digital humanities, saying: “As Digital Humanities departs from poetics, it loses its ability to articulate what it needs to articulate.”

[If this is funny to anyone, it will probably be funny to people here at E-Poetry. Nevertheless, I offer it up here to the Internet as a curious digital relic of this gathering.]

I’m here at the University at Buffalo enjoying the E-Poetry Festival. Amid this discussion of digital work, concrete poetry, and related innovative practices, and among this great crowd of poets, I’ve developed a very short piece for anyone with Perl installed to enjoy – just copy and paste on the command line:

yes | perl -pe '$.%=26;$_=$"x$..chr 97+$.'

It does use “yes,” one of my favorite Unix/GNU commands, and the -p option to wrap the Perl code in a loop. So there’s some bonus stuff there on the command line. But the Perl code itself is only 25 characters long, not a bad length for a program that displays the alphabet.

The Digital Studies initiative at Dartmouth College is seeking applications for postdoctoral position in Learning Sciences and Assessment. The Postdoc will be affiliated with The Tiltfactor Laboratory (http://www.tiltfactor.org), the leading game design research group in values-conscious design.

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College designs, creates, and studies games. From social activist games, where we examine empathy, to games for health where we study if players are learning about immunization, we focus on what we call ‘critical play’ that fosters human values. We also encourage the artistic and innovative place of games in culture. Given the multidisciplinary nature of our projects, the candidates will likely have interests that span several disciplines, such as psychology, gaming, and learning; or machine learning, social games, and HCI. Technical expertise among candidates is highly favored.