Grand Text Auto

I’m here in Buffalo for the E-Poetry Festival at UB. Last night I got to present work downtown at the Sqeuaky Wheel, a media arts center that has been helping artists produce video, film, and digital work since 1985.

With my collaborator Stephanie Strickland, I presented “Sea and Spar Between,” our recent poetry generator which offers an unusual interface to about 225 trillion stanzas arranged in a lattice.

Since I mentioned some funny CYOA-like smut that has recently issued from the IF community, I’ll also suggest a less lewd piece of branching narrative, one which allows the reader to make choices early in the text and in the story’s past: Andrew Plotkin’s The Matter of the Monster. Perhaps it’s a case of the folktale wagging the dog – in any case, it’s brightly written, cleverly put together, and worth reading.

We have three great talks on games this week at UC Santa Cruz. All are free and open to the public. Please help spread the word!

Monday
Title: Mama Ludens vs Fanboi – What is wrong with the Gaming Revolution?
Speaker: Jessica Enevold, Assistant Professor at Lund University, Sweden and Managing Editor for the journal Game Studies
Time and Place: 2pm Monday May 16th, Engineering 2 room 599

Tuesday
Title: What will the games business look like in 5 years?
Speaker: John Davison, VP of programming at CBS Interactive for GameSpot and Metacritic
Time and Place: noon Tuesday May 17th, Media Theater (M110)

I believe that Curveship and the example game Lost One may have just recieved their first roasting, thanks to the firepower of the S.S. Turgidity and the intrepid, enterprising player character Stiffy Makane. The “erotic adventures” that unfold in The Cavity of Time, released as part of the Indigo New Language Speed IF, allow you to jump everything within reach. And, just to be clear, to fuck all of those things. If you were offended just now, let me suggest that you don’t fire up this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style garden of fucking paths. Otherwise, this offering, written in the slick Undum system, may please you. Not like that. I mean it may amuse you.

Interactive fiction aficianados who aren’t at MiT7 (Media in Transition 7) and who thus missed Jaroslav Svelch’s excellent presentation – please check out the corresponding paper which he’s helpfully placed online: “Indiana Jones Fights the Communist Police: Text Adventures as a Transitional Media Form in the 1980s Czechoslovakia.”

I’ve noted here at MiT7 (Media in Transition 7) that we’re now achieved some very reasoned discussion and understanding of the virtues of different approaches to preserving and accessing computer programs. Not that we’ve solved the underlying problem, of course, but I’ve been pleased to see how our overall approach has evolved.

Instead of simply dismissing emulation, migration, or the preservation of old hardware, we’ve had some good comments about the ways in which these different techniques have proven to work well and about what their limitations are. We saw this in the plenary discussion on archives and cultural memory late this morning – audio of that conversation will be coming online. Update: Here it is.

At Media in Transition 7 here at MIT, after a good start in the opening plenary and first break-out session, we had a fascinating session yesterday on “Computer Histories.” The papers presented were:

• Sandra Braman presented “Designing for Instability: Internet Architecture and Constant Change.” [Abstract.]
• Kevin Driscoll spoke on “Revisiting Bill Gates’ “Open Letter to Hobbyists.” [Abstract.]
• Colleen Kaman’s talk was “‘Interop,’ Internet Commercialization, and the Early Politics of Global Computer Networks.” [Abstract.] [Full paper.]

Wow! In less than two months, we are SOLD OUT of the 1st edition of our Pox Game! But do not fret! The Tiltfactor team is publishing a 2nd edition. Pre-Order Edition 2 now! Expected ship date 9/1/2011. We’ll have some at GENCON in Indiana this August as well at our BOOTH!

Thanks to everyone who bought a set and helped -ahem- spread the word about POX.

Using this shiny JavaScript PDP-11 emulator, you can play the influential 1973 game Hunt the Wumpus (type USR/GAMES/WUMP after following the instructions to start Unix) in a very suitable context. The FAQ explains why, for instance, backspace has no meaning on the system.

A collaborative story by Jesse Ashcraft-Johnson, Eleanor Crummé, Alex Ghaben, Cisco Gonzales, Ray Gonzalez, Boling Jiang, Nick Montfort, Shannon Moran, Kirsten Paredes, Carter Rice, Tyler Wagner, and Jia Zhu

“Mr. President, can you summarize the events of the G-6 conference?”

“First, a bunch of world leaders surrendered their favorite prostitutes. Then, we all yelled ‘Yeehaw!’” That was what George H. W. Bush thought, anyway, as he delivered a quick straight answer to the question.

“Mr. President, what was your holiday message to the troops?”

“I told the boys: either step up to the challenge or there will be no Christmas presents this year.”

If you’re heading over to look at today’s parodical “Final Edition,” allow me to suggest instead a thoughtful and compelling re-imagination of the New York Times, the special edition of July 4, 2009 by the Yes Men and the Anti-Advertising Agency. Instead of being just a joke that falls flat – one that was released on the 11th day of the month and features a New York skyscraper in flames, very tastefully – the latter “fake” newspaper is actually a productive utopian vision.

SPAG (The Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games) #60 is out – the latest issue of the long-running interactive fiction newsletter. On the cover, a figure in a dark sport coat looms, his face a grim rictus as he hunches toward some computer or iPad. I don’t recall seeing this sinister individual at the festive and very enjoyable IF Demo Fair, which Emily Short organized at PAX East, but I do recall seeing happy interactions of the sort depicted in the rest of that scene.

These cards have been seen at MIT. Some say they point the way to an interactive fiction that you can play, if you search the campus and find a way in.

Tiltfactor Director and Digital Humanities Prof. Mary Flanagan and students worked with local a health organization on “Pox: Save the People,” a game that depicts the importance of immunization. Read more at Dartmouth Now: http://bit.ly/g83Yxm

The Indiecade call for submissions is OUT! Submit your game(s) as soon as possible and spread the word Submissions for the 2011 IndieCade Festival are now open!

IndieCade is awesome, for it is the only stand-alone international festival of independent games out there. The festival showcases budding new game designers from around the world — the student, basement hacker, and former industry idealist alike. The festival will take place October 6-9 in L.A.-adjacent downtown Culver City, bringing together the worldwide indie community, industry heavy-hitters, and players to see, hear, and experience the next big thing.

The Second International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC-11) in Mexico City was a great success, thanks in large part to local organizer Rafael Pérez y Pérez and to the support of UAM and UNAM Posgrado.

If you’re interested in computational models of creativity, please take a look at the proceedings. It was announced in Mexico City that the next ICCC will take place in 2012 at University College Dublin. We hope you’ll look forward to joining us there. And from year to year, computationalcreativity.net will keep you informed about conferences in the series.

Dennis "Thresh" Fong

Dennis “Thresh” Fong, a retired pro gamer and founder of Raptr and XFire, participated in an exhibition match against EISBot during a visit to UC Santa Cruz today. While Dennis had not played StarCraft: Brood War for several years, he provided EISBot with an excellent challenge. Dennis played as Zerg (orange) and the outcome of the match is shown in the video below:

Just a quick note that ICCC-11, The Second International Conference on Computational Creativty, is going very well here in Mexico City. We’ve had five sessions of brief presentations followed by lengthy discussions among the panelists and members of the audience. The research into computational creativity that is represented here includes work on theory and on creativity in many of the arts. We’re looking forward to this afternoon’s keynote speech by George E. Lewis.

By the way, for those who couldn’t make it here and for those who did, the complete ICCC-11 proceedings are online.

Here’s the abstract from a presentation I gave yesterday, from my pedestrian stance as a non-dancer, at a high-energy workshop on dance technology:

Why Watson Can’t Dance: Attempts at On-Screen Dance in Popular Digital Media

Nick Montfort

Dance Technology and Circulations of the Social v2.0, MIT, April 21-23, 2011

My thanks to Mary Flanagan, Aden Evens, and the others at Dartmouth who put on the digital poetry symposium last Friday (April 15). I was very glad to participate along with Marjorie Luesebrink, Braxton Soderman, and my collaborator Stephanie Strickland. With Stephanie, I showed, discussed and read from our “Sea and Spar Between.” I also presented some of my smaller-scale poetry generations, including words from the ppg256 series, “The Two” and its French translation by Serge Bouchardon, and “Taroko Gorge” and its transformations by Scott Rettberg and J. R. Carpenter.

Tiltfactor is humming, and the lab and the lab director Mary Flanagan are in recent news circles in the art world, commercial gaming, and in public health domains. See our latest press, including Flanagan’s work featured in the latest ARTnews article on videogames and art, April 2011; Melanie Plenda’s article. “POX: Play the game, save the people.” New Hampshire Union Leader, 8 April 2011, B1; Rick Ganley’s NHPR Morning Edition interview with Flanagan on POX;  HealthNewsDigest.com spreading the word on POX; and Stephanie Clifford’s piece on the new Monopoly game from Hasbro in the New York Times.

Dartmouth’s Digital Poetry Symposium, held all afternoon, Marjorie Luesebrink discussed her use of Microsoft Excel as a platform for her poetry. The idea that a story or poem can be revealed through direct manipulation drove her curiosity, and she had come to think of the interface as the defining part of the medium. The predominant trend is to make the relationship between machines and people more simple, yet it is the stage for complexity.

Inventing the Future of Games is a one-day symposium happening today in Silicon Valley. It gathers some of the brightest minds from universities and industry to discuss potential futures of game design and technology. To follow/discuss on Twitter the tag is #IFOG2011, and for updates afterward you can connect with the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media via Facebook or Twitter, or keep an eye on our Vimeo channel.

Metadata Games has several implemented games and our recent March 2011 pilot study on the tagging system using a control and experimental group with 200 of the same images showed some surprisingly accurate results, generating over 4000 new image tags. We’ll be doing a more public test very soon; contact us through contact at tiltfactordotorg if you want to help us test!

And Now, a message from our latest team member:

As the call for papers for ACM Creativity and Cognition explains, we’re only two weeks away from the deadline. Papers, artworks, and proposals for tutorials and workshops are all welcome!