Grand Text Auto

The POX game was in the NH Union Leader this past Friday, complete with interviews of Mary Flanagan and Martin Downs of the Mascoma Valley Health Initiative.
Here are some excerpts:
Flanagan is quick to point out the game takes no stance on whether vaccinations are good or bad, it simply explains how diseases are transmitted and allows the players to fight them. She may be quick to make that point given all the controversy over vaccines and the, turns out erroneous, link between the vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella and autism. A recent British Medical Journal article uncovered fraudulent data was the to blame for this belief and pretty much debunked the idea. “The game let’s you come to your own conclusion,” she said. “People can make their own choices, but you end up seeing how the system works.”

On April 2, “ClubFloyd,” a group of players of interactive fiction, took on my Book and Volume, which was released on the [auto mata] label in 2005. They played the game on ifMUD and conversed online about it. Reading the discussion was a treat for me. Not because every bit of it was positive – I found out about some bugs. For instance, since the current time is only reported in the status line, it can’t be easily determined when playing the game via a bot on a mud, the way this group was playing. But the feedback from these sessions was very useful, and would have been hard to come by otherwise.

Jörg Piringer has a sweet new video of every displayable character in Unicode, one character per frame.

On netpoetic.com, you can find Pringer’s discussion of this piece.

Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2
Launch at the Bergen Public Library
Monday May 2, 2011

The Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies welcomes you to attend two special events celebrating the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

Video and audio of Oulipolooza, a festive tribute to the Oulipo in which I participated, is now online. The event was held on March 15, 2011 at the Kelly Writers House at Penn and was organized by Michelle Taransky and Sarah Arkebauer. Speakers were:

KATIE PRICE
LOUIS BURY
JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ
GERALD PRINCE
and NICK MONTFORT

It was quite an honor to be part of this group, which included one of my Ph.D. advisors – Gerry Prince. I may have been the least distinguished Oulipo scholar among these speakers, but I tried to make up for that by being the only one to wear a party hat.

The new Tiltfactor game, POX: Save the People is released! Lab director Mary Flanagan spoke about the game with New Hampshire Public Radio today. Listen now if you missed it!

Last week, we launched our game POX: Save the People. Today, we’re visiting the New England Archivists to discuss results of our Metadatagames Pilot Test! And next Monday, Mary Flanagan will be interviewed (4/4)  during Morning Edition on NHPR.

Meanwhile, our new TiltBling is in stock  — Check out project manager Sukie in his new TiltWear:

This is the only known photograph of the Tiltfactor exclusive "I Heart Huge Pixels" shirt in existence.

I strongly encourage those of you who haven’t seen it yet to check out Brian Kim Stefans’s Introduction to Electronic Literature: a freeware guide.

Right now it is “just” a list of links to online resources, from Futurism through 2010, that are relevant to understanding different important aspects of electronic literature – making it, reading it, sorting through different genres, and understanding its historical connects.

(Seen at a university in Cambridge, MA – not MIT or Lesley University.)

The 2011 International Conference on Computational Creativity will be held in Mexico City April 27-29. We now have information on the keynote address by Prof. George E. Lewis, “Improvising With Creative Machines: Reflections on Human-Machine Interaction.” And, there’s a list of accepted papers and demos. I’m looking forward to seeing those of you who are presenting at the end of April in Mexico City. And if any others with an interest in the field can make it to the gathering and be part of the discussion, attend the presentations, and learn about systems through demos, please do!

The long awaited Context Providers, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna has just been released from Intellect Press! Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning.

The authors introduce the concept of artists as context providers—people who establish networks of information in a highly collaborative creative process, blurring boundaries between disciplines. Technological change has affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions are shared,
creating a need for flexible information filters as a framework for establishing meaning and identity. Context Providers considers the work of media artists today who are directly engaging communities through collaboration, active dialogue, and challenging creative work.

I gave a talk about Curveship in the “IF Suite” (actually an ordinary hotel room with a few upturned beds, not a suite) at PAX-East 2011 earlier this month. It was great to present to fellow IF author/programmers from around the world at this event, which was effectively the second annual Festival of Interactive Fiction. The IF Summit was organized by Andrew Plotkin, a.k.a. Zarf, once again this year. Thanks to Jason McIntosh, there’s pretty good-quality video (very good, considering the ramshackle setup) of the first 22.5 minutes of my talk:

In 2001, Beehive was the first Web publication to print a creative digital media piece of mine, “The Girl and the Wolf.” I had written this story back in 1997 in Janet Murray’s Interactive Narrative class at MIT. (These days, I teach this class here at MIT.) It was strongly inspired by the readings of folk tales we had done in Henry Jenkins’s Children’s Literature class. “The Girl and the Wolf” is a very early creative piece of mine, but I remain pleased with the systematic concept and with what I wrote. It’s a simple arrangement of nine versions of a story, allowing the levels of sex and violence to be increased independently. With some contemporary references and a few other turns of phrase, I introduced only a few deviations from well-known folkloric versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story.

Our new board game, POX, was officially released at the New Hampshire Immunization Conference in Manchester NH this week!

Tiltfactor project manager SukdithPunjasthitkul and our über intern Max Seidman were on hand to explain gameplay, playtest with educators and public health officials, and discuss the design process.

Max Seidman shows folks how to play POX

Our partners in the planning and design process, Mascoma Valley Health Initiative, was awarded the 2011 NH Dept of Health and Human Services / Public Health Service “Excellence in Immunization Partnerships.” Edward Ihejirika of MVHI picked up the award in person.

Death and the Powers had a brilliant and resonant U.S. premiere on Friday at the Cutler Majestic in Boston. I’ve been looking forward to the opera’s completion, and then to its coming to the U.S., for several years. My mentor from the B.U. poetry program, Robert Pinsky, wrote the libretto, and my current colleague Tod Machover composed the opera. Congratulations to all those who put this production together, including Tod’s Opera of the Future group at the Media Lab. Death and the Powers is technically intricate and thematically ambitious, and all of that came together perfectly. (Image source.)

Yes, we’re using it! The Critical Play Method, culled from work from the Values at Play project and Mary Flanagan’s  work creating games that take on issues that need to be deeply and meaningful ingrained in a game. It is included in Critical Play, but here’s a succinct checklist to share!

This is so cool:

“About Playtimes: The Playtimes website is part of a wider Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project entitled ‘Children’s Games and Songs in the New Media Age’. The project is part of the AHRC’s ‘Beyond Text’ programme which seeks to highlight the importance of communication, sensory perception, orality and material culture within current scholarship and today’s digital culture. The ‘Children’s Games and Songs’ project aims to preserve children’s games and songs as an important aspect of our national culture; but also seeks to explore how they continue to be a part of the lives of children living in the age of computer games and the internet. What does this oral tradition borrow from the media; and how might it connect with the entertainment and information technologies of the age of new media?”

I’ve been thinking about this post about Chris Trottier’s gameplay models as well as my own experience with casual games in general and Facebook games more specifically.

It has become reasonably clear, zeitgeist-wise, that at least the perceived demographic for most Facebook games is the mom demographic.  For many casual games as well (I’m willing to bet that is a big reason for the otherwise inexplicable rise of the “hidden object game.”  Highlights magazine is really sad they didn’t pioneer that genre and make a mint.)

If you’re interested in story generation or Processing, do check out Scott Rettberg’s new screencast describing the process he undertook in writing and programming After Parthenope. He goes through the nuts and bolts of the piece and how it rolls out language using a hand-crafted trigram model; he also explains some of the pleasures of authoring a system like this.

Dr. Magy Seif El-Nasr will be giving a talk at UCSC this Friday. All interested are welcome!

Title:

Effective 3D Visual Design for Games: Integrating Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Results from Experimental Studies, and Artistic Tacit Knowledge

Time & Location:

March 18, 11:00 am, E2-599

Abstract:

Jeff Orkin, of Restaurant Game fame, has just launched Improviso, a system that allows players to improvise (online) and make a somewhat corny science fiction film by taking the role of director or lead actor. Orkin developed the system with collaborating students at the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. I was pleased to see an early version of the system this summer, and very glad that the project has now blasted off. If you do Windows, download Improviso and see what you can make of it and with it.

Please join the editors of Context Providers – Margot Lovejoy,
Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna – and contributors Mary Flanagan and
Ellen Levy for a brief introduction to the book, followed by a
reception at The New School, New York.

Context Providers
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts

edited by Margot Lovejoy
Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna

Intellect Press, UK / University of Chicago Press

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo8920656.html

I just prepared a screencast for Judy Malloy’s Authoring Software project, walking through the code of my generative fiction After Parthenope and explaining my process of writing and coding it in Processing.

After Parthenope Authoring Screencast from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

I had a great time showing Curveship, and explaining the motivation behind it, at the IF Summit next to PAX-East today. And it was generally a great weekend of catching up with the people who are continually discussing this system (and many other matters) with me online. My thanks particularly to Zarf, the main organizer of the IF suite, Dave, who set up us the conference room, and Emily, who ran the IF Demo Fair on Saturday night. And generally, hooray for interactive fiction and the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction – I hope we have many other productive gatherings in years to come.

Tiltfactor continues to represent and engage at Pox East this weekend!

First off,  a panel discussion on Friday with lab director Mary Flanagan on Getting the Most Out of Your Game Education.

Pictured here, playtest sessions for our nearly-released game POX: Save the People with folks in the long lines by lab researcher Sukimon. A great way to pass the time, save lives, etc!