Grand Text Auto

[An announcement from Penn’s Kelly Writers House:]

We’re pulling out all the constraints for our OULIPOLOOZA next Tuesday,
March 15, at 7:00 pm. Organized by our own Sarah Arkebauer (C’11) and
Michelle Taransky, this celebration of all things Oulipo will feature five
experts and aficionados talking about the “Ouvroir de littérature
potentielle,” the highly-influential French school of avant garde poetry.
The evening will be rounded out by the launching “An Oulipolooza,” a
collection of new Oulipian writing, and a constraint-inspired reception.
This is one celebration you should not A Void!

The Kelly Writers House presents

Platform Studies, Material Computing, and the Atari VCS

Nick Montfort, MIT

A presentation in the
Workshop in the History of Material Texts
University of Pennsylvania – March 14, 2011 – 5:15pm
Van Pelt Library, 2nd Floor

Brian Green (Psychochild) has a recent post over at his place about why he might be changing his mind about the possibilities of User-Generated Content that I think contains a very strong idea: that of [player] intent, and I think it relates strongly to something I’ve been talking about, including this post.

I think here it is worth dividing up two concepts that I have been lumping together somewhat:

Tuesday, March 15th 12:15-14:00
HF Building, Room 301
“Reading Chatbots”
Visiting Fulbright lecturer Mark Marino, Asst. Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, will discuss his current book project: Reading Chatbots: Conversational Actor Networks: an interdisciplinary investigation into autonomous conversational agents drawing upon theories from Communication, the Humanities, and Social Sciences. The book demonstrates a methodology of software studies, reading chatbots with attention to their performance of race, gender, sexuality, and class. http://markcmarino.com

Monday, March 21st 14:15-16:00
Sydneshaugen Skole, Room 304B
“Exquisite_Code”
Media artist Brendan Howell is in from Berlin as a visiting lecturer at KHiB. Howell will present the “Exquisite_Code” project, and other electronic literature related projects. Exquisite_Code is an algorithmic performance system for heterogeneous groups of writers. http://www.wintermute.org/brendan/

As if polishing a statue of our glorious leader, the Web secretariat of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction has hoisted a fine new website. It has everything the old site had, but shiner and more expandable – which is important for a Cambridge-based group with a destiny that is manifest, a group that continues to share IF with the Boston area and the world.

Please do note that PR-IF will be at PAX-East 2011 with a suite and a conference room. All events are open to the public and do not require a PAX-East badge. I’ll hope to see some of you there.

Interested in electronic literature, and a new large-scale resource listing works, authors, and more? The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is now available in beta form. Also, check out this screencast about the ELMCIP Knowledge Base.

By ELMCIP, we mean Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, a research project that extends throughout Europe and is funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. ELMCIP is a project to try to understand creative communities working in electronic literature. Among the many involved parties are friends and collaborators Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg.

Naomi Clark and I had a remarkably reasonable discussion in the comments section here the other day, and I’ve been mulling over it since.  The gist being I was saying I didn’t really see the point of describing labor mechanics as a specific thing, and Clark discussing (at length, to her credit) what that point was.  I think she’s the right one here, which I probably would have figured out earlier had I seen the talk, especially since so much of my thinking of late has been in terms of organizational/behavioral economics (specifically, relating a large social game audience to a large corporation conceptually.)

At the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference, esteemed designer Chris Trottier assembled advice from her astounding career as a game designer […]

Screencast: Introducing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (HD) from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

I guess that answers the perennial question, “I can has cheezburger?”

…in my opinion, little to none of it good.  For the moment, I just want to point out this little […]

Pox is done. The boards are being packed and shipped and I’m doing what I always do at the end […]

Wow, I’m starting to really hate missing the actual talks…notes and slides are great but I’m afraid I am probably missing nuance.

Zimmerman is typically on-target, but I’m wondering about this (paraphrased?) passage from his presentation with Naomi Clark, taken from notes from an attendee (thank you, Tiny Subversion):

“Why is there a rise in games of labor? It is linked to contemporary culture. In industrialized 21st century cultures there are new lifestyles that are mirrored in these games of labor. We are taught to want and to work for the fantasy of labor. You don’t really have a desire to make a virtual farm until the game explains to you that that is what you want.”

This morning I gave a talk in the GDC Education Summit — Interactive Storytelling: Preparing Students to Innovate — and I’m posting my slides below. As for the topic, my talk description ended up being pretty accurate:

We want students to create innovative games, but innovation in interactive storytelling can be hard to imagine for students, both undergraduate and graduate. Designing an interactive story isn’t a secret art or a matter of magical technology. It’s the design of a system, of elements and operations, just like other parts of games. We can prepare students for this work by helping them understand the history of mainstream and trailblazing projects, get experience with the tools and models available, and learn the strengths and limitations of different approaches. This lecture introduces ideas and systems your students can work with now.

Almost a decade after the project began, the IF Theory Reader is finally here, thanks to the hard work of editors Kevin Jackson-Mead and J. Robinson Wheeler. The book has been published by Transcript On Press and has made it out in time for PAX-East, where Kevin’s group The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction will be hosting a hospitality suite.

There are 438 pages in this book, which can be downloaded as a PDF for free or purchased as a paperback for a mere $13.26.

Raph Koster has [as usual, certainly] summed up a fair bit about social gaming in his GDC presentation. I wasn’t […]

To me, the white elephant in the [digital] game design room is that of dynamic content. Maybe it’s an invisible white elephant, because not many other people seem to be talking about it.

Reader’s Block, David Markson, Dalkey Archive, 1996

A pivotal point in this book – one that is reassuringly labeled “A Novel” – is the paragraph that reads, in its entirety, “Spent Adidas.” The other shoe drops. Imagination finally spills from one isolated paragraph to the next. This two-word paragraph does not stand out as unusually short among many that relating incidents or facts; literary, artistic, or philosophical deaths; and sometimes simply an author’s or some famous character’s name. How can we avoid being overwhelmed by the weight of what we know, what we have read about other lives? How can what we have learned about history frame, rather than imprison, what we seek to create as readers and writers? Why even attempt to imagine, when truth is stranger and so weighty? These questions raise themselves like ghosts in Hades scenting blood. As in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a powerful image of a writer’s path of thought. Then, the poesies that succeeded in Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” takes a different turn in Reader’s Block, after a struggle.

This year’s Game Development Conference in San Francisco promises to be enjoyable and informative. We are doing a soft-launch of […]

This year’s Game Development Conference in San Francisco promises to be enjoyable and informative. We are doing a soft-launch of our new beloved tiltfactor.org site (uber exciting!), as well as following lab director Mary Flanagan as she’s speaking at the GDC Education Summit: Monday 10:00-11:00 Room 301, South Hall: http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12198.

(and, just for GDC, we’re donning our new sneak-preview Tiltfactor bling, soon available on our web site!)

We are also bringing student designer E McNeill, winner of the 2009 Imagine Cup game design second place, as he launches his first indie game Auralux; also along is Heidi Gamer, our Virtual Finance Expert. Tiltfactor is also participating in the Game Education Rant at the GDC on Tuesday 4:15- 5:15 Room 301, South Hall.

This and That Thought, a Turbulence commission, is a robot riot. (Turn on your sound before beginning!) The new issue of Culture Machine grapples with e-lit and the digital humanities and looks to be made of win. And there’s the happy occasion of a new issue of Game Studies, focused on game reward systems.

Learning from YouTube by Alexandra Juhasz is an open access MIT Press “video-book” published on Vectors. It’s made of “texteos” (with YouTube-like videos at the core) and is hilarious and incisive. I suggest you vread it right away.

There’s a nice Slate article on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series, quoting not only both of the main COYA authors but also Zork creator and Infocom implementor David Lebling.

Ubermorgen’s Clickistan is a wild ride. Designed as a web art extravaganza, and in part serving to fund raise for the Whitney Museum of American Art (a pretty credible cause, as causes go) Clickistan is a conceptual work that locates its work somewhere “between the 7th and 8th bit of every byte.” In other words, Clickistan is a nation surfing the hinterlands of the on and off of binary logic. This makes us very excited at Tiltfactor!