Grand Text Auto

Today at Tilt we are thinking about play and motivation, looking at variable ratio reward scheduling, empathy, and other means by which players might find pleasure in a game. To Caillois in his Man, Play, and Games, the experiences of competition, chance, altered perception (vertigo), and make believe are ways in which play can set the stage for pleasure. Csíkszentmihályi’s flow state (and the nice excerpt from Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention) is worth a read; it is a nice investigation into pleasure through perseverance. But what about the simple satisfaction of completion, or taking a step toward completion? Or, how about, the classic Barthes treatise on The Pleasure of the Text, one of Tiltfactor’s all time favorite reads?

It’s tough to write about the ideas that didn’t work out. Sometimes the negative results actually aren’t very interesting, and it’s better not to discuss them. In other cases, it’s impolite to point out other people’s roles – to blame them – and impossible to discuss the failure otherwise. But when a failure is not too big of a deal, possibly instructive to bring up, and as least as much my fault as anyone else’s, that rare opportunity to post about it presents itself.

If you’re a fan of the ideal (not the reality) of video games that are adapted from literary works, and particularly if you liked Gatz…

Do check out The Great Gatsby for NES. Old chap.

“D.P.O.” is a pretty amazing X-Files episode, featuring not only an arcade, which is central to the episode, but also a Lenscrafters cameo, glimpses of a Jerry-Springer-like show and a music video, a reference to the land art piece Lightning Field, a rural boy pranking cows, Jack Black, and a Playboy centerfold with at least a passing resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I particularly like how Moulder picks out the suspect by locating his initials on the high score screen of a Virtua Fighter machine. One thing I’m wondering about the arcade in this episode, though: It has a jukebox, which is rather instrumental (no pun intended) to the way the episode … plays out.

Truth is often stranger than fiction. Sometimes fiction just exaggerates for effect, of course. In the world of this commercial,

• Early Macintoshes have a green-on-black, all-caps display.
• Interactive fiction text goes only 3/5 of the way across the screen.
• Macs use 5.25″ floppy discs.

These changes were no doubt thoughtfully made to construct the “retro” in a more intense way, allowing for a readable and seemingly old-school display and collaging different aspects of 1980s home computers. This way the green-on-black display and 5.25″ disks can live alongside the iconic presence of the early Mac. Plus, GLaDOS gets to say the multisyllabic word “Macintosh” at the end of the video. The creators of the video surely knew they were doing it wrong but decided to try to construct something more 80s than 80s.

This semester we have initiated a new research group at UiB — the Electronic Literature Research Group. With so much research activity now happening in our group in this area, and after consulting with our colleagues in Digital Culture, we decided that it would be good to have a separate research group focused specifically on e-lit, digital art, and other digital media aesthetic-related research in addition to our existing research group in Digital Culture. We are hoping that the group will extend beyond our colleagues in the program at UiB and include researchers and writers interested in these topics from elsewhere, in other UiB departments, in Bergen (and the world).

Google’s spam cop, Matt Cutts
the head of the Webspam team
in the sprawling, subterranean world
found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,”
snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles,
a Google no-no.

Liquid nitrogen and “fairy tale pumpkin”
will flag a Web site that goes from zero
zero influence on the latter, he said.
Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if
organic search results
warn against using tricks

to snooker his employer.
You could imagine a dozen contenders
“Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance,
And bedding? And area rugs?
Who is that someone?
The next it was essentially buried.

Prepress English version of article forthcoming in Norwegian in Vagant 1/2011 as “Bokstaver i bevegelse”

Prepress version of article originally published in Norwegian in Vagant 4/2010 as “Flukten fra språkfengselet”

The first Electronic Literature Collection was published in 2006. Including 60 works of electronic literature of diverse form and content, all published under one cover online and on a CD-ROM, the collection offered readers and educators a valuable resource, a set of works distributed freely under a Creative Commons license. The ELC provided teachers with a place where they could send students interested in exploring e-lit, and critics with a set of archived works around which they could gather their discourse – a set of common touchstones that served to help develop and refine a shared critical language about the emergent forms of literary practice.

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 is now out! Congratulations to editors Talan Memmott, Brian Kim Stefans, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans on bringing this project to fruition. The collection includes 63 works in 6 languages from 12 countries, and includes a wide variety of work, ranging from the classic web hypertext The Unknown, to the amazing narrative database / textual performance work The Last Performance, the minimalist poetry generator stylings of Nick Montfort’s PPG256, to Alan Bigelow’s philsophocomical “comic strips for the Web” Brainstrips, to Allison Cliffords visually stunning interactive treatment of the poetry of ee cummings The Sweet Old Etc.

Thanks to the hard work of the editorial collective, Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans, and to contributions of more than 70 (often collaborating) authors, we now have an incredible new anthology: volume 2 of the Electronic Literature Collection, which offers 60 new reading experiences for the networked computer.

(Here’s the ELO’s announcement about the new volume.)

The StarCraft AI competition introduced at AIIDE 2010 will be part of the AIIDE 2011 program. Last year the main event was won by UC Berkeley’s team, which showed how a computer opponent could be used to destroy enemies. This year, we expect to see even more sophisticated agents. Competition details are available here.

a big big honor! Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Jodie Mack received a Jury’s Choice First Prize award at the 2011 Black Maria Film Festival for her animated film. Mack describes her winning 28-minute “Yard Work is Hard Work” as “an animated musical featurette made with thousands of cut-outs from discarded printed materials. The piece follows a pair of newlyweds as they learn the perils of home ownership and life in general.”

Curveship runs on the Ben NanoNote, by the way. It could be faster, certainly – I and others will be working on that. But it does run, which is a good start and bodes well for the ability of Curveship games to run on many different platforms.

Happy Chinese New Year.

Happy Groundhog Day. Today, I’m releasing Curveship, my interactive fiction system that models not only the fictional world, but also the narrative discourse. A development version (0.5) of this Python framework is now available for download. You can find the links, along with some description and documentation of the system, at curveship.com.

(Original photos by April King and Postdlf, Wikimedia Commons; they & these modified versions are CC by-sa 3.0.)

“Code of Best Practices In Fair Use For Poetry” has just been released by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. “Poetry” as a cultural force, in the popular consciousness, is very traditional, but poets of course also have undertaken some of the our most unusual, avant-garde writing. The document gives a hint of the wide sweep of poetic practice while showing that poetry has long played host to quotation, parody, and other remixological practices. And the “Code” achieves its main purpose of outlining common sorts of writing and use that fair use seems to cover, as poets see it. I’m glad to have been involved in some of the meetings that led to this document. I hope it will helpful us continue the discussion about alternatives to cultural lockdown, bringing in the perspectives, not of industries, but of the creators of different sorts of culturally significant work.

In August 2010, the first ever Mario level generation competition was held at the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) conference. The contest involved generating a personalized level for a particular player, using metrics from a player’s  prior playthrough of a different level. There were three entries from the Expressive Intelligence Studio, including the winner, Ben Weber!

However, this competition had only the CIG audience as participants and judges. Julian Togelius and Noor Shaker at ITU Copenhagen have now opened up the competition for the general public to participate. The goal is to gather more (and more detailed) data on the differences between the generated levels and players’ preferences between them. We invite everyone to participate in these experiments!

Sherry Turkle is coming to Dartmouth to speak on the 10th of February about her newest research, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books. The 15th of April 2011 we’re hosting a DIGITAL POETRY SYMPOSIUM at DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, with leading digital poets John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Marjorie Luesebrink.
See more info at Dartmouth’s Digital Studies Website.

Last night I projected words to accompany music at a local lounge. This practice does not seem have an established name – does it? Please let me know if you’re aware of the conventional term. I have heard the phrase “text jockey” used. I’ve also come up with some other terms that don’t seem to fit perfectly. In a sense, this is VJing, but it’s also a practice that is compatible with VJing, since words can be projected in a subtitle-like fashion on moving images.

Building on the great success from last year, we are pleased to announce that there will be a second workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, to be held this coming June 28 in Bordeaux, France, co-located with FDG 2011. The workshop focuses on advancing the state of the art in computational techniques for creating content for computer games by bringing together researchers to discuss novel research and important issues in procedural content generation. The deadline for long and short papers is March 11, 2011.

Overview

Indie Game Designer E. McNeill's new game, Aurora

Dartmouth’s own E McNeill has released his indie game Aurora for PC. Aurora is an ambient indie RTS game. It’s beautiful, abstract, and — be warned, it is utterly addictive!

Congrats E, we are proud of this fantastic accomplishment!

This year’s MIT Mystery Hunt was won by my intrepid friends on team Codex Alimentarius early Sunday morning. I’m glad I had the drive (the 5.25″ drive, to be exact) to help them as they solved one of their puzzles.

It’s the beginning of another year, which means it’s time for another Global Game Jam. Santa Cruz is proud to host a site for the third year in a row, and we continue to grow. In fact, we’re currently tied for the 2nd largest site in the US and the 10th largest site in the world! But even if you’re not ready to dedicate a full 48 hours to the festivities, you should still come check out our keynote speakers this year, who will be talking from 4:30 on Friday, January 28th. We continue our tradition of world class talks to kick off our game jam, and this year we have three veterans of the industry that offer unique and fascinating perspectives on game design.