Grand Text Auto

Tonight, Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls joined the variable_d salon to discuss activism in a digital age. Formed in 1985, the artists assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their tastes adn personalities. Between 1985 and today, over 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, have produced posters, billboards, public actions, books and other projects bring gender issues to the forefront of public debate and discussion.

Tiltfactor explores human values in games and in the game design process. Some of these values include things like sharing, loyalty, privacy, and cooperation. Often, these values are necessary for altruistic acts to occur.  Looking at the evolutionary roots for altruism, however, Dr. Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, studied how 18 month old children will automatically assist an adult who needs help opening a door. This behavior seems to arise earlier than most children are taught to be polite, suggesting that there is a natural inclination to help embedded within the human spirit. Read the November NY Times article, and
look at Tomasello’s book Why We Cooperate, with Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms and Elizabeth Spelke.

Belatedly, I want to mention a least a bit about the great conference that I participated in two weekends ago in New York: The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor. The gathering was organized by Trebor Scholz and took place at the Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts at the New School.

Thriller:

Smooth Criminal:

Something to give thanks for and dance your way into turkey comas. Happy Thanksgiving!

On Monday (November 30) at 6pm in MIT’s room 14E-310,

The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing will present a talk by

Marina Bers

associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and adjunct associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University.

That’s an interview with Alan DeNiro now up at Grinding to Valhalla. DeNiro is author of the just-published Total Oblivion, More or Less, in which Minnesota, and then the rest of the US, is invaded by ancient European tribes. DeNiro also wrote and programmed one of the most unusual interactive fiction pieces of recent vintage, Deadline Enchanter. Or perhaps the word is “bizarre.” The game seem to not completely work, in a few different senses of “work,” but I was intrigued with it and found it to be oddly compelling, a refreshing experiment. Hopefully novel-readers will receive a similar wake-up slap from Total Oblivion, and, hopefully DeNiro won’t abandon interactive fiction now that he’s made it to print.

Piksel, a festival for free-software-creating and -using artists and developers, has begun in Bergen, Norway. If you can’t drop by, at least visit the festival on the Web and check out the brilliant hackery on display at the main exhibition.

Rachel Miller of Virginia Commonwealth University just interviewed me about my electronic literature work – my digital writing, focusing on my interactive fiction. She asked some very good questions. In return, I asked if she’d let me post the interview here, to which she kindly agreed.

1. Do you have a specific audience you are trying to appeal to with your work? (It may be different audiences depending on the genre.)

Yes, certainly. I even think of specific people who I would like to enjoy particular pieces of work, and that offers very good guidance. I also think of groups of people such as the interactive fiction community, digital poets, and electronic literature authors and scholars.

Andrew Stern’s company Stumptown Game Machine released their Touch Pets Dogs, published by ngmoco for the iPhone. On this social network, everyone knows that you’re a virtual dog. Versions of it are in the top 10 free apps on the iPhone App Store now, and in the top 100 of pay apps.

Rover’s Day Out is the winner of the IF Comp. (Dogs everywhere!) The game is by Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman. Broken Legs by Sarah Morayati took second, Snowquest by Eric Eve third. Congratulations to all authors! If you haven’t played the games yet, they’re still there waiting for you.

Only with the absurdity of this video can you accurately capture the almost-entirely failed message of Call of Duty.

Choice quote: “My girlfriend has walked in front of the telly again.”

This just in from Tiltfactor at Sea correspondent E McNeill via games(TM) magazine.

While every boy knows that Fighting Fantasy was like, you know, 900 times better, than Choose Your Own Adventure, the level to which Christian Swinheart goes to dissect the CYOA series is nothing short of phenomenal. His visualizations of the story paths, in particular, are beautiful depictions of a system in operation.

While I won’t bother trying to add anything to Christian’s epic foresight into the series, I have to say I was fascinated by Inside UFO 54-40:

Distinguished Lecture: Frank Lantz
Interim Director, NYU Game Center and Creative Director, Area/Code
Wednesday, Nov 18th, 2-3:30pm
Engineering 2, room 506

“Innovations in Game Design: Through Practice to Theory”

Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has been an innovator in the field of game design for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive.

For the ears: cfml-prototype.mp3

Context Free is an excellent tool for exploring generative spaces in the domain of 2D visual art (and Structure Synth does a fantastic job in 3D), but can a language of circles, rectangles, and triangles mutated by rotates, translates, and scales be translated into the domain of music? The result is not just a rich analogy, but a fun and expressive software performance instrument.

On Monday (November 16) at 6pm in MIT’s room 14E-310,

The Purple Blurb series of readings and presentations on digital writing will present a talk by

D. Fox Harrell

creator of GRIOT, a system that generates poetry and interactive multimedia narrative using his Alloy algorithm. Alloy uses an algebraic semiotics formalization of the cognitive linguistics theory of conceptual integration, also called conceptual blending.

The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment.  The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots.

Competition details are available here.

Actually I haven’t had the energy to keep mining each of the presentations at The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice, but they were rich in provocation and new ideas, and now I have to post something to follow “part 1.” The workshop went very well; particularly good were two long evenings of electronic literature, digital poetry, and readable digital art that were done by individuals but showcased collaboration. These two readings stood out because so much of the workshop time (which usually would have gone to very full days of panels) was dedicated to the presentation of creative work, and because the variety and quality of work was stellar.

Thursday 12 November 2009
at Dartmouth College

Feeling PLAYFUL this Autumn?
Join us anytime 4-7pm this Thursday, 12th of November for a
TILTFACTOR OPEN HOUSE!

Visit Dartmouth’s GAME RESEARCH LABORATORY, Tiltfactor
(http://www.tiltfactor.org).

ENCOUNTER our research with the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Values at Play, and the Games and Learning Institute!
PLAY our games (such as the casual hit of the spring, LAYOFF, and our new board game, VEXATA)!
SIP COCOA in the PLAYCUBE!
EXPLORE the games of Dartmouth’s student game designers!
JAM with Rockband — and SING so much, you’ll be a POPSTAR!!
EAT like Pac-Man from our esteemed snacks while you play!
ASK us about digital culture and games-related majors, minors, and courses!

I’m at a fine gathering, The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is a workshop Scott Rettberg organized here in Bergen, Norway. Here’s a tiny glimpse of it.

First, Daniel Apollon has very deftly provided us with a video of last night’s electronic literature readings / presentations by nine readers: Jörg Piringer. Roderick Coover, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Renée Turner, Serge Bouchardon, Chris Funkhouser, Talan Memmott, and Michelle Teran. It was remarkable for being an extremely long e-lit reading that was also very compelling throughout and offered a wide range of work, never lagging at any point during the three hours. The video is just over 11 minutes.

It has to have been 4 or 5 years since I’ve seen a recent Simpsons episode.  After catching up on the last few episodes, I can really appreciate how “with it” the Simpsons have been.  After all, it’s gotta be relevant if being parodied by the Simpsons.    Particularly relevant is episode 21, where Bart’s teacher is replaced with a younger, hipper instructor.

Bart: “Then Zack skyped us, live blogged our spelling bee, and friended us on facebook!”

FDG 2010 has put out their Call for Papers, the important date being 5th February as the paper and poster submission deadline.

FDG 2009 was a fantastic conference, filled to the brim with various gaming academic luminaries, fascinating papers and a wide variety of interests. I’m looking forward to 2010, as it’s just down the road in Monterey!

Luis and Gay Tony in GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony

Last week, the second and final installment of the Episodes of Liberty City downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV, The Ballad of Gay Tony, was released. Unlike the more sullen story of Nico Bellic, clawing his way up from nothing, Gay Tony’s Luis begins with a crisp suit, good job, plenty of cash and all sorts of expensive items to wreak havoc throughout Liberty City. What marks out GTA IV’s DLC from a simple mission pack or extra campaign is that it offers the chance to experience Liberty City from a new perspective, reimagining the gameplay, and thus, the game, in the process.

The Electronic Literature Organization’s
Fourth International Conference
& Program of Digitally Mediated Literary Art

June 3-6, 2010
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by the ELO and Writing Digital Media 
at the Brown University Literary Arts Program
dedicated to Robert Coover

The Electronic Literature Organization and Brown University’s Literary Arts Program invite submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference to be held from June 3-6, 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

• electronic literature
• writing digital media
• language-driven digital poesis
• literal art

Those of us who study computer and video games are very fortunate to have two free, online, peer-reviewed journals that do not assess page fees: Game Studies and Eludamos. And, there is at least one more free, online, peer-reviewed journal that does not assess page fees and includes articles about computer and video games: Digital Humanities Quarterly.

That’s the preface to my mentioning that a new issue (vol. 3, no. 2) of Eludamos is now out.

Also, that journal has issued a new call for papers: