Grand Text Auto

The mammoth 10th anniversary issue of the online journal Drunken Boat is now out. I have a piece “Electronic Literature (in Performance)” in the DB Electronic Arts and Literature folio about the work presented at last year’s Electronic Literature in Europe conference, describing many of the works and including video documentation of many of the performances. Jessica Pressman also has an excellent essay, “Charting the Shifting Seas of Electronic Literature’s Past and Present” close reading e-lit from the Drunken Boat archives and discerning emerging genres, and there is a new hypertext poem, “That Night” by Steve Ersinghaus and James Revillini, among other delights. The other folios in the 10th anniversary issue of Drunken Boat include the Mistranslation project, with contributions from a number of digital poets, a huge collection of materials from Black Mountain College, 100 new poems, conceptual fiction, visual poetics, nonfiction, and a folio on arts in Asia. It is less a journal issue than an entire library of interesting literary production. I look forward to exploring it in more depth.

Literactiva is a new blog, in Spanish, about interactive narratives and literature of several types – interactive fiction, games, and digital poetry. Users can rate the different items that authors Grendel Khan and Depresiv have reviewed. Recent reviews brought to my attention a Lovecraftian, epistolary, online game called De Profundis (English page) and the IF Ofrenda a la Pincoya (which you can play online).

After some discussion this spring, the contributors to Grand Text Auto (including me) decided to make a change. We noticed that while Nick Montfort had kept up a steady pace of interesting contributions to the blog, the rest of us (four of whom have become parents in the last two years) have been blogging at a much more occasional pace, to the extent that it was no longer really fair to call it a group blog, since Montfort was pulling most of the weight. Nick started his own blog, Post Position, a couple of months back. This does not however mean the end of GTxA altogether. The format of the group blog has changed, and now has begun life as an aggregator of our individual blogs, including this one. We’re also keeping open the possibilities of doing other things as a group, such as the exhibition that was recently at the U of I and previously at the Beall, creative projects or distribution of creative projects, symposia and such. And I think the change from a group blog to an aggregator will be interesting. In the past I’ve used this space in a different way from my posts to GTxA. Maybe more idiosyncratically, or personally. The new GTxA will likely be a mash-up of individual blogging styles. I hope that, if nothing else, the new arrangement will inspire to blog here more than once or twice a year. I should at least be sharing some of the awesome links I share with my friends at facebook.

Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin), is now back as an aggregator of four blogs by the original GTxA authors, including this one. Check it out.

E McNeill, a friend to Tiltfactor and one of Dartmouth’s own, constitutes the only one-person game making ‘team’ at this year’s Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition!
He’s a finalist in the Game and Development competition. He is showcasing his game ALTERNEX in Egypt! Follow the proceedings here and follow on twitter at #ImagineCup.

Games are a global medium, and to theorists such as Lisa Nakamura at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference 2009, one cannot separate the construction of digital games into particular cultures and practices. Having one national “essense” or sensibility is entirely fictional, Nakamura notes, because games are very global in their production practices and marketing practices. Nakamura brings up theorist Martin Lister (New Media: A Critical Introduction, 2003 ) to support her position, as Lister notes that “the videogame is the most thoroughly transnational form of popular culture, both as an industry” and “content” such as characters and stories.

I’ve been meaning to write something deliberate and detailed about the May 3 Penguicon talk, “Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction,” by Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf). And I’m still waiting to do that. I didn’t want to wait any longer to mention the talk on here, though, since it is presented very well in its Web version and will be useful for many people. It’s an intriguing discussion of the other major idea behind Inform 7 – the one that isn’t “natural language” programming. The discussion of how to code interactive fiction is one I’ve been mulling over as I continue to work on Curveship. I think providing first-class representations of actions is very helpful in dealing with some of the problems Zarf addresses, although it doesn’t solve everything by itself. And I think that having representations, within actions, of atomic events (such as exerting force on something and thereby touching it) deals with another of the problems that Zarf mentioned. But I’ll have to leave the extended discussion of that for another post.

The First International Conference on Computational Creativity will be taking place in Portugal on January 7-9 2010. ICCC-X will follow on a decade of smaller-scale workshops and symposia. The call for papers lists the deadline of September 21 for papers, and promises:

The conference will include traditional paper presentations, will showcase the application of computational creativity to the sciences, creative industries and arts, and will incorporate a “show and tell” session, which will be devoted to demonstrations of computational systems exhibiting behaviour which would be deemed creative in humans.

Chris Klimas, the hypertext and IF author who runs Gimcrack’d, has just released free versions of Twine for Mac and Windows, along with documentation and several screencasts that explain how the system works and a command-line tool, called “twee,” for working with stories in Twine’s format. Twine is a system for constructing interactive stories using a visual map, not unlike Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace. While it lacks the august heritage of that piece of software, Twine is freely available and free to use for any purpose, even commercially.

Michael Gentry, author of the stunning, large-scale, Lovecraftian interactive fiction Anchorhead, has another full-scale IF, his first since that award-winning game came out in 1998.

Dave Cornelson, who founded the Speed IF competitions and the IFWiki, has led his interactive fiction company, Textfyre, to publish its first game.

The game that is so notable in both of these ways is Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter. It is available for either Windows or Mac for about $25. As with all of the planned offerings of Textfyre, this game is directed at a specific audience: young readers wanting to experience the pleasures of reading while playing computer games. The hope, no doubt, is that parents will appreciate the fun and literacy-enhancing qualities of interactive fiction.

and perhaps he had a hand in a gaming classic…

In the last couple of months, I’ve been utilizing my Gamefly subscription to the fullest. I’ll talk about that in another post (sneak peek: I heartily recommend it). It’s allowed me to play games I otherwise wouldn’t have done, including Call of Duty 4 and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.

Both games take place in a fictional Middle Eastern country, whereby “fictional” we can replace “Iraq, but we didn’t want to say that.” This is a trend that began with Full Spectrum Warrior, a game released only half a year after Saddam Hussein’s capture, which was set in “Zekistan”. This isn’t all that far off Team America’s “Durkadurkastan.”

Only a few short weeks after I wrote about policing game spaces, Free Realms introduces the referees. They seem to act as embodied Game Masters, helping out the good players, while the embodiment makes sure the bad ones know they’re being watched.

A great solution.

Famous abandonware site Home of the Underdogs is back, or at least quickly returning to its earlier state, at http://www.hotud.org/. Different appearance, same games, same mission and community.

Update, June 22: HotU is being revived on several sites, as Clara noted in comments: http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net and http://hotu.pratyeka.org are others.

This past January, Craig Reynolds from Sony’s research group in Foster City gave a presentation at UC Santa Cruz on current challenges in creating computational crowds, especially those where the members of the crowd are cooperating to perform some task. A video of the talk can be viewed here:

https://slugtube.soe.ucsc.edu/play-video.php?ID=1072

As a contrast to the recent talk by Mark Henne from Pixar, this talk focused on the underlying algorithmic difficulty of creating the desired algorithmic behavior. Mark’s talk focused more on how to integrate behavior into an existing pipeline, and challenges with ensuring the filmmakers retained artistic control over the procedurally generated scene.

This segment on the Today show, aired June 18, 2009, talks about how the games industry is increasingly focusing on girls and women in game creation and marketing. While the segment has its cringeworthy moments (floating talking head in a video game world, ew!), it mostly provides a good overview of current industry thinking about designing and marketing games for girls and women. Interviews with women on the floor of GDC are generally very good.

My daughter Tatum is shown in the segment (she’s in the light blue top with brown straps). She was invited up to Ubisoft in San Francisco for an afternoon during GDC for the taping of the segment. They were great hosts!

Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.2 (Spring 2009) has been published. The issue includes a cluster of articles on finishing digital humanities projects, edited by Matt Kirschenbaum, a cluster of articles on data mining, edited by Mark Olsen, three articles including my piece “Communitizing Electronic Literature“, and a review by Johanna Drucker of Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

A sketch for a "cute little dungeon crawl"

I’ve got a whole philosophy of game design I’m sitting on here, but today I’d like to share just one little provocative tidbit: game designers design players too.

Carlos Diuk, Andre Cohen, and Michael L. Littman of Littman’s RL³ Laboratory at Rutgers devised a new way of doing reinforcement learning, using Object-Oriented Markov Decision Processes, a representation that looks at a higher level than usual and considers objects and interactions. They had a paper about this at last year’s International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). Better yet, they demonstrated their OO-MDPs representation by using it in a system that learned to play Pitfall in an emulator. I don’t believe that the system got all the treasures, but watching it play and explore the environment was certainly impressive. It seems like the technique is an interesting advance. By trying it out on a classic game, the researchers suggest that it will have plenty of “serious” uses in addition to being used in video game testing and in game AI.

Here’s a nice, simple game prototype that explores the core movement, inventory, and timing mechanics of Motherload that took just 10 minutes to design and 60 minutes to program using our new design tool.  Rather, this is the half of a nice, simple game prototype that supports human play testing, but there is more to it than that.

Chaos Theory looks great even now, mainly due to its strong filter effects

Spurred on by the delicious gameplay for Splinter Cell: Conviction at E3, as well as somehow managing to contract a cold in the Californian summertime, I found myself downloading Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory from the Xbox Originals service. I expected to be underwhelmed by the graphics, as it’s often easy to let graphical fidelity get in the way of a play experience (for those unconvinced, I dare you to try and play Final Fantasy VII again!).

I am pleasantly surprised to say I am wrong: this game remains a great, thrilling experience.

On Friday, May 29, 2009, Mark Henne from Pixar came to UCSC and gave a talk on crowds in the movie Wall-E. You can watch the video here:

https://slugtube.soe.ucsc.edu/play-video.php?ID=1070

I was impressed by the complexity of the AI underlying the characters that comprise the crowds, another reminder of just how complex seemingly simple real-world behaviors can be. I was also struck by how the entire process was optimized to ensure that the artists could, if desired, take a single character from a crowd and manually change its look and behavior. This is consistent with the entire filmmaking process at Pixar, which is optimized for complete artistic control over the end product. Games, in contrast, are much more willing to accept the limitations of the game engine being used.

I got to hear Brenda Brathwaite speak about her recent work yesterday. As you know if you’re read the Escapist article about her board games, she’s been developing a series of non-digital games about very serious subjects: The middle passage, Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland, and the Holocaust – so far. I also got to talk with her and some others about Train (upper right) at the GAMBIT Game Lab and got to play against her there in Siochan Leat (lower left). The latter, also known as “The Irish Game,” is a very playable game, although in my limited experience, it seems like it may have too many symmetries. I tried to play for a draw (since that seemed like a “fair” outcome), forgot about a rule and fell behind, and then caught up again to draw the game in the end. Since Train was “spoiled” for me and others, we talked about the play that had taken place in other sessions, and ended up having a very interesting discussion. I have no problem with games that rely on the players being naive, and which can be played only once, as long as that one experience is valuable. The verbal game Max and Nora is like this, and the way that some people play the party game Psychiatrist is similar, also. The latter game can easily be generalized, though, and can be endless fun (and insightful) if it is. Train is about something quite different: the drive for efficiency that obscures the ethics of one’s action. It is meant to provoke substantial conversation, and it does that well, helping us think about the nature of play and the design of games as well as about an important historical episode.

Tarleton Gillespie, author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, presented an interesting paper at MIT’s Media in Transition 6 conference – one that is helpfully available online, and which is called “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’”

Gillespie considers the way that YouTube and other companies in the business of “content hosting” have positioned themselves as offering “platforms” – a stance that has populist benefits and which at least has the potential to distance these companies from liability for material they serve up. Interestingly, Gillespie finds that the computational sense of platform pre-dates this Web 2.0 and content-delivery sense. Admittedly, that sense, too, is a relatively new way of thinking about platform, and the most recent OED sense. Gillespie quotes this fine blog post by Marc Andreessen: