Grand Text Auto

The avatars in 1 vs 100 are nicely expressive

All last week, Microsoft has been trialling 1 vs 100, an Xbox Live version of the popular game show. For those uninitiated, the real 1 vs 100 pits a contestant, dubbed The One, against 100 other people, called The Mob. All players answer each question. If a member of the Mob gets it wrong, they’re out of the game. The more The One can knock out of the game by successfully answering questions, the more money she can win if she walks away. If The One gets it wrong, it’s game over.

Keith Stuart’s provocative article in The Guardian plugs modern-day interactive fiction and suggests that novelists should be more involved in the making of video games, as they have been in the past. The article is on the right track. There is certainly reason for video game companies to license, or, less frequently, collaborate with those who make movies. But there are lots of things that games can do, and novelists could bring interesting perspectives, skills, and art to games – even they aren’t text-based interactive fiction. Of course, the right match has to be made and the writer has to be persuaded that video games are serious enough. I suggest Ubisoft grab Paul Auster, a dizzying writer. If he didn’t mind the association that come with writing and co-directing the movie Smoke, video games should be no problem.

Poemland, Chelsey Minnis, Wave Books, 2009

Minnis, confronting poetry, hurls a fruit salad. The pages of the eleven sections of this book have only a few lines each, most ending in ellipses. The images (”getting hit with a folding chair / And being held by your braids…”) accumulate and converse (”I’ll chop your head off! / And I’ll carry it around by the hair…”), commenting on various vague situations and on poetry (”It’s like trying to drink a bottle of champagne in a roadside bathroom…”) You might imagine that it’s boring to hear poets yammer about writing poems and being poets (”If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream…”). Not so. Via references to fashion and offbeat interpersonal statements, the lines of Poemland connect the concerns of our poetry subculture (poverty, recognition, originality, connection to the past, authenticity) to culture more broadly. The book is fun to read from line to line, too (”With this book I have made a very expensive joke…”) and is beautifully and aptly designed.

www.jesperjuul.com
gambit.mit.edu

Juul believes that there’s something missing from academic game studies.

We are beginning to understand that games are not static artifacts. Games are dynamically created and changed by the players who engage with them and the cultures within which they are played. Each play session is a completely different experience with different motivating factors and very different meanings.

Games can be:
-rule based systems that you master
– fictional worlds that you imagine
– social phenomena that you play with other people
– self-expressions that show who you are.

The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity has just concluded. I posted about the morning; here are my notes on the afternoon talks.

The first item for the afternoon was my invited talk, “Curveship: An Interactive Fiction System for Interactive Narrating” I worked a while to provide the paper to accompany my talk, trying to introduce IF, explain the basics of narrative variation, and get into at least some of the technical details of my system, including the string-with-slots representation, which I’ve been working on a great deal recently. I also tried to include handy references and pointers. Incidentally, I’ve been meaning to post more about Curveship, and I’d love to hear any questions you have about it at this point, even before I’ve properly introduced the system on this blog.

The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity (CALC-09) is taking place now at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In the first session on metaphors and eggcorns, researchers reported on using natural language understanding techniques in innovative ways:

Beata Beigman Klebanov presented on the use of a topic model (LDA, latent Dirichlet allocation) to detect the most obvious or deliberate types of metaphor, which are discussions of one domain the terms of another and which were annotated by people in this experiment. For different k, metaphorical uses were found to be less frequent in the k most topical words in the discourse overall.

Starting June 25th 2009!
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Practicum in Digital Culture & New Media – 10A
MACHINIMA

FLANAGAN  FS 49    DARTMOUTH   10A   301 N.FAIRBANKS

In this workshop, we conduct research in developing, understanding and advancing a real-time rendering and video production technique based on video games. This special topics course will allow a group of students to study the techniques of Machinima. Throughout the term students will examine film techniques and story creation techniques that apply to the traditional film form, examine Machinima on a technical and aesthetic basis, and critique current examples of Machinima films. Outside of class, students  will collaborate, putting  forth a large amount of effort to write and produce their own Machinima.  Our course aims to investigate the underlying concepts of this new form of media, examining the relationship to animation, traditional cinema, and forms of popular culture. During the course, we will create Machinima projects while developing the theoretical framework around this approach as it relates to film and video, games, play, and participatory media.

In his 2009 speech at Dartmouth, Jesper Juul argued that the list of games people choose to play is itself a form of self-expression. His “video game literacy” really does exist. People read, experience and cite games like they do printed text. Yet we don’t consider gamers to be ‘well-read’ just quite yet.

Why we don’t spend more time playing games? Why is experiencing games viewed as less beneficial than spending the same amount of time reading a book?

A dish for today: “Served Cold,” in the traditions of concrete poetry, search engine poetry, and poetry featuring incorrect but widely-used spellings of names.

Heads up from Frank Lantz at Games for Change 2009 for some inspirational examples of games helping us understand social change. Check out the blog Overcoming Bias, by economist Robin Hanson;  Intuition Games’ Gray game, which has players attempt to get players in a mob to switch sides; the phenomenon of “Kidney Chains,” where nonsimultaneous altruistic organ donations, if organized, can occur in optimally useful networks. Lantz talked about the practice of Min – Maxing in games, and the kidney chain is a game-like optimal solution to solving a social issue (there are 60,000 people waiting for kidney transplants at a given time). Finally he discussed optimal social solutions: complexity theorist Bruce Sawhill has noted,  “You no longer want to find the best solution — you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you’re still there.”

massively multiplayer mushu by Tiltfactor

June 12-14, 2009 join us to play two Tiltfactor urban games at the Come Out & Play Festival! The festival will transform New York City once again into an urban playground!

Opening on Saturday June 13 at 4 PM at the Festival HQ at the The Tank (354 W 45th St. between 8th/9th Aves)– Photopolis! Team up with players from New York, Beijing, and Shanghai for a cross-continental photography challenge.

On Sunday June 14 at 11 AM, start playing Massively Multiplayer Mushu! Talk to strangers, find clues, and fetch ingredients for a secret collective food festival!

“25 Microchips That Shook the World,” an article by Brian R. Santo that was published this month in IEEE Spectrum, is a fascinating look at important hardware components and their historical influence – a look within various hardware platforms.

Well Played 1.0: Video Game, Value and Meaning is now out from ETC Press. It’s available in print from Lulu.com and has been offered to the creative commons and can be downloaded as a PDF or read on the Web.

My contribution is “Portal of Ivory, Passage of Horn,” an article comparing two of the top games of 2007. Thanks to everyone who discussed this comparison with me at Grand Text Auto when I first blogged about this pair of games. My article is, I think, both more extensive and more focused than what I originally wrote, and I hope it helps to advance the discussion of video games.

Here’s a beautiful 42-second video: Last Day Dream by music video director Chris Milk.

Last year we undertook an experiment here: simultaneously sending the manuscript for Expressive Processing out for traditional, press-solicited peer review and posting the same manuscript, in sections, as part of the daily flow of posts on Grand Text Auto. As far as I know, it became the first experiment in what I call “blog-based peer review.”

Over the last year I’ve been finishing up Expressive Processing: using comments from the blog-based and press-solicited reviews to revise the manuscript, completing a few additional chapters, participating in the layout and proof processes, and so on. I’m happy to say the book has now entered the final stages of production and will be out this summer (let me know if you’d be interested in writing an online or paper-based review).

One of my last pieces of writing for the book was an afterword, bringing together my conclusions about the blog-based peer review process. I’m publishing it here, on GTxA, both to acknowledge the community here and as a final opportunity to close the loop. I expect this to be the last GTxA post to use CommentPress — so take the opportunity to comment paragraph-by-paragraph if it strikes your fancy. (more...)

I have a new blog: Post Position. Here’s my welcome post.

ICCC X, the First International Conference on Computational Creativity, will be taking place January 7-9 in Lisbon. The X, I believe, indicates the decade of workshops and symposia leading up to this conference. Here’s the scoop:

Although it seems clear that creativity plays an important role in developing intelligent computational systems, it is less clear how to model, simulate, or evaluate creativity in such systems. In other words, it is often easier to recognize the presence and effect of creativity than to describe or prescribe it.

The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the exchange of ideas on the topic of computational creativity in a cross-disciplinary setting.

Pat Harrigan and I are pleased to announce the publication of the final volume in our POV series: Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Following the first two volumes (First Person and Second Person) this project broadens our scope yet again. While the first volume was mostly (though not exclusively) focused on computer games and electronic literature, and the second injected tabletop gaming, performance-oriented play, and other kinds of systems that create meaning through play, this new volume greatly increases the range of narrative forms considered, while continuing to keep our previous concerns in play.

Given this, it’s probably no surprise that this is the biggest volume yet (more than 400 pages, though not, as the catalog currently states, more than 600). We continue to include the voices of practitioners and critics — for example, both Rafael Alvarez, who wrote for The Wire, and critic Jason Mittell reading The Wire‘s structure in game-like terms. We also continue to bring together popular arts (e.g., The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Watchmen, and Doctor Who) with experiments that will only be directly experienced by a select audience (e.g., Tamiko Thiel’s culture-crossing VR installations and Richard Grossman’s three-million-word, four-thousand-volume novel). And we also continue to connect the present and past, bringing in writing on vast narratives ranging from the early female superhero Miss Fury to Thomas Mann’s masterwork Joseph and His Brothers.

But shifting the focus to vast narrative also, of course, introduces discontinuities with the previous volumes.

There is a new podcast interview featuring yours truly, Mary Flanagan, along with Suzanne Seggerman about games for change at the Brainy Gamer. Everyone’s preparing for the Games for Change festival in NYC — just a few weeks away! Read more at http://www.tiltfactor.org.

Daniel Benmergui of “Storyteller” and “I wish I were the Moon” fame has a beautiful new piece out, one that is a poem as well as a game: “Today I Die.” Announcement of release here.

MAYA Design’s whitepaper “The Wrong Could” by Peter Lucas, Joseph Ballay, and Ralph Lombreglia contains the best cloud-computing metaphors yet, ones that are incisive as well as amusing:

Today’s so-called cloud isn’t really a cloud at all. It’s a bunch of corporate dirigibles painted to look like clouds. You can tell they’re fake because they all have logos on them. Real clouds don’t have logos.

Here’s what the Boston Cyberarts Festival exhibit at 1305 Boylston Street, which offered visitors the opportunity to play several Atari VCS games along with Tempest 2000 (Jaguar), Rez (Dreamcast), and Bit.Trip Beat (Wii), looked like:

The last photo shows George Fifield (director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival), Andrew Y Ames, and Nick Montfort (caught by the camera in his weekend attire).

Today Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, spoke at Dartmouth on “Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet.” Zittrain first defined the term “civic technologies” to mean those technologies that rise and fall and depend on participation.

Zittrain spoke first on Internet history: the development of the Arpanet –> Internet, he noted, was inherently playful and had an exhilarating sense of freedom and respect among users. The financial constraints for the development of the Internet significantly influenced — helpfully so — its design. Courtesy in networks, from access to attitude, as well as the the lack of business plans made this endeavor revolve around free information in the first place. Costs were low in production, and fees were not expected to be recouped through the use of the system (no sales, for example, were planned to support the infrastructure).

No, people weren’t ticked off – we had a great event full of Processing programming today at MIT, at Processing Time, part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Update: Screenshot of the winning program from the MIT News Office.

In case you were wondering where the hypertext novel has gone – it’s right here, and still being updated by the enigmatic Daniel W. from a secret location on the Lower East Texas. Paperback also available.