Grand Text Auto

DAC09 (a.k.a. Digital Arts and Culture 2009) will be held stateside, at UC Irvine, and is sure to offer a fantastic collection of papers, events, art, and discussion. “This iteration of DAC will dwell on the specificities of embodiment, cultural, social and physical location with respect to digital technologies and networked communications.”

This year’s DAC will feature several themes, and papers are to be submitted with one or more of these in mind:

• Embodiment and performativity
• After mobile media
• Software/platform studies
• Environment/sustainability/climate change
• Interdisciplinary pedagogy
• Cognition and creativity
• Sex and Sexuality

Processing Time is a party and competition where individuals and pairs will code up beautiful programs. It’s happening at MIT on May 2 as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. We hope you can join us!

• The 2008 XYZZY awards, the Oscars of interactive fiction, were handed out yesterday. IF Comp winner Violet by Jeremy Freese garnered the big prize of Best Game as well as three other XYZZYs. Congrats also to winners Eric Eve, C.E.J. Pacian, Jim Munroe, Renee Choba, Paolo Maroncelli & Alessandro Peretti, and all those whose games were nominted.
• A new issue of Eludamos has been published with articles on video game literacy, serious games, Loom, wipEout HD, and more.
• I’m told that GDC is over.

Go ahead. They’re little and red. By Tale of Tales, by Tomas Nilsson, by Donna Leishman, by Jason Ermer, by Gammick Entertainment, by Nick Montfort, by Roald Dahl, by Monty Python, by Tex Avery, by Kenneth Whitley.

Last week (March 18-21) I was at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference in New York City, at NYU. I took a few notes on the talks that seemed like they’d be of most interest to GTxA readers:

From the panel “Textual Studies and Video Games”

Matt Kirschenbaum: Preserving Virtual Worlds

The project takes a broad view of virtual worlds, from Zork to Doom to Second Life. They are fun, economically important, and platforms for creativity – and threatened, hard to preserve. Companies don’t preserve their own IP. DRM hinders preservation. Funded by NDIIPP. UIUC, Maryland, Stanford, RIT, Internet Archive, Linden Labs. Research preservation problems and approaches. Strategies: store, migrate, emulate, reinterpret. We deal with software, not data, and there’s a strong argument for emulation, as with facsimiles.

Here’s a fun bit of news… My in-development virtual-pets-meets-social-networking iPhone game, Touch Pets Dogs, was one of a few new products demoed as part of the big iPhone 3.0 press event at Apple yesterday, showing off new features like microtransactions and push notifications.

For the curious, on the engadget.com liveblog of the event scroll down to 10:54am to see images, as well as at 50mins 30secs on this video from apple.com. The puppies were demoed by Neil Young and Chris Plummer of ngmoco, Touch Pets’ publisher.

Tokyo Garage is a remix of the classic and elegant generated nature poem Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort. He wrote the code, which I did not feel the need to improve upon. I might well get sued for this piracy tribute. I hacked the words to make it more about urbanity, modernity, and my idea of Tokyo, a city I have never been to.

Kevin Driscoll and Josh Diaz have a new article on the history of chiptunes in the Journal of Transformative Works. It comes complete with video clips that document game sounds with the images and game play that accompany them.

Tiltfactor is at new digs and has another new game. Tilt and the multi-institutional Values at Play project are proud to announce the release of the new casual computer game, LAYOFF.

Developed by members of the Tiltfactor Lab and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Game Design and Development program, LAYOFF is an examination of the current financial scandal.

In preparing for my reading at MIT yesterday, I put together a page listing my various works of literary and computational art, collaborative, translated or adapted, and individually created. You should notice the new addition to the main page of nickm.com if you happen to visit.

The list includes some new pieces: Taroko Gorge, a poetry generator written originally in Python, presented here in my port to JavaScript, and ppg256-2, the second of my 256-character poetry generators written in Perl. You can see the former running on its Web page; the latter can be copied and pasted onto the command line of systems with Perl installed (that’s Mac OS X and Linux, by default) or consult the full instructions.

I’m glad to see these recent items about the book I wrote with Ian Bogost: Michael Agger reviewed Racing the Beam in Slate, providing a very nice description of our investigation of the VCS and the concept of platform studies. And, in The Boston Globe this Sunday, there’s an interview of yours truly by Geoff Edgers. In the interview, we discuss the lasting importance of the Atari VCS and some interesting aspects of the platform.

Update: Immediately after I posted this, I noticed Troy S. Goodfellow’s review that is just out in Crispy Gamer, “Print Screen: ‘Racing the Beam’ and ‘Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li’ – One of these is good.” He warns, appropriately,

There’s a fascinating recent interview with Gerald A. Lawson, who was behind the Fairchild Channel F. The system was originally called the Fairchild Video Entertainment System or VES, and was the first cartridge-based video game console. Among other things, the rollout of this system apparently prompted Atari to finish and release one of my and Ian Bogost’s favorite systems, the Atari VCS, which had been in development.

As it happens, Jerry Lawson is black and was the son of a longshoreman. In the interview, he mentions his experience with TV repair – something he has in common with the first Atari employee, Al Alcorn, who Lawson knew. I sense from the interview that Lawson was the more text-oriented of the two:

I tried to sell Alan a character generator. He showed me the way he was doing it, which was much simpler, and I said, “Heck, there’s no sense using a character generator.” ‘Cause what he did was he decoded segments to make block lettering, numbering for score keeping [in Pong]. He really didn’t have need for anything else that was character oriented.

He did help fix Atari’s coin mechanisms, though – kids has been exploiting them to get free games.

Threading through ebr (Electronic Book Review) in recent months are two longer pieces, “Electronic Literature: Where Is It?” by Dene Grigar and a mega-review called “Locating the Literary in New Media,” by Joe Tabbi. Also, note the response to Second Person and review of Half Life (the novel by Shelley Jackson, not the game) that are up.

We’ve had some sometimes heated discussions on here about open access and academic publications.

Now, here in the U.S., Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has revived a bill that would reverse the NIH open access policy and ban other federal agencies from adopting similar policies. (There’s a longer, more detailed analysis of this H.R. 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Work Act, online, too.) It’s a real disappointment to me to see backtracking on one of the few areas where academics have been doing something really new and of social impact, making use of the Internet to better share our work. If you feel the same way, please write your representative about it. Of course, you can write if you feel differently, too, and in any case you can tell us why you stand where you do, by sharing your letter here or by leaving some other comment.

Here’s what I wrote to my representative:

Some claim that today’s video game box art isn’t up to par with, say, … Atari 2600 box art.

“Someone surrenders and you don’t just go and kill them anyways.”

North Side, Inc. is set to show a protoype of their sandbox adventure Bot Colony at GDC at the end of this month. Their page for the game promises:

This prototype will demonstrate the dialogue engine powering Bot Colony™, which implements Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Generation and reasoning on very large knowledge bases. The game characters are intelligent agents that react to their environment. They have perception, exhibit goal-oriented behavior, and are capable of learning.

From outline to full text, witness here the writing of 13 (annotated) sentences about startups in EtherPad. Thanks to Charles McKenzie for this nugget.

Stephanie Strickland’s article “Born Digital,” describing electronic literature as a practice distinct from the publication of e-books and entwined with programming, is now up on the Poetry Foundation’s site. If you yourself are curious yourself about what characterizes e-lit, or if you’re hoping to be able to better explain the concept to others, I suggest you take a look at what Strickland has insightfully written.

Michael Jackson’s arcade games are being auctioned off. He will still apparently maintain two ping-pong tables in his basement.

I learned in the past few days that Laura Borràs Castanyer of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) is apparently being dismissed from her position at UOC.

This comes as quite a surprise, as Professor Borràs directs Hermeneia, a major European research group on digital literature; is also organizing the 2009 e-Poetry conference; has been overseeing the Ciutat de Vinaros Prize for digital literature; and is serving in the editorial collective for The Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2, the follow-up to the first volume that Scott and I worked on with Kate Hayles and Stephanie Strickland. Without having heard the complete story, the justification for this action apparently has something to do with her not having performed adequate service. This justification is also rather surprising, given only these activities that those of us in the Electronic Literature Organization know about.

We have news of a faculty position in creative enterprise and public leadership at Vanderbilt, one that is open to those working in digital media:

Vanderbilt University is seeking an innovative and entrepreneurial tenure-track scholar to help build a new program in Creative Enterprise and Public Leadership. The program includes graduate and undergraduate courses, internships, and hands-on creative practice and is part of a larger Creative Campus initiative described below.

Karen Collins, author of Game Sound, did an amazing study in which she traces how the peculiarities of the TIA (Television Interface Adapter) may have influenced the tonal sensibilities of Western youth and may be linked to the later use of flat seconds in rave, heavy metal, and industrial music. The article is “Fine Tuning the Terrible Twos: The Musical Aesthetic of the Atari VCS” (PDF version, deprecated HTML). Thanks much to 8-bit and 1-bit artist Shifty for handing me a copy of this paper last week.

In the 1990s, Seiko manufactured and supported a service for a pager in a wristwatch’s guise. The unit could only display two eight-character lines, and because it (more or less) used a seven-segment display, it could only display a subset of the letters in the English alphabet. (I speak of it in the past tense, for service is discontinued as the device did not survive Y2K.) For instance, it could not display the letters K, M, or W, so it could not render the words “Seiko,” “Message,” or “Watch.” Nevertheless, Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an ode to the Seiko Messagewatch on the Seiko Messagewatch.

Jamey Pittman’s Pac-Man Dossier is a Web page that contains everything that is known about Namco’s famous arcade game Pac-Man. As Pittman writes, “New discoveries found during the research for this page in December 2008 have allowed for the clearest view yet of the actual ghost behavior and pathfinding logic used by the game.” On the page, you will find a detailed analysis of why turning the joystick before reaching a corner is a good idea; an enormous table listing Pac-Man’s speed, the ghosts’ fright time, and other statistics for each level; and a discussion of the accelerated “Cruise Elroy” state which Blinky enters under certain circumstances. Word of this resource reached us thanks to (no, really) Inky.