Grand Text Auto

Earlier I mentioned that this book will discuss three “effects” that arise in the relationship between system operations, surface presentation, and audience experience. These will serve as the major waypoints for the remainder of this volume. The first — “the Eliza effect” — is the well-known phenomenon in which audience expectations allow a digital media system to appear much more complex on its surface than is supported by its underlying structure. However, I will consider what most authors have ignored: during playful interaction with the simulated therapist for which the Eliza effect is named, the illusion breaks down rapidly. One alternative to breakdown, with a system of this sort, is to severely restrict interaction. Another is that pursued by many modern games: never building up the Eliza illusion, and instead clearly representing the operations of a simple system on the work’s surface. But these simple systems prove too limited for the fictional experiences games seek to make available to their players, resulting in breakdowns of a different type. This leaves only one option for those seeking to create ambitious playable fictions: more developed system models of story and character. (more...)

In this chapter I have talked about the perspectives from which I look at processes — perspectives that are authorial, critical, and political.

So far, however, there’s been little mention of something quite important about digital media processes: the fact that they don’t operate on their own. From web-based knowledge repositories to console-based video games, the operations of digital media are, in important ways, only truly realized in contact with audiences. A wiki’s processes mean little if the audience doesn’t use them to add data, edit it, and follow the connections embedded in it. Similarly, many of a game’s processes never come into operation if the game has no player. (more...)

Speaking of $200 books, I just received my copy of Blackwell’s A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. It looks great, with essays by a range of interesting people, including digital media heavy-hitters like Alan Liu, Marie-Laure Ryan, Johanna Drucker, and GTxA’s Nick Montfort. If you’re at an academic institution, make sure your library is getting a copy.

Lauren Collins’ 21 January 2008 article, “Friend Game: Behind the Online Hoax that led to a Girl’s Suicide” seems to me as significant and timely an examination of online culture as Julian Dibbell’s

In 1974, the cover of Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines proclaimed, “You can and must understand computers NOW.”

Nelson’s book (mentioned earlier in this chapter’s discussion of Expressive AI) wasn’t a response to the ubiquity of computers. In fact, Nelson’s book was published the year before the first personal computer kit — the Altair — became available. At that time the number of computers was tiny by comparison with our present moment. Those that existed were carefully tended by teams of professionals (what Nelson called the computer “priesthood”) and determining their uses was considered the province of specialists. It seemed a long way from everyday life. (more...)

• Six years in the making, Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer is an impressive collection of 29 essays by an array of computer scientists, philosophers and bot builders. Published by Springer, it’s pricey at $199, so I plan to use my local university library to access a copy. (Also, Amazon lets you browse random scanned-in pages of the book, to give you a flavor; it looks really good.)
• Seven years in the making, Erica T. Carter, Jim Carpenter’s poetry generation system, has gone open source. Read a GTxA post on Erica from a year ago here.

My second meaning for “expressive processing” is rather different — and itself has two elements.

First, it encompasses the fact that the internal processes of digital media are designed artifacts, like buildings, transportation systems, or music players. As with other designed mechanisms, processes can be seen in terms of their efficiency, their aesthetics, their points of failure, or their (lack of) suitability for particular purposes. Their design can be typical, or unusual, for their era and context. The parts and their arrangement may express kinship with, and points of divergence from, design movements and schools of thought. They can be progressively redesigned, repurposed, or used as the foundation for new systems — by their original designers or others — all while retaining traces and characteristics from prior uses. (more...)

Figure 1.1: Authoring data and process.

A few paragraphs ago I said that the possibility of creating new simulated machines, of defining new computational behaviors, is the great opportunity that digital media offers. Seizing this opportunity requires a bit of a shift. It is common to think of the work of authoring, the work of creating media, as the work of writing text, composing images, arranging sound, and so on. But now one must think of authoring new processes as an important element of media creation. (more...)

A computer is a strange type of machine. While most machines are developed for particular purposes — washing machines, forklifts, movie projectors, typewriters — modern computers are designed specifically to be able to simulate the operations of many different types of machines, depending on the computer’s current instructions. (more...)

Expressive Processing is the name of my forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press. Now is the time, in traditional academic publishing, when the press sends the manuscript out for peer review — anonymous commentary by a few scholars that guides the final revisions (and decisions). As Jeff Young reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, we’ve decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review. (more...)

Malcolm Ryan, a frequent commenter on here who several of us recently heard undertaking to analyze a page of Peter Rabbit, has apparently been circulating the beginning of a manifesto pertaining to interactive narrative and drama systems. Most people in this area think of Dogz when they hear “dogmatic,” but there’s also the obedience to doctrine that the Dogme 95 filmmakers have pledged and the Dogma 2001 vows Ernest Adams proposed, following the lead of those filmmakers.

Grand Text Auto has managed to obtain the first vow from this still-secret document:

As a signatory to the 2007 Narrative AI Manifesto, I do hereby solemnly vow that:

1) I will no longer assign events a numeric “tension” value and plot a story as an Aristotelean “dramatic arc”. I recognise that real stories contain situations and devices that are more semantically complex than can be represented by a sequence of numbers that rises and falls.

What else might be in store? We have some ideas …

• I heard several wonderful talks from researchers at GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Game Lab. It was particularly good to hear from my new colleague, Jesper Juul, who has joined us as a lecturer in the program I’m in, Writing and Humanistic Studies. Welcome, Jesper!
• Ian Bogost and I completed our book on the Atari VCS, Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform. There is still copy-editing, indexing, design, production, much more to do before it manifests itself to the world, but we’ve got everything in to the press. Whew!

There is a new call for proposals out for the 2008 Vienna Games Conference, to be held October 17 – 19th this year! The theme, “Future and Reality of Gaming” (F.R.O.G.), is incredibly interdisciplinary, intended to forge bridges between industry and academia. Representatives from design, industry, theory, culture, and education will be sharing their current findings and innovative models for thinking about games and for making them.

The organizers are seeking proposals from a range of folks including those who work in the areas of Education, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, the Arts, HCI, Media and Communication Studies, Philosophy, Social Science….

“Interested authors are requested to submit an extended abstract of approximately 1500 to 2000 words due 28th of March 2008 exclusively as email attachments (doc-files or rtf-files) to eva.frick@univie.ac.at.”

The organizers promise an engaging and convivial atmosphere, and knowing these particular organizers, this conference

The AISB conference is holding their second virtual pets symposium, building upon the first one from last April.

The Reign of Catz & Dogz symposium aims to explore aspects of interaction with anthropomorphised embodied devices such as Aibo, Pleo, Paro and Nabaztag, software such as Catz, Dogz and Nintendogs, as well as the numerous non-commercial devices and systems that have been developed in many research labs. The world-wide popularity of many of the commercial examples of such artefacts provides evidence of the widespread appeal of interacting with artificial representations of creatures – however the academic investigation of such interactions remains scarce.

As Julian Dibbell reports:

I am pleased to announce that my first book, the widely cited but long out-of-print MY TINY LIFE: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Being a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle and the Author’s Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO), can now be downloaded in its entirety in a handsomely formatted PDF edition, completely free of charge. Or, if you prefer, the fine folks at Lulu will package up a perfect-bound paperback version for you . . .

Ian Bogost announces a Monday launch date for the new Persuasive Games title Fatworld (funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). It looks to be a far cry from exergaming — and from the constant bemoaning that “kids aren’t getting outside because they spend all their time on those darn video games.” While the game’s not out yet, we can get an intriguing sense of its procedural rhetoric from the Fatworld page on the Persuasive Games site. Rather than simply telling people what they should do, it aims to expose the fact that “our culture and environment are actually structured to discourage healthy habits.”

AIIDE (AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment) is the premier conference for artificial intelligence, games, and other forms of interactive digital entertainment (disclosure: I’m the general chair of AIIDE this year). The Call For Papers is now available. Papers are due April 22. The conference will be held October 22-24, 2008. The full CFP follows:

Things are bad! And ten of them are the worst of all, the worst of all time. With that in mind, and in the spirit of looking into the bottom 5% of user-created content, Grand Text Auto presents you with this list of the 10 worst lists of 10 worst things.

[10] The 10 Best and 10 Worst IT-Related Super Bowl Commercials of All Time (So Far). The compilers of these two lists say “we must admit to a soft spot for monkeys,” which won’t save them from a fusillade of my abuse. The lists are not ranked, precluding an exciting buildup of interest; they can’t keep themselves to ten and include an honorable mention; the article is broken up over six pages for no good reason; and there is only one case in which the commercial itself is included – every other entry just has a textual description. The payoff we get for clicking through this is learning about things like Autobytel.com’s lugubrious advertisement The Pajama Purchase. And, as the one person who bothered to comment on this list has written: “You should post a follow-up article to this: Top 10 worst spelling and grammar mistakes in this article.”

While in game studies we often reference tabletop role-playing games — especially Dungeons & Dragons — there are few academic press publications that take them seriously, and much of the discussion situates tabletop games as computer game incunabula. Pat Harrigan and I decided to take a different approach with Second Person, inviting a range of RPG practitioners and theorists to look carefully at tabletop structures, experiences, and histories, with or without reference to their digital counterparts.

We’re very happy with the results — and now I’m happy to announce that these essays are becoming part of the First Person thread on electronic book review. This not only makes them publicly available, but also brings them into ebr’s network of ripostes, glosses, enfoldings, and so on. We’ll be adding the essays to ebr over time, this is only the first release, and I’m excited to see that a couple thought-provoking ripostes are already present.

This release begins with our overall Second Person introduction and an introduction to round one of Tabletop Systems. There are also three full-length essays:

Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, a peer-reviewed online journal specializing in new media and net art, has a new issue out. It features work by Thom Swiss, Mark Marino, Braxton Soderman, Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Jaka Zeleznikar, Michael Peters, and Jeanne Hamming.

You can skip your 2008 video game conferences and just read the keynotes, in five easy pieces. Thanks to dfan for this one.

A Review of Giant Brains
or Machines That Think
by Edmund Callis Berkeley
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
1949
286 pp.
(DjVu reader required)

Let me begin by admitting that I trudged to this book like a zombie, simply hoping that I might be amused to encounter frequent, non-ironic mentions of computers as “giant brains.” What I discovered was, while not a masterwork, a clearly-written and evidently very influential volume that is fascinating at times. It provides a view that goes beyond a single computing machine but is situated very early in computing history, before the first working stored-program computer (the EDSAC) had been completed. Giant Brains enlarged my thinking about the history of computing, tickling my digital media senses with its speculations about how individuals might use computers.

With regard to your request, I cannot agree to review for your journal right now. If [it] becomes an open access journal, I will be very glad to review articles for the journal.

Having written this in an email recently, I wanted to post about my reasoning and ask what Grand Text Auto readers, commenters, and bloggers think about this issue. Open access journals and other scholarly publishing issues are classic ivory tower matters, but my concern about restricting access to Grand-Text-Auto-like subjects has a lot to do with my concern for non-academic readers and commenters here, as well as academics who aren’t at major research universities with full access to journals. This includes people at small liberal arts colleges, even if they write award-winning papers, and independent scholars, even if they regularly keynote conferences and contribute authored and edited volumes to the academic discourse. It also includes game-makers, electronic literature authors, creators of digital art, and those who arrive here curious about digital media. Not to mention one of our six drivers.

I think there must be a few things that those of us who are part of the scholarly publishing process can do to foster an open-access future. The easiest thing that I’m able to think of is simply not volunteering our labor to lock academic writing away from the public.

Via AiGameDev.com I’m excited to see the Game/AI blog come back to life with an active thread on game industry and academic AI research collaborations. It’s pretty clear that finding common ground for this kind of collaboration is a challenge — though one that people are are trying to address through conferences like AIIDE.

While researching my forthcoming book (about which more news soon) I’ve posted selections from correspondence about a number of influential digital fiction systems, including James Meehan’s Tale-Spin (1 2), Scott Turner’s Minstrel (1 2), and Michael Lebowitz’s Universe (1). Now I’m pleased to continue the series with some information from GTxA’s own Andrew and Michael. I emailed them to learn more about the relationship between Façade and two earlier efforts: PF Magic’s “Petz” series (on which Andrew worked) and Phoebe Sengers’s The Expressivator (created at CMU while Michael was there).