Grand Text Auto

Lost in the Static
Sean Barrett
Silver Spaceship Software
2007

Lost in the Static is a wonderful little Windows game, one that was quickly developed around an innovative concept. The gameplay is conventional: it is a typical platformer and combines standard jumping challenges with movement through new and interesting spaces. But the means of creating an image on the screen is not at all conventional, as this screenshot should make clear.

ELO Meetup at the MLA

As we have for the past several years, we are planning an informal meet-up for people affiliated with or interested in the Electronic Literature Organization at this year’s MLA conference. This year, we are planning on meeting at the “Big Bar” at the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, after the “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating” panel, from 5-6 PM on Friday, December 28th. We plan to converge on the bar and have a drink or two. Afterwards, for those who would like to continue the conversation and take advantage of the world’s best deep-dish pizza, we’re reserving some tables at a nearby restaurant. If you’re only planning on joining us for a drink, just show up at the Big Bar at 5PM. If you want in on the pizza, please send an email to Stefanie Boese (sboese2 at uic dot edu), indicating how many people plan to attend and your preference for sausage, spinach, or mixed vegetarian pizza. We’ll put the order in ahead, so we won’t have to wait long in the restaurant to eat. We will “go dutch,” splitting the bill evenly and paying in cash.

Electronic Literature & Related Panels at the MLA 2007

This year’s convention features several panels (“New Reading Interfaces,” “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, and Navigating,” and “Electronic Literature: After Afternoon”) that are explicitly focused on electronic literature, and several that are more tangentially related to the subject. Below is a mini conference guide focused on e-lit.

I push the loaded trolley across the car park, battling to keep its wonky wheels on track. I pop open the boot of my car and then for some reason, I have no idea why, I look up, into the clear blue autumnal sky. And I see him. It takes me a long moment to figure out what I am looking at. He is falling from the sky. A dark mass, growing larger quickly. I let go of the trolley and am dimly aware that it is getting away from me but I can’t move, I am stuck there in the middle of the supermarket car park, watching, as he hurtles toward the earth.

Recently I’ve been playing Mass Effect. As I expected, so far the story and characters shine. As for NPC interaction, while underneath it looks to be pretty much the same old dialogue trees, there’s the potential for much better performance with the new system. I mean that in the acting sense, rather than the computational sense.

For those who haven’t been playing (or reading about) Mass Effect, during each exchange with NPCs there is a set of options presented for types of things to say (rather than, in games like Knights of the Old Republic, things we assume the player character will literally say). A selection can be made while the NPC is still talking, and then triggered when appropriate. After the trigger, the player character animates and voice acts through a response that expresses the basic idea of the chosen option, but perhaps performed in a surprising or clever way (or sometimes, an unintended one). Apparently this went through 10-12 iterations before the version we see in the game. The result can feel like a nicely-scripted conversation between two characters, and somewhat less like the navigation of an option tree.

On the other hand, it also makes conversation feel a bit less first person — sometimes more as though we’re influencing Shepard (the player character) than playing as Shepard.

The finalists for the Independent Games Festival, held annually at GDC, have been announced.

Much like I felt from the 2D physics-based indie game jam a few years ago, highly procedural and generative gameplay can make for compelling games. Two of the five games competing for the grand prize make creative use of 2D physics: Crayon Physics Deluxe, and World of Goo. Check out the trailers for each; I’m particularly taken by the trailer for Crayon, which taps into the nostalgia for older mediums I wrote about a few months ago. I’m reminded of the excellent Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings animations from my Captain Kangaroo days; sigh… It would have been cool if SketchFighter 4000 were competing this year too.

I’m delighted to announce that Stuart Moulthrop, a longtime friend to Grand Text Auto and a valued mentor and collaborator of mine, has won the 3rd International Digital Literature Award Ciutat de Vinaròs in both categories.

His Deep Surface is the winner in the narrative category.

His Under Language shared the prize for poetry with Isaias Herrero Florensa’s Universo Molecula.

Moulthrop has already put both of his winning works online. I have not found a link to Universo Molecula yet, but will add one when I do. Isaias Herrero Florensa also received the special prize for best work in Catalan. See the announcement of the winners for more details about the award.

Want a Better World? Build a Better Game! Social Impact Game Contest 2007
Submissions due January 1, 2008

The Values At Play project is now accepting submissions to its first Social Impact Games Contest! Values At Play is a three year investigation of social values and games. Selected contest entries will be archived and available for public play in the Values at Play Game Library.

Winning games will be archived and promoted by our not-for-profit team. Contest judges will include game designers Katie Salen, Jesper Juul, and Games for Change President Suzanne Seggerman.

The Values at Play research project launched version 1.0 of its website, http://www.valuesatplay.org, which offers a wealth of game design and scholarship about games. Valuesatplay.org has also begun accepting submissions for its Social Impact Game Contest.

November’s last week marked two major milestones for Jeremy Douglass, of GTxA neighborhood blog Writer Response Theory. First, on Tuesday, he posted his recently-accepted dissertation, “Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media.” I’m digging in to this document right now, planning to cite some of Jeremy’s work on the aesthetics of breakdown in my forthcoming book.

For our last Purple Blurb of the semester, Andrew Plotkin will be joining us at MIT in the Trope Tank (14N-233) at 6pm this Tuesday, December 4, to share some of his work with us.

Andrew, sometimes known as Zarf, is a leading interactive fiction author, having written and programmed A Change in the Weather; So Far; Spider and Web; Hunter, In Darkness; Shade; The Dreamhold and Delightful Wallpaper. He is also a designer of different sorts of computer games (such as System’s Twilight) and games off the computer (such as Capture the Flag with Stuff, a game which draws several hundred CMU students each semester). His work includes a hypertext piece created as a part of large-scale collaborative art project, a Lisp interpreter for Infocom’s virtual machine, a 32-bit portable virtual machine of his own for interactive fiction, called Glulx, and a detailed digital concordance for John M. Ford’s novel The Dragon Waiting.

As Game Developer publisher Simon Carless notes over on GameSetWatch, the magazine’s editors have announced the 2007 finalists for their annual Front Line awards. Pat Harrigan and I are pleased to see Second Person listed as a finalist in the Books category!

Here is another documentary to report, this one a 5-part series on the Discovery Channel called Rise of the Video Game, airing each Wednesday night over the next few weeks. Episode One, a week ago (that I unfortunately missed), included discussion of the Cold War’s influence on the creation of the first videogames.

This looks interesting: filmmakers Peter Haas and Silvia Holzinger began making a documentary film about computer pioneers and “grandfather nerds”; they ultimately turned their focus to the now 84-year-old Joseph Weizenbaum. The resulting piece is called Weizenbaum, Rebel at Work.

At a time when the German capital, Berlin, was struggling with famine after World War II, Joseph Weizenbaum was soldering and programming the world’s first computers. He created the first banking computer in the world, was perhaps one of the first computer nerds ever and pursued an unprecedented career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the “mighty” MIT in Cambridge, where he invented the first virtual persona, ELIZA/DOCTOR, a program that engaged humans in conversation with a computer.

One of the memorable moments of May’s Future of Electronic Literature symposium was a first look at slippingglimpse — a new work of e-poetry from Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Paul Ryan. It’s a great combination of text, visuals, and a thought-provoking concept, resulting in water reading text reading technology reading video. Or, as they put it:

the water reads the poem text (full-screen mode) using motion capture coding that assigns the text to locations of movement in the water;

Submissions for the Visionary Landscapes ELO conference, at WSU near Portland, Oregon, are due Friday. You can submit presentations and/or creative work.

A Review of Hacker Culture
by Douglas Thomas
University of Minnesota Press
2002
296 pp.
$19.95

This is a fine book that already seems antique, and not just because of the Commodore PET on the cover and the centrality of WarGames and Hackers to the discussion of the cultural situation of hacking. Not because of any dated analysis, either: there are good arguments in here about the importance of secrecy in hacking, the way the hacker becomes a locus for technological anxiety, and questions of the body in the digital realm. The book seems to raise the question, though: Where have all the hackers gone?

Computing and the Internet now seem to be fully productized and anything but an “electronic frontier.” Eternal September hit long ago like nuclear winter. The very concept of a long-distance call has almost been forgotten by most phone users. The computer-savvy obediently turn to iPhones for world wide access, to make use of whatever applications have been developed by Apple, Inc. in partnership with AT&T – all other uses being prohibited. Quite an irony, considering that the two Apple Computer founders first went into business selling phone phreaking equipment. Once hackers, now hacked.

Something to be thankful for: Steven Poole placed a PDF of his 2000 book Trigger Happy online under the CC by-nc-nd 3.0 license. Trigger Happy is an important early book about video games and aesthetics. The electronic edition, revised in 2001 and 2004, has been noted on Mefi and elsewhere; thanks also go to ifmud’s inky for the tip.

A reminder about a call for papers recently ended up in my inbox – quite a surprise, since I had not seen the original call and didn’t even know that this journal existed. But there is a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal on computer gaming that has already published its first issue. The journal is called Eludamos, and these are the people behind it. I’ve pasted the call for papers below.

That is, the Society for Literature, Science, and Arts ’07 conference, CODE, vis-a-vis the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT).

Recently I participated in a conference in Portland, Maine, the SLSA ’07: CODE, and then, the next weekend, the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies in Alexandria, Virginia. Andrew has already offered very detailed notes about the AAAI symposium, but I wanted to mention, more briefly, a few things about both of these interesting events.

My interest in story generation, heightened by work on my book manuscript, has brought me to correspond with the authors of a number of seminal systems. I’ve been posting what I can share publicly, leading to posts about Tale-Spin (1 2) and Minstrel (1 2). Now I’m pleased to add a post with more information about Michael Lebowitz’s Universe.

I outlined the approach taken by Universe last year, in a series of posts contrasting it with Minstrel (1 2 3 4 5). But, as with my writing about other systems, this was entirely based on reading publications about the work — I hadn’t yet heard directly from the authors. In this post I’m including some of the thoughts and memories shared by Lebowitz in our recent correspondence:

I’ve got to admit to being surprised that anyone has run into UNIVERSE after all this time. It was a pretty small piece of work but one that was fun and I rather liked. We could have done a lot more with it these days — we were quite limited by computing power.

The United States Library of Congress is archiving 300 electronic literature web sites in collaboration with the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) and archive-it.org. To suggest sites to be included in this project, please see

http://eliterature.org/wiki and note there is a FAQ linked on that page, http://eliterature.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ.
*****************
Categories:
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Electronic Literature: Collections of Works: Sites that aggregate works of electronic literature by multiple authors, such as online journals and anthologies.

Electronic Literature: Individual Works: Individual works of electronic literature and collections of works by a single author, as opposed to collections of works by multiple authors.

Electronic Literature: Context: Sites related to the critical, theoretical, and institutional contexts of electronic literature.

The winner of the 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition was just announced. It is Lost Pig And Place Under Ground, a brilliant work which may quickly become my main example of what interactive fiction can do. It has a character you can converse with, unusual physical laws that allow for a system of magic, a riddle-like object recognition puzzle, a mini-maze, pants, fire, and loads of in-jokes. There is a good explanation of how IF works, and the writing is brilliant. The game is attributed to the orc Grunk although the author’s “real” name (in the IF community) is Admiral Jota. Grunk explains the concept of interactive fiction on his livejournal:

In normal story, one person tell story and other person listen to story. … But this not like that. In this kind of story, one person tell story and other person help tell story. It other person job, figure out what person in story do next. Some time, person in story have really tricky problem, so person that helping can only finish story by thinking really hard to figure out how person in story can do that thing. Like “PUT BUTTER ON BOTTLE THEN TAKE FROG OUT OF BOTTLE AND EAT FROG”. Or some time it easy like “EAT FROG”. It depend on story.

Congratulations also go to Christopher Huang, who wrote #2 An Act of Murder, Sam Gordon who wrote #3 Lord Bellwater’s Secret, and all the others who fielded games that people played and enjoyed. The game with the highest standard deviation

are there args going on all around me, or am I paranoid? Wait, don’t answer that!

This ad says, “the secret of the L-system is our amazing growth formula” and mentions Lindenmayer… Who talks about L-systems in Times Square advertising? : )

Last weekend, the AAAI Fall symposia were held in Arlington, just outside Washington, DC. Nick, Michael and I were there for the Intelligent Narrative Technologies symposium, among 60 people in attendance from the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia. Like the 1999 symposium on Narrative Intelligence, this was a gathering of both accomplished researchers and new faces to the field. (My first foray into academia was at one of these meetings, exactly 10 years ago, at a Socially Intelligent Agents AAAI symposium at MIT, where I co-presented Petz and first met Michael and several other Oz Project members.) Unlike the 1999 NI symposium, this time around it was almost completely academic computer scientists, with almost no industry folk in attendance and few who would identify themselves primarily as artists or writers.

An important general point brought out during the symposium was the need for a standard platform for interactive character and drama research, which if adopted by multiple groups, could greatly increase sharing of research results. I couldn’t agree more; we started talking about how to make that happen.

For me, the most exciting talks were on the final day, focusing on story generation and representation. But I’ll run through the program chronologically, quickly summarizing most of the talks, and going into detail on a few. I’ll link to those pdf’s that are currently available online.

someone has to mention the South Park Guitar Episode, I’m afraid. As of tonight the only clip on youtube is this legit preview. I found the closeups profound, and the sound, ah, the sound of the plastic interface… Meanwhile, Jonah Brucker-Cohen forwarded me this. Seeing as I’m from Milwaukee, this strikes a particular, ah, chord. Don’t you cry no more!