Grand Text Auto

Hi all, watch for materials emerging from the Center for future civic media at MIT (C4FCM) made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

“The Center for Future Civic Media aims to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information.” The group, led by an MIT team spanning Comparative Media Studies (Henry Jenkins) and the Media Lab (Mitch Resnick, Chris Csikszentmihalyi), has a goal of developing new technologies that support

The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995-2007 features 11 installations by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Previously on view in Germany, it’s now at the Miami Art Museum and Freedom Tower, October 21, 2007 to January 20, 2008. These two artists use sound and space in a way that evocatively pushes at the edges of what we might consider fiction.

Check out the Turbulence post for more detail, or peruse sample pages from the book (which also comes in a collector’s edition).

Yesterday I posted that we expected to be back to normal today. Unfortunately, we’re not. After GTxA’s uninvited guest on Wednesday (we got “0wn3d” — keep your WordPress up to date) we’re missing a number of images and sounds from the last month. And, unfortunately, we found out that the folder in which they were stored was, mysteriously, being skipped on the nightly backups. So what follows is a list of files for which we’d really appreciate you checking your browser caches.

There’s a great short documentary at Ubuweb, Sucking on Words, by Simon Morris, about the conceptual, “uncreative” writing practice of Kenneth Goldsmith.

As some of you may have noticed, Grand Text Auto has had some changes of appearance today. And some images from the last month are currently missing. But things should be back to normal soon. Thanks for your patience.

Last month, when I got in touch with Scott Turner (author of Minstrel) I asked if he would be willing to share some memories of the context in which his landmark story generation project was created. I also hoped he would let me publish his thoughts on Grand Text Auto — as James Meehan had last year let us publish some of his memories of the creation of Tale-Spin. This came to fruition yesterday, when Scott sent me the thoughts below and agreed to let us publish them. I enjoyed the stories (as will most who’ve gone through the grad school process) and I think they offer an interesting perspective, especially when combined with Scott’s contributions to our ongoing discussion of Minstrel and the future potential of its approach.

I came to UCLA for my graduate work in the Fall of 1982. I was actually recruited to UCLA — they paid to fly me out to visit the campus, meet with professors and graduate students, and even offered me a “bonus” to enroll during my recruiting trip. The bonus turned out to be book money, but they could have saved themselves the trouble — I was already committed to attend before the trip.

As a senior I had spent part of the year trying to construct an equivalence between token networks and finite state automata. I wasn’t successful, but I thought it was pretty fun, and I was interested in UCLA primarily because Sheila Greibach (of “Greibach Normal Form” fame) taught there. So I arrived in the Fall of 1982 excited to start graduate school and plumb the mysteries of formal machines. Somewhat to my dismay, I discovered fairly quickly that Prof. Greibach wasn’t very accessible or very interested in taking on any new graduate students. It also became apparent that the students working in theory and formal machines were quite a bit smarter than I was.

This week’s The Escapist is about stories in games, including articles about the literary significance of the Half Life series, roleplaying in online Myst worlds, and advanced facial animation in David Cage’s new game.

And most interesting to me, an article by Mark Yohalem suggesting that game developers should back off on making character-driven games with interactive dialog, and instead make physical action-oriented games that reveal some sort of backstory as you play. For example, how the original Myst did it.

Why? Because making good interactive characters is somewhere between really hard to impossible. Yohalem says developers have a “misguided notion that it’s worth sacrificing a player-driven game to achieve a character-driven story”.

I’d like to make a preliminary announcement about our site– including the “gametalk” blog, our growing game repository, our games contest (which will be annnounced formally here shortly), game designer interviews, and curriculum material for the Values At Play initiative at Hunter College+ NYU. Check it all out at the Values at Play site. Of note is a recent team blog post on the new Manhunt by Jay Bachhuber. Enjoy, contribute, and let us know of any glitches!

Robert Medeksza of Zabaware, pictured left in the Zabaware t-shirt, creator of the Ultra Hal chatterbot assistant, has won the 2007 Loebner Prize Competition, the annual Turing Test competition now in its 17th year. Past multi-year winner Rollo Carpenter is pictured in orange.

The chat logs of this year’s top three placers can be downloaded on the competition’s information page. This year, Loebner has implemented an application that plays back the chat sessions as they happened in real-time, including logs of the human judges versus both the bots and the human confederates. Very cool.

In a small step towards ractors, Andy Bayiates, writer and performer known for his work with the Neo-Futurists, perhaps best known among GTxA readers as the voice actor for Trip of Façade, is now at your service, over the Internet, as your own personal astrologer. First person astrology indeed!

Since our jobs thread seems to be a useful resource, perhaps it would also be good to collect some of the upcoming conference deadlines of interest to GTxA folks.

14 November (less than two weeks from now) is the deadline for ISEA 2008 submissions.

18 November (also quite close) is the deadline for Digital Humanities 2008 submissions.

30 November is the deadline for the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization conference (calls for presentations and a media art show). I’m excited to have a U.S. conference on digital literature with an open call. It’s been a while.

Last year I posted a series of thoughts about two story generation systems: Minstrel and Universe (1 2 3 4 5). I had some critical things to say about the Minstrel system, but they were based on my reading — I hadn’t yet been in contact with the system’s author, Scott Turner. This month I finally connected with Scott, and yesterday he sent me the following thoughtful response to the issues raised by our previous discussion on Grand Text Auto.

I’m particularly happy about this because Scott has graciously offered to try to respond to any further questions in the comments for this thread. Also, I’ll be paying close attention to the conversation, given I’m writing about Minstrel in my forthcoming book. Below are Scott’s thoughts.

I haven’t worked in AI for many years, but I was delighted when Noah contacted me and I had a chance to read the discussion on this blog of my dissertation work. At the time I did this work there was no Internet as we know it today, and in some sense I worked virtually in isolation. No one else was working on computer storytelling, creativity or related subjects such as interactive fiction. The best that I could hope for in the way of a community of interest was occasionally meeting up with folks like Michael Lebowitz at a conference. I can’t help but think that if I were doing my work today, the feedback I could get through the Internet would greatly improve my results. The Internet is truly wonderful in the way it can bridge space and economics to bring together similar interests in ways that could never happen in the physical world!

After Noah pointed me towards this blog I read through the discussion of Minstrel and found it very thought provoking. I thought I’d take a few minutes to share some insight into how Minstrel came to be and discuss some of the issues that Noah raised.

(THAT IS ALARMINGLY THESE ARE NOT LOVESICK ZOMBINES ZOMBIES A NEW GAME IN FLASH BY JASON NELSON) IT WOULD PERHAPS LOOK LIKE EXCEPT PERHAPS LESS WORKSAFE AND WITH VIDEOS OF JASON NELSON

From my earlier post on James Meehan’s Tale-Spin (now with a new comment from Scott Turner, author of Minstrel) some may remember that there are three versions of the system that I know about. First, the full Tale-Spin, created by Meehan at Yale, then pursued further at UC Irvine. Second, Micro Tale-spin, created as a pedagogical example by Meehan (and translated into Common Lisp by Warren Sack). Third, the version created by Meehan for “Smart Machines” — an exhibition at the Boston Computer Museum in 1987.

I find the original Tale-Spin a fascinating system. Unfortunately, it seems completely lost. Meehan (now at Google) has been through his garage on my behalf, with no luck. Chances of archives remaining at Yale or UCI seem slim.

Micro Tale-spin, while instructive, is so simplified that it loses much of what was compelling to me about the original.

This leaves us with the version created for “Smart Machines.” According to Meehan, it existed at a level of complexity between that of the full and micro versions. For the past year I’ve been hoping to find it.

It’s time to get hands-on with the future of scholarship. This is the message of ThoughtMesh, one of the intriguing projects in the new “Difference” issue of Vectors. I decided to give it a try.

MIT students compose literary texts on Dymo label makers.

I know we don’t often make personal posts here, but people have been asking about the fires and how I’m doing. This is a quick note to say I’m still at home, the fires aren’t (yet) near where I live in San Diego, and they’ve asked us to stay off the roads and our cellphones (to keep capacity free for emergency personnel). I’ve been getting my fire updates from KPBS via Twitter and the local paper via Blogspot.

John Zuern offers a detailed and insightful review of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 in ebr. Among other aspects of the Collection the review addresses is whether or not the difference between print and electronic literature is anything other than trivial?

In The Commonplace Book Project that “dead” medium, interactive fiction, is used to give shape and machinery to unborn works by everyone’s favorite author of the ancient and eldritch, H.P. Lovecraft. The project began during April-June of this year. There are now seven games in three languages (English, Spanish, and French), which are sure to make for delicious snacks if one has not been sated by the IF Comp that is currently underway. But in the Lovecraft universe … games snack on YOU!

A Review of A Commuications Primer
By Charles and Ray Eames
1953
Running time 0:21:29
Internet Archive (Prelinger Collection)

I recently made time to view an important short film made by Charles and Ray Eames. This influential American husband-and-wife team were designers who applied their art to many forms: furniture, film, exhibitions, books, toys. Their house provided an early example of the use of industrial elements in a domestic space. I find that their chairs enhance the viewing of A Communications Primer and many other media experiences.

The Eames’ best-known film is the 1977 Powers of Ten, the zooming visual explanation of scale which has no doubt been shown in more than 10^4 classrooms and 10^2 science museums. In their much earlier film A Communications Primer they describe the application of Claude Shannon’s model of communication to familiar media experiences, along with some that aren’t very familiar nowadays, such as telegraphy. There are very nice iconic images deployed, as well as shots of media technologies in use.

I thought we’d already seen The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age — but if I could make it to Frankfurt I’d certainly drop in on Art Machines Machine Art, running now through January 27th.

I just gave a presentation today at The CineKid Festival, an annual Film, Television and New Media Festival for Children that is held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (with approximately 30 satellite festivals held in cities all over the Netherlands).

The New media programme consisted of the great Cinekid Media Lab (which had both art installations as well as popular software and hardware such as Wiis), and seminars.

Our all-afternoon seminar, “New Media: Make way for play” featured

I thought the opening of the Grand Text Auto group show at the Beall Art+Tech gallery went very well, especially when you consider how elaborate the three large installations were. All of the artworks worked, installations and otherwise! And they were physically arranged to fit nicely in a somewhat small space, without feeling overly cramped. Thanks again to all those who put so much time into organizing and setup. (I wasn’t one of them. ;-)

As I hoped would happen, I found it really interesting to experience our various literary and ludic works together in one place.

Each of us gave a “future directions” presentation at the GTxA symposium, held the day after the group show opened. Here is the text of mine, pre-written as a blog post, in the spirit of the show being borne from the blog.

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Future directions… well, this show feels like some kind of funky vision of the future. Giant mutated joysticks… VR cave texts… a novel physically pasted around the world… a first real taste of the Holodeck… I’ve never seen such a cross-section of games/art/literature in one space. Many thanks to the Beall Center for hosting the show, and for Noah for organizing and curating it. It’s truly exciting, and I’m honored to be part of it.

Nick turned Grand Text Auto into a platform for literary gameplay with his post on When Musicians Play Interactive Fiction. Then a recent email query from Mike Alber reminded me of one of my favorite Oulipian literary games, much less well known than “N + 7”: larding. I suggest we give larding a try here on GTxA.

The process of larding, also known as “line-stretcher’s constraint” (after 19th Century writers who were paid by the line) creates a very simple game. From a given text, pick two sentences. Then write another sentence in the interval between them. Then write another sentence in each of the two available intervals of the new text (between first and second, between second and third). Then write another sentence in each of the four available intervals, and so on until the desired length is reached.