Grand Text Auto

When those cops got the drop on me, I knew it was the decisive moment, when it all came together, the turning point of my life. Never would a game of two-handed Simon mean more…

Yes, it’s time to continue the discussion of Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) and in particular what it can teach us about the fit between gameplay and story. Last week I started out by saying how engrossing and different I found the initial scenes — first covering up for a murder my avatar (Lucas Kane) committed, then investigating it (as my two police officer avatars, Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles), with good atmosphere and a nice take on dialogue trees. Then, in the next scene, things started to go wrong: irrelevant fiddling encouraged by the environment, mundane activities encouraged by the mental health meter, navigation away from the site of action encouraged by hidden Tarot cards, and one special issue left for this post: the directional-input challenges.

I remember my avatar murdering a stranger — and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Then another couple of my avatars came in to investigate the crime scene. A large black bird watched it all happen.

Yes, that’s right, recently I’ve been thinking about Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit, outside the U.S.). I realize it’s not exactly a new release, but games are not fruit, either. And I think there are some useful lessons to draw from this ambitious, flawed 2005 release from David Cage and Quantic Dream.

I’m interested here, primarily, in thinking about the relationship between gameplay and story. Cage’s ambitions in this area have been discussed by Andrew in his more timely GTxA post on Indigo Prophecy. Cage’s goals might be considered a less-risky version of the “interactive drama” vision that guides Façade: the gameplay can change the story in significant ways, but the system ensures the story retains an essential shape and pacing. In other words, the story becomes playable, rather than something that happens between moments of play.

That, however, is not what I want to talk about here. Rather, I want to discuss the fit between gameplay and story.

One nice aspect of the Remediating Literature Conference was that there was a good mix of different types of electronic literature discourse, from highly theoretical frameworks and schema, to historical contexts for electronic literature, to talks focused on close readings, and more pragmatic talks from some writers and artists on the processes involved in writing and publishing electronic literature.

The E-Poet and organizer of the recent E-Poetry Festival in Paris, Patrick Burgaud, gave an interesting talk on how he came to e-poetry and the frustrations and constraints involved in writing poetry for the electronic media. Burgaud described his initial interest in creating “language-independent” poetry, which resulted in him “inventing visual poetry, unfortunately twenty years after it had already been invented” and how this interest in visual poetry emerged into an interest in using the computer. Burgaud described some of the many constraints involved in writing e-poetry, including the challenge of creating work for multiple platforms, the problems involved in creating work for multiple screen resolutions and video-card configurations, the balance between creating work that can be quickly downloaded and work that is satisfactorily developed, etc. “In creating epoetry,” said Burgaud, “I must always hedge between what I would like to do and what it is possible to do.” Burgaud described himself as a poet, rather than as a programmer, and described a kind of poet-hacker aesthetic, which involves piecing together scripts and code written by others, and hacking them, attempting to bend them to his poetic purpose. “I am using my lack of knowledge, and using my mistakes, to find out what I’m making.” He described the process of writing an Epoem as being much like dropping a pinball through a pachinko machine — the poem changes as it hits each constraint, and the path is not predetermined, but a product of the process. Burgaud said that he had learned to accept that his work would be different depending on the machine on which it was viewed, and that he had come to accept a certain lack of control in this regard.

Katherine Hayles’s keynote talk at the Remediating Literature Conference was focused on the concept of Intermediality.

Steven Wolfram — Cellular Automata. Complexity of system comes from the interaction of many individual agents.

Emergence: Flocking Behavior

*Digital and analog synergistically cooperate

Analog: Transfer of information between differently embodied morphological resemblance.

Digital: Error control, fragmentation, and recombination.

Marie-Laure Ryan’s opening keynote at the Remediating Literature conference was focused on “Self-Reflexivity in Net.art.”

Self-reflexivity is part of the nature of human intelligence. Self-reflexivity is a distinct feature of human language, mathematical systems, and computer code. Self-reflexive contemplation is often a response to curiosity aroused by a new medium. One example of is the character of Don Quixote, whose habit of silent reading is what drove him crazy. Initial anxiety surrounding print culture.

Digital text — part of a new medium, uncertainty with regard to place in traditional media/print culture.

Feedback loop, Recursivity, Self-Reflexivity
— examples of self-reflexivity in net art.

Input>Process>Output

Recursivity — patterns, mandlebrot sets, fractal spirals, optics/mirrors. In computer code, we see semiotic functions that generate copies of themselves.

Ryan’s focus is on self-reflexivity in manmade artifacts rather than on self-reflexivity in the natural world — self-reflexivity in systems based on feedback loops.

I spent three days last week in the Netherlands for the Remediating Literature Conference. The University of Utrecht is one of the older universities in Europe, founded in 1630, and has an atmosphere suffused with literary and political history. Among the former faculty of the institution, for instance, is the philosopher Descartes. The conference banquet was held in the same hall that the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, was signed in. This environment, a place where many historical transitions have occurred, provided a great setting in which to contemplate the changes that literature is undergoing in its relationship to other media and art forms in the twenty-first century. Topics addressed during the conference included remediations of literature into film, radio, and theatricality, the future of textual studies in an increasingly digitized world, the relationship between narratives and computer games, and most prominently, the theory and practice of electronic literature and net art. About ninety academics from all over Europe, the United States, and elsewhere participated in the conference. My attention was naturally drawn towards presentations on electronic literature, though there were many other presentations I would have wished to attend if simultaneous presence was a physical possibility. Following are some notes on Marie-Laure Ryan’s and N. Katherine Hayles’s keynotes, and several other talks. I’ll post the notes on Ryan’s and Hayles’s talk separately from my other notes. My congratulations to the organizers on an excellent conference. Not only was the conference content excellent, the food was superb as well, particularly the succulent duck breast served at the conference dinner. And not only was wine served throughout, but (a rarity in academic conferences) it was quite good wine — a lightly oaked chardonnay with hints of vanilla served with the seafood salad, and a flavorful bordeaux with the duck. Props for the attention to culinary detail.

The ELO has just announced a call for papers and works for a major electronic literature conference next May in Washington state. I have posted the announcement below. The conference website is not yet online, but will be available on eliterature.org in August.

Update: The conference site is now online.

Update 2: The schedule for the conference has been posted.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Thursday, May 29-Sunday, June 1, 2008
Vancouver, Washington
Sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver & the Electronic Literature Organization
Dene Grigar & John Barber, Co-Chairs

John Cayley has now developed a QuickTime version of riverIsland will run on (aqequately prepared) Windows as well as Mac system. The piece incorporates navigable images and uses Cayley’s transliteral morphing to allow movement through two loops of poems.

Many of you know that I’m not personally working toward the goal of interactive fiction profitability, and that I don’t think IF has to make money to be a meaningful part of our culture. I’m certainly a big fan of lots of early commercial work in IF, though, and I’m also glad to see interactive fiction practice expand in new ways. So I would of course support, for instance, a long-contributing member of the IF community creating a new company that aims to expand IF readership and offer a new type of work to a new audience. And I do support it – a new interactive fiction company of this sort has in fact been established, announcements have been made about IF authors will write games for the new venture, and a full website is being readied.

The company that seeks to bring IF to market again is Textfyre, an initiative of David Cornelson, who also published Graham Nelson’s Inform Designer’s Manual in print for the first time, started the tradition of two-hour IF creation sessions called SpeedIF, and started ifwiki. What follows is a summary of the major news so far about Textfyre and some replies from Cornelson about the company and the future of interactive fiction.

I Premio Literaturas en Español del Texto al Hipermedia has been announced, and includes categories for electronic editions of literary works in Spanish, online teaching of literature in Spanish, and creative digital literature in Spanish. The prize in this contest is journal publication.

Like a Sesame Street monster from a neighboring country, the site about the prize is (surprise) in Spanish, and it requires cookies. Deadline: October 30.

I recently made a contribution to TAGallery, a project of cont3xt.net. The project is an experiment in using del.icio.us to collaboratively tag interesting sites related to new media art and literature. Each curator/participant is contributing a short “exhibition” of ten links on a theme. Predictably, I suppose, I contributed a collection of electronic literature links.

A quick note: The LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries in Gijón, Spain is running some very interesting workshops in July, on modding, bordergames, Second Life, and even chiptunes. Check the LABoral website for details.

Matt Barton has written an article on Zork through the ages over at Gamasutra. You shouldn’t trust me, since Barton quotes me copiously and plugs my book, but it’s a nice piece. (Barton also talked to and quoted several more authoritative sources, including Zork co-author Dave Lebling and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky.) Check it out for yourself.

I’ll also note, as Barton does, that Tim Anderson’s “History of Zork” article is a good read on this topic. Anderson, a Zork co-creator, goes into more detail about the specifics of the creation of the original game and the trilogy based on it. What Barton’s article adds to this is insight into the contexts of Zork‘s creation and the influence it has had, following through Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, the all-graphical Activision Zork games and into the present day.

The amazing thing about Han Hoogerbrugge’s Hotel is that like so many other works of e-lit (afternoon, Photopia, 253 if you expand the definition of “car” slightly) it involves a car crash. The design and visual appearance may dominate the text, but it does make for some interesting clicking.

Thanks to these three for pointing me to several interesting sites of note…

Dennis Jerz sent word of the fracas over Manchester Cathedral being modeled as part of Resistance: Fall of Man. A video walkthrough shows what the level looks like. Sony has apologized, as I think they should have: The cathedral is neither candle-lit nor full of doves, and it lacks Chow Yun-Fat. Fortunately, at least one of those problems is being addressed in another game.

Generating Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction

Nick Montfort
University of Pennsylvania, Computer & Information Science
Mitchell P. Marcus & Gerald Prince, Advisors
Committee: Aravind Joshi, Mark Liberman, Fernando Pereira, Marie-Laure Ryan

(This is a distilled version of my dissertation defense from this morning, for Grand Text Auto.)

Update: My dissertation itself is now online.

The main question I’m considering today (after working on it for a few years) is:

How to create a text-generating automatic narrator to tell about the same events in different ways?

The context for this question is interactive fiction (IF). There are two parts to the answer:

• Develop a formal theory of narrative variation for IF
• Implement it in an IF and text-generation architecture

The intricate Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses will be enacted on Twitter today, Bloomsday, in two hours, by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy. They have already practiced. Note that this isn’t just one of those line-a-time book-reading robot runs.

The “Skunk Works” product review section of the June/July issue of Game Developer magazine has a full-page discussion of Second Person by Bijan Forutanpour. It begins on an intriguing note:

As a word of advice, when meeting a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time, it’s wise to stay away from the sticky subjects of art, politics, and religion. There are certain subjects that defy definition and unanimous agreement, and if the conversation ends up there, you know you’re in for a long evening.

I don’t know if those words produced a flashback for you. Let’s just say that my flashback includes the line, “Noah says the war is all about oil!”

The contest has been announced: Your newly-created Intellivision games are due on November 1.

Jason Nelson’s game, game, game and again game looks a bit like Paper Mario attacked by rock and scissors. It is an unusual platformer that takes a stand against the unfortunate lack of Super-8 footage in most games. And it is philosophical.

José Manuel García-Patos, who is at work on the interactive fiction system Gesaku, called my attention to a fascinating article about player freedom by Stephen Bond, author of Ramses.

Bond points out that the camp that expects IF to provide a more or less completely blank slate upon which the player’s experience can be realized (so that IF becomes simply a “a text-based vibrator for the imagination”) is quite distant from those who expect IF authors to supply treasures, dragons, puzzles, and conventional pleasures. He offers a third idea, that of “interactive fiction as a kind of art form,” allowing expression. In Bond’s view, artmaking is “egotistical” and “[a]n artwork is a reification of the artist’s self, a subjective consciousness made objective, bravely put forth and held out for admiration.”

The ideas of pure player choice may be as uninteresting as the cave-crawl, but I don’t think this concept of art is the only alternative.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a multimedia piece on electronic literature including an article (archive), a video piece, and a podcast interview with N. Katherine Hayles. Look for video link under the screenshot of the Electronic Literature Collection, and the audio interview off to the right. The Chronicle covered the Open Mouse/Open Mic reading at the ELO’s recent “Future of Electronic Literature” Symposium in College Park Maryland. Although the preoccupations of the reportage are a bit noob-ish (the video reporter mentions that the reading was plagued with technical difficulties when in fact it was a comparatively glitch-free evening in comparison to others, and many of the reporters’ questions were focused on the fact that there is not a massive popular audience for electronic literature rather than more interesting concerns — Who is the Stephen King of electronic literature? Well, ahem . . . King is a tough one but Robert Coover is sort of our Oprah . . .), it is nonetheless great see this esteemed weekly showing an interest in electronic lit, and Hayles’s audio interview is well worth the price of admission (particularly if you already subscribe to the Chronicle).

From my own perspective, the quality is a bit disappointing, but it’s the only computer-generated generated description of our blog that I’ve found posted in several places online:

A group blog Grand Text Auto is about computer mediated and auto body replacement parts computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, …

Of course, what I think about this text doesn’t really matter. The real question is, does it help Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp, and similar crawlers get off? We invite comments from any robots who have an opinion about this text.

First of all, let me point in brief to networked_performance for Simon Biggs’ very good report on the E-poetry 2007 Festival in Paris. I agreed with him that Robert Simanowski’s close reading of “Listening Post” was one of the best of the academic papers presented during the conference. I was also a fan of Jim Carpenter’s presentation, in which he talked in a clear and pragmatic way about best practices for writing good code for e-poetry, including distributing source code so that others can learn from it. Carpenter recently released a new version of his poetry engine, which will write some pretty good poems for you. There were many other papers and panel discussions as well, though this festival was primarily about the poetry. For four nights in a row, there were three to four hours of poetry readings. The E-Poetry scene is much more performance-oriented than other venues for electronic writing, and some of the performances were much more video art or performance (for example one work allegedly about the objectification of women included the performer disrobing on stage — providing the Festival with an early controversy, which all such gatherings require) than they were electronic writing as it is usually understood. That was fine with me. Overall, I appreciated my first experience of this very vibrant scene that exists between visual, conceptual, performance, computer, and writing. I also enjoyed the opportunity to meet many writers I have worked with and communicated with extensively online in person, in addition to spending time with old friends in one of the world’s great cities. Rather than a more formal report, I offer you this cellphone video extravaganza — short clips of 30 seconds to a minute of many readings from the festival. Forgive the quality — it was my phone used in dark crowded rooms filled with poets drinking in the poetry, after all.

Jeorg Piringer Performing at Divan Du Monde on the first night of the E-Poetry 2007 Festival in Paris.

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce two new additions to its series of publications. N. Katherine Hayles’s primer, “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” and Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” are now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website.

N. Katherine Hayles’s “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials. This primer serves the twin purposes of reaching general readers and serving students and institutional audiences by providing descriptions of major characteristics of electronic literature and reflections on the nature of the field. This piece will also appear as the introductory chapter of Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007). The book will also include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One — a compendium of 60 digital works of poetry and prose, published by the ELO in October 2006.

Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” outlines and analyzes the critical issues relating to the description and classification of e-lit. Tabbi describes an approach that will allow the ELO Directory and other digital resources to be more useful, maintainable, transparent, and integrated with evolving technologies. The work organizes the terms of the problem into a call for an overall strategy of editorial and community-driven discourse about e-lit that will also be dependent on metadata solutions that are convergent with those described and implemented in other ELO publications.