Grand Text Auto

Two visitng positions related to Grand Text Auto-y things, here in Philadelphia:

The University of the Arts Multimedia Department seeks candidates to fill a visiting designer position as an assistant or associate professor. The successful candidate should have a strong background in any of the following areas: interface design, interaction design, usability engineering, human-computer interaction or digital installation. Rank and salary will depend upon qualifications and experience.

The University of the Arts Multimedia Department seeks candidates to fill a visiting position as an assistant or associate professor. Rank and salary will depend upon qualifications and experience. A focus in any of the following is of particular interest to the department: information theory, human computer interaction, game theory and contemporary art and design history.

An international festival for new technology art is taking place in Cambridge, England from April 25-29. It seems that this includes an LED workshop – good thing it’s not taking place in Cambride, MA. There’s a blog for the festival, too.

Jesper Juul and Judith Faifman will be speaking at UCSD on Wednesday from noon to 2pm. All welcome! Official information follows…

What is Game Literacy? Two presentations on playing and reading games

Noon- 2pm, Wednesday, April 18th
San Diego Supercomputer Center Auditorium

On Wednesday, April 18, 2007, two international authorities will examine video gaming and literacy, from the perspective of the game maker and the player. Both talks will be delivered from 12 noon to 2pm in the auditorium of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, based at UC San Diego.

Evan Shamoon, a writer at the recent successor to Computer Gaming World magazine, now called Games for Windows, solicited us with a nice set of questions, resulting in a substantial article published in this month’s issue. The article is called “Type What You Feel”.

I’ll continue my somewhat dubious practice of scanning in and posting such articles online (hopefully no one at GFW will complain, especially since we just plugged Microsoft’s hardware and conference cruises).

This blog gets a mention in the article too — perhaps the first time it’s made it into print? I can’t remember.

Based on an original design by Toshihiro Nishikado, this is a ferocious simulation of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in which three Spartans fight to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army. Facing insurmountable odds, their valor and sacrifice inspire all of Greece to unite against their Persian enemy, drawing a line in the sand for democracy. The original graphics come to life when iconic, geometric images are combined with processing power. Find one in your local theater today, or try the online version now…

Looks like there is some unusual RPG territory left to be discussed in Third Person, or, if you believe person is four-sided, maybe Fourth Person. Quick, roll saving cube against HYBRID!

Archival & Social Studies, a digital, free, and peer-reviewed journal on archival science, has launched. The journal covers digital issues and draws from other disciplines to solve current problems in archival science. Volume 1 number 0 of A&SS is now out. (Perhaps the bibliographically inclined can explain why the volumes seem to be numbered by an analyst and the issues by a set theorist? A search for “vol 1 no 0” shows this has been done elsewhere.) The Intersections section includes “Archives in the Digital Age: New Uses for an Old Science,” “Searching for meaning in the Library of Babel: field semantics and problems of digital archiving,” and my article “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction.” Those interested in submitting should see the manuscript submission guidelines.

Emily Short is interviewed in the main featured article in the current Gamastutra. Jim Munroe (an IF author himself; he wrote Punk Points) talks with her, and their discussion deals a good bit with one of my favorite of Emily’s games, Savoir-Faire.

This just in: Microsoft is releasing a controller with a keyboard for the XBox 360. (Further, I didn’t know this — you can also just simply plug in a regular USB keyboard into the 360.)

Till now, we have been assuming that market for language-based interactive drama would necessarily be limited to PC and Mac users, because of the keyboard requirement.

So, we hadn’t seriously considered developing interactive drama for consoles, because of the keyboard issue. But now… hmm.

(~90% of all game purchases these days are for console, ~10% for PC, from my understanding.)

If you’re in the mood for futuristic, jet-powered automotive descruction, Jetspeed is a slick side-scrolling vehicular combat game you might like. It was done in Flash by Damien Clarke for Albino Blacksheep. The music and graphics work well with the gameplay and are quite polished – closer to the Alien Hominid end of the spectrum than the Animutations end.

If your tastes are more abstract, check out Kenta Cho’s L.A.2, which repurposes the Game of Life as a shooter – you shoot “gliders” into the self-generating and attacking grid around you.

Submissions are open for the 3rd Ciutat de Vinaros International Prize of Digital Literature. There are three prizes in Digital Narrative (2500 Euros), Digital Poetry (2500 Euros) and a special “Vincent Ferrer Romero” Prize for the best work of Digital Literature written in Catalan (1000 Euros). This is currently the only annual prize competition with a substantial purse that I’m aware of in electronic literature, and all digital authors are encouraged to submit. The judging criteria specify:

• Works that explore and use the possibilities of the computer as a space for creation.

The first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly has arrived! Congratulations to editor-in-chief Julia Flanders and the people of DHQ.

Selections: In “Interpretative Quests in Theory and Pedagogy,” Jeff Howard explains and develops some of his work in teaching postmodern novels via quests, as described before here on GTxA. In “Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms,” Mark Wolff describes how the Oulipian view of “potential” does not immediately lend itself to the analysis, rather than the production, of texts. And there’s a review, by Johanna Drucker, of Willard McCarty’s Humanities Computing.

Speaking of developer blogs, the team at Tale-of-Tales has multiple blogs, not just the Drama Princess one we’ve linked to. Check out their main blog, which has lots of activity lately. (I replaced Drama Princess with it on our blogroll.)

On their main blog they have a nice series of screenshots of some of the works in exhibition at Laboral in Spain (1 2).

stretch your browser window wide… apologies in advance…

Paolo Tajè’s article over at Game Career Guide proposes six layers for gameplay: Token, including elements like the player’s “man,” opponents, and power-ups; Prop, their properties; Dyn, the verbs of game dynamics; Goal, in-game motivations; Meta, elements outide the game itself such as its division into levels; and Psycho, the desired emotional responses of the player. The article applies this “Gameplay Deconstruction: Elements and Layers” (or GD:EL) model to Pac-Man and Tetris. Thanks to ifMUD for the tip about this one.

so i am back, with news on the opening of a new, enormous musuem in Spain: Laboral: centro de arte y creacion industrial in Gijon, Asturias. This weekend, three inaugural shows initiated this new center/ museum: Feedback, curated by Christiane Paul, JemimaRellie, and Charlie Gere; Gameworld, curated by Carl Goodman, and Lab Cyberspaces Project, which had a jury choosing the works. I am exhibiting in two of these shows — Feedback and Gameworld. I will post images from the opening when I’m back in the US — shortly! Meanwhile, check out the website!

What does “chu” mean? The answer is not available on the Wikipedia disambiguation page. My fellow Dreamcast owners may particularly be wondering about this. If you’ve played Space Channel 5, you will probably recall that all the cute alien opponetnts say “chu” to indicate you need to press the A button. I’ve heard that our own Mary Flanagan asked Space Channel 5 (and Rez) creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi what “chu” means, and he explained…

You know, chu!

Borut Pfeifer, an experienced programmer-designer-writer-entrepreneur, friend of GTxA and currently working at EA’s Los Angeles studio on Neil Young and Doug Church’s dream team, has stuff to say on his new blog.

Check it out.

This coming Wednesday, Jordan Mechner, Mark Marino, Jeremy Douglass, and yours truly will be at USC for an evening of discussion around “writing and gameplay” — in part as a celebration of the publication of Second Person. As Mark discusses over at WRT, even with four speakers we’re barely able to scratch the surface of the book’s diversity. But I’m very glad to have one of the world’s most respected game designers (and game writers, who also makes films) on stage with interdisciplinary scholar/artists like Mark and Jeremy. It should be a fun evening.

Game/Play in the UK may be winding down, but no fear: as I write, the new Gameworld show is opening today at Laboral in Gijon, Spain. The show is exhibiting many games discussed here on GTxA, including the recently debated canon. There’s a huge selection of interesting machinima and game-oriented films as well.

(Note the final list of pieces being exhibited have yet to be listed on the official site.)

AAAI symposia, held each Fall on the east coast (often in the Boston or DC area) and Spring (often at Stanford), are small, not-too-expensive conferences with just a few tracks, each focused on a specific AI topic. They’re a good place to meet like-minded folks and go deep on a topic over the course of 2-3 days.

10 years ago now, as a young developer-researcher from the game industry, these meetings were a great way for me to dip my feet into the academic waters and gently wade into the research scene. It was at one of these symposia in 1997 at MIT, on socially intelligent agents, that I first met then-grad-student Michael, which later led to our collaboration (borne in a hottub, to continue the water metaphor for a moment). Other past AAAI symposia I attended included meetings on narrative intelligence (resulting in this edited volume), and game AI. The game AI symposium track has since grown into the bigger AIIDE conference, so I haven’t been to symposia in several years.

Good news though: Brian Magerko and Mark Riedl are co-chairing a new symposium on AI-based narrative, for this November.

CFP for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies
http://gel.msu.edu/aaai-fs07-int/

Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, November 8-11, 2007
Submissions due: May 1, 2007

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. As the reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and education technology increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. The term “narrative intelligence” was coined to refer to the ability in both humans and computers to organize experience into narrative form. Previous and current work that in this field has produced results in narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling user interface modalities, narrative performance by autonomous embodied agents, cognitive models of narrative, and common-sense reasoning.

I’ve just received my copy of The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media. Editors Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a great table of contents — including contributions from Jean-Pierre Balpe, Philippe Bootz, Laura Borràs Castanyer, Markku Eskelinen, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Marie-Laure Ryan, Roberto Simanowski, and yours truly. My piece is a revised version of my Playable Media and Textual Instruments essay.

The Rhizome Commissions Program is now accepting proposals – they are due April 2. “In 2007, Rhizome will commission eleven new art works with fees ranging from $1000-3000.” Ten of these are for Internet projects in general, one for a project focused on the Rhizome community specifically. Projects that result will be shown at the New Museum at an event.

Project Hippasus is an MMO planned by Frozen North for the PC and Xbox 360 – a Mathematically Magical Optimization? The virtual world will offer “accidental learning” because, according to the plan they’ve put together in four weeks, you’ll have to solve math problems as you roam about. Apparently you’ll need to decompose your opponents into their frequency components in order to defeat them. Or maybe hurl weapons along their principal eigenvectors. Or something. I don’t know … math is hard. Let’s go shopping on Second Life!

Edward Picot recently posted a lengthy review of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. Picot clearly spent a good deal of time with the collection, and has both positive and negative things to say about it. I think that Picot has attempted to be fair and balanced in his discussion of the collection, and I’m grateful to him for giving the ELC such careful consideration. He is one of the first people to review the ELC intelligently and at length in English, though as usual, the Swedes are ahead of the game.

In the end, Picot finds the ELC “an essential collection,” and encourages “Anyone interested in the field of electronic literature to get it on DVD,” though along the way he finds a few nits to pick. The collection is actually published on the web and CD-ROM (old-school) and along with Picot I encourage you to get your copy of the free, Creative Commons-licensed collection of electronic literature, and then make copies of it for your friends.

I’d like to just briefly address a few of the points Picot makes, in order to clarify my perspective as one of the editors. I hope that Nick, Stephanie, and Kate will also jump in with comments if they’d like. I’ll restrict my comments to Picot’s critique of the curatorial/editorial aspects of the project. Picot also reviews four works in the collection, two (“The Jew’s Daughter” by Judd Morrissey and “Windsound” by John Cayley) positively, and two (“MyBALL” by Shawn Rider and “Carrier” by Melanie Rackham) negatively. There are sixty works in the collection, and I think that everyone is entitled to their opinion of each of those works. None of them were included casually. Each of the four editors thought that each work merited inclusion.