Grand Text Auto

• Here are three links (1 2 3) covering a positively cyberpunk-looking Will Wright giving a keynote at this week’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival, a conference traditionally focused on music and film that in recent years has added an interactive media track. Wright wanted to talk about story, perhaps because he’s talking to so many linear media folk, but was billed to talk about Spore, so he tries to mash the two subjects together. Wright points out the problems with status quo approaches to interactive story, and implores game developers to make games that listen to the player more, suggesting Groundhog Day or Truman Show type structures. (btw, Wright’s comments about “story parsing” are identical to the points he made in a July 2002 SIGGRAPH panel on interactive story Noah and I organized.) The first two links here are live (attempted) transcripts, each of which differs a bit, each containing phrases I find it hard to believe Wright would utter, such as “Games inherently are this branching tree” and “movies are far more compelling than interactive drama, because interactive drama is quite flat”. (I think it depends what he means by interactive drama in the context of this speech; as a counterpoint, one transcript has Wright describing Façade as an interesting approach that moves towards generativity.)

For me this year’s GDC was different from previous years, because my attention these days is so oriented towards business and funding. As a result I made the tradeoff to skip many potentially interesting design talks, in order to make room for lots of hallway conversations, meetings, business-track lectures, cruising the expo booths for useful middleware, and catching up with friends and colleagues.

I’ll start with the (sadly) long list of talks I missed:

A three-year project by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber has come to fruition. The result is that an important set of early digital poems is available once more; the editors, also, have saved the original bits and made the running work available in several emulated, ported, and recorded ways, setting a powerful example for future preservation and porting of digital art, games, and poetry.

Take a look at the New York Times article on video game preservation, discussing curator Henry Lowood’s list of canonical video games. He picked the ten games with Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector. These “most important video games of all time” are:

• Spacewar! (1962)
• Star Raiders (1979)
• Zork (1980)
• Tetris (1985)
• SimCity (1989)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
• Civilization I/II (1991)
• Doom (1993)
• Warcraft series (beginning 1994)
• Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

If you’re reading Grand Text Auto via Bloglines, you presumably aren’t reading this – the service hasn’t updated our feed since February 25, as a commenter pointed out. We don’t know of any other aggregators that are having problems, and the feeds we’re providing seem to be valid.

Other feeds that Bloglines hasn’t properly digested recently seem to include those of Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) (fixed a few days ago) and IF author Adam Cadre (still doesn’t register updates to the main bloggy part, the calendar). A recent thread at the Bloglines forums suggests that this update problem may be widespread among WordPress-based blogs. Although the title of that post mentions that “newly added feeds aren’t updated,” the problems that bloggers report there are not limited to new feeds.

There’s a fork in the Web up ahead. If you’re part of the angry mob that can’t put up with XHTML, you’ll be pleased, or at least less angry, to know that W3C is relauching activity on HTML. Yes, the HTML Working Group is back. Google finds 95 results for a search on “I hate XHTML” and 14,100 for “I hate HTML,” but I suppose you can’t please all of the document engineers all of the time.

Jean Baudrillard, 77.

An abecedarian, typographic zoo awaits you online: Bembo’s Zoo. Monkey with that alphabet a bit (that is, click on something) and you’ll discover the animal nature of letters. A classic site, and a book tie-in, from 2000.

The applause-filled, frivolity-filled XYZZY Awards have just concluded. Congratulations to all the interactive fiction authors whose work was nominated. Various characters from IF games (and some of the usual characters from ifMUD) gave the awards, as is traditional. Amid the humor, there was also some time to remember XYZZY award winner Star C. Foster.

The Best Game award this year went to The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve; that game also won the Best Individual NPC award. Emily Short’s Floatpoint took the awards for Best Story and Best NPC. Andrew Plotkin’s Delightful Wallpaper took the Best Individual PC, Best Puzzles, and Best Writing awards. By the way, since these were done in TADS 3 (The Elysium Enigma) and Inform 7 (the two others), that’s a lot of wins for brand-new IF development systems.

And Andrew Plotkin’s reviews of Myst live on, too. See Zarf’s lastest review of Myst Online: Uru Live, the recently re-animated MMO – or perhaps non-MMO. Zarf also provides the definitive Uru FAQ.

Onward to day two, with more fascinating presentations about many aspects of many different sorts of games…

Speaking of prolific Northwestern grad students, recent industry-hire and friend of GTxA, Robin Hunicke, is already a game designer at EA/Maxis and leading the finally-announced MySims project for the Wii and DS. You’ll have to try to find additional adjectives for the term “super-cute” to describe its look and animation. Congrats Robin!

Robin’s been blogging over the past few months here and there about the process of being a game designer, gave a presentation last week at Microsoft’s Game Cruise, and will again next week at GDC.

FYI, there will be two back-to-back game festivals in Vancouver, BC, this May: first, the Vancouver International Game Summit, May 3-4, followed by the Northwest Games Festival on May 5, including a game contest with cash prizes!

I’m here at the University of Florida attending the gaming group’s third annual conference, World Building: Space and Community For my own purposes and to highlight what’s being discussed here, I’ve typed up some notes. Conference speakers are particularly welcome to comment, particularly if my notes didn’t accurately record what you said — I’ll fix my notes, in that case. These notes are meant to point you to the authors’ own abstracts; please go there to read up on the research and to cite. Updated to include evening keynote.

Georgia Tech has announced their annual Living Game Worlds III, this year themed “PLAYING WITH REALITY” @ 29th March 2007. It’s presented by the GVU Center and the Graduate Program in Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture, with Katy Salen and Tracy Fullerton keynoting.

Among mainstream game developers, Warren Spector is one of those putting significant effort into building more sophisticated interactive stories. To the list of exciting GDC talks next week, we need to add Spector’s newly announced talk “The Future of Storytelling In Next-Generation Game Development” (as well as Ernest Adams’ “Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories” for that matter). Recall Spector was a participant on a GDC panel on interactive story I moderated two years ago, although his attitude was somewhat dour at the time.

These days, after founding and reportly getting funding for his new studio Junction Point, Spector seems more optimistic. He was interviewed in this month’s print magazine Game Developer (owned by CMP, the same company that runs GDC and Gamasutra.com). Since few of you may get the magazine, I’ll type in a few highlights from the article:

There is a middle ground [between sandbox games like The Sims, and roller coaster rides like Half Life], and I don’t think it involves the choose-your-own-adventure approach. … The key for me is creating linked sandboxes and letting players explore those little narrative chunks on their own. [As the game developer] I’ll determine why it’s important that you get through a door, but how you get through it, what happens, and whether you kill, talk to, or ignore everyone on the other side belongs to you. That concept of sharing authorship is where the sweet spot of game narrative is… it’s a hybrid of a linear string of pearls game structure and a sandbox approach.

Arthouse Games has gotten a sneak peek at the close-to-final version of Jonathan Blow’s Braid, and an interview with Blow. You might remember Braid from last year’s Indie Game Festival at GDC, where an early version won for Innovation, or from last month, when Blow was first to withdraw from Slamdance 2007 over the Super Columbine controversy, or maybe you remember him from the Experimental Gameplay Workshop (EGW) at GDC, which he organizes each year.

I missed GDC last year (had a newborn at home), so haven’t gotten a chance to play Braid, but it looks very innovative indeed — not your grandmother’s platformer. Looking forward to the final release.

Jeff Orkin, experienced industry developer cum grad student — a transition I wish more developers would make! — is building an AI-based interactive narrative of some sort called The Restaurant Game, with a pretty cool implementation method:

The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. In a few months, we will apply machine learning algorithms to data collected through the multiplayer Restaurant Game, and produce a new single-player game that we will enter into the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer. It’s never been easier to earn Game Designer credentials!

The work of AI-oriented Northwestern University grad students has been interesting for quite some time (1 2 3) — and here’s a new project to add to the list. Nate Nichols and Sara Owsley, in Kristian Hammond’s InfoLab, have created a system called News at Seven, that intelligently and autonomously combines news text, images and video from the Web, related commentary from the blogosphere, avatars from Half Life 2, speech synthesis, and broadcasting via YouTube, to create a daily short newscast. It’s an AI-based mashup.

Via Raph Koster’s blog (and Gameology before that), an artist named Rosemarie Fiore has created beautiful long-exposure photographs of old arcade games such as Tempest, Gyruss and Qix.

Gorgeous. (I feel bad for all the young’uns who never got a chance to play these games in the 80’s.)

For you, Nick!

I was delighted to read about two recent developments which involved one of my most beloved institutions, the library, working to preserve and provide access to one of my favorite forms of expressive, aesthetic media: the video game.

I learned from Jason R. Finley that UIUC’s undergrad library now offers video games. You can visit their gaming collection site, read all about their mission and use policies, and even suggest titles to buy. (I presume that suggestions from UIUC affiliates are weighted more highly.) The consoles listed are ones that are on the market today, but the library also boasts “a selection of retro/vintage games for use in-library only (including NES, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, etc.).”

Street Fighter: The Later Years. (The first three episodes are out.)

The Guardian reports that a study of surgeons at New York’s Beth Israel hospital who spent at least three hours a week playing video games performed 42% better at keyhole, or laparoscopic, surgery than doctors who had not. But what games were they playing?

Mark Marino, one of the people named Time Magazine’s man of the year last year, has turned his bleeding-edge writing implements to the task of Web annotation. Travelogues and journals were in use for a while before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, and A Journal of the Plague Year, and, more recently, email had existed for a at least few decades before Carl Steadman wrote Two Solitudes, Rob Wittig Blue Company, and Scott Rettberg Kind of Blue. As Marino has noted, literature of annotation exists, too, but Nabokov and Wallace, for instance, had a long tradition of “real” endnotes and footnotes to build on. Web annotation isn’t even out of beta (and specifically, the Diigo system isn’t) and Marino is already digitally scribbling a story in the form.

The dog-eared tale is called “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” and, appropriately, annotates the referred-to Borges story as told to us by a little fish. Marino has offered some context for the project in another post, saying,

“Marginalia” offers one example of annotation used to write upon the web and to use the web as writing. Borges seems an uncanny muse for this project for a variety of reasons, explored in the tale. After introductory text post, the story begins with a machine translation of Borges’ tale, posted on the web. Floating over the text, are the reflections of a meta-narrator, who sends the reader to other places on the web. As a result, the story is also reading over the shoulder of this character. The bookmarks themselves are the story.

Important! System requirements ahead. To read, you must:

1. Install the magical Diigo button in your browser.
2. Use a supported browser (Firefox on OS X works; Opera doesn’t)
3. Be patient, since annotations will take some time to load.