Grand Text Auto

The Eighteenth International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia is operating under the banner “Five Autonomous Programmes, One Unified Conference.” The programs, each with its own chair and committee, are: Hypertext Models and Theory, Practical Hypertext, Hypertext and Society, Hypertext and the Person, and Hypertext, Culture, and Communication. The deadline is May 7th.

Matthew Kennedy Gould is a lucky guy. Not just because he won $100,000, a trip to Tahiti, and got playfully handcuffed to a buxom blonde while they soaked in a hot tub after wrestling together in a pit of honey. No, Gould is lucky because he is the first person I’m aware of to have experienced true interactive drama.

The good news for us is, it was all videotaped, edited, broadcast on cable in 2003, and is rentable on Netflix.

The vision of interactive drama I’m referring to, first put forth by Brenda Laurel in her 1986 dissertation “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System” and 1991 book Computers as Theatre, and expanded upon in the mid 1990s by Joseph Bates’ Oz Project team at CMU, has a single naive player entering an artificial, dramatic story world, with all the other characters played by improvisational actors guided by a drama manager, who is monitoring the plot as a whole to fashion a coherent, Aristotelian tension-arc style story, centered around the player.

One day, while playing the 1980 arcade game Berzerk, Abbott imagined a maze where the solver would have to avoid a robotic opponent.

Tony “Tablesaw” Delgado’s column on puzzle mazes traces the twisty path of maze design from the basic spatial variety, through logical mazes or “mazes with rules,” into the digital, and back into logical form. The main maze discussed is Theseus and the Minotaur by Robert Abbott. The short article is a fascinating read that sheds some light on how digital and non-digital games and puzzles exist in an ecology, how they evolve together, and how computer-based play differs from paper-based attempts at solution.

The Future of Electronic Literature, a symposium of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Electronic Literature Organization, will take place in College Park, MD on May 2 & 3. Registration is now open. Registration is free for ELO members and University of Maryland students (optionally, you can pay a small amount to get lunch), and it’s very cheap for others. Please register if you’re planning to attend!

Here’s the official word:

Here’s a note about my academic life: I’ve recently accepted a position at MIT as assistant professor of digital media. I’m planning to move up to the Cambridge area this summer, after I finish my dissertation here at Penn, and will start teaching in the fall. I’ll be joining the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and will be working with Comparative Media Studies and that program’s founder, Henry Jenkins. Of course, I’ll keep blogging – although I won’t possibly be able to write at the rate Henry does. I’m hoping to get a lot of great creative, teaching, and research work done at MIT; to learn a lot from my colleagues there, students and faculty; and to generally have a great time.

And then turn out the link? Note that links to the many good pages of the trAce Online Writing Centre (1995-2005), at trace.ntu.ac.uk, will no longer work, and should, in theory, be updated to point to tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk. Of course, there’s no easy, general way to deal with link rot; from a searcher’s perspective, you can try to find the old page on the Internet Archive, or maybe you know enough about the resource to re-Google what you’re seeking. You can read further about the trAce de-linking and the specific fracas surrounding it.

Yesterday, I witnessed Rune Klevjer‘s highly entertaining and presumably successful defense of his dissertation What is the Avatar: Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games at the University of Bergen. In the Norwegian tradition, Rune had to dodge the slings and arrows of his “opponents,” Espen Aarseth from ITU Copenhagen, and William Urrichio from MIT, which he did most skillfully. An amusing and elucidating exchange occurred between Aarseth and Klevjer on the importance of the concept of fiction within computer games that included an extended metaphor in which imaginary tree stumps were agreed to be bears, though Aarseth insisted that the bear behind him was in fact dead and therefore not a threat. Klevjer’s most clever response to an Aarseth jab was to illustrate the difference between indirect and direct discourse as the difference between “throwing you over my shoulder and carrying you out of here” and “politely asking you to leave the room.” Though I have yet to completely read and absorb the above-linked dissertation, my initial impression is that it is a very careful and well thought-out examination of the nature of the avatar(s) in computer games, with a particular focus on the relationship between the player and the avatar in the first-person shooter genre.

Gamer academics, take noteL T.L. Taylor sends word that ITU-Copenhagen is now looking for two game development professors. The university’s building is even cooler-looking than in the illustration below, and don’t worry – it isn’t that dark most of the time. Animations of the building, hopefully the same ones that had the great techno soundtracks, are also available.

The IT University (http://www.itu.dk/), home of the Center for Computer Games Research (http://game.itu.dk), is seeking applicants for two positions as Associate or Assistant Professor of game development. The faculty will teach in our international English language program that focuses on game design, analysis, and technology (http://www.itu.dk/mtg/). Relevant areas of research and teaching are:

An interesting post at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type estimates that the average Second Life avatar consumes about 1,752 kWh per year. That compares to the average worldwide per capita consumption of 2,436 kWh per year. A lot of juice.

I just got the latest Atlantic Monthly in the mail, and in it there’s a letter to the editor commenting on November’s article about our efforts to build interactive drama. It contains an unusual critique, one that I’d never considered; I think it’s worth posting here for discussion.

Here’s a link that expires in 3 days, but I’ve taken the liberty to cut-and-paste the whole letter here:

I’m just back from a talk by Daniel C. Howe at Temple University. He showed us Phoneme.Machines, Code.Re(a)d, Open.Ended, Cave.Boxing, text.curtain, and Live.Text.Mix, many of which are linked from his home page.

And I’m about to head to the Flarf poetry festival at the Kelly Writers House, which starts at 6pm and is part of the MACHINE reading series that I founded. If you can’t make it but still want to Flarf out this evening, check out the YouTube videos of Flarf in action.

Joshua Birk of the blog Cathode Tan sheds some new, phosphorescent light on an H.P. Lovecraft story. His The Case of Randolph Carter is an AJAX hypertext, well-written and frequently engaging, designed to play out in nine different endings and to incorporate some elements of interactive fiction. One clicks to select words and actions rather than typing commands. While I don’t find the interface as appealing as the standard textual exchange of IF, those who aren’t fans of typing to their fiction may have a different opinion. Perhaps this tale will be of particular interest to some of those who reside in the eldritch birthplace of hypertext?

Leading IF author Emily Short has just posted a review of Pat Harrigan & our own Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Second Person – perhaps the first full length review of the recently-released book? At the risk of providing spoilers, I’ll mention that Short, who contributed a two-page article to the volume, gives a detailed assessment of what the book has to offer to those interested in interactive fiction, and concludes:

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a new column by Katie Haegele: DigitaLit. As you might guess, it is about digital literature. The first one introduces the concept and the online novel Mortal Ghost, by Lee Lowe.

There’s a special issue out of Bathhouse, a journal of “interdisciplinary and hybrid arts.” It features a new essay from Dmitry Golynko-Volfson on the history and future of the Russian Net art scene. I was happy to hang out with Dmitry at the Summer Literary Seminars last year, in between wandering the city reading sticker literature. The new Bathhouse also has video of Talking Cure, which I performed in St. Petersburg during the same trip.

Bathhouse is edited by current Creative Writing graduate students at Eastern Michigan University — and earlier featured Nick’s collaboration with William Gillespie on The Executor.

If anyone made it to some of the weekend 1 events, let us know how they went.

OPENPORT: Realtime Performance, Sound, & Language
begins this week @
Links Hall
3435 N Sheffield, 2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60657
$12 ($10 students, seniors, unemployed)

Links Hall’s new Artistic Associates each curate a month-long series of performance, based on expertise in their respective artistic fields. February’s program has been curated by Nathan Butler (US), Mark Jeffery (UK), Judd Morrissey (US), and Lori Talley (US).

full details: http://www.openportchicago.com

Today being Groundhog Day, in the spirit of the most excellent movie, I will recycle two past Groundhog Day-related blog posts.

Groundhog Day and IF (again)
Let’s do it again

I’m excited about an upcoming event — next Thursday at UCSD — on Massively Multiplayer Online worlds, game studies, economics, and cultural politics. The off-campus guests are Julian Dibbell and Raph Koster, and the local talent includes a grad student from my department Ge Jin (aka Jingle) as well as William Huber (a grad student in Vis Arts). It’s from 4-6:30pm, and there’s more info below.

A piece of LED art, referring to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force, seems to have been “neutralized” by a Boston police bomb squad. Police have found several other devices, presumably the same Lite-Brite-style artworks. And it seems they now have declared the devices part of a hoax that is “not funny.” A caption in that last article claims that at least of the devices was “detonated.” The news about this one came to me from Joe Shaw.

Liberty Arcade is a collection of interactive games that illustrate fundamental concepts from the social sciences. These games are designed to provide you with a better understanding of the underlying processes at work in modern, complex societies. Play the games, have fun and, by all means, think for yourself!

Very well! Let’s check out the quarterless arcade of The Institude for Humane Studies, “a unique organization that assists undergraduate and graduate students worldwide with an interest in individual liberty.” The game from Liberty Arcade that I’ll look at now is a simple but telling one, Tragedy of the Bunnies. It was created in 2004; the author doesn’t seem to be credited anywhere obvious. This exceedingly straightforward Flash game comes complete with an explanation of the “Moral of the Story,” so that if people don’t learn through gameplay, they’ll still be able to discover that…

As any economist will tell you, people respond to incentives. If there’s a valuable resource lying about in a commons—picture a pizza at a frat party—people will try and grab as much of that resource as they can before the resource is depleted. This response is natural—it’s an example of people responding to incentives. In other words, in a zero-sum game, you need to “get while the getting is good”. The more other people get, the less there is for you.

Eyebeam passes along word of The Creative Act, a collaborative project which has declared February “Create-a-Thing-a-Day Month. Participants in the project will make something creative each day during the month of February, choosing a different theme for each week. The project has some interesting constraints, such as that thing should take no less than 20 minutes and no more than 1 hour to make. Participants then post text, or a photo, or some other documentation to the group blog.

Earlier this month I posted an excerpt from my in-process manuscript — currently titled Expressive Processing — on the topic of process intensity. Interesting discussion ensued, I decided to post further excerpts, and I realized what excerpt I’d post next: the part of the book that comes just before the section on process intensity.

This is a central passage for the book. I’m laying out my basic perspective — what it is that draws me toward examining processes — and starting to work through the practice-oriented part of that perspective.

I appreciated the comments from people last time (they’ve already resulted in manuscript revisions) and I’ll be interested to hear any thoughts on the moves this excerpt makes.

Media Machines

A computer is a strange type of machine. While most machines were developed for particular purposes — washing machines, forklifts, movie projectors, typewriters — modern computers are designed specifically to be able to simulate the operations of many different types of machines, depending on the computer’s current instructions.

This is why a computer can simulate a movie projector: showing a set of image frames in quick succession. It’s also why a computer can act like a tape player: reading and amplifying a stream of sound data.

And it is for this same reason that computers can be instructed to act like previously-impossible types of machines.

Jim Carpenter, poet-smith and blogger of The Prosthetic Imagination, has placed an early version of Erica T Carter, version 3 online. This is a poetry-generating machine that is the (beta) successor of Jim’s earlier ETC/Erica T. Carter/Electronic Text Composition projects, which have been discussed on here and at Autostart, exhibited at the Slought Foundation, and read as part of the MACHINE series and at Brown’s E-FEST.

The interface for ETC 3 is quite clever: The user is invited to type in a “topic” (perhaps a single word, perhaps a phrase?) and then generate a poem based on this. The difference between this sort of a system and one that generates poems with the click of a button is like the difference between the Oracle of Delphi and a guy babbling in the street. By accepting some topic T, the reader’s thoughts shift immediately from the skeptical posture of “does this text make any sense?” to the more inquisitive “how does this text relate to and comment upon topic T?” Even if the system were throwing away the input, this would be an interesting direction for the interface. However, it isn’t discarding it (at least, not always), as topic-words sometimes end up directly in the output text. For the casual Web user who wants to strap on an imagination, the simple interface also has some advantages over the complex settings of the earlier ETC systems, but perhaps an “advanced poem” page could be made available if there are other underlying parameters to vary.

• Journalist extraordinaire Clive Thompson (1 2 3 4 5) has a new Wired article about Pleo, a next-gen robotic pet, created by Caleb Chung, the creator of Furby. The Pleo website is rife with cheesy pronouncements — “Can the seemingly impossible… be possible?”, “Can the subtleties of nature be… re-created?”, “Now is the time to bring magic to life”, and “Pleo is the first truly autonomous Life Form capable of emotions that allow personal engagement” — yet, Pleo does looks interesting. Although the YouTube video in the Wired article, to me, is a rather stiff, mild demo — in fact the Wikipedia page suggests that demo was rigged — I assume there will be more exciting behaviors in the final product. How big it will sell at $250 is a question; at that price, it probably can’t become the phenomenon Furby did.
• Brian Eno will be composing generative music for Spore!
• Don’t miss GameTunnel’s list of 2006’s top 10 indie games, including the oddly abstract-looking life simulator, Kudos.

I did a short interview with Franz Thalmair about the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, that has just been published by the Austrian webzine CONT3XT.NET. It will also be published next week by the UK-based new media collective furtherfield.org.