Grand Text Auto

Games for Change (G4C) has launched the early registration website for its 2006 conference on “Social Change and Digital Games.” The 3rd annual event will be co-hosted June 27th and 28th with the Parsons The New School for Design in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Recently there’s been some high-profile, mainstream business press on games: a few weeks ago, Will Wright and Spore were featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and a Second Life avatar made it to the cover of the May issue of Business Week.

The trend continues in the June 10 issue of The Economist, with a one-pager on game AI, repeatedly quoting Dr. Mateas of GTxA, and including two screenshots of our project Façade! Here’s a link to the article on their subscription-only site; here’s a scan I made of the article. [Update: the article is now properly online here.]

Baby Boomer Gamers!
You are invited to participate in a survey about the play preferences and patterns of video and computer game players of the “Baby Boom” generation…

Imagine the situation, somewhat reminescient of another one you may remember: The sun is brought. You have a rock. You win, because Rock Shades Sun.

This is one of the 300 possible outcomes in RPS-25, a generalization of Rock, Paper, Scissors to 25 items. Be sure to see how all outcomes are spoken.

You know what a serious game and sport RPS is, surely. But the relevance to those in new media and compter gaming, those who don’t happen to be interested in decision theory? If this isn’t a digital game, I don’t know what is.

The new deadline to send proposals for the first issue of the review is

– the end of August if you send your paper both in English and in French
– as soon as possible if you send it only in one language (French or English). The paper will not be published if we don’t have time to translate it.

La date limite pour la réception des articles est portée à

– fin Août si vous fournissez l’article en français et en anglais
– le plus tôt possible si vous le fournissez dans une seule langue (français ou anglais). L’article ne pourra être publié si nous n’avons pas le temps de le traduire.

QMail, by Andreas Lloyd, may not offer the lyrical turn of Richard Powers’ nicely presented “They Come in a Steady Stream Now,” but it does offer all the spam. It shares the simulated inbox medium with Scott’s Kind of Blue (Web interface) and Rob Wittig’s Blue Company (archived edition). I suppose it could be seen as an email narrative, although I’m not sure reading for plot is appropriate. The interface does have interesting angles and spaces, and the piece certainly scores points for toying with a corporate properties in an interesting way. There are also tasteful advertisements. And strange 404 pages.

“CC” is a poem by Nick Montfort, written for the Web in April and May 2006.

1. The poem is written for Carmen Conde’s centenary in 2007.
2. The poem contains 100 words, each of which are (more or less obscure) words in both English and Spanish.
3. Moving the pointer over a word highlights that word and one other, so that the pair can be read as a phrase, aloud or in the mind.
4. Conde’s book Jaguar puro inmarchito (Pure Unwithered Jaguar), and the fact that the word “jaguar” is a word in both English and Spanish, suggested that, in the interests of purity, the letters in that word should not occur anywhere in the poem.

When people play and try to figure out games, they work at learning to see and understand in new ways. When they seek help from others, asking people who have solved the game to supply hints, they give others the opportunity to teach, and to try to understand how to draw a solution out from a player who is puzzling over it.

Numerologists are hopping excited, and fearful. The number of the beast, and all that. So in the morning it will be 06:06:06:06:06. This long a series of single digits in a date and time won’t occur again until, um, July of next year, when 7 gets its lucky day.

• Microsoft is holding a chatterbot contest with $40K in prizes. Bots due Oct 15.
• E3 panel of game designers on interactive narrative
• Brandon Rickman critiques Glassner’s Interactive Storytelling
• Ernest Adams on “Perlin’s Law” (oh please)
• An ongoing series of game structure analyses at Only A Game (1 2 3 4) — identifying key player moves (aka verbs, or discourse acts) in several games
• Excerpts from Katherine Isbister’s Better Game Characters By Design
• Second a-Life
• Very cool recursive interactive images
• DARPA life recorders (previously blogged 3 years ago as “LifeLog“)

In Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, I started to consider how a long-standing but neglected literary tradition, the riddle, offers a way to consider computer games and how people understand them, learn from them, and are able to see the world through them in new ways. In what follows, I’m going to suggest how the analogy between the riddle and interactive fiction can be extended to other sorts of games that involve figuring out. I’ll follow this post up with another in which I consider a bit more about how the riddle can help us understand interactions among computer gamers.

The Art and Space Science Fellowship at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory has a call for proposals for Space Art projects. The successful applicant with have a three month residency at the laboratory, travel, food, accomodations, a small stipend, and the opportunity to work with scientists and NASA satellite missions both at Space Sciences Laboratory and at other partnering institutions nationally. Space Arts is a growing interstellar field. A database of ongoing projects is a available at spacearts.info. In reviewing the projects, I note that while many of them are innovative, we have yet to see the first space-based interactive fiction, and that this could pose an even greater challenge for Nick Montfort than getting a running version of Zork installed on the light board atop Philadelphia’s PECO tower.

Belgian game design duo Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, aka “Entropy8Zuper!”, creators of 8, have more than one ambitious new projects in the works.

The first is The Endless Forest, a dreamy, non-goal-oriented online world where players embody human-faced deer, beginning alone in the forest but before long encountering other deer avatars, and soaking up the peaceful environment together. They’ve just released Phase Two of the forest, which now allows players to collect “the hidden magic of the forest to cast spells on each other”, altering each other’s appearance. Their artistic goals include exploring new forms of narrative in an online world, presumably emergent narrative.

Especially relevant to GTxA readers is their newest project, Drama Princess, currently in an initial design phase

The trAce Online Writing Centre, having recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, has now moved into virtual archival boxes at Nottingham Trent University. Featured at the trAce Archive, along with many other materials, is a scanned-in copy of Cyberwriting: Selected Internet Resources for Writers by Simon Mills – the first document of the project and a fascinating backwards glance and writing online in the good old days.

While this marks the end of trAce at NTU, trAce is scheduled to reappear in September 2006 as an online journal at the University of Luton.

The call for papers for perthDAC 2007 is out. The theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference will be “The Future of Digital Media Culture” which, I presume, leaves plenty of room for electronic literature and other GTxA type interests. The conference will be held from 15 – 18th September 2007, during the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth. There will be a double blind peer review process for papers. The deadline for 500 word abstracts is 14th August 2006, and the deadline for full papers is 4th December 2006. Although it’s a long, expensive way to go from just about anywhere else, Perth is a wonderful city in a fantastic part of Western Australia, with great culture, food, wine, beaches, parrots, and Aussies. I was there for a couple of weeks last winter/summer and I’m looking forward to going back.

NILE ain’t just a river in Egypt … and it’s heading toward you. The 4th International Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments (NILE) Conference will be happening in Edinburgh August 8-11. While the paper deadline has long passed (March 1) and this particular blogger won’t be able to make it, we here at Grand Text Auto did want to note the event for those who might attend. We welcome any reports or comments about this conference. Thanks to Melanie Hundley for the note about NILE.

The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed, including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.

Yesterday in Los Angeles, Grand Text Auto, among others, celebrated the wedding of Jennifer and Noah!

Pictured, from left to right: Andrew, Scott (played by Eva Vu Stern; we realize this is confusing, as Eva has more hair than Scott), Nick, Noah the dashing groom, Mary and Michael.

On that note, Scott is rumored to be occupied with nuptial ideas of his own recently…

When Oulipians discover that someone else used a particular ingenious constraint for literary composition long before they thought to “invent” it, they call this plagiarism by anticipation. Reading through Craig Dworkin’s excellent Anthology of Conceptual Writing that is online at UBUWeb — all the way through it, this time — I see that famous conceptual artist and writer Lawrence Weiner, in his 1970 “Tracce/Traces,” appropriated of the visual and interactive framework for Digital Ream, or close to it: there are fifty (rather than five hundred) single, white, linked words on dark gray (not black), appearing on consecutive pages. At least, Weiner’s typesetter (Dworkin? UBU’s Goldsmith?), using BBEdit 6.5 according to metadata in the pages, managed to get this digital discount — all about three years before I posted Digital Ream. Now it makes me wonder if the print version of Ream was also ripped off years before it was created…

I’m currently working with Blair MacIntyre, Steve Dow and Manish Mehta on AR-Façade (Mary mentioned this in an earlier post). Part of this project involves evaluating the difference in the player experience between the desktop and embodied AR versions of Façade. And of course, to do this, we need to better understand the player experience of the original Façade. Following up on earlier evaluation work on Façade, we’re currently conducting a web survey. We seek participants who have played Façade and are willing to answer questions about their experience. The online survey does not collect any identifiable personal information and will take approximately 10-15 minutes of your time.

attention ! New York publisher looking for graphic novelists/ manga artists and writers

Poetry publisher Wave Books proffers an online system, Erasures, for creating subtractive poems. The project celebrates Wave’s recent publication of Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow, which was composed in this manner. A page links to that book and illustrious predecessors produced by deletion: Jen Bervin’s Nets, produced by removing letters from Shakespeare’s sonnets; Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, based on the first four books of Paradise Lost, and Tom Phillips’s A Humument. My favorite digital tool for creating texts in this way, presented in performance at A Night at the Cybertexts at DAC 2001, is John Cayley’s Instrumental, which allows the user to multi-select runs of text and then delete everything except what is highlighted. It’s nice, of course, to also have a flexible Web system like this to allow people to share what they’ve shored against ruin.

The schedule is posted for the upcoming Northwest Games Festival, Saturday June 3rd in Portland, and it appears to have a sizable dose of interactive narrative content. Southern Oregon-based Chris Crawford will be keynoting, presumably discussing and pimping his and his team’s latest Storytron efforts. Portland-based Alexandre Owen Muniz will be giving a presentation on IF; his piece A New Life tied for 2nd place at IF Comp 2005.

Since I assume there’ll be plenty of newbies there, rather than present Façade I volunteered to give an intro to game programming lecture, where I plan to proselytize Inform 7 (and 6), Processing, Torque (also Oregon-based!) and any other accessible systems and high level languages I can think to suggest.

MacKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, has written a new open text, Gam3r 7h3ory, in which he is interested in two questions: can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in, and can there be a critical theory of games. For GTxA readers, the answer is already yes and yes. But of course the real meat lies in the particulars of how you answer those questions. Wark invites us all to participate in the on-going evolution of this text. Thanks to Ben of the Institute for the Future of the Book for pointing this one out.

As a programming language, the natural-language-like Inform 7 (main I7 site) might recall COBOL — whether or not it fulfills a similar grim destiny. But in addition to being a way to write code, Inform 7 is a way to describe spaces and objects in a simulated world. An interesting precedent here, although it generates 3D graphical images instead of a simulation for textual interaction, is WordsEye, a system now in closed beta. More images and the texts that generated them are available at SemanticLight, and there’s a paper about the system.