Grand Text Auto

Today’s Gamester column, written by Tom Leupold and appearing in Inside Bay Area, is about IF: “Games with no pictures? Yes, they really did exist.” The focus is on Scott Adams of Adventure International, Adventureland, and Pirate Adventure fame. He’s still writing IF, and is now at work on The Inheritance, a game based on the Old Testament.

David Welbourn is the force behind the content and upkeep of ifwiki, the increasingly useful wiki about IF founded by Dave Cornelson. David W. offers another useful index into interactive fiction at the Key & Compass IF Games index. Thanks to Dennis Jerz for pointing this one out.

Been too busy to post, but would like to share a few links:

• Devil’s advocates: Clive Thompson calls interactive narrative “dry water” and a “nonstarter”, noting (via GTxA) that interactive poetry is more prone to success; and Greg Costikyan opines,

  To me, the search for the interactive narrative game is one of those things that people have bashed their head against the wall about since the beginning of computer games – and if you want to bash your head against that wall, that’s great. Sooner or later someone will break through the wall, but me, I’ll go do something else.

  Bam… bam… bam…
   

• Clive again, on next-gen characters’ ever deeper descent into the Uncanny Valley. Reacting to a preview of Indigo Prophecy sequel Heavy Rain,
  

  This wouldn’t be so bad if the designers were actively trying to create some eldritch, sephulchral nightmarescape straight out of Goya’s Black Paintings. But no … they’re trying to create a spunky, cute, realistic girl. God almighty, these people must be stopped. This stuff is hideous beyond description…

(Interestingly, Clive seemed to like our foray into interactive narrative, but didn’t seem to like our attempts at avoiding the Uncanny Valley…!)

Thanks to coverage on Gamasutra, I shall merely note last week’s Girls ‘N’ Games thinktank held last week on the UCLA campus. The event consisted of an intense day workshop followed by a conference. I’m cited along with some fantabulous colleagues including Brenda Laurel, Tracy Fullerton, Justine Cassell, Mimi Ito, Carrie Heeter, and Celia Pearce, only to name a few. Look forward to a book emerging from the event…

Meanwhile, I’m in the throes of formal assessment on the RAPUNSEL project! We’re working with over 80 kids at a particularly cool school. molto interressante!

In Soviet Russia, language says that William Burroughs is virus! Robert Kendall’s stickerific and aphoristic Logozoa project (mentioned before on here) now offers an “E-Doption” program — and a short program, too. Two lines of code will include an randomly reloading logozoan (one of about 200, for now) on your page.

The truly assiduous reader will be also be able to determine what other text on this page changes each time the page is reloaded.

This gem has probably become the most famous execution of an Apple II program recorded online. I’d be very interested to hear if you know of any other contenders, though.

Something like the reverse of this music video project has been done, too, using a soundtrack sampled from classic hardware and more “modern” video: “Video Computer System” by Brazilian electonica duo Golden Shower hit the net way back in 2000. Samples of VCS sounds aren’t truly chiptunes, sure, and you gotta like the textual Applesoft BASIC program idea, but both of these are still high-quality cultural productions.

Following up on my previous post about upcoming conferences, here’s another batch of conferences of interest to GTxA readers.

ACM Multimedia 2006 Interactive Arts Program
ACM Multimedia is the premier annual multimedia conference. The ACM MM Interactive Arts Program brings together the arts and multimedia communities to explore, discuss, and push the limits of both multimedia technology through the arts, and the arts through multimedia technology. They’re looking for both papers and interactive art exhibits. ACM MM will be held in Santa Barbara, California (USA), October 22-28, 2006. Submissions due June 1.

The gaming website TeamHomp, while busy covering E3, has just added new column on IF and similar matters, Cardinal Points. Graphical adventures may be in the works for future installments, but the first column is a good introduction to IF with several solid recommendations of modern-day games.

Three years old, that is. Yup, it’s Grand Text Auto’s third birthday. Besides some great discussions with you all this past year here on the blog, and some all-time-high traffic numbers for the site (mostly spam bots, but still), lots has happened this year for us “drivers”: completions of PhD’s, releases of digital fiction, poetry and art, new jobs, and not to mention a kid or two. Probably a book announcement or two in there somewhere as well.

We’re looking forward to more as we begin year four!

deadline: 10 June 2006
La version française figure ci-dessous

Dear colleague,

The Paragraphe Laboratory at the University of Paris 8 is creating a new bilingual Fench/English academic review called regards croisés/crossed looks that focuses on the digital literature. This review will become a locus for exchanges between different points of view on digital literature. The review is resolutely multicultural and pluridisciplinary. It puts contributions by authors and researchers together. Researchers will come from literature, communications studies and new media studies, semiotics, psychology.

Electronic Book Review keeps on going, and going, and going: New contributions are now available on three threads, Writing [Post] Feminism, Critical Ecologies, and End Construction.

Among the new items on the feed is a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality, which I’m very glad to see being further discussed. (Noah’s review on here has been one of too few texts to grapple with this formidable book.) The ebr review seemed to me to based on more than one misreading, however – or at least to be written from a perspective or frame that doesn’t have much to do with Ryan’s arguments. My disappointment with these problems in the review was pretty much erased when I read Dave Ciccoricco’s riposte to review. I would say more nice things about this response, but I’d be writing a review review review if I did that. I’ll just encourage everyone to check out the whole thread, including, if you can manage, the book.

Yesterday, as Scott predicted, I successfully defended an interdisciplinary PhD at Brown. I’ll be posting more information about it before long, and hopefully updating my moribund personal website at the same time, but first I have some plans. The biggest is for this May 28th, when I’ll be getting married to Jennifer. We’ve been friends for 19 years now, and I’m looking forward to being family with her.

This morning I went to GDX, a one day game symposium hosted by the Atlanta branch of the Savannah College of Art and Design. I caught a keynote lecture by Noah Falstein on serious games and a talk by Brenda Brathwaite on censorship challenges to games. Here are my relatively unedited notes from those talks.

Noah Falstein

Opens by saying “serious games” is a bad name. Implies that all other games are trivial or frivolous and that serious game aren’t fun. His interest is games beyond entertainment.

Have you been following this whole Harvard student book plagiarism story? I’m sorry that this young girl, pushed by the needs of a publishing machine and, no doubt, by her own ambition, should have fallen into this trap so early in her career. But the fact is that although she has been manipulated and packaged, what has happened to her has very largely been her own fault. The thing is, it’s not conventions of character and plot that Viswanathan is accused of copying, it’s whole sentences of text.

It’s not Tomb Raider, and it’s not Doom – but it is quite an adventure. At least, it’s a few minutes’ worth of an adventure. It’s Tomb of Doom. In Flash, and in claymation style.

The latest version of Chris Crawford’s elusive Erasmatron — renamed the Storytron — is out. Here’s his announcement of the pre-alpha version of their Story World Authoring Tool (Swat):

At last, after years of work and rivers of hype, our first version of Swat is available for download! It’s not even an alpha version — not all the features are in place, and there are plenty of bugs. But it’s good enough for you to start learning about our technology and how it all works. We would very much like to hear your comments on Swat. Yes, it’s far from complete — this is version 0.51, because we figure it’s only half-finished. And if you’re leery of being a lab rat, you might want to wait a month or two for a more complete version. But if you’re the kind of pioneering soul we seek, then you can exert a lot of influence over the development of the technology by getting in at this early stage.

Below, I’ve included three photos from my reading of Ream, taken by Jill Ivey, along with a link to a new digital version of the poem that was done by Jim Carpenter.

Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about: hypertext.

Okay, that’s not exactly the way that Melanie Hundley’s series of questions begins. But Hundley did contact me with a survey she is doing for her dissertation in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. It’s about how authors who have written both for print and hypertext compose their work.

I offered to post the questions and my replies here on Grand Text Auto, so that she could simply continue with her the survey in comments following this post. Others who want to answer some or all of the questions themselves, or to discuss them or my responses, are of course welcome to do so in comments, too. On to the questions and answers…

My poem Ream, discussed before on GTxA, is now – thanks to encouragement from Andrew – available in a Web edition.

Here it is: Digital Ream.

After years of work and anticipation, Graham Nelson’s new interactive fiction development system, Inform 7, is out. The new system is in many ways more different from Inform 6 than OS 10 was from System 9: Code looks like natural language (like English prose, specifically), a new and well-crafted IDE from Andrew Hunter is provided, and numerous improvements to the language and world model have been incorporated. Games still compile to z-code, however, to run on the standard interpreters that run earlier Inform games.

Check out the World of Awe Enhanced CD and Aspect 7: Personas and Personalities.

I know you are out there…

There are a number of interesting conference and workshop deadlines approaching.

The 3rd international Conference on Technologies in Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE 2006), Darmstadt, Germany, December 4-6, 2006. Papers are due July 15, 2006.

Workshop on adaptive approaches to optimizing player satisfaction in games, held in conjunction Simulation of Adaptive Behavior 2006, Rome, Italy, September 25-29, 2006. Papers due May 21, 2006.

Sandbox: ACM SIGGRAPH Video Game Symposium, Boston, MA, USA, July 29-30, 2006. Papers due May 15, 2006 (Extended deadline!)

Game-On 2006, Braunschweig, Germany, November 29-December 1, 2006. Early submissions due July 31, 2006 (there’s a later deadline of September 15th).

Greetings from Karlskrona, Sweden, where I’m a visiting distinguished scholar at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. While my students at Hunter College NYC are busy prepping for their graduate reviews (crits) mid-May, I’ve been making the rounds with folks here in the Literature, Culture and Digital Media program. Past scholar visitors to the program have included Kate Hayles, Jesper Juul, and Jay Bolter.

(large scale chess demo derby, Stockholm)

Brian Kim Stefans has just deployed Web-works aplenty in the container format of his Brown Masters of Fine Arts thesis, “Kluge: A Meditation, and Other Works.”

I don’t know how many Brazilian GTxA readers we have, but I’ll be giving a few lectures in Brazil during the third week of May (the 17th, 18th, and 20th). It’d be great to meet folks down there.