Grand Text Auto

The latest issue of Vectors is on Mobility. Each of the flash articles/interactive works explores a different theme related to mobile technology and culture. Two of the pieces are by authors familiar to GrandTextAuto readers, WiFi.Bedouin by Julian Bleeker and PlaceStorming by Jane McGonigal. In WiFi.Bedouin, Julian documents his experiments with setting up WiFi hotspots that are not connected to the public internet, but rather provide local, place-specific experiences. In PlaceStorming, Jane provides a guided cutup mechanism for turning an academic text into a superhero manifesto that is then hidden in a geocache and publicly performed and documeted by the finders of the cache.

Remember this mobile game?

It works on most platforms, particularly cushiony ones. It’s designed to be single player, although it can be quite entertaining to watch others play! Tends to take weeks or months to level up though.

I suppose you can play it anywhere, although it’s most fun to just hang in your crib with your homies, er, parents.

A sporty outfit is a plus, but not required.

The Organic City is an Oakland-based site for collaborative storytelling, rooted in a common environment. It’s a project of Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern at Cal State East Bay, and it just launched, less than a month ago.

In concept and basic workings, the site is similar to Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, which takes New York and its cityscape, and which Scott discussed in his recent DAC presentation. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is an innovative project that has amassed many writers, but that site is about six years old and, in some ways, seems unpleasantly old-school in its interface and its workings. The Organic City project features a story map that looks and works well; there are even plans for mobile access. (Registration is required to add stories, no doubt because the potential for story-spam has been wisely foreseen.) The mobile media page links to several other related projects, too.

In a cost-cutting move, Sony is discontinuing its revolutionary line of robotic puppies, the Aibo.

Has Sony screwed the pooch with this move? Aibo generated so much good PR for them over the years. Interestingly, only 150,000 were purchased since its release in 1999, I would have thought more. Then again, it cost $2000.

Clearly, expressive virtual pets continue to have the power to fascinate and generate serious revenue. Maybe Sony has a new robotic creature of some sort in the works to succeed Aibo. If so, W00f.

(via Ludology.org)

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, are offering their first fellowship in visual and performing arts for creative innovation in Second Life. From their annoucement:

This $4,000 fellowship will provide a young artist with a chance to be free for a semester or summer to explore the use of the digital world of Second Life as an artistic medium. In doing so, we hope that we will see Second Life used to even greater potential in the expressive arts to the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art.

Molleindustria [English] [Italian] offers brilliant “political videogames against the dictatorship of entertainment.” Over on Water Cooler Games, Ian just wrote up their latest, an anti-McDonald’s game in the vein of the anti-Kinko’s Disaffected! This is a pretty complex one that involves much more than paper-shuffling, as the extensive introductory tutorial (in the style of a managerial PowerPoint presentation) should signal. I can’t comment yet on the long-term playability of McDonald’s Videogame, but the site is definitely worth a visit, and I do recommend at least starting up and playing with all the games. The ones that involve fornication might wait until after work, though.

I was tipped off on ifMUD to the discontinuation of Western Union’s telegram service. Stunning, I know. And the telegram took such good care of itself. You can check it out on the site if you don’t beleive it, but it’s a fact: the major United States Victorian Internet provider is down.

It looks like Canada remains online, though.

Also note the Dead Media project working note on the death of the singing telegram, or at least of the Western Union executive who created that means of communication, about a decade ago.

I’m happy to annouce that we’re hosting the second Living Game Worlds symposium at Georgia Tech, on Thursday, February 16th. Last year, the first Living Game Worlds symposium (1 2) was held in honor of Will Wright receiving the Ivan Allen Award. The event was so successful we’ve decided to do it again. This year’s symposium explores what game design can learn from an interdisciplinary engagement with other fields. Will Wright kicks off the event with his keynote Design Learning: How Other Fields Can Inform Interactive Design. Registration is free, so if you’re in the area, drop by. We do ask that people pre-register so that we have a sense of the head count.

Raigan Burns, one half of the N team whom we briefly met at Slamdance, sends us this list of freeware games he recommends, culled from looking at hundreds of freeware titles. Several of the stickman titles in the list were inspiration for N, which won the Audience award at both IGF05 and Slamdance06. Enjoy, in no particular order:

Seiklus: abstract stickman adventure game
http://autofish.net/clysm/games/seiklus/index.html
http://autofish.net/clysm/art/video_games/seiklus/seiklus12.zip

Puchi: another tiny stickman game, this was a huge inspiration for N, super-fun puzzle/platforming
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4849

Frontline: yet more unclassifiable and addictive stickman action
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4378

The IGDA’s AI Interface Standards Committee is recruiting new members, from both industry and academia. See the call for applications below, open until February 20:

The awards ceremony at Slamdance was a great party: three bands + liberal quantities of tequila = fun. Red Bull and Corazon were official sponsors of the Guerilla Game Competition, so the drill through the whole competition was all the free Red Bull you could drink all day, and all the free tequila you could drink all night. I unfortunately had a nasty cold the first couple of days of the competition, and so was having to take it very easy. But by the last night I was back in fighting trim. Andrew, who has more important things than game competitions going on in his life, was able to fly in for the last day, so we were at the awards ceremony together. An hour or two into the party, the organizers Sam and Carolyn took the stage and started announcing the awards.

Sandbox, the first ACM Video Game Symposium, will be held this summer, July 29 and 30, in Boston MA, USA (collocated with SIGGRAPH 06). This is the first ACM-sponsored conference on video games; rumor has it that it may eventually spawn into its own ACM games SIG, with its own conference, etc. In addition to the papers, the Hot Games session will preview previously unreleased titles from major game companies as well as indie developers. The call for participation encourages a broad range of submissions, ranging from technical papers to humanistic game studies, from game design to analyses of the economics and business of games. Long papers are due May 1, Hot Game demos are due July 1. Read on for the full CFP.

The Electronic Literature Collection will bundle together all sorts of readable digital work: animated, interactive, hyper, cyber, and on and on. Works are sought for the first volume, but only until the deadline next Tuesday, January 31. See the call for works for details!

This just in . . . I’ve heard like none of the details, but Holy Toledo! Façade body-slammed the competition and took first place at the Slamdance Festival. Congrats to Michael and Andrew, and I look forward to the footage of you guys in your tights and Mexican wresting masks.

The San Diego paper has an aritcle, “Accidental traveler in a brave new world,” about Mary Ann Buckles, the first to undertake a serious, involved study of interactive fiction or any sort of computer game: “Interactive Fiction: the Computer Storygame ‘Adventure.'” As a New York Times story and Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludology.org noted a while back, Buckles seems to have been broken from academia by interactions with her committee and the PhD process, but to have kneaded herself into a career she’s enjoying – as a massage therapist.

Brian Kim Stefans’s blog Free Space Comix has returned to the Web as Free Space Comix III, now WordPressified and served up one letter at a time. (It arrives in one’s browser window so quickly, however, that it looks like you’re getting it a page at a time.) For a thorough grounding, you can check out the first incarnation of the blog, the 2002-2004 Free Space Comix, and the 2004-2006 Free Space Comix II. From these sites, and from behind the arras (Brian’s site), a bevy of intriguing texts, poems, and online artworks will be revealed – and nowadays, syllabi, too, since Brian’s teaching and completing his MFA in creative writing at Brown.

Here are some folks who think about “digital writing” in somewhat different terms than we usually do at GTxA. The Writing in Digital Environments Research Center has just announced the First WIDE Conference, “Writing : : Digital Knowledge,” to be held April 6th and 7th, 2006, at the James B. Henry Center of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. The information here is from their announcement email.

I’ve been here at Slamdance for the last couple of days exhibiting Façade. Andrew flies in later today. It’s a cool venue, though, echoing Ian’s post, we’re not getting as much foot traffic I’d like. Façade would be particularly suited for the non-gamer indy-movie-loving audience who descend on Park City for Sundance and Slamdance. In conversations in bars and restaurants, it’s fun introducing random festival goers to the concept of indy games. After describing Façade, a common reaction is to say “Oh, I’ll have to send my kids by the game lounge” – funny given the subject matter. I of course take great pains to explain that, as an art form, games can be aimed at adults as well as children, and that in fact Façade was not designed for children. (On a related note, Façade, which was supposed to be included on Moondance Games IGF compilation CD, was excluded at the last minute because having it in the compilation would have required ESRB “Strong Language” and “Alcohol Reference” descriptors which none of the other games required – not kid’s stuff indeed. Our next game will have to involve killing things so that we can get an E rating.).

Attention Philadelphians and those nearby! The MACHINE reading series at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization, will soon feature:

On February 15: Loss Pequeño Glazier (University of Buffalo, author of Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, numerous digital works, and Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm) joins Penn’s own Jim Carpenter (creator of the Electronic Text Composition system) to take the Writers House to the limits of computing and poetry. The program will be hosted by poet and critic Charles Bernstein (With Strings, My Way: Speeches and Poems, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Dark City). This “Constructing Poets” program is co-sponsored by the Penn Creative Writing Program.

January 30th is the deadline for proposals to the ISEA 2006 Symposium. ISEA is the International Symposium on Electronic Art — the big gathering that took most of GTxA to Scandinavia in 2004 (where we raised a toast and took notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7). This year the ISEA 2006 Festival and Symposium will take place in San Jose, California from August 5th through 13th. The Symposium will include papers, artist presentations, and posters on the themes of Transvergence, Interactive City, Community Domain, and Pacific Rim. This year’s co-chairs are the extremely savvy Steve Dietz and Joel Slayton — so expect a great event, and get those proposals done in the next 10 days!

A simple and elegant computer interface being used to simulate an inscrutable computer interface, in White Chamber.

This post is dedicated to the escapers, and those who want to be escapers. Perhaps you remember Toshimitsu Takagi’s Crimson Room (Grand Text Auto post & discussion). By now the game has established itself well enough to be briefly glossed in Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite the free encyclopedia. And the master of one-room Flash has since released Viridian Room. Now – well, I’m a few weeks late with this revelation, but anyway – he’s also completed White Chamber.

I shall lend credence to Jeremy Douglass’s characterization of Grand Text Auto as being a source of “breaking news and events” in interactive fiction – a characterization seen in his recent Writer Response Theory post on interactive fiction news resources.

The first breaking news item is Jeremy’s even more recent discussion of how interactive fiction tends to be characterized in news stories, which includes a proposed generation system for news stories about IF. For a very different take on interactive fiction and the news, check out the transcript from Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure, provided by Defective Yeti.

Here people might not properly capitalize a proper noun. They might transpose letters in ‘thier’. They might use jargon that isn’t in oxford. And all of that is OK with me.

Whether or not you’re a textual scholar, you may have wondered what the editorial values are on the three-leet site Slashdot, and what principles and practices apply to posting “stories” there. If so, you’ll be interested in a lengthy, recent post that tells the whole story and also offers a Goldilocks theory of story length and a sort of rhetoric of hyper-linking. There is some very fascinating conversation afterwards, too: “The process of reading is pipelined. Humans can scan through text very quickly because while the eye is scanning one word you’re parsing the sentence from a few words before and thinking about the meaning of what came before that. When you hit a grammatical or spelling error you cause a pipeline stall.”

.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.

                Computational Aesthetics:
  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Approaches to BEAUTY and HAPPINESS

         AAAI 2006, Boston, July 16 or 17, 2006

         http://www.computationalaesthetics.org

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

                  *         *         * 

Our aesthetic agency for beauty and emotion is one of the most 
celebrated bastions of humanity.  If machines could understand and 
affect our perceptions of beauty and happiness, they could touch 
people's lives in fantastic new ways. Drawing variously from work in 
diverse fields such as psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy,
recent applications of artificial intelligence have begun their foray
into the computation of, inter alia, art, music, poetry, and affect. 
Both the theory and praxis of aesthetics by computational means are 
seeing rapid advances, and the time is ripe for thematic integration.
Hence, this workshop will bring together AI theorists and 
practitioners across various realms in study and celebration of its 
central thematic, COMPUTATIONAL AESTHETICS.

Ian Bogost and Persuasive Games have just released Disaffected! for Windows and Mac. The game, mentioned earlier on here, is a parodical critique of working life at FedEx Kinko’s and a Slamdance finalist. The whole Persuasive Games site has gotten an upgade, too, with a new page that showcase their games. Also, see Ian’s post on Water Cooler Games about the release of Disaffected!

Will FedEx deliver a threatening legal letter to Persuasive Games? How will the high-concept Disaffected! fare against the AI juggernaut of Façade at Slamdance? What did Vaugn do with Thor’s package? What will happen when late-generation situationists take the game into FedEx Kinko’s and play, or invite employees to play with them? Stay tuned!