Next week, at UCSD, we’re having this continent’s first Software Studies workshop. I’m very much looking forward to having GTxA’s Nick, Michael, and Mary in San Diego, along with an all-star lineup.

If you can make it for the public session on Wednesday (all afternoon) I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. But you will need to RSVP.

The official announcement follows. (more…)

CALL FOR PAPERS

*** Interactive Storytelling’08 ***

1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling

26-29 November 2008, Erfurt, Germany
http://www.ai.fh-erfurt.de/ICIDS08

Submission Deadline: June 15, 2008

*** The first joint conference of the two previous European conference series:
- TIDSE (“Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling”) and
- ICVS (“Virtual Storytelling – Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling”)

*** SCOPE***

Interactive Digital Storytelling is a huge step forward in games and learning. This can be seen through its ability to enrich virtual characters with intelligent behaviour, to allow collaboration of humans and machines in the creative process, and to combine narrative knowledge and user activity in interactive artefacts. In order to create novel applications, in which users play a significant role together with digital characters and other autonomous elements, new concepts for Human-Computer Interaction have to be developed. Knowledge for interface design and technology has to be garnered and integrated.
(more…)

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

2) To provide a forum for European authors of electronic literature to share, demonstrate, read, or perform their work.

3) To discuss and explore the foundation of a European research network focused on electronic literature, funding opportunities for such a network, and network activities.

The seminar will last three days and will include about 20-30 participants. The day-long meetings during the first two days will consist of short presentations of papers in panel format. Additionally, there will be performances, readings, and demonstrations of electronic literature in the evenings. The third day of the conference will be dedicated to proposing and discussing the formal establishment of a research network on electronic literature in Europe. Paper presentations should be in English. Presentation and performances of works can be made in English or in the native language of the presenter. (more…)

Yesterday was our fifth birthday. Happy Birthday GTxA!

Ian Bogost writes in “The Rhetoric of Exergaming” that gross motor activity in the living room is inhibited by coffee tables. That seems to be true in many cases, but not when your coffee table is also a functional NES controller. Kyle Downes has built such a furnishing and functional piece of hardware, which also serves as a storage box. A glass tabletop places the unit in beverage-supporting mode. While playing the NES with this controller may not qualify as a fitness activity, it’s certainly a change and engages more than the player’s thumbs. If this trend of controller embiggenment, kicked off by Grand Text Auto’s own Mary Flanagan and her [giantJoystick], keeps rolling along, we might be playing casual games on ginormous cell phones before too long. Oops - we already are. (Thanks to Hanna for the tip about Downes’ project.)

In early 2007, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a reading of all of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

On May 15, 2008, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will host a reading of another work that first appeared on a long scroll of paper - Adventure, in its original version by Will Crowther. “As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds, MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University.” This table-read is at noon on the basement level of McKeldin Library, in MITH’s conference room - at the table, I presume. And the reading may contain spoilers!

Thanks to Dennis Jerz, author of “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave,” for the tip.

Personally, I’m struggling to keep my health up so I can continue playing this game, but if you’re the other way around, and in Baltimore, check out the second day of the Fourth Annual Games for Health Conference 2008. And, dear reader, if you are attending, drop us a note about how the conference is going or a link to anything you have online about your experiences.

May 8-9, 2008 / Baltimore Convention Center / Baltimore, Maryland / Web site for registration: www.gamesforhealth.org

The Games for Health Conference offers a rich platform for learning, promotion, networking and business development for organizations interested in the intersection between games and health. Topics to be covered include exergaming, medical simulation, interactive messaging, health behavior change, medical informatics, physical therapy and game development. More than 300 individuals from 100 organizations - academic institutions, government agencies and foundations - are expected to attend. Also, a pre-conference event on May 7 will offer two workshops: Games Accessibility and Virtual Worlds & Health. All conference participants will have the chance to interact and play with these games that are improving society. Registration is $495.00 for Thursday, May 8 & Friday, May 9 and the pre-conference workshops on Wednesday, May 7 are $99.00-$129.00.

A Review of Prehistoric Digital Poetry:
An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995
By Christopher T. Funkhouser
University of Alabama Press
2007
408 pp.
$75.00 cloth/$39.95 paper

This is an incredible compendium of decades of seldom-noticed work, guided by poetics, that has been done with language and computers. The work surveyed in this book is not “prehistoric” in the sense of being before history was developed; nor does it include pre-computer work that anticipated or laid the foundations for digital practice. But Funkhouser’s effort is clearly archaeological in terms of its scale and effort, and it is an attempt to recover a prehistory in the sense that our awareness of digital media history usually has the graphical, popular Web as its starting point. This recognition of our digital blind spot, or dark age, was what also motivated me and Noah to try to fill in a similar gap with The New Media Reader, which collects materials from WWII to the WWW. (more…)

Why must you hate gamers, game studies? Thus rants classics professor Roger Travis in The Escapist. Ian Bogost rants back.

Here’s something that’s new on the Web: Planet Interactive Fiction, an aggregration of blog posts (from Grand Text Auto among other fine places) about IF. Christopher Armstrong has set this up and, as you can see from a visit, it’s buzzing with useful IF information and discussion.

Now, since we often mention things that are new, I will supplement this happy news with a recollection of some things that are gone, in the sense of no longer on the Web with original URLs defunct: Hotwired, [Internet Archive] an early commercial site that may have been the first sizable Web magazine and which was responsible for the invention of the banner ad. The Spot, [Internet Archive] a Web soap that ran through 1997, is once again totally gone, after a puzzling relaunch which ran from 2004 to (it seems) no later than 2006. The academic journal fineArt Forum [Internet Archive] is gone - their URL simply redirects to the MIssissippi State University page. That journal published the Digital Arts and Culture 2003 proceedings, which are now gone with it. We’ve come to expect that academic journals, however unglamorous they may be, will be around for a while, but when they are digital and rely on continued hosting, universities can just drop them to let them sizzle into the depths if they want.

By the way, it’s great that the Internet Archive has many (not all) of the materials from these sites still available, even if not searchable, even if available at a very different speed from the usual Web. Some of these sites were updated rapidly; some of these and others were no doubt not spidered completely. Those interested in the Web’s history should certainly be grateful for what is there and remains accessible online. Still, the Internet Archive only “solves the problem” of access to the Web’s past to the extent that building one library “solves the problem” of access to and preservation of books. (Historically, it hasn’t.) We need a diversity of efforts with different priorities, policies, and technologies, inspired by the good work the Internet Archive has done but not simply an imitation or mirror of this one successful effort.

The book reviews at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies have been an extremely valuable resource for digital media scholars. The site has been online since 1996; it provides information about events and courses as well as about books. The book reviews in particular have helped those with different approaches (from literature, the visual arts, history, the social sciences, law, and so on) learn about important new media work in adjacent areas, and, of course, has helped to keep scholars aware of the new books available for personal consumption and use in courses. The site has been an important part of the discourse about digital media, one of the really important sites, along with ebr (Electronic Book Review), for discussion of book-length studies and arguments.

So I’m particularly pleased that RCCS has just published Kimberly De Vries’s review of the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1. This anthology of creative digital writing, book-like in many ways but provided on CD-ROM and on the Web, not as bound leaves of paper, was released in 2006 and is to be the first of a series. It has received some very positive attention, most of it internationally - it was reviewed in publications in Australia, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. But in the United States, for the most part (ebr, again, excepted) volume 1 of the ELC has fallen into the crack between the individual Web work and the real book, tumbling through space like at the beginning of Myst. It’s a particularly pleasing surprise that RCCS, with its important focus on books, has chosen to include the first volume of the collection among their materials reviewed. De Vries has provided a thoughtful review, to which two of my co-editors, N. Katherine Hayles and Grand Text Auto’s Scott Rettberg, have replied. Check out the other two May reviews and take note of Hayles’s new book, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, mentioned on here before, which includes the ELC v1 on CD-ROM as an insert.

For one thing, I have to note that interactive fiction must be resurgent. There’s a vodka ad placed in a few Cambridge, Massachusetts bus stops that refers to text adventures pretty directly.

Beyond that, ROFLCon has been taking place these past two days on the waxed floors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among the many microcelebrities and meme creators who convered for the con were Stephen Granade (an interactive fiction guy, among other things) speaking about LOLTrek, Jason Scott (currently working on the Get Lamp interactive fiction documentary) speaking about precursors to Internet memes and diction, and Kevin Driscoll on dance crazes and Soulja Boy - see the longer list of attendees/speakers, too. Last night there was a great gig at the Middle East featuring Lemon Demon, Leslie Hall, and an inspired performance by Trocadero, who provided the soundtrack to Red vs. Blue and played a nice cover of “Still Alive.” The “really short summaries” of talks on the ROFLCon site will be supplemented soon with full video coverage. Congrats to Tim Hwang, Christina Xu, and the rest of the team for bringing it all together.

The Atari 2600 could have been a player-programmable system! Fathom that.

If you were old enough to hold a joystick in 1978, you have encountered the work of Rob Fulop. Early in his career Rob made a name for himself as an Atari 2600 game programmer and designer, responsible for the highly successful cartridges Demon Attack (Billboard’s Video Game of the Year in 1982), Cosmic Ark (1982), Fathom (1983), as well as the 2600 ports of Missile Command (1981) and Night Driver (1978) from the original arcade games.

If you followed the news in the early nineties, you have also encountered Rob’s work. In the late eighties Rob co-developed Night Trap for Hasbro’s never-released NEMO system; in 1992 (without Rob’s involvement) Sega acquired and published Night Trap for their Sega CD platform, that later played a key role in the 1990s Congressional hearings on offensive video game material. Night Trap, along with Mortal Kombat, begat the ESRB game industry ratings system.

I met Rob in 1992, fresh out of grad school and barely 22 years old, becoming one of the first employees of his newly founded company PF. Magic. Rob had this crazy idea for a “virtual pet” (a what?), that ended up establishing a new game genre and becoming PF’s most successful product line, still selling to this day (Petz is now owned by Ubisoft). Rob was one of my primary mentors, and what I learned from him has influenced all my work since.

Last October on 793.5, his blog, Rob described a halfway completed, unreleased Atari 2600 cartridge he had developed in 1984, called Actionauts. To my knowledge, Actionauts would have been the first player-programmable virtual bots.

I set out to make a game featuring a programmable robot. Such occured to me at the time as a “natural”. My goal was to create a simple and fun programming game, with the principal challenge consisting of the experience of “debugging” - doing the basic “how did I blow it THIS time” shuffle… a familiar dance near and dear to the heart on anybody whose written even the simplest BASIC program. The idea was pretty basic. A robot on the screen would be controlled by a linear series of ‘commands’, its program if you will. There would be four commands to start with… consisting of the most primitive things a robot could be told to do. The player needed to get the robot to acheive a number of onscreen objectives.

Rob has recently announced he is releasing limited edition copies of the Actionauts cartridge for sale, for interested collectors.

A version of Actionauts did get released for the Commodore 64 in 1985; you can play it emulated here. (A related concept, Robot Odyssey, came out in 1984 for the Apple II and TRS-80. And don’t forget Big Trak from 1979.)

Mr. Fulop has also been recounting other bits of history from his days as a 2600 (a.k.a. Stella) developer, including his attempts to make David Crane cry, and advice on “killing one’s children”.

This has been so overexposed as to finally oblige a post - so, sorry if you’ve already heard it. There’s a set of backup files from the main Infocom disk that exists and seems to be in very small-scale but discernible circulation. Among other things, it contains emails about the eventually scuttled sequel to the game Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, design notes for this sequel, and two early very incomplete but working mock-ups of it. Andy Baio’s lengthy post on Waxy.org unearths an email conversation about the never-completed game Milliways, ak.a. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe from more than 20 years ago. (more…)

The last of the senior animators of the original core group at Disney (a.k.a the “nine old men”), National Medal of Arts recipient, and co-author of The Illusion of Life, the gold standard character animation reference.

Putting aside unnecessarily pretentious claims such as “The worlds first piece of online conceptual video game art”, Stewart Hogarth’s The Naked Game is brilliant.

Welcome to the Naked Game. What you are seeing is a primitive version of ‘Pong’, being played by two artificial intelligences, with the entire code governing the mechanics of the game exposed below it, and the variables affecting the mechanics to the right. Furthermore, you can remove lines of code and see the effects in real time.

I kind of think of this as the Web 2.0 indie game version of HAL devolving as he sings “Daisy”.

(via Indiegames.com)

As mentioned earlier, I very much enjoyed the first HASTAC conference. Now registration has opened for the second HASTAC iteration, themed “TechnoTravels/TeleMobility.” I’m also happy to say there will be a substantial selection of software studies content, including a panel featuring information from the first North American software studies workshop, special software studies presentations by Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass using the massive-resolution HiPerWall display at UC Irvine’s branch of Calit2, and a short talk by yours truly on the Expressive Processing blog-based peer review project.

Via Water Cooler Games — Chris Crawford’s presentation yesterday at the Game Developers Exchange in Atlanta, on his “Nine Breakthroughs” useful in developing Storytron. Good stuff!

Update: The Storytron site has a new look! They’re still beta, but getting close to an initial launch.

I suppose “digital materiality” (among other things, the topic that Matthew Kirschenbaum treated so well in his recent Mechanisms) is no longer widely considered an oxymoron. A scholarship is being offered this year along library and information science lines for PhD study of “Digital Materiality and the Management of Cultural Heritage Collections.” Follow the link for contact information:

Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) is offering a once-off Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Research Scholarship for a PhD in Digital Materiality. …

We are particularly interested in international students, those working/studying in the cultural heritage sector and those who are keen about reflecting on the philosophy and theory of the materiality of digital artifacts. The description is intentionally wide in order to accommodate a good range of potential candidates.

From the call:

Indiecade invites independent game artists and designers from around the world to submit interactive media of all types – from art to commercial, ARG to abstract, serious to shooter – for consideration. Work-in-progress is encouraged.

A diverse jury of industry leaders will select entries for top prizes at the IndieCade @ Open Satellite Festival. All entries for the Festival will also receive consideration for presentation at the other 2008 IndieCade international showcase exhibitions.

Submissions Deadline: April 11, 2008 at Midnight PST.

For more information and to enter: www.IndieCade.com.

[This is a continuation of part 1]

The version of the Expressive Processing manuscript used for both forms of peer review begins with an introductory chapter composed, in part, in response to a desire to let people know what is at stake right up front. I wrote it to let readers know, from the beginning, what I am advocating and why it matters to me. I also wanted a first chapter that could be assigned as a stand-alone class reading (as so many monograph chapters are) and function to make my case.

In the blog-based review I got a number of important comments on this chapter, especially on my discussion of process intensity and The Sims. In the course of that discussion I also learned a number of things about the blog-based review form that still hold true in my conclusions about this project. (more...)

*

Chris Funkhouser is author of the excellent volume Prehistoric Digital Poetry, which I hope to write about at greater length before too long. He told us today during the Codework workshop at WVU about Emmett Williams's "The IBM Poem," a 1966 computationally-generated poem and system for generating poems. I can find little information about this poem on the Web - certainly, not the specification of how the generator works, which Funkhouser was kind enough to hand out to us on paper.

Here is a partial implementation (Update: a complete implementation; my earlier version is still available) of the poem-generating process in Python which I just wrote up. You may modify or do anything you like with this. I dedicate this program to the public domain as described in the linked document. I've uploaded a text file containing the program that also appears in this post, below. (more...)

I just got to hear Ted Nelson (inventor of the term "hypertext," author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines) kick off the Codework workshop with his talk here at West Virginia University. I did not take notes during Nelson's talk. The basic ideas he expounded (as one might guess) were the ones expressed in his books and in the last talk of his that I heard, in 2001 at Brown. He showed some examples of cross-document connections and transclusion in Xanadu Space, and demonstrated the underlying data representation, ZigZag.

I will mention, though, the question I asked and the answer Nelson gave. I wondered if he - so influential in communicating to people how computers can be used to enlarge the mind and liberate people - could tell us a few programs that he encountered that showed him that potential. He mentioned the programming langauge Prograph and a language that gives the capability to produce executables for PC and Mac, REALbasic. When I pressed him to mention any programs - including small-scale ones like games - that influenced him, he said he wasn't a game guy and just mentioned some other "full platforms" that aren't computers: Tinderbox, Emacs, and Flash. Well, on the one hand, I was hoping to learn about smaller-scale non-applications that showed the potential of the computer. (Did he like Eliza? The animals "AI" game? Anything like that?) But, Nelson is not a games guy - he's a meta guy, interested in platforms, programming languages, and development systems. So this was a fair answer. And I'll have to check out Prograph and REALbasic.

As many Grand Text Auto readers know, earlier this year I put a mostly-completed draft of my manuscript (for Expressive Processing) through two forms of peer review. One was a review by three anonymous field experts selected by my publisher, The MIT Press. The other was a blog-based review right here on Grand Text Auto. I posted each chapter, section by section, with a new addition each weekday morning — inviting paragraph-by-paragraph comments from the readers here.

For those who like discussions to cut to the chase, here's what happened, from my point of view. The blog-based review and the anonymous review both pointed to the same primary revision for the manuscript: distributing the main argument more broadly through the different chapters and sections, rather than concentrating the argument largely in a dense opening chapter. In addition, the blog-based review also gave me a great deal of specific feedback on my supporting arguments and examples.

From this we might conclude that anonymous, press-solicited peer review can be abandoned. (more...)