Grand Text Auto

Last year we undertook an experiment here: simultaneously sending the manuscript for Expressive Processing out for traditional, press-solicited peer review and posting the same manuscript, in sections, as part of the daily flow of posts on Grand Text Auto. As far as I know, it became the first experiment in what I call "blog-based peer review."

Over the last year I've been finishing up Expressive Processing: using comments from the blog-based and press-solicited reviews to revise the manuscript, completing a few additional chapters, participating in the layout and proof processes, and so on. I'm happy to say the book has now entered the final stages of production and will be out this summer (let me know if you'd be interested in writing an online or paper-based review).

One of my last pieces of writing for the book was an afterword, bringing together my conclusions about the blog-based peer review process. I'm publishing it here, on GTxA, both to acknowledge the community here and as a final opportunity to close the loop. I expect this to be the last GTxA post to use CommentPress — so take the opportunity to comment paragraph-by-paragraph if it strikes your fancy. (more...)

I have a new blog: Post Position. Here's my welcome post.

ICCC X, the First International Conference on Computational Creativity, will be taking place January 7-9 in Lisbon. The X, I believe, indicates the decade of workshops and symposia leading up to this conference. Here's the scoop:

Although it seems clear that creativity plays an important role in developing intelligent computational systems, it is less clear how to model, simulate, or evaluate creativity in such systems. In other words, it is often easier to recognize the presence and effect of creativity than to describe or prescribe it.

The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the exchange of ideas on the topic of computational creativity in a cross-disciplinary setting.

(more...)

Pat Harrigan and I are pleased to announce the publication of the final volume in our POV series: Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Following the first two volumes (First Person and Second Person) this project broadens our scope yet again. While the first volume was mostly (though not exclusively) focused on computer games and electronic literature, and the second injected tabletop gaming, performance-oriented play, and other kinds of systems that create meaning through play, this new volume greatly increases the range of narrative forms considered, while continuing to keep our previous concerns in play.

Given this, it's probably no surprise that this is the biggest volume yet (more than 400 pages, though not, as the catalog currently states, more than 600). We continue to include the voices of practitioners and critics -- for example, both Rafael Alvarez, who wrote for The Wire, and critic Jason Mittell reading The Wire's structure in game-like terms. We also continue to bring together popular arts (e.g., The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Watchmen, and Doctor Who) with experiments that will only be directly experienced by a select audience (e.g., Tamiko Thiel's culture-crossing VR installations and Richard Grossman's three-million-word, four-thousand-volume novel). And we also continue to connect the present and past, bringing in writing on vast narratives ranging from the early female superhero Miss Fury to Thomas Mann's masterwork Joseph and His Brothers.

But shifting the focus to vast narrative also, of course, introduces discontinuities with the previous volumes. (more...)

There is a new podcast interview featuring yours truly, Mary Flanagan, along with Suzanne Seggerman about games for change at the Brainy Gamer. Everyone's preparing for the Games for Change festival in NYC -- just a few weeks away! Read more at http://www.tiltfactor.org.

Daniel Benmergui of "Storyteller" and "I wish I were the Moon" fame has a beautiful new piece out, one that is a poem as well as a game: "Today I Die." Announcement of release here.

MAYA Design's whitepaper "The Wrong Could" by Peter Lucas, Joseph Ballay, and Ralph Lombreglia contains the best cloud-computing metaphors yet, ones that are incisive as well as amusing:

Today’s so-called cloud isn’t really a cloud at all. It’s a bunch of corporate dirigibles painted to look like clouds. You can tell they’re fake because they all have logos on them. Real clouds don’t have logos.

Here's what the Boston Cyberarts Festival exhibit at 1305 Boylston Street, which offered visitors the opportunity to play several Atari VCS games along with Tempest 2000 (Jaguar), Rez (Dreamcast), and Bit.Trip Beat (Wii), looked like:

The last photo shows George Fifield (director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival), Andrew Y Ames, and Nick Montfort (caught by the camera in his weekend attire).

Today Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School and Co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, spoke at Dartmouth on "Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet." Zittrain first defined the term "civic technologies" to mean those technologies that rise and fall and depend on participation.

Zittrain spoke first on Internet history: the development of the Arpanet --> Internet, he noted, was inherently playful and had an exhilarating sense of freedom and respect among users. The financial constraints for the development of the Internet significantly influenced -- helpfully so -- its design. Courtesy in networks, from access to attitude, as well as the the lack of business plans made this endeavor revolve around free information in the first place. Costs were low in production, and fees were not expected to be recouped through the use of the system (no sales, for example, were planned to support the infrastructure).

Who would have known that the infrastructure would form the basis of international banking, entertainment, and health care? The structure we have built, to Zittrain, is just not tenable in terms of scale and vulnerability. Yet most of the solutions that leap out would cause problems far worse than they might be now. (Zittrain is not the only scholar who notes that the core of the problem of computing in the future is the increasingly "sealed box" approach to computing systems and the restrictions on what is passed, sold, and given on the Internet).

The class of technologies known as civic technologies currently runs into this systemic vulnerability. Wikipedia is another example technology that follows this trajectory - a system that started in a backwater and found the attention of Slashdot and others to become a target site for collaboration. Wikipedians maintain their pages in multiple languages, and at any given time, Zittrain notes, the entire system of Wikipedia is 45 seconds away from chaos without people -- volunteers-- doing this constant maintenance. Using the Jeffersonian meme "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," the lack of single people or authorities maintaining so much of the infrastructure of valuable civic technologies is interesting -- they utterly depend instead on the participation of maker/users.

Zittrain concluded by speaking of North Korea's radios and how they are modified so that citizens may only listen to one of three stations. But activists in Radio Free Korea are attempting to send open radios over the border. The implications for Internet "appliances" of today with pre-imposed technological limitations are extraordinarily telling given this history.

The talk ended with the hope for new technologies that would no longer be engineered to shape and control experience, and that could be used for a variety of things. The audience was sparked into discussion, and did suggest a variety of institutional mechanisms (law, policy) that could help protect individual rights. Zittrain maintained that the technical as well as cultural components make systems which are not only emerging from policy issues but are matters of public choice.

No, people weren't ticked off - we had a great event full of Processing programming today at MIT, at Processing Time, part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Update: Screenshot of the winning program from the MIT News Office.

(more...)

In case you were wondering where the hypertext novel has gone - it's right here, and still being updated by the enigmatic Daniel W. from a secret location on the Lower East Texas. Paperback also available.

Konami just canceled their game Six Days in Fallujah due to public outcry. (Critical outcry couldn't have helped.) There's also been some outcry in favor of the game, along with a declaration that video games should be acknowledged as having the power of art and as being able to take on difficult contemporary subject matter. For instance, in this IGN editorial by Michael Thomsen.

It wasn't the first video game, or even the first arcade game, but that's like sort of like saying the Model T wasn't the first car. Pong looms large in both arcade and home video game history. The cabinet and the home unit helped pave the way for economically successful video games, the basic game form was changed and reinvented in numerous ways, and Pong became part of the zeitgeist. Recently, the movie rights to Pong have even been optioned by Uwe Boll.

Pong's design and engineering, its relationship to earlier games, and its launch can be discussed in very great detail, and they have been in many books and various digital forms, from FAQ to page to site. In our book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Ian Bogost and I briefly describe how Pong blasted into the arcade video game space that Bushnell's Computer Space had attempted to open up:

The first Pong unit was installed in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a bar in Sunnyvale, California. Increasingly apocryphal stories of the game’s installation report lines out the door but almost never mention the precedent for coin-operated video games in Andy Capp’s. When Alcorn installed Pong in the summer of 1972, Computer Space was sitting there in the bar already.

Pong solved the problem that plagued Computer Space—ease of use—partly by being based on the familiar game table tennis and partly thanks to the simplicity of its gameplay instructions. “Avoid missing ball for high score” was a single sentence clear enough to encourage pick-up play, but vague enough to create the partial reinforcement of the slot machine and the midway; after failing, players wanted to try again. One other important sentence appeared on the machine: “Insert coin.”

In this post, I'll mention a few things that I think made Pong appealing to tavern game players in the early 1970s. Then, I'll look to how a handful of the many Pong remakes over the years have tried to refashion the game for new settings. (more...)

perl -le 'sub p{(unpack"(A3)*",pop)[rand 18]}sub w{p("apebotboyelfgodmannunorcgunhateel"x2)}sub n{p("theone"x8)._.p("bigdimdunfathiplitredwanwax")._.w.w."\n"}{print"\n".n."and\n".n.p("cutgothitjammetputransettop"x2)._.p("herhimin it offon outup us "x2);sleep 4;redo}'

A new site, Sarien.net, provides something both convenient and uncanny: The ability to play several of Sierra's graphical adventures as you watch other players' avatars move through the world and act - without affecting the space you're in. Thanks to GameSetWatch for this one.

Inform 7 has a new website with explanatory screencasts, a new version of the development system (build 5Z71), many parts of the toolchain now being offered as free/open-source software, and physics!

Ian Bogost, co-author with me of Racing the Beam, has just announced a CRT television emulator - a project to make an emulator's display look more like that of a circa 1980 television. The code is to be integrated into the full-featured Atari 2600 emulator Stella.

Yesterday a group of us from the HASTAC III conference toured the Grand Text Auto exhibit here at UIUC's Krannert Art Museum, which was curated by Damon Baker. The exhibit is great! Although many of the same pieces appear from the UCI Grand Text Auto exhibit, it's different in several ways and has several new pieces. Update: Thanks to HASTAC scholar Veronica Paredes, there's now a video and text about the exhibit up on the HASTAC blog. Check it out!

The presentation of pieces is very nice; Damon has put up helpful curatorial texts and presented both interactive and non-interactive pieces very thoughtfully. Mary's [giantJoystick] hasn't made it to campus yet, although there's a 16' tall space here right at the center of the NSCA building waiting for it. The elaborate augmented reality incarnation of Façade couldn't be mounted again. However, the desktop Façade is exhibited very nicely; it shares center stage with Noah et al.'s Screen on the CANVAS in the Krannert Art Museum's Intermedia Gallery. Scott et al.'s The Unknown is presented as a browsable hypertext, an open book, photos and texts, audio that plays continually, and a hotel bell. Scott's Frequency appears on a computer and his and my collaboration, Implementation, is on display in manuscript and photographs. And, I have many small pieces throughout the exhibit: ppg256-1 and ppg256-2, Winchester's Nightmare, and Taroko Gorge.

A nice thing about the exhibit is that the underlying works are almost all available for free online; in every case, there's documentation of them. Here are the links: (more...)

While many GTxA works are exhibited in Illinois, USA right now, if you happen to be in Germany,Tiltfactor's LAYOFF game has been included in an interesting new exhibition, "Let's restart!!!" at D21 Leipzig, Germany. Other artists include Jim Andrews, Parangari Cutiri, monochrom, and Joan Leandre.

lets restart signage 2009

I've been too busy parenting to blog, but have no fear. After months of debating whether or not prelinguistic children should have their own avenues of online expression, Jill and I gave in and let Jessica get her own laptop. Here she is writing her first blog post, as mother and grandmother look on expectantly. Coming soon, posts on the importance of board books in the new media landscape. Also, musing on the nature of remote controls (colored buttons more fun than grey). And. . . why adult food is always better than baby food unless too spicy. Plus. . . liquids are fun to blow bubbles in and dump.

I'm here in Urbana, Illinois at the third and biggest annual HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference. We're being hosted by the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at UIUC.

There are actually official, HASTAC-appointed bloggers for each of the events, so I'm not planning to step on their virtual toes by doing summary blogging of every panel. But I'll mention some things about the first panel, to try to get off to a good start and give a sense of the conference. Later, I'll hope to reflect on the Grand Text Auto exhibit a bit, too. (more...)

In Steve Meretzky's interview with Technology Review, he talks about how he got started at the company, the z-machine, how technologically advanced Infocom's software was, and how important it was that games there were individual efforts.

Following Grand Text Auto tradition (Eva and Nataly and Jessica) Jen and are happy to welcome a daughter into our lives.

Zoe's a couple months old now, and already stunning us with the pace at which she's growing and changing. Meanwhile, I'm hoping for a slow return from my total blogging hiatus. I wish I could blog from the new GTxA show at the Krannert Art Museum, but I'm going to have to leave that role to Nick. (Thanks Nick!)

There's a new Grand Text Auto exhibit, following up on the one we had at UCI. This one has just opened at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and will be up through July 26. Come and check it out, if that's at all feasible. I'll be there on Monday at or around 4pm for a tour of the exhibit given by curator Damon Loren Baker, part of the HASTAC III conference program.

The second issue of UpRightDown has just begun. What exactly has begun is a year-long storytelling exercise. "Every two weeks we will post a new episode of the plot (left column), which can then be performed (right column) in words, image, video, sound, et cetera."

The magazine is also giving away prizes: $1000 to the best performance, $300 to the best plot.