Grand Text Auto

Although the &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing may appear at first to be an HTML character entity reference, it’s actually a new book. Arranged back-to-back like Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee in The Killer, it offers copious amounts (400 pages) of recent provocative writing in various genres. It’s published by Lake Forest College Press.

I’m delighted to have my work in the good company of that by many excellent writers, including J.R. Carpenter, Craig Dworkin, and Michael Leong. My contribution to the volume is just a page each of output from the Latin and Cyrillic versions of “Letterformed Terrain,” from Concrete Perl.

I direct a lab at MIT called The Trope Tank. This is a lab for research, teaching, and creative production, located in building 14 (where the Hayden Library is also housed), in room 14N-233. Its mission is to develop new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language.

DARTMOUTH AT PLAY
FRIDAY MAY 17
Loew Auditorium 2 – 5 PM
GABRIEL SCHLUMBERGER DISNEY · MIKE MEARLS WIZARDS OF THE COAST · CATE GARY BLIZZARD ENT. · REGINA GLOCKER PRESIDENTIAL GAME · JUSTIN KRETER HASBRO INC · LINDEN VONGSATHORN MICROSOFT

Tiltfactor is pleased to announce our second annual Dartmouth at Play event!

What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.

O

HYMEN! O hymenee!
Why do you tantalize me thus?
O why sting me for a swift moment only?
Why can you not continue? O why do you now cease?
Is it because, if you continued beyond the swift moment, you would soon certainly kill me?

[This "House of Leaves of Grass" is a 24K poetry generator that produces about 100 trillion stanzas. Vast, it contains multitudes; it is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. By Mark Sample, based on "Sea and Spar Between."]

Members of the Tiltfactor team attended the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in San Francisco and presented research on games designed for our BIAS project!

Geoff introduced our work by discussing the goals of our lab and the theories behind our BIAS research. We then talked about our games Awkward Moment and buffalo and played a few rounds of each game with the audience. The attendees were receptive of our games and eagerly joined in to play! Geoff finished our discussion by presenting data to show that our games can help players think of themselves and others in ways that reduce the effects of implicit bias. The audience seemed particularly interested that we presented evidence of some transformation in players’ thinking – we love evidence-based research, too! We had a wonderful and engaged audience and thank them for attending our session and for their thoughtful questions about our work.

Well, this time they did. And a Canadian one at that.

This week is the Digital Arts Exhibition at Dartmouth! All week long FAB(rication) Lab has been going on in the Hopkins center with students and visitors learning about programming, animation,  and many other subjects that combine art and technology!

Tomorrow (Thursday, May 9th) from 7pm to 10pm in the Black Family Visual Arts Center will be the Digital Arts Exhibition with interactive installations, games to play, and student artwork! There will be food from Salt Hill Pub. There will be a student animation showing at 7:30pm and student live action showing at 9:00pm.

At UC Santa Cruz we’re launching a new professional MS in Games and Playable Media, which will be offered through our Silicon Valley campus and will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program. We are currently in the selection process for the first position to be hired, the Creative Director. Simultaneously, the job ad is now live for the Program Director. For this newly-opened position we’re seeking someone with demonstrated leadership in the games and playable media field. Application review begins May 29, 2013. The job includes program and curriculum vision, planning, management, and evaluation; teaching and advising students in the program; and ongoing professional work and/or research in the games field. Those who have already applied to the Creative Director position are encouraged to also apply for the Program Director position, if appropriate.

The first ever “Different Games” conference in 2013 was a resounding success. What a receptive community and the organizers, presenters, and attendees were all passionate, smart, and offered so much as game designers, writers, and researchers. I’ve never been to a conference that started off by following an inclusiveness statement, and now that I have, I think it is a great idea to get folks on the same page and open for what is to come. I sat in on the Queering Games panel run by Naomi Clark and Riley MacLeod; then went to the Twine workshop and read great IF/games by the Twine community. After that, there was a tremendous modding exercise of Awkward Moment where huge groups make their own in order to provoke discussion.

There’s a nice article by Illya Szilak, with a discussion/reporting by Melinda White, about the Library of Congress Electronic Literature Showcase. This ran April 3-5; I was down there to read from Ad Verbum and Taroko Gorge and to speak about electronic literature’s history with libraries on the last day of the event and exhibit. And it was an excellent exhibit.

Thanks to Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara, the Trope Tank has a new technical report, TROPE-13-01: “Electronic Literature for All: Performance in Exhibits and Public Readings.”

This report covers readings of interactive fiction done by the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, the Boston area IF group, and the exhibit Games by the Book, discussed previously on here. But there is much more detail in this report about how these attempts managed to share computational works (works that are both games and e-lit) with the public. If you are interested in outreach and presentations of this sort, please take a look.

April 2009

APRIL 28
Scott shared a link.

In 2013, my wife was part of the Atakan campaign for rector at UIB. When the opposition in a debate accused Team Atakan of knowing nothing about digitalization, Jill started up an “Atakan Meme” facebook page. I wanted to do what I could to help the campaign.

On May 10th, at the Computer History Museum, UC Santa Cruz will host some of the world’s most exciting thinkers on interactive storytelling for Inventing the Future of Games 2013. Rather than focus on yesterday’s tips and tricks, our focus is on how the future of interactive storytelling is being invented now. There will be talks, panels, discussion, and live demonstrations — including, I am excited to share, the first-ever public demonstration of a major, not-yet-announced interactive storytelling technology being developed by UC Santa Cruz and multiple partner organizations.

The Tiltfactor team is off next week to THREE exciting events! First is our RePlay Health Game at the Society of General Internal Medicine on Friday April 26, 2013, from 3-4:30pm.  Our team (Max and Geoff, with special guest star Dr. Pat Lee) will be playing our sport to help reconsider health care delivery initiatives with doctors from around the globe! Next, our research team (Cote and Geoff) will be presenting at the annual American Educational Research Association meeting in San Francisco. The conference theme is “Education and Poverty” and the team will be presenting our paper, “Poverty, Parity, and Play? The Possibility of ‘Unlearning’ Inhibiting Gender Biases through Games.”

We are pleased to announce that EIS co-director Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and myself, Eric Kaltman, along with Christy Caldwell at UCSC Library and Henry Lowood of Stanford University Library, have been awarded an NEH Digital Start Up Grant aimed at investigating archival and preservation methods for digital software and games! The grant covers the development of an initial archival methodology focused on the preservation of computer games created for academic research. We have chosen UCSC’s Prom Week as the case object for our investigation, and are extremely honored to be helping further archival research with an EIS created game. The project will focus not only on the game object itself, but also on its development process. Our hope is to enumerate, categorize and potentially archive all relevant secondary documentation along with Prom Week to gain a greater understanding of the requirements for preserving the process and creation of digital games.

18 Cadence is a new piece of electronic literature that’s almost definitely not a game, something less than a book, and explores a rarely tackled corner of interactivity in interactive narrative: the choices and decisions of how to tell a story, what bits to include, what to leave out, how to arrange them. It’s available for free on the web or as an iPad app.

Since the news has apparently reached a certain social network (of which I am not a member), I’ll mention on here that with a minimum of fuss and no prior announcement, Flourish Klink and I got married today.

A challenge that arose was writing wedding vows that captured that essential and positive semantics of the traditional statements, but which acknowledged that two people can be, in some ways, opposites, looking at things from different directions while also agreeing to live as partners and to make the same commitment to one another.

The following is the third in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Here, interns Andrea and Viviana briefly describe their prototyping process for designing a competitive multi-player mobile game:

Our team was assigned with the task of creating a mobile, multiplayer metadata collection game that incorporates elements of fast paced competition and “one upping” your competitor. The catch is that we had to turn what worked as a competitive synchronous game into an asynchronous game. How would we enable players to form an exciting attachment to the game and be competitive with each other as each player interacted with the game over varying time spans? What would make players come back and play another round?

This week at the annual Game Developer’s Conference Education Summit, Tiltfactor Director Mary Flanagan has been called out to a ‘Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch,’ where leading game design instructors battle it out by revealing secrets to their game design teaching, their design philosophies, and pedagogical quirks. Speakers include yours truly (Mary), USC Interactive Media Division chair and Game Innovation Lab director Tracy Fullerton, UC Santa Cruz Expressive Intelligence Studio co-director and Expressive Processing author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Rules of Play and the Game Design Reader co-author and NYU Game Center professor Eric Zimmerman. The program will be MC’d by designer Justin Hall! Don’t miss it — the session ID is 823443.

This past week Tiltfactor sent a few versions of our Handwashing game to Haiti. Late last year, the former Minister of Health of Rwanda, Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, requested that we try and come up with a solution, in the form of a game, to help encourage children to wash their hands more. Both in the United States and abroad, washing your hands is one of the most important ways to avoid getting sick, but too many children don’t do it. So, we are trying to help!

We hope that our testing in Haiti will reveal which of the various different illustration options (seen above) they prefer!

The following is the second in a 3-part series of posts by Tiltfactor student interns. Metadata Games is a NEH-funded open source project that uses games to help crowdsource archive and library holding tags. Below, interns Alannah and Rebecca briefly describe their process for designing a tag verification digital game:

One classic downfall deserves another: Hitler reacting to the cancellation of Google Reader.

The University of California, Santa Cruz is hiring a new Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. This is someone who works full time helping students and faculty do interesting projects, thinks about the future technical direction of the program (and has a budget to purchase technical items worth investigating), helps people figure out how to exhibit and distribute their work, and manages the DANM spaces in the Digital Arts Research Center (including a black box theater, a white box gallery, a rapid prototyping lab, etc). The starting salary range is $57,500-$80,500 and review of applications begins March 20th. Please help spread the word, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Nick, a game design intern, and I teamed up for this term’s metadata game design challenge. Our assignment was to create a game designed to collect metadata to be associated with audio files, in order to make these files more accessible and retrievable via search engines. For this task, Nick and I (mostly Nick) designed a “Words-with-Friends”-style smart phone game, called Lost In Transmission, in which players are presented with segments from two sound clips: 1 “solution clip” (for our initial prototype of the game, we used the audio from an old school Chevrolet commercial) and 1 trash clip (for our prototype, the audio from an old coffee commercial). These clips were chopped into segments, scrambled, and divided randomly among players. By assigning tags to their segments, sharing them with each other, and collaborating to differentiate the “solution clip” from the “trash clip” and place the “solution clip” segments in the proper order, players work to accomplish the tagging required for providing accurate, quality metadata.