Grand Text Auto

That’s one of the things which really impressed me about Missing: Since January– it turned a CD-ROM based game into a controlled ARG setting where the player received e-mails, scrolled real websites and ones fabricated for the game, while solving conventional puzzles.

[...] – Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s introduction to the experiment – The Institute for the Future of the Book’s introduction – Coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education – First section of Expressive Processing [...]

[...] Expressive Processing peer review experiment begins today (the first actual manuscript section is here) and will run for approximately ten weeks and 100 thousand words on Grand Text Auto, with a new [...]

[...] on Grand Text Auto, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is running an interesting experiment in peer-reviewing: a blog-based peer review. Visit the site to read portions of his text and comment on [...]

This paragraph touches upon the interesting and mindboggling topic of recursivity (systems within systems within systems…), also present within reproduction through DNA. Douglas Hofstadter wrote an excellent book about it (Gödel, Escher, Bach).

[...] – Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s introduction to the experiment – The Institute for the Future of the Book’s introduction – Coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education – First section of Expressive Processing [...]

I think it is amazing how alot of the games that would typically be a singular activity are now digitally interactive with the computer as well as people connected through the Internet. Previously, I read about literary moos which are interactive chat rooms created like the settings of a particular book. Chat room participants take on the roles of characters via living in the book. I would love to see this technology available to all combining games with learning… edutainment.

lies in it’s ability to repeat certain tasks with a great speed and to execute multiple tasks simultanously.

The real strength of a modern computer lies in its ability to repeat certain tasks with a great speed and to execute multiple tasks simultaneously.

the last sentence is important – you point to the core issue of your book, but it is not clear for me; what do you mean?
the processing of the computational machine – but not the use of the machine? or do you mean both the use including the processing?

you talk about about “the actual processes that make digital media work” and than about “the computational machine”
process and machine is not the same.

What I’m trying to get at is the design of the system’s processes. Such designs are very much in dialogue with the physical machinery on which they are intended to operate. For example, the textual output of Tale-Spin/Mumble (coming up in a later chapter) is produced by a set of processes that had to be kept deliberately simple (more simple than other natural language generation work from the same lab at the same time) in order to co-exist with the world simulation on the available computer hardware. Or, to take a more contemporary example, the graphics-focused hardware design of consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360 make a smaller amount of their processing power easily available for AI-style processes. But, on the other hand, I’m not trying to consider the physicality of how, say, the hardware storage operates. For a good example of that, see Matt Kirschenbaum’s new book (Mechanisms).

“able to simulate the operations”

I would say: “..able to simulate and preform the operations “

Hi, Noah, I’m finally getting to my par. by par. notes. Hopefully they won’t be too picky. I’m having trouble with the causality implied in this sentence.

Is “ethnography” the field or sociology or anthropology? Isn’t ethnography a methodology?

Also, would this be a good time to footnote some of the texts that do look at the insides? I know you are in your intro and probably don’t want to break stride here, but it could situate your book more.

This is why a computer can simulate a movie projector: showing a set of images frames in quick succession.

The fact that computers can simulate machines does not explain why computers do simulate the particular machines that they do (movie projectors, slide projectors, etc.).

The fact that computers can (meaning do) simulate those now is the result of a set of cultural, consumer, and producer priorities.

For me, in those sentences, the meaning of “can” slips from “potential purpose” to the “contemporary functionality” that we are familiar with.

Does that help?

I agree very much with this paragraph. My friend Bill and I were recently trying to publish a book that examined how gaming hardware has influenced/determined the gaming industry over the decades, starting with the old mainframes and moving into more modern eras (Intellivision, NES, CP/M, etc.) However, the publishers we talked to insisted that people would only be interested in the games (i.e., the “output”) rather than the machines. We insisted that an understanding of the machinery was crucial, but, alas, our pleas fell on deaf ears.

Indeed, Mark, Platform Studies does take this perspective, and Ian and I are seeking proposals for books in the series. Thanks for noting that.

Wow — it would be great if the outcomes of the blog-based review of this manuscript included finding a home for another manuscript!

[...] Q: Is this site still up and running? A: Yes. (Otherwise, how would I be typing this? But the person asking the question had trouble finding the chapters themselves. Here’s section 1.1.) [...]

“and even collaborative authoring by large, dispersed groups (as with projects like Wikipedia)” – This may be nit-picky, but this example is not just talking about a computer on it’s own, but a network of machines. It doesn’t necessarily fit with your other examples.

“This is what modern computers (more lengthily called “stored-program electronic digital computers”) are designed to make possible…”

Is it? This makes it sound like you are defining the intention of the people responsible for designing modern computers. Is that what you are trying to do?