Grand Text Auto

The next Media in Transition conference (see reports from the last one: 1 2) will focus on storage and transmission - a hot topic in digital media that continues to heat up. Note that although the deadline is not until January 9, submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, so those with ideas for the conference should submit now.

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

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Rilke turned to writing poems in French because there was no good word for “absence” in German. J. R. Carpenter’s in absentia presents place and the lack of place in English and French, mashing up a Google map (or, actually, a satellite view) of Montréal with rental and real estate annotations by herself and others. (The standard schmear of mash-up gaudiness is not present here, I should note.) “The guy upstairs cross-dresses; his unsteady stiletto gait traipses heavily over my head. The girl next door turns tricks, for cash or beer or kicks I couldn’t say; five in the morning, five in the afternoon, her headboard bucks at the wall behind mine.” Even those interested in video games will find something to pursue in these locational texts, as Ubisoft’s involvement with the local community is one of the subjects of discussion.

It’s a writing project on the Web. “in absentia est un projet d’écriture sur le Web. Nouvelles oeuvres de fiction signées J. R. Carpenter avec auteurs invités: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara, Colette Tougas.” Those are the invited authors. “Présenté par DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal.” Enjoy.

Malcolm Ryan has started a new project on his new blog, Words on Play, to review one book a week, covering topics such as game design and interactive narrative. The list is not restricted to those books that have just recently been released. The review project was prompted, in part, by his recently starting a list of “Secret Books of Game Design” - books that are not explicitly about the topic, but which are well-known by designers.

It’s an ambitious task for someone who didn’t even mange to get through discussing a page of Peter Rabbit (scroll down to the very end of the post), but perhaps the reviewing task is easier in some ways than the project of full story analysis. Even if the reviews are nowhere near as detailed, and even as the summer wanes and my reading time diminishes once again, I’ll be interested to see what’s posted weekly.

I’m pleased to announce, and link to, the first work in Inform 7 by a major poet. Now, it does compile without any trouble in its current form, but the file might need further editing to actually produce a playable, enjoyable game. Is anyone up to it?

In the past, when Pat Harrigan and I both contributed to a book, it was always as the editors. But now Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball (from gameplaywright) have announced Things We Think About Games. Pat and I each shared a little of what we think with the book’s author/editors, as did such folks as John August, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, John Kovalic, Michelle Nephew, Philip Reed, S. John Ross, and Mike Selinker. Robin D. Laws calls the result an “unholy mixture of helpful guidebook and jabbing provocation.” I’m looking forward to holding one in my hands!

The latest issue of The Iowa Review Web, volume 9, number 2, is out. This is a special issue on “Instruments and Playable Texts,” guest-edited by long-singing hypertext star Stuart Moulthrop, author of the 1991 Victory Garden and winner of the 2007 Vinaròs prizes in both narrative and poetry. One of his prize-winning pieces, “Under Language,” is included in the new TIRW number.

The issue also provides “Concerto for Narrative Data,” a new work by another hypertext fiction pioneer, Judy Malloy. John Cayley’s “riverIsland,” another prizewinner (in the 2001 Electronic Literature Organization awards) appears in a recent interactive QuickTime version. There are two offerings from Shawn Rider, “So Random” and “PiTP.” You may know of Ryder from his wry piece in the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1. Elizabeth Knipe’s “activeReader,” which is something of a response to Bruce Andrews’ essay in the 2003 Cybertext Yearbook, is also featured. And, there’s a contribution of mine, “The Purpling,” a computation-free poem in purple hyperprose and, alas, probably the least playable and most minimally instrumented work of this lot.

It’s great to see TIWR back after almost a year. I hope you’ll enjoy the new issue.

This September will be the third Game Writers Conference, now called the Writing for Games Track, part of the annual Austin GDC. The theme this year is “The Future of Storytelling in Games”, and includes intriguing lecture titles and topics such as “Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing Great Game Characters”, “New Interfaces, New Gamewriting Opportunities”, “Writing for Socially Networked Games: Blending User-Generated Content with Storytelling”, “The Play is the Thing: Interactive Storytelling from the World of Improv Comedy”, “Special Ops: The Writer of the Future”, and many more.

I’m looking forward to giving a talk called “Linearity is Hell: Achieving Truly Dynamic Stories in Games”, where I will probably say things the audience will not want to hear, and generally challenge the mindset behind the term “interactive storytelling”.

Also, speaking of game companies as machines, I see that Ken Perlin is in the Online Games track talking about “Interactive Actors That Express Emotion”, with his assocations listed as Actor Machine and Noise Machine.

There is apparently “anti-video game legislation” happening in New York state. Check out the letter from our own J.D.R. to NY developers, and if you are a New Yorker, decide to help if you can. (more…)

I’m honored to announce that Second Person is a finalist for the Diana Jones Award! Pat and I are very pleased to be in such great company, ranging from a major RPG (Grey Ranks) to an innovative festival (Come Out and Play), a worthy charity (Child’s Play), a popular podcast (Canon Puncture), and an innovative publishing model (Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design). We’re also impressed to have our book characterized as a “necessary, seminal volume” in the statement on the nominees.

Finally, it’s great to have an interdisciplinary project like Second Person recognized by different audiences. Earlier this year we were finalists for the Front Line Awards and semi-finalists for the Origins Awards. The Diana Jones award will be given August 13th.

In further developments, much more of Second Person is appearing online at ebr. More on that before too long.

I haven’t posted for the past few months, a big reason being that I’ve been consumed by starting up a new game production studio in my home town of Portland. In May I founded Stumptown Game Machine, a sister company to Procedural Arts. SGM’s first project is to build a substantial collection of web-based 3D casual games for a major reality-television show, to go live in the fall with the new TV season.

This all came about because a producer friend of mine in town needed to build these games in a short amount of time, and asked if I could put together a team to do it. Within a few weeks and with some seed money, I opened an office in a really sweet building, hired several local coders and artists, and began production. Instant company!

The proceeds of my efforts at SGM will help fund my Procedural Arts work, and serve as additional human resources for it as well. I plan to peel back from SGM in a few months to get back to working on my primary development goals, building commercial interactive comedies and dramas, an effort I’ve spent a great deal of time on since Façade launched three years ago now (!).

When SGM’s games launch this fall, I’ll post about them. This does mean a further delay in getting those Procedural Arts products done, but it brings in some helpful funding for them.

The Games, Learning, and Society conference v. 4.0 this year in Madison Wisconsin gathered an insightful group of educators and designers who are intent on making a difference in the domain of learning and play. I ran a workshop there for Values at Play, and many of the panels during the full two days of conference-going were amazing.

Among the best of the panels (more…)

Ian Bogost just pointed me to a page on building your own modern version of Tennis for Two, the proto-Pong, proto-Odyssey game that Willy Higinbotham devised in 1958. It’s just the thing to do with that oscilloscope you have lying around. Interesting that the game is in side view and has a net, unlike the first wave of digital tennis games that were to follow.

Sorry, our blog went south for the summer. We’re back now.

Three of us (Andrew, Michael, and yours truly) attended the first AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies in November of last year just outside Washington D.C. Andrew provided a summary of the talks and mentioned that the gathering was a productive and interesting one. I found the talks and discussion to be very stimulating, and some new collaboration has developed from contacts I made at that gathering. Now, the call for submissions is out for the sequel: the AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, to be held at Stanford University on March 23-25, 2009.

AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of all human societies. Human beings make sense of the world by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. In addition, stories as a form of entertainment play a central role in our social and leisure lives. As a result, story and narrative have become a key interest for Artificial Intelligence researchers. The role of narrative as a primary mechanism for organizing human experience has been recognized in many fields, spawning multidisciplinary research that encompasses philosophy, art, psychology, cultural and literary studies, drama, and other domains.

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