Grand Text Auto

I’m serving now as the president of the Electronic Literature Organization. We’ve been working to move the site to a new server, which has unfortunately left most of eliterature.org down for a while. (We did make a point of getting the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1 back up as soon as possible at the new site, so that teachers, students, and other readers would have access to it.) I’m sorry for the inconvenience. My thanks go to the ELO directors who worked on this and to our new system administrator, Ward Vandewege, for managing the transition. Our new host and our retooling should mean that we will be able to avoid outages like this in the future, and that we will be able to better develop the site and our other ELO projects.

Eden, by Pablo Holmberg, Drawn & Quarterly, 2010

Yes, these comics sometimes veer into the extremely sappy, but they’re metafictional and wonderfully fabular throughout. Eden collects more than 100 simple four-panel strips featuring a diminutive, somewhat rabbit-like king, or at least, someone who wears a crown, in a magical land. An extremely insightful naïvite, of the sort that one hears in the occasional oracular pronunciation of a child, comes through at times. But these comics do not overlook death or other serious subjects. Holmberg, who writes and draws in Buenos Aires, has Eden and more available on his website, in Spanish. Odd that to learn about a Web comic, I had to go into my local comic store and buying a book, but it goes to show that book-based institutions have more than a retail function. And, it seems unlikely that Holmberg’s work would have appeared in translation without a publisher such as Drawn & Quarterly. Through such everyday efforts, we sometimes find the extraordinary.

This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt.

Submission for the StarCraft AI Competition is now open. Complete details are provided at the submission site.

Two recent hit songs on the Web are the tribute “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” by Rachel Bloom and the non-tribute “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo. Perhaps after me and you – us, them, him, her, and it will be next?

The typographical treatment of “Fuck You” in the video is much more straightforward than in the well-linked “Say What Again” video by Jarratt Moody, which sets dialogue from Pulp Fiction to animated type. The words and letters in “Say What Again” aren’t demanding to be read as insistently, and they’re doing so much that it’s a joy to see them in motion. When there’s not as much happening, getting presented visually with the same words that are being sung to me seems a bit like having someone slap me repeatedly while saying “Slap! Slap! Slap!”

Dr. Cordelia Fine, with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, notes in her summary of many gender studies in her book, Delusions of Gender, about gender and the brain a) several studies have found no difference in hemispheric size in neonates; b) the allegedly bigger female corpus (callosum) is in dispute and c) size vs function has not been proven: as Dr. Fine notes, “getting from brain to behavior has proved a challenge.” There may be biological difference in brain, but what do they show us about our thinking?

Ms. Blue pointed out a great Atari commercial that has been online for a while, but which is particularly appropriate to mention here: A TV ad for Pole Position. (The name of this blog does in fact refer to that game.) A few notes about this amazing TV spot:

• There’s an amusing jab at corporate executives, people who “stop exciting things from happening.” Even though the makers of the commercial may not have known or cared, this no doubt resonated among programmers at Atari.
• “Muffy, Buffy, Biff Junior, and I …” Nuff said.

After I presented poetry generators ppg256-1 through ppg256-5 at Banff in February, I shouted out, more or less spontaneously, “50 character reward to whoever gives us the best explanation of what ppg256 is!” Why did I say that? Childhood trauma, possibly, but the more immediate reason, as I mentioned earlier, is that the last of these, ppg256-5, is based on a section of Tristan Tzara’s February 1921 Dada Manifesto, one which ends with the phrase “50 francs reward to the person who finds the best way to explain DADA to us.”

In recent years, I’ve written a series of 1k (that is, exactly 1024 character) reviews on here. This ruse has helped me compose succinct (and possibly useful) notes about many things that I wouldn’t have otherwise written about. But some things that are worth reviewing, such as a documentary about interactive fiction, are really better treated in a bit more depth. Given my interest in the aesthetics of code, and in code that produces aesthetic output, a book entitled Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think is certainly one of those things.

In recent years, I’ve written a series of 1k (that is, exactly 1024 character) reviews on here. This ruse has helped me compose succinct (and possibly useful) notes about many things that I wouldn’t have otherwise written about. But some things that are worth reviewing, such as a documentary about interactive fiction, are really better treated in a bit more depth. Given my interest in the aesthetics of code, and in code that produces aesthetic output, a book entitled Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think is certainly one of those things.

Emerging Langauge Practices is a new journal based at SUNY Buffalo (poetic hotbed and host of the next E-Poetry) and founded by Loss Pequeño Glazier, Sarah JM Kolberg, and A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz. Issue one is a real accomplishment.

There are eye-catching creative projects by mIEKAL aND & Liaizon Wakest and by Lawrence Upton and John Levack Drever. There are also pieces by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Molleindustria. (We can only hope for further industrialization of this sort and more of these compelling productions in future issues.) The issue also includes a piece by Abraham Parangi, Giselle Beiguelman’s mobile tagging, Sandy Baldwin’s plaintive piece “** PLEASE REPLY MY BELOVED **,” and Jorge Luis Antonio’s wide-ranging article on digital poetry.

New Scientist is running an article about the use of data mining in computer games. The article focuses on research being presented at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2010). Catch live coverage of the conference here.

You may have noticed a slew of posts on the Get Lamp blog, Taking Inventory, or seen the writeups on Boing Boing, PC Gamer, CNET, or other sites. But I’ll say it here too: Jason Scott’s documentary about text adventures, years in the making, is completed, has been pressed and assembled, and is now for sale and shipping. The movie is Get Lamp, and there is a trailer for it online.

A recent article in the Washington Post discusses South Korea’s world-leading gaming culture. Considered the world’s most technologically integrated country, with high numbers of gamers and internet users, South Korea is the one to watch as far as gaming policies. Appx 95% of households have broadband access, and in July 2010 there were appx 420,00 concurrent users of the popular online game Maple Story — that is about one in every 115 South Koreans playing the same game at the same time. The e-sports movement has gained massive momentum in South Korea as well, with popular Starcraft competitions.

The 3G Summit a visionary 4-day initiative in Chicago that convenes 50 urban teenage girls with five leading women game designers and scholars for intensive dialogue, inquiry, game-play, and mentorship. Through multi-faceted workshops and a public forum, this initiative will critically confront gender representation and participation in our society’s fastest growing cultural medium.

In their quest to use human computation ability to its fullest, U-Washington researchers made a game called Foldit available on the web to model the folding of proteins. Based on Rosetta@home project, where volunteers were contributing the downtime on their home computers to power a protein-folding program, Foldit uses human volunteers as game players. (Read further in a recent NYTimes article). Players can compare their results in the system and celebrate the acuity of pattern-recognition among people!

Kurt Reinhard of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts has posted a 10-part video series about storytelling in our networked, digital age. The first part (“Change of Storytelling”) includes comments by:

• Ian Condry (MIT)
• Joshua Green (UCSB)
• Dean Jansen (Participatory Culture Foundation)
• Henry Jenkins (USC)
• Joe Lambert (Center for Digital Storytelling)
• Nick Montfort (MIT)
• Clay Shirky (NYU)

I also appear in part 7 (“Risks of Social Media”) and part 10 (“Bits and Pieces”). Besides the august company listed above, you can see that the videos get to some of the critical issues in storytelling today: fans attired as stormtroopers and “Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!”

There are many recent studies that try to discover anew why, during a time when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law and business, there so few women scientists and engineers.

The 2010 AAUW research report Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) presents evidence that can help to explain this puzzle. Primarily, the research points to environmental and social barriers – including stereotypes, gender bias and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities. These elements persist to block women’s participation in STEM, but the report does recommend things everyone can do to help the associated fields open up. A collection of related recent reports can help flesh out this picture. The good news: Women are slowly on the increase in academic departments in these areas. The bad news: women continue to earn less $ than their equally educated and experienced male counterparts, across the board in almost every career category.

Local sound artist/electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman released an extraordinary piece on the b-side of his November 2009 cassette hallicrafters, inc. The piece is called 10 poke 54272+int(rnd(1)*25),int(rnd(1)*256) : goto 10 and is 18 minutes of sound produced by a Commodore 64 emulator running the BASIC program that is the title of the piece.

The memory locations beginning at 54272 are mapped on the Commodore 64 to the registers of the SID (Sound Interface Device). By POKEing random values into them, the SID, although it is a musical chip, is stimulated to produce sounds in what probably seems like a non-musical way: based on the effect of register settings and the sequence produced by the system’s random number generator, a polynomial counter.

Jason MacIntosh at The Gameshelf has just posted a great 10-minute video introducing interactive fiction, with specific discussion of some good games to begin playing. I’m there offering some unconventional ideas about why it’s interesting for those new to IF to start off by playing complex, difficult games.

Command your space bovine!

In space, social interactions are sparse. Space Cow Clicker overcomes this problem. In this parody of a satire, you command a battlecruiser (Space Cow) in an epic battle  to click enemy units. The first player to click all of the opponent forces wins: To click is natural, to command is Bovine!

A great event will be taking place in Mexico City at the end of April, one that is sure to help us connect computing and creativity in new ways. I’m helping to organize ICCC-11 and am planning to be there. I hope some of you will submit to this conference, and that I’ll see some of you there. -Nick

2nd International Conference on Computational Creativity

April 27-29, 2011
Mexico City, Mexico
http://iccc11.cua.uam.mx

Original contributions are solicited in all areas related to Computational Creativity, including but not limited to:

1. computational paradigms for understanding creativity, including heuristic search, analogical and meta-level reasoning, and re-representation;

device design by Ed Flanagan

We’re taking a moment to reflect on the lab’s move to Dartmouth. First, we found some press to share if you’d like to chart our progress with us! In an upcoming post, we’ll review all of our new games. It has been a lot of fun setting up camp at Dartmouth and we’re thankful for the support and enthusiasm around us. Thanks to colleagues near and far, friends, advisory board, the administration at our home institution, our emerging program, staff, interns, and STUDENTS!
Go Tilt!

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“Acting for embodied interactive narrative”

Ken Perlin, NYU

Date: July 16th, 2010
Time: 1:15pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 192

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the School of Engineering.

Abstract

The transition from game play to emotionally believable embodied interactive protagonist-driven narrative requires something more radical than better animation blending or motion capture.  It requires rethinking the process of virtual acting from the ground up.  We must abandon linear thinking altogether and create virtual actors that can move, emote, interact and respond in real time with plausible expression, emotion and body language.