Grand Text Auto

The Electronic Literature Organization’s
Fourth International Conference
& Program of Digitally Mediated Literary Art

June 3-6, 2010
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by the ELO and Writing Digital Media 
at the Brown University Literary Arts Program
dedicated to Robert Coover

The Electronic Literature Organization and Brown University’s Literary Arts Program invite submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference to be held from June 3-6, 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

• electronic literature
• writing digital media
• language-driven digital poesis
• literal art

Once again, Purple Blurb offers readings and presentations on digital writing by practitioners of digital writing. All events are at MIT in room 14E-310, Mondays at 6pm. All events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and Humanistic Studies.

September 14 — Noah Wardrip-Fruin is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009), co-creator of Screen (among other works of digital writing), and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip Fruin, and Mary Flanagan, half of the art-theory collaboration Grand Text Auto, gathered at the Digital Games Research Association’s 2009 Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory in Uxbridge, UK. Mateas is speaking on “Operational Logics,” Wardrip Fruin’s paper is “Agency Reconsidered,” and Flanagan is presenting the co-written paper, “Anxiety, Openness and Activist Games: A Case Study for Critical Play,” and speaking in an interactive workshop called ““Some Assembly Required”: Starting and Growing a Game Lab.” In between these presentations, both of Flanagan’s more recent books (Critical Play and re:SKIN), and Wardrip Fruin’s Expressive Processing are available in the MIT bookshop on site!

I’m happy to announce the publication of my first monograph, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. As the subtitle suggests, this book is a software studies take on the past and future of digital fictions and games. As of today it’s available in bookstores as well as online — and a PDF of the introduction can be downloaded from the MIT Press site.

How do we understand moments of “agency” with games and other forms of digital media — what Janet Murray characterizes as players’ “satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”? Last month our DiGRA 2009 abstract on this topic sparked a thoughtful discussion. It pushed the co-authors (Michael Mateas, Steven Dow, Serdar Sali, and yours truly) to take a closer look at what our definition of agency might be — not just what might encourage or diminish it — and how our thinking breaks from the past. As we worked to complete the full version of the paper we decided that our paper would focus on agency as a “phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computational model.” Anyone interested in reading the version we submitted to DiGRA can do so after the break.

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...)

June 30th is the proposal deadline for "The Future of Writing" -- to be held November 6th and 7th at UC Irvine. Proposals are sought for digital art works and electronic literature (there will be an exhibit), individual presentations / demonstrations (15 min), and panels (70 min). The organizers' interests are broad -- as the CFP makes clear:

"The Future of Writing" is a mini-conference (November 6-7, 2008) designed to bring together scholars across the UC system and a cadre of nationally recognized experts to explore how the new communications technologies, particularly the Internet, are challenging previous conceptions of what "writing" is.

By Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern

(This is the text of the talk we gave at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference just now. Mark Marino already has a reply online.)

Introduction

In the 1960s, Eliza, and specifically that system running the famous Doctor script to impersonate a psychotherapist, prompted conversations and controversies about anthropomorphic concepts of the computer, artificial intelligence and natural language understanding, user interfaces, and even psychotherapy. Decades later, Janet Murray hailed the system as the first electronic literature work, saying it was at that point still the most important one. All this was the result of a rather small amount of code that lacked multimedia elements, contained very little pre-written text, and was developed by a single person, Joseph Weizenbaum.

Noah just spoke at HASTAC II (Irvine, CA) about the process of reviewing Expressive Processing here on Grand Text Auto. Noah has of course written about this review process here on the blog. I don't intend to thoroughly blog HASTAC II; anyway, it would make little sense to recapitulate Noah's presentation here, since we know about the process first-hand and via his writing about it on here. But here's a quick paraphrase of the Q&A:

Q: How did the press react? Do they think this will work in other fields? What will happen with this model?
A: Acknowledgment that it was a good investment of time for me, but only those who are really interested will do it in the future.

As mentioned earlier, I very much enjoyed the first HASTAC conference. Now registration has opened for the second HASTAC iteration, themed "TechnoTravels/TeleMobility." I'm also happy to say there will be a substantial selection of software studies content, including a panel featuring information from the first North American software studies workshop, special software studies presentations by Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass using the massive-resolution HiPerWall display at UC Irvine's branch of Calit2, and a short talk by yours truly on the Expressive Processing blog-based peer review project.

[This is a continuation of part 1]

The version of the Expressive Processing manuscript used for both forms of peer review begins with an introductory chapter composed, in part, in response to a desire to let people know what is at stake right up front. I wrote it to let readers know, from the beginning, what I am advocating and why it matters to me. I also wanted a first chapter that could be assigned as a stand-alone class reading (as so many monograph chapters are) and function to make my case.

In the blog-based review I got a number of important comments on this chapter, especially on my discussion of process intensity and The Sims. In the course of that discussion I also learned a number of things about the blog-based review form that still hold true in my conclusions about this project. (more...)

As many Grand Text Auto readers know, earlier this year I put a mostly-completed draft of my manuscript (for Expressive Processing) through two forms of peer review. One was a review by three anonymous field experts selected by my publisher, The MIT Press. The other was a blog-based review right here on Grand Text Auto. I posted each chapter, section by section, with a new addition each weekday morning — inviting paragraph-by-paragraph comments from the readers here.

I'm surprised to see the opening paragraph of Jeff Young's piece in the Chronicle today, in which he's offering one of the first post-experiment evaluations of the Expressive Processing blog-based peer review project. The lead and headline seem to focus on the idea that blog-based review will "not replace traditional blind peer review anytime soon."

I'm not surprised because I disagree about blog-based review replacing press-solicited reviews, but rather because finding a replacement for press-solicited review was never a goal of the project. Rather, the project participants (the Institute for the Future of the Book, the MIT Press, UCSD's Software Studies initiative, GTxA, and yours truly) had goals such as seeing what would take place in a blog-based form of review (this was, after all, the first known experiment), learning from comparing the results of the two forms of review, and (most importantly) garnering responses from the GTxA community that will help improve the book. (more...)

I occasionally make posts composed of link dumps, to help GTxA readers find articles they might enjoy and may have missed. This time I need to split the dump into two parts, the first part being a set of articles ranging from the slightly over-the-top to the truly hyperbolic. I will gently attempt to challenge, refute or debunk each as I go. :-)

• Hypertext boring? That's the assertion Ben Vershbow made in a post that leads with a commentary on Hypertextopia, spawned from an earlier GTxA post. I've certainly been one to vent my issues with hypertext as a form for fiction, but "boring", hypertext isn't. Like Nick's Portal v. Passage post, Ben's post spawned a good discussion though, including reactions elsewhere (1 2 3); in the discussion, Ben admits to being deliberately provocative. (As a side note, btw, Ben is a developer of CommentPress, used to implement Noah's Expressive Processing blog-review project here on GTxA.)
   
• In the annual GDC rant session, Clint Hocking asked:

This week we've passed two important milestones in the Expressive Processing project. First, the blog-based review has now covered most of the material included in the blind, press-solicited review — and some useful overall impressions have been collected from participants in the blog-based review. Second, MIT Press has sent me the blind reviews. To mark these milestones, Doug Ramsey from UCSD has put together a news release (including video).

Now, looking forward from here, three things have been set in motion. (more...)

At this point, with chapter eight concluded, we have nearly reached the end of the version of Expressive Processing sent out for anonymous peer review by MIT Press. So now is the time for me to ask for what Ian Bogost, and others, have identified as a real challenge for this blog-based review form: Are there any broad thoughts on the overall project? (more...)

I face a dilemma. As of today, the blog-based peer review of Expressive Processing has completed chapter seven ("Authoring Systems") and is embarking on chapter eight ("The SimCity Effect"). But I'm not sure what follows after chapter eight.

In the version MIT Press sent out for blind peer review, the next chapter ("Playable Language") is incomplete. (more...)

From one perspective, the challenge faced by Terminal Time is the primary focus of the entire computer science research area of “natural language generation” (NLG). This work focuses on how to take a set of material (such as a story structure, a weather summary, or current traffic information) and communicate it to an audience in a human language such as English. On the other hand, very little NLG research has taken on the specific version of this challenge relevant for Terminal Time (and digital media more generally): shaping this communication so that the specific language chosen has the appropriate tone and nuance, in addition to communicating the correct information. Given this, digital media (such as games) have generally chosen very different approaches from NLG researchers for the central task of getting linguistic competence into software systems. (more...)

If I've been remiss at blogging over the past few months, it's not from lack of interest; my finite time at the keyboard has been consumed with work. (Even keeping up with the daily unfolding of Noah's excellent book takes a bit of time — well worth it though!)

About 9 months ago (time flies!) I posted my thoughts on an improved natural language understanding interface for interactive comedies/dramas. NLU is one of the R&D fronts I've been working on since that post — improved drama management and authoring tools being the other major fronts.

In that post I talked about the advantages, from an AI-implementation perspective, of limiting the player's input to only eight words. After some further design work, I've now brought that number down to six. In my estimation, six words of natural language, per utterance, seems to be the smallest number that still allows a player to be highly expressive in a natural, conversational way.

The Tale-Spin effect has had a huge impact on previous interpretations of Tale-Spin, even when the interpreters have come from very different positions as scholars. Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) and Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997) provide helpful illustrations of this. In these cases, the Tale-Spin effect not only causes the authors to misinterpret Tale-Spin, but also to miss opportunities for making fruitful connections to their own areas of interest. (more...)

This week, when I was talking with Jessica Bell about her story for the Daily Pennsylvanian, I realized one of the most important things, for me, about the blog-based peer review form. In most cases, when I get back the traditional, blind peer review comments on my papers and book proposals and conference submissions, I don't know who to believe. Most issues are only raised by one reviewer. I find myself wondering, "Is this a general issue that I need to fix, or just something that rubbed one particular person the wrong way?" I try to look back at the piece with fresh eyes, using myself as a check on the review, or sometimes seek the advice of someone else involved in the process (e.g., the papers chair of the conference).

But with this blog-based review it's been a quite different experience. (more...)

Last week, chapter three looked at the specific case of "Computer Game Fictions." This week, chapter four — "Making Models" — broadens the frame again, wrapping up Expressive Processing's section on the Eliza effect and setting up issues that will thread through the rest of the book.

As before, particular aspects of the conversation stand out in my memory. (more...)

Ian Bogost and I had a great time doing a panel at the last HASTAC conference. Ian presented some of the "platform studies" work he and Nick are pursuing, and I presented some of the first formulations of the ideas in Expressive Processing. The deadline for submissions to this year's HASTAC II is almost here: February 15th. I'm writing mine right now...

Authors of game fictions have worked hard — through conventions such as the quest-tracking journal and tree-driven conversations presented as menus — to avoid the Eliza effect. Rather than conceal the operations of their processes, game fiction authors seek to expose them to the audience. But, despite this, game fictions still face a dilemma remarkably similar to that outlined at the end of the previous chapter.

Both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time take advantage of what games do well — in particular, simulated movement through space and combat. The relatively free-form actions allowed to players in these areas might be seen in parallel with the free-form text composition allowed both to those interacting with Eliza/Doctor and to the students involved in Harold Garfinkel’s yes/no therapy experiment. The difference, again, is in what changes to the state of the system, and influence on future operations, can be produced by this interaction. (more...)

Last week the sections of Expressive Processing's second chapter — "The Eliza Effect" — were posted. This week will see all the sections of chapter three: "Computer Game Fictions."

So far I'm quite happy with the feedback I'm getting. As discussed in my previous "meta" post, as well as in some of the comments, I'm pleased to be hearing everything from reflections on the wider field movements in which Expressive Processing participates to very detailed comments about word choices (and, in one case, an ungrammatical sentence). It's all going to help me make the book better, and some comments will certainly influence my work beyond this book. (more...)