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...)]]> http://grandtextauto.org/2009/05/12/blog-based-peer-review-four-surprises/feed/ http://grandtextauto.org/2009/05/10/my-new-blog/ http://grandtextauto.org/2009/05/10/my-new-blog/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 04:05:23 +0000 Nick Montfort http://grandtextauto.org/2009/05/10/my-new-blog/ I have a new blog: Post Position. Here's my welcome post.

Although it seems clear that creativity plays an important role in developing intelligent computational systems, it is less clear how to model, simulate, or evaluate creativity in such systems. In other words, it is often easier to recognize the presence and effect of creativity than to describe or prescribe it.

The purpose of this conference is to facilitate the exchange of ideas on the topic of computational creativity in a cross-disciplinary setting. It will bring together people from AI, Cognitive Science and related areas such as Psychology, Philosophy and the Arts who research questions related to the notion of creativity as it relates to computational systems. This focus on creativity in the context of computational systems has the potential for increasing innovation in existing fields of research as well as for defining new fields of study, including:

1. Artificially Creative Systems: development of computational systems that produce or simulate creativity. These systems may be inspired by human creativity or by the possibilities of artificial systems beyond human capabilities.
2. Computational Models of Human Creativity: construction of cognitive models of human creativity that can be the basis for computational creativity.
3. Computational Systems for Supporting Creativity: production of user interfaces, interaction design, decision support, and data modeling techniques that lead to the development of intelligent assistants that support the user in being more creative.

While the submission deadline is not imminent (it's September 21), you should check out the CFP and see if you'd like to share your work in this context, which is open to work on creativity across many different media.

Pat Harrigan and I are pleased to announce the publication of the final volume in our POV series: Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Following the first two volumes (First Person and Second Person) this project broadens our scope yet again. While the first volume was mostly (though not exclusively) focused on computer games and electronic literature, and the second injected tabletop gaming, performance-oriented play, and other kinds of systems that create meaning through play, this new volume greatly increases the range of narrative forms considered, while continuing to keep our previous concerns in play.

Given this, it's probably no surprise that this is the biggest volume yet (more than 400 pages, though not, as the catalog currently states, more than 600). We continue to include the voices of practitioners and critics -- for example, both Rafael Alvarez, who wrote for The Wire, and critic Jason Mittell reading The Wire's structure in game-like terms. We also continue to bring together popular arts (e.g., The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Watchmen, and Doctor Who) with experiments that will only be directly experienced by a select audience (e.g., Tamiko Thiel's culture-crossing VR installations and Richard Grossman's three-million-word, four-thousand-volume novel). And we also continue to connect the present and past, bringing in writing on vast narratives ranging from the early female superhero Miss Fury to Thomas Mann's masterwork Joseph and His Brothers.

But shifting the focus to vast narrative also, of course, introduces discontinuities with the previous volumes. As the above paragraph already indicates, these essays draw in examples from television, comics, film, and novels more fully. But rather than a random selection of examples and approaches, Pat and I have sought out the projects and the authors we think can help make the connections with topics established in the previous volumes. And this also lays the groundwork for considering cross-media phenomena, such as the various ways that universe building and continuity function (or break down) in examples "managed" as differently as Doctor Who, Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, and Star Wars. Finally, within computational media, Grand Text Auto readers may be particularly interested in this volume's more extensive treatment of MMOs and virtual worlds. Richard Bartle provides a new typology of such worlds (complementing his influential player typology), Matthew P. Miller discusses his work on City of Heroes, Tanya Krzywinska compares the narrative strategies of World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ren Reynolds looks at the narratives through which we understand such worlds, and Henry Lowood talks about player-produced replays and machinima in WoW.

Of course, as with prior volumes, things won't end with the paper publication. With electronic book review we'll be publishing "ripostes" to the essays, drawing in a wider variety of perspectives. And the time is also coming to reflect on the project overall, something I'm excited to see happening in Troy S. Goodfellow's review on Crispy Gamer -- the first I know of to take in the whole project. For more info now, you can check out the online table of contents. Thanks to those who have followed us for the journey.

Today’s so-called cloud isn’t really a cloud at all. It’s a bunch of corporate dirigibles painted to look like clouds. You can tell they’re fake because they all have logos on them. Real clouds don’t have logos.

The last photo shows George Fifield (director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival), Andrew Y Ames, and Nick Montfort (caught by the camera in his weekend attire).

Zittrain spoke first on Internet history: the development of the Arpanet --> Internet, he noted, was inherently playful and had an exhilarating sense of freedom and respect among users. The financial constraints for the development of the Internet significantly influenced -- helpfully so -- its design. Courtesy in networks, from access to attitude, as well as the the lack of business plans made this endeavor revolve around free information in the first place. Costs were low in production, and fees were not expected to be recouped through the use of the system (no sales, for example, were planned to support the infrastructure).

Who would have known that the infrastructure would form the basis of international banking, entertainment, and health care? The structure we have built, to Zittrain, is just not tenable in terms of scale and vulnerability. Yet most of the solutions that leap out would cause problems far worse than they might be now. (Zittrain is not the only scholar who notes that the core of the problem of computing in the future is the increasingly "sealed box" approach to computing systems and the restrictions on what is passed, sold, and given on the Internet).

The class of technologies known as civic technologies currently runs into this systemic vulnerability. Wikipedia is another example technology that follows this trajectory - a system that started in a backwater and found the attention of Slashdot and others to become a target site for collaboration. Wikipedians maintain their pages in multiple languages, and at any given time, Zittrain notes, the entire system of Wikipedia is 45 seconds away from chaos without people -- volunteers-- doing this constant maintenance. Using the Jeffersonian meme "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," the lack of single people or authorities maintaining so much of the infrastructure of valuable civic technologies is interesting -- they utterly depend instead on the participation of maker/users.

Zittrain concluded by speaking of North Korea's radios and how they are modified so that citizens may only listen to one of three stations. But activists in Radio Free Korea are attempting to send open radios over the border. The implications for Internet "appliances" of today with pre-imposed technological limitations are extraordinarily telling given this history.

The talk ended with the hope for new technologies that would no longer be engineered to shape and control experience, and that could be used for a variety of things. The audience was sparked into discussion, and did suggest a variety of institutional mechanisms (law, policy) that could help protect individual rights. Zittrain maintained that the technical as well as cultural components make systems which are not only emerging from policy issues but are matters of public choice.

Here are the titles of the pieces presented, and the team names in ALL CAPS, as we saw these pieces presented after an afternoon of coding:

Turquoise Hexagon Processing
CHRIS ROBY

Omega Mix
COMMON SENSE COMPUTING

Recycled Broken Clocks
THE GOSUB GARAGE

Untitled
OPTIMUS COPRIME

Untitled
PEANUT BUTTER CODING TIME

Clock Drawing (After Sol LeWitt)
ROOSTA

Tide Clock
SANDBAR

Not Enough Time
TARI K

Spiky Time
TEAM ROCKET

Motion Clock, Stillness Clock
UIMPROVERS

Evolutionary Time
ZOYBLE

It was a great day for participants, audience members, I hope for the many volunteers (thank you!) and definitely for me, the organizer. We programmed clocks or other Processing programs that are displays of time. We saw some amazing stuff that was done during this Saturday afternoon: A display of broken (and stopped) clocks that swelled and diminished to show what the current time is; an extremely elaborate program that sent MIDI signals through a long chain to present an interactive, performing clock; a digital tune transformed into time; a program to catch and release the numbers on an analog clock; a program inspired by the instructions of Sol LeWitt; and much more.

Here are the winners, with the Fame and Wealth prizes picked by the creators of Processing, Casey Reas (appearing via video) and Ben Fry (present in person):

• Fame (display at the MIT Museum for the remainder of the 2009 Cyberarts Festival): Motion Clock, Stillness Clock - by UIMprovers (Eric Rosenbaum & Seth Hunter)
• Wealth ($50 gift certificate to the MIT Press Bookstore): Evolutionary Time - by Zoyble (Chris & Madeleine Ball)
• Audience Award: Motion Clock, Stillness Clock - by UIMprovers (Eric Rosenbaum & Seth Hunter)
• Programmer Prize (voted by participants): Motion Clock, Stillness Clock - by UIMprovers (Eric Rosenbaum & Seth Hunter)

"Motion Clock, Stillness Clock" uses slit scanning to cause one of two clocks to progress: the motion clock, if the image is moving, and the stillness clock, if the image is still.

"Evolutionary Time" gives a view of time on an evolutionary scale, offering the user the ability to browse a tree of organisms.

Congratulations to those who were lauded, but also to everyone who participated, learning more about computation and art while also showing others (including me) the incredible potential of this system.

Thanks to the Festival and George Fifield, to the Center for Advanced Visual Arts and the Program to Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, and to Leila Kinney and Pardis Parsa and all the others who helped out, including, of course, Ben and Casey, the creators of Processing and the judges of this competition.

• Pong, Al Alcorn, Atari, Arcade coin-op, 1972.
• Pong, Harold Lee, Alan Alcorn and Bob Brown, Atari, dedicated home TV game, 1975.
• Video Olympics, Joe Decuir, Atari, Atari VCS, 1977.
• Pong: The Next Level, Supersonic Software Ltd., Sony PlayStation, 1999.
• Boundish, Nintendo, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, 2006.

It wasn't the first video game, or even the first arcade game, but that's like sort of like saying the Model T wasn't the first car. Pong looms large in both arcade and home video game history. The cabinet and the home unit helped pave the way for economically successful video games, the basic game form was changed and reinvented in numerous ways, and Pong became part of the zeitgeist. Recently, the movie rights to Pong have even been optioned by Uwe Boll.

Pong's design and engineering, its relationship to earlier games, and its launch can be discussed in very great detail, and they have been in many books and various digital forms, from FAQ to page to site. In our book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Ian Bogost and I briefly describe how Pong blasted into the arcade video game space that Bushnell's Computer Space had attempted to open up:

The first Pong unit was installed in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a bar in Sunnyvale, California. Increasingly apocryphal stories of the game’s installation report lines out the door but almost never mention the precedent for coin-operated video games in Andy Capp’s. When Alcorn installed Pong in the summer of 1972, Computer Space was sitting there in the bar already.

Pong solved the problem that plagued Computer Space—ease of use—partly by being based on the familiar game table tennis and partly thanks to the simplicity of its gameplay instructions. “Avoid missing ball for high score” was a single sentence clear enough to encourage pick-up play, but vague enough to create the partial reinforcement of the slot machine and the midway; after failing, players wanted to try again. One other important sentence appeared on the machine: “Insert coin.”

In this post, I'll mention a few things that I think made Pong appealing to tavern game players in the early 1970s. Then, I'll look to how a handful of the many Pong remakes over the years have tried to refashion the game for new settings.

Pong's graphics were straightforward, and must have seemed so even at the time. While video games were novelties in many contexts, Pong could not have seemed surprisingly high-tech that first day in Andy Capp's. Computer Space offered more elaborate graphics, a snazzier-looking console, and more complicated and impressive controls. Pong did deploy the basic elements of image, sound, and even text (or at least numbers, to keep score), though, without being a dazzling multimedia experience. "Pong" is an onomatopoetic word, highlighting the arcade cabinet's sound capabilities. The knob controls may not have looked fancy, even when Pong was launched, but they are responsive and would have been immediately intuitive to anyone who had used a radio dial.

The form of the game and the way that it is played was familiar, too. Pong implemented a table-tennis or tennis-like game. As in previous tennis-like video games, the traditional game was not represented with great fidelity, but abstracted. A line appears where the net would be, but it is a simple decoration, playing no functional role in the game as an obstacle. This is in keeping with the flattened representation of tennis that Pong, an inherently 2D game, provides. Also, to keep the quarters dropping, "ball serves automatically" so that there is no opportunity to pause between points. Finally, it's important to the original reception of Pong that it was a competitive game that fit in well alongside other social, multi-player activities such as darts and pool. In this regard, it was not unlike to the two-player version of Computer Space, a game that also was produced in a single-player cabinet.

The tennis game in the first home video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey, was not known to engineer Al Alcorn but apparently (based on the ensuing course case) was to Pong designer Nolan Bushnell. The product that Atari developed and finally released in 1975, a version of Pong that people could purchase and connect to a living room television, bounced the game back into home court from the arcade. It was sold by Sears in the sporting goods section, a sign that even Atari's exclusive, successful retailer couldn't figure out exactly how to categorize video games.

The original device mimicked the arcade game in many respects: an automatically serving ball, for instance, although this was not necessary in the home, and knobs that were fixed alongside one another as they were on the cabinet. The units innovated a bit over the Odyssey game, though, providing sound and a score display, as the arcade game did, and a higher-resolution display. The home game even offered a color display. Picking up on these important arcade game elements - which Atari managed by designing a special chip - made the home version of Pong the first successful, faithful video game port. Atari released more versions to support additional players and different games, and to imitate new arcade variants, and a wave of knock-offs arrived. Some of the home units were made more suitable for their living-room contexts be means of detachable controllers (a feature of the original Odyssey) and some allowed the players to control the release of the ball.

With the 1977 launch of the Atari Video Computer System (VCS, which of course became better known later as the Atari 2600), Pong possibilities expanded. The system came with a cartridge that was basically a version of the arcade game Tank with some additional options and some new plane games - the familiar Combat. The Atari VCS was in large part designed around the requirements of Tank and one other important hit arcade game. That one, of course, was Pong, and the launch title that implemented it for the system was Video Olympics by Joe Decuir, who also did the core of Combat and worked on the Atari VCS chipset. Video Olympics is a paddle game and has fallen by the wayside among recent VCS players, who rely on the trusty joystick that was the only controller included with the final manufactured version of the Atari 2600 and with the Atari Flashback systems. It's an interesting game, though. For one thing, there's the primitive "AI" that it offers in its first two "Robot Pong" variations, which offer challenge for a single player - a challenge that Combat didn't provide on the system. It also provided an explosion of Pong variants that vaguely referred to numerous sports, deepening a trend that could aready be discerned in dedicated home units.

Games reimplementing, referencing, and playing with Pong have shown up in many contexts since then. They're not hard to find on the Web and can even be spotted on seat-back entertainment systems in airplanes. One of the more elaborate attempts to reboot the Pong franchise was the Playstation game Pong: The Next Level, for Playstation and PC, which moves the game into crude but 3D spaces populated by, for instance, penguins on ice or sheep on an island. Various power-ups and complexities are added to the mix. It's a great example of dropping the things that make a classic game great - effective controllers, simplicity and directness - and adding things that are completely irrelevant.

The more recent GBA game Boundish doesn't make the same mistake. It's much more abstract and compelling visually, as with the other titles in the bit Generations series. While the game adds radial play and other interesting variations, it keeps the complexity of play at a good level. The problem is that, while Boundish supports a two-player mode with one cartridge, two GBAs can be made into a two-player system only after a great struggle involving cables that are different for each model (original, SP, and Micro - forget using a DS). And, the cartridge provides further evidence that even a good one-player Pong, incorporating what we've learned since the days of Video Olympics, is lame compared to the two-player experience.

Pong continues to resonate, though. Plasma Pong by Steve Taylor is an intriguing recent project that added fluid dynamics - one that was apparently halted at the behest of the current Atari. It just goes to show that even if the company can't take off from Pong and innovate, it can still prevent others from doing so. My guess is that successful future Pong games will probably be made. I suppose it's possible that something spectacular might happen on the more highly representational, 3D front, using licensed properties - say, a collaboration between Natalie Bookchin, John Woo, and Chow Yun-Fat - but I'm not holding my breath. To keep Pong's power, new twists on the game will probably need to keep the abstraction, the directness, the good control scheme, and certainly the two-player nature of Al Alcorn's first arcade cabinet.

Ian Bogost, co-author with me of Racing the Beam, has just announced a CRT television emulator - a project to make an emulator's display look more like that of a circa 1980 television. The code is to be integrated into the full-featured Atari 2600 emulator Stella.

The presentation of pieces is very nice; Damon has put up helpful curatorial texts and presented both interactive and non-interactive pieces very thoughtfully. Mary's [giantJoystick] hasn't made it to campus yet, although there's a 16' tall space here right at the center of the NSCA building waiting for it. The elaborate augmented reality incarnation of Façade couldn't be mounted again. However, the desktop Façade is exhibited very nicely; it shares center stage with Noah et al.'s Screen on the CANVAS in the Krannert Art Museum's Intermedia Gallery. Scott et al.'s The Unknown is presented as a browsable hypertext, an open book, photos and texts, audio that plays continually, and a hotel bell. Scott's Frequency appears on a computer and his and my collaboration, Implementation, is on display in manuscript and photographs. And, I have many small pieces throughout the exhibit: ppg256-1 and ppg256-2, Winchester's Nightmare, and Taroko Gorge.

A nice thing about the exhibit is that the underlying works are almost all available for free online; in every case, there's documentation of them. Here are the links:

• Screen (Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Sascha Becker, Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain)
• Façade (Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern)
• Taroko Gorge (Nick Montfort)
• Frequency (Scott Rettberg)
• Implementation (Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg)
• ppg256-1 and ppg256-2 (Nick Montfort)
• Winchester's Nightmare (Nick Montfort)
• The Unknown (William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton)

I will add photos here when I have them. I hope some readers will happen to be at UIUC and will be able to visit!

lets restart signage 2009

LAYOFF game in the Let's Restart exhibition, Leipzig

lets_restart catalog

There are actually official, HASTAC-appointed bloggers for each of the events, so I'm not planning to step on their virtual toes by doing summary blogging of every panel. But I'll mention some things about the first panel, to try to get off to a good start and give a sense of the conference. Later, I'll hope to reflect on the Grand Text Auto exhibit a bit, too.

First up was the Innovations in Participatory Learning Panel. Craig Wacker, a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, described the foundation's initiative in participatory learning and related a particular positive experience with Black Cloud, and environmental game that led to unexpected types of engagement and discussion among students.

Then Tim Lenoir presented his project, Virtual Peace, which simulates providing humanitarian assistance. It was developed with Virtual Heroes, the company that developed much of the back end of America's Army and had a platform for assessment. Virtual Peace simulates Hurricane Mitch hitting Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, and it lets people practice negotiating skills in virtual conference rooms.

Suzanne Seggerman, president of Games 4 Change, spoke about how her organization supports and promotes socially responsible games. They provided a toolkit and workshop for nonprofits, providing help on making such games at every step. (In the toolkit, Let the Games Begin, Mary Flanagan's talking head is featured, speaking under the word CONCEPT.)

Jan Reiff discussed HyperCities, implemented using the Google Maps API. She showed images from a project about Los Angeles's Hi Fi, Historic Filipinotown that was implemented in the system, with research done by a UCLA history class.

The panel ended with Ed Bender, of Follow the Money. The site analyzes and makes available data on political donations at the state level, something the project originally did, many years ago, by mailing out floppies.

Following Grand Text Auto tradition (Eva and Nataly and Jessica) Jen and are happy to welcome a daughter into our lives.

Zoe's a couple months old now, and already stunning us with the pace at which she's growing and changing. Meanwhile, I'm hoping for a slow return from my total blogging hiatus. I wish I could blog from the new GTxA show at the Krannert Art Museum, but I'm going to have to leave that role to Nick. (Thanks Nick!)

The magazine is also giving away prizes: $1000 to the best performance, $300 to the best plot.

Call for Papers

We hereby invite scholars in any field who take a professional interest in the phenomenon of
computer games to submit papers to the international conference "The Philosophy of Computer
Games 2009", to be held in Oslo, Norway, on August 13-15, 2009.

Accepted papers will have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical issues in relation to
computer games. They will also attempt to use specific examples rather than merely invoke
"computer games" in general terms. We invite submissions focusing on, but not limited to, the
following three headings:

Fictionality and Interaction
Computer games are often conceived as a setting for fictional narratives, facts, objects and events,
although the interactive setting is thought to give fictionality a special character and to be
intertwined with non-fictional aspects in various ways. We invite papers on relevant discussions of
fictionality, narrative, fictional objects, simulation, virtuality, and kindred cognitive notions like
make-believe, pretense, and imagination.

Defining Computer Games
Is it possible to point to some defining characteristic(s) of computer games? We are especially
interested in discussions of formal definitions of computer games in terms of characteristics such as
rules, play, representation, computation, affordances, interaction, negotiable consequences, and so on.
We welcome both constructive and critical discussions, as long as they are directed at clearly
articulated proposals.

Ethical and Political Issues
What are the ethical responsibilities of game-makers in relation to individual gamers and society in
general? What role, if any, can games serve as a critical cultural corrective in relation to traditional
forms of media and communicative practices, for example in economy and politics? Also, what is
the nature of the ethical norms that apply within the gaming context, and what are the factors that
allow or delimit philosophical justifications of their application there or elsewhere?

Your abstract should not exceed 1000 words. If your submission falls under one of the three
headings, please indicate which one. Send your abstract to submissions@gamephilosophy.org. All
submitted abstracts will be subject to double blind peer review, and the program committee will
make a final selection of papers for the conference on the basis of this. Full manuscripts must be
submitted by August 8, and will be made available on the conference website.

Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2009. Notification of accepted submissions will be sent out by
June 10, 2009.

Olav Asheim
Miguel Sicart
Frans Mäyrä
Patrick Coppock
Sten Ludvigsen
Ole Ertløv Hansen
Stephan Günzel
Runje Klevjer
John Richard Sageng
Ragnhild Tronstad

The conference is a collaboration between the following institutions:

• Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the
University of Oslo, Norway
• Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway
• Digital Games Research Center, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Science at the University
of Modena & Reggio Emilia, Italy
• Nordic Game Research Network
• Intermedia, University of Oslo, Norway
• Games Research Lab, University of Tampere, Finland
• Center for Computer Games Research at the IT-University of Copenhagen,
Denmark
• Philosophical Project Centre (FPS), Oslo, Norway
• Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway

For more information, visit www.gamephilosophy.org

"Are you running a CD-ROM?" I asked. ... "Each one of these is a different Web site, a different multimedia document stored on a computer somewhere that's programmed to let the public in," she said. "Don't you have a home page?" ... Actually, I no longer thought of her as Annie but as ala5@columbia.edu. ... "Ah, a Macintosh. An anachronism, but supposedly so easy to use," I said, sinking into the chair. ... "Ha, PPP controls your modem, my dear. I have discovered its secret." ... "It's a MOO," Annie said. "I didn't know my dad was into them." ... "Man or a woman?" I asked. "Man." "What was he wearing?" "Pants." ... So I turned to BOMB-3 (THE HACKER). ... "It's called The Zoo." ... But after the Data Encryption Standard was adopted as a federal standard to scramble data, everything changed. ... Yuri put together a "VRML walkthrough" of Lionel's house and put it on the Web, where people could visit. ... She tried to cancel her latest command and start over. But still we were locked in place. NO CARRIER.

perl -le 'sub b{@_=unpack"(A2)*",pop;$_[rand@_]}sub w{" ".b("cococacamamadebapabohamolaburatamihopodito").b("estsnslldsckregspsstedbsnelengkemsattewsntarshnknd")}{$_="\n\nthe".w."\n";$_=w." ".b("attoonnoof").w if$l;s/[au][ae]/a/;print;$l=0if$l++>rand 9;sleep 1;redo}'

Here's the page for the series of generators.