http://grandtextauto.org A group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:34:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Utensils in a Landscape, Chris Edwards, Stray Dog Editions, Vagabond Press, 2001 Searching for something suitably disruptive in the landscape of Australia, where Jacket is rooted, I found this. The first poem is made from sometimes misquoted bits of The Book of Common Prayer and Burroughs’s “The Cut-Up Method …” With ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/02/utensils-in-a-landscape/ What do American Idol, lonelygirl15, and Invisible Children have in common? They were all instituted to function based off of mass audience interactions and they all deliver strong and dramatically-compelling narratives.  The idea of interactive preexists video games and virtual worlds, and it’s alway refreshing to go back and examine new ways ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/02/interactive-storytelling-of-the-less-virtual-variety/ I’m back from a nice slice of summer in Sydney, Australia. I spoke at the University of New South Wales when I was there, gave two talks at the Powerhouse Museum in connection with their “The 80s Are Back” exhibit, and was one of the three judges of the ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/02/up-above-once-again/ Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga has completed a beta version of his extensive and well-designed Videogame Timeline. He’s also written a blog post about the project, in Spanish. The timeline contains people, technologies, businesses, platforms, accessories, and games and has a mode that shows connections between these items. http://nickm.com/post/2010/02/videogame-timeline/ Heather Logas only has through tomorrow to make the crowdsourced funding goal for her indie storygame — or all the funding pledged so far is lost. Heather describes the game by saying: Remember those Choose your own Adventure books you used to love as a kid? The game is a ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/help-heather-over-the-finish-line/ At UC Santa Cruz, the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program is organized around collaborative research groups. For those applying this year (deadline February 15th) I’ll be leading a group on the theme “Playable Fictions.” This is a great way for writers, game designers, and related sorts of digital ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/playable-fictions-mfa-deadline-nears/ EIS PhD student Teale Fristoe spent last summer at Microsoft Research working on Kodu, the exciting new platform for game creation. Now we’re developing a proposal to extend Kodu with support for deeper characters, social situations, and dynamic stories — providing the first high-level computational support for the kinds ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/help-us-bring-deeper-characters-to-kodu/ In our director Mary Flanagan’s home state (coincidentally also home to D&D creator Gary Gygax and GenCon), Dungeons & Dragons is not allowed to be played in prison. In a recent New York Times article, prison officials were noted as saying that Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession ... http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1429 The second annual global game jam at UCSC is coming up, kicking off on Friday, January 29th. But even if you aren’t participating in the jam, you should still come by the Simularium at 4:00 pm on Friday to check out the great speakers we have lined up. This year, ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/global-game-jam-featuring-awesome-speakers/ The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a prestigious professional society serving the interests of academics and professionals with interest in computing, broadly viewed. Within the ACM, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) serve the needs of specific communities of interest by operating conferences, fostering publications, and generally promoting the creation and ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/if-the-acm-had-a-special-interest-group-on-games-would-you-join/ I attended Super Happy Dev House 36 and presented a lightening talk about the upcoming AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition. The competition is interesting to the hacker community at Super Happy Dev House, because the Broodwar API enabling the competition is a reverse engineering project providing direct access to game ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/starcraft-ai-at-super-happy-dev-house/ As we prepare to publish a photo book of Implementation we have been gathering and tagging new photographs submitted by people around the world at a dedicated Flickr site. We have gotten in hundreds of new photos and the process of using flickr to organize the material has been very ... http://retts.net/index.php/2010/01/implementation-bergen/ Composer Pauline Oliveros joins us in our weekly variable_d salon via the Dialogues. In Dialogues, students and members of the community come with ideas, themes, and questions and engage in a teleconferenced discussion of contemporary issues in the work. Past visitors have included Brenda Laurel, The Guerrilla Girls, and Katherine Hayles. 4pm, ... http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1423 Please join us in Hanover for an upcoming symposium at Dartmouth College, “Activism in the Electronic Age: The impact of technology on political protest” will examine the recent 2009 Iranian elections and other historic moments of activism involving the use of technology. Tuesday, February 9, 2010 @ 4:30 PM, Location ... http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1419 [English follows...] Mon générateur d’histoires “The Two” est désormais en ligne avec une traduction française, “Les deux” , de Serge Bouchardon. La version anglaise était auparavant disponible en Python. C’était le second de trois générateurs de 1k que j’avais réalisés à la fin de 2008. “Les deux” génère des histoires ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/les-deux-the-two/ Here’s YouTube Doubler proof that letters and the digital can live together. Also, Steve Reich, eat your heart out. And let it be a dish served cold. http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/digitally-literally-yours/ Gatz, Elevator Repair Service, directed by John Collins, at American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA, Jan 7-Feb 7 2010 This play answers the question “what’s six and a half hours long, uses every word of The Great Gatsby as its text, and cannot be staged in New York?” Gatz is an admirable, ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/gatz/ Yes, It’s a Nonsense Word The lowdown on Zork’s name, inasmuch as a lowdown has been provided in print, was given by authors Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson in 1979 in the article “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” Computer 12:4, 51-59 (April 1979): The first version of Zork appeared ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/a-note-on-the-word-zork/ A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, Jesper Juul, The MIT Press, 2010 Juul’s latest, like his Half-Real, offers many insights, particular and general, while being succinct and clear stylistically. The book is not just about matching tile games, although there’s a good chapter on them and their genealogy. ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/a-casual-revolution/ Read about Gaming Angel’s The Ten Most Influential Women In Games Of The Past Decade on Kotaku. Featured are Lucy Bradsahw (Sims, Spore), Kim Swift (Portal), and Kellee Santiago (Flower). http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1409 Read about Gaming Angel’s The Ten Most Influential Women In Games Of The Past Decade on Kotaku. Featured are Lucy Bradsahw (Sims, Spore), Kim Swift (Portal), and Kellee Santiago (Flower). http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1409 Here are some tiny bits of code to generate some amusement and aesthetic value. The album sc140 features 22 tracks, each one generated by no more than 140 characters of SuperCollider code. You can download 80 MB of MP3 (for the weak!) or grab the source code (less than 4 KB, ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/micro-art-machines/ Here are some tiny bits of code to generate some amusement and aesthetic value. The album sc140 features 22 tracks, each one generated by no more than 140 characters of SuperCollider code. You can download 80 MB of MP3 (for the weak!) or grab the source code (less than 4 KB, ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/micro-art-machines/ The 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists have been announced. Especially interesting to me are the finalists and honorable mentions for the IGF Nuovo Award, an award intended to “honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.” My collaborator, Ian Bogost, ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/igf-finalists-announced/ From a 4 January 2010 conversation between Mary Flanagan and Nick Montfort: nick: so, I just have this question about the way you (and someone else) reacted to gender stereotyping in a nightmarish/dystopian/stereotypical game environments nick: you wrote While there are some glaring stereotypes that take away from its freshness and originality ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/every-day-the-same-dude/ Nissan Datsun 510: Fastest Car on the Planet Forza Motorsport 3 is, as described by one of the designers, “car porn.” And, well, that beauty above? That delicious, glistening, throbbing piece of machinery? That’s a Nissan Datsun 510 from 1970. You’re free to take a moment right now, if you need ... http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/01/designer-intent-vs-emergence-nissan-edition/ We’ve got a slew games to design this winter term at Tiltfactor (http://www.tiltfactor.org), Dartmouth’s nonprofit game research lab — and you can help, if you are up to the challenge! We’re asking Dartmouth students to propose to take on one of these five game challenges — more info will be sent ... http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1404 Talieh Rohani made a video of about six minutes in which I discuss the basics of interactive fiction and show a few artifacts related to the material history of this form of computer game and digital literature. This video, “Exploring Interactive Fiction,” was made for the recent Jornada de Literatura ... http://nickm.com/post/2010/01/short-video-interview-on-interactive-fiction/ Tiltfactor is interested in learning and in our context as an academic-focused research laboratory. The essay “Making College ‘Relevant” by Kate Zernike (Dec 29 2009) offers up an interesting take on “training” students for specific careers and jobs. While students and parents increasingly worry about the applicability of students’ future ... http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1402 Indie Italian gamemaker Molleindustria’s release Every Day the Same Dream is a simple, elegant, exploration into the banalities of everyday corporate life. While there are some glaring stereotypes that take away from its freshness and originality (especially in regard to gender; the character’s wife is in the kitchen with a frying ... http://www.tiltfactor.org/?p=1399