http://grandtextauto.org A group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art. Mon, 12 May 2008 16:04:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway. The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/12/call-for-papers-and-works-seminar-on-electronic-literature-in-europe/ Yesterday was our fifth birthday. Happy Birthday GTxA! http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/11/were-five/ Ian Bogost writes in "The Rhetoric of Exergaming" that gross motor activity in the living room is inhibited by coffee tables. That seems to be true in many cases, but not when your coffee table is also a functional NES controller. Kyle Downes has built such a furnishing and functional ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/10/a-swell-and-swollen-nes-controller/ In early 2007, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a reading of all of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. On May 15, 2008, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will host a reading of another work that first appeared on a long scroll of paper ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/09/a-reading-of-the-adventure-text/ Personally, I'm struggling to keep my health up so I can continue playing this game, but if you're the other way around, and in Baltimore, check out the second day of the Fourth Annual Games for Health Conference 2008. And, dear reader, if you are attending, drop us a note ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/08/games-for-health-underway-in-baltimore/ A Review of Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995By Christopher T. FunkhouserUniversity of Alabama Press2007 408 pp.$75.00 cloth/$39.95 paper This is an incredible compendium of decades of seldom-noticed work, guided by poetics, that has been done with language and computers. The work surveyed in this book is not "prehistoric" in ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/08/digging-digits/ Why must you hate gamers, game studies? Thus rants classics professor Roger Travis in The Escapist. Ian Bogost rants back. http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/06/game-studies-agon/ Here's something that's new on the Web: Planet Interactive Fiction, an aggregration of blog posts (from Grand Text Auto among other fine places) about IF. Christopher Armstrong has set this up and, as you can see from a visit, it's buzzing with useful IF information and discussion. Now, since we often ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/04/here-and-gone/ The book reviews at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies have been an extremely valuable resource for digital media scholars. The site has been online since 1996; it provides information about events and courses as well as about books. The book reviews in particular have helped those with different approaches ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/05/01/elc-v1-gets-thrown-as-a-book/ For one thing, I have to note that interactive fiction must be resurgent. There's a vodka ad placed in a few Cambridge, Massachusetts bus stops that refers to text adventures pretty directly. Beyond that, ROFLCon has been taking place these past two days on the waxed floors of the Massachusetts Institute ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/26/we-loled/ The Atari 2600 could have been a player-programmable system! Fathom that. If you were old enough to hold a joystick in 1978, you have encountered the work of Rob Fulop. Early in his career Rob made a name for himself as an Atari 2600 game programmer and designer, responsible for ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/23/joystick-programming-on-the-2600-or-how-stella-got-her-bots-back/ This has been so overexposed as to finally oblige a post - so, sorry if you've already heard it. There's a set of backup files from the main Infocom disk that exists and seems to be in very small-scale but discernible circulation. Among other things, it contains emails about the ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/19/the-end-of-the-restaurants-universe/ The last of the senior animators of the original core group at Disney (a.k.a the “nine old men”), National Medal of Arts recipient, and co-author of The Illusion of Life, the gold standard character animation reference. http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/17/ollie-johnston-95/ Putting aside unnecessarily pretentious claims such as "The worlds first piece of online conceptual video game art", Stewart Hogarth's The Naked Game is brilliant. Welcome to the Naked Game. What you are seeing is a primitive version of 'Pong', being played by two artificial intelligences, with the entire code ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/17/my-mind-is-going/ 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, ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/16/software-studies-meets-technotravelstelemobility/ Via Water Cooler Games — Chris Crawford's presentation yesterday at the Game Developers Exchange in Atlanta, on his "Nine Breakthroughs" useful in developing Storytron. Good stuff! Update: The Storytron site has a new look! They're still beta, but getting close to an initial launch. http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/12/crawfords-nine-breakthroughs/ I suppose "digital materiality" (among other things, the topic that Matthew Kirschenbaum treated so well in his recent Mechanisms) is no longer widely considered an oxymoron. A scholarship is being offered this year along library and information science lines for PhD study of "Digital Materiality and the Management of Cultural ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/10/sweets-digits-are-made-of-this/ From the call: Indiecade invites independent game artists and designers from around the world to submit interactive media of all types – from art to commercial, ARG to abstract, serious to shooter – for consideration. Work-in-progress is encouraged. A diverse jury of industry leaders will select entries for top prizes at the ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/08/indiecade-deadline-nears/ [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 ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/05/blog-based-peer-review-some-preliminary-conclusions-part-2/ * http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/04/i-got-yer-future-of-games-here-in-my-greasy-mitt/ Chris Funkhouser is author of the excellent volume Prehistoric Digital Poetry, which I hope to write about at greater length before too long. He told us today during the Codework workshop at WVU about Emmett Williams's "The IBM Poem," a 1966 computationally-generated poem and system for generating poems. I can ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/04/process-of-the-ibm-poem-by-emmett-williams/ I just got to hear Ted Nelson (inventor of the term "hypertext," author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines) kick off the Codework workshop with his talk here at West Virginia University. I did not take notes during Nelson's talk. The basic ideas he expounded (as one might guess) ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/03/programs-ted-nelson-likes/ 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 ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/03/blog-based-peer-review-some-preliminary-conclusions-part-1/ Putting The New Media Reader together with Noah years ago meant amassing a huge variety of material from different sorts of sources. This diversity, and the sheer amount of text and images, made the book difficult to compile and edit. We knew that despite rather extreme efforts from us and ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/02/the-new-media-reader-correct-us/ 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 ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/02/expressive-processing-review-a-question-of-goals/ Daniel C. Howe and Aya's Karpinska's present to us, that is. I'm sure you think you don't have time to look at it, but it's worth the trip to their "No Time Machine," which fetches statements from the Web about how people don't have time, dropped into new dialogues. It's ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/02/no-time-is-the-present/ (Update: April Foolery!) The official Website for the movie Superbad (IMDB) seems to have been hacked or something. The promotional content has been replaced with incomprehensible junk that seems to serve no commercial purpose. Unless ... a Superbad video game or similar spinoff is nearing launch, and this update signals the ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/01/superstrange/ (Update: somewhat obvious April Foolery!) News of a very surprising and innovative move in journalism: The former Los Angeles Times has transitioned to become The Los Wikiless Timespedia, "continuously updated by the fine people of Los Angeles and the World." "We tried basically all the gimmicks we know," said new ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/01/la-times-gets-hits-with-wiki-stick/ (Update: April Foolery!) Starting today, with this post, I'll be making my new novel, Moby Disk, or the Worm available on Grand Text Auto in draft form. I'm definitely hoping to get your comments, but because of some difficulties with CommentPress, I've decided to go with the standard comment mechanism ... http://grandtextauto.org/2008/04/01/moby-disk-111/ It warms my heart to see that a major Internet company has turned its Web page black, joining the protest against the Communications Decency Act only 4433 days late. http://grandtextauto.org/2008/03/29/political-responsibility-at-last/