Index of Grand Text Auto Posts
(rough draft, under construction)

Sections

About GTxA
Interactive/Generative Story/Poetry/Art
Art and Science/Technology
Studies of Games, et al
Conference Reports
Teaching
Works, Shows
Interviews and Reviews
Independent Game Development
Net oriented
Digital Rights
Announcements

About GTxA

introductory post - some of the burning issues we'd like to address on Grand Text Auto
Fifth Wheel Man - Scott Rettberg joins the blog
Get Your Text On - announcing year 2 of GTxA, with a redesign
Welcome Mary Flanagan - Our new guest driver!

Interactive/Generative Story/Poetry/Art
(also see related Announcements)

How to Destroy Possibilities - limiting a world of possibilities so that the experience can be controlled and contained
Hypertext Fiction Never Tried? - thoughts on deeply nonlinear hyperfiction
'Literary Devices' - discussion of Richard Powers' inspiring short story
Chopped Fresh, not Canned - somewhere between large-ish chunks of hand-authored content and pure procedural generativity
I Can't Get No Satisfaction - on wanting deeply interactive digital fiction
The Space of Interactive Narrative - understanding computer-based "story-like things"
Comic Book Dollhouse, , Magic Crayons and More - Chaim Gingold’s Masters thesis on game design and interactive narrative
Narrative as Virtual Reality - discussion of Marie-Laure Ryan's new book, with the author
(Sharing) Control - Why would an author *want* to yield the authorial control of a piece to some sort of AI engine?
Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeer - how symbolic/rule-based AI can be integrated with statistical AI to achieve some of the advantages of each
What We Write About When We Write About Behavior - what are the ways people describe, represent, write down, their designs for non-linear interactive experiences?
Responsive Narratives - Glassner's new book, plus wariness of tackling interactive story primarily by way of design
AI and authorship - for interactive narratives, what lies between brute force authoring approaches and building a human-level AI?
Interaction and Agency - on the relationship between interaction and agency
Fun Is Fine - link to essay with suggestions applicable to games, IF, interactive drama
Let's do it again - discussion of stories designed to repeat
Defrosted, still tastes good - link to a collection of interviews with digital storytelling practitioners
Choose One of Four Deep Paths - structural analysis of a choose-your-own-adventure book
I want a holodeck now! - Chris Crawford interview about his Erasmatron interactive storytelling technology
Machine Learning and Literary Work - how recent AI techniques, including machine learning, might be used in IF
Fiction and Recombinant Text - textual alterations, and the relationship of such techniques to story
Taking Bernstein's Bait - what do games teach us about personal relationships, sexuality, the human condition?
Simulation Aggravation - what is and isn't simulation?
That Darn Conundrum - thoughts on the challenges of building interactive drama
Narrative Intelligence at Last - Nick's discussion of Michael and Phoebe's edited compilation
"Agitating for Dramatic Change", Agitation Reaction On Gamasutra, Reaction to Littlejohn - link to and reaction to an extensive new article about interactive drama
Play Misty With Me - the lack of emotion in games
DARPA/IPTO Program in Narrative Intelligence? - DoD funded research of an NI approach to memory and experience
Notable New Research - procedural literacy, stealth learning, and computational (proto)ethics
Skotos StoryBuilding on Social Gaming - more multiplayer madness coming at you
Patent Poet - a patent for Ray Kurzweil's AI-based cybernetic poetry software
Joining Zoesis - I liked the Oz Project so much, I joined the company
The Whoa Effect - Breazeal's Leonardo, and what kind of effect, if any, will end up being common among short interactive experiences?
Interactive Storytelling Exam - Coupling the Emotional Range of Drama with the Engagement of Interactivity
Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction - how narratology can inform a formal theory of interactive fiction, one that isn’t restricted to the narrative aspect of the form
Clicking a Mouse (and Cracking a Whip) in Two Worlds - what it means when a "real" action in the world is also to be an action in a fictional world? Jill Walker's dissertation
Trying To Break It - players usually try to push a virtual character to its limits, to try to break it
Time To Stop Playing Now? - how responsible should I feel as the author for people stepping over the line?
Making, Not Telling - does it bother other people as much it bothers me to hear the oxymoron "interactive storytelling"?
Reflections of a Larger Issue - reframing ludology vs. narratology as high-agency vs. low-or-no-agency
Emotion in games - an article at MSNBC.com on the future of emotion in games, interviewing Michael and Andrew
F’rubber - issues involved with creating virtual humans, including the "Uncanny Valley"
Groundhog Day and IF (again) - how the movie Groundhog Day suggests a model for how interactive stories could work
Moral Treatment of Virtual Characters? - How should people treat creatures that seem ever more emotional with each step forward in technology, but who really have no feelings?
Experimental Game Lab - a new video game research lab Michael founded at Georgia Tech
Text-Porn on Little Screens — an AI Sweet Spot? - text-porn bots have passed the Turing test?
Silverman on Evaluating Interactive Fiction/Drama/Games - how to evaluate an interactive fiction or drama-based game that might also have training value
Turkle on Emotional Agents - article on emotional robotic and virtual characters, including robots in nursing homes
Some Early Constructive Criticism - highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of Facade as perceived by Hunicke and Zubek
The Coding and Execution of the Author - an attempt to develop a more useful perspective on how humans and computers work together to create literary texts
ACM Queue on Game Development - Can Computer Games Employ AI Artfully?
Newly Available Platform for Interactive Story Research - an "alpha" version including an authoring interface for the development of characters’ roles in an HTN format
Game Writing Whitepaper - a good introduction to the majority of writing work in the industry
"This is not a game" - I don’t really care what is a game and what isn’t - I’m interested in things that are playable
Story Representation Workshop - better understanding of storytelling abilities by people and machines is necessary for the development of more compelling and participatory multimedia systems
Electronic Writing Jam - what would a Jam of electronic writers look like?
The Poet Laureate and the Machine - discomfort with purely statistical approaches to poetry generation employed by systems such as Gnoetry
Unconscious Thinking - why do I have trouble caring about what artificial minds have to say?
Artifactual eWriting meets Embodied Agents - Lifeline: you guide the other survivor by talking with her over your microphone
Computational Creativity Workshop - systems that generate novel configurations out of raw material given to the system
Breaking Up, Broken Down - The Breakup Conversation: vast collections of reactions to player input, arranged in hierarchies, that compete to understand and respond to the player
New Particles Articles - the things that you play with on your playstation or xbox can actually have substance and not be just about cheap thrills
Word Counts - on writing for games: "My Fingers are Blistered and Bleeding"
Oulipolooza - discussing the idea of formal constraints (mostly in writing, but also in other media) as well as offer explanations and examples of various constraints
On Improving the Form - ideas on how to improve interactive narrative experiences
Inform from the Beginning - The third edition of the Inform Beginner’s Guide (IBG) has just been published
Public Override Void: On Poetry Engines and Prosthetic Imaginations - a suite of software components that allow a user to generate aesthetic texts
Thereby Hangs a Tale - a nice article about creating IF -- Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF
Take Off Every Zag - a new version of the Zag Glulx interpreter is now available
We Few - pondering whether nontrivial infinite palindromes can exist
Playboy’s Girls of Gaming - those who finally make (pardon my adjectives) a truly rich, deep and well-rounded interactive animated erotic experience, will make a killing

Art and Science/Technology

Expressive AI - on developing AI techniques and architectures that enable new forms of interactive experience
Artist Programmers: an ongoing discussion - Should artists be able to program? Several practitioners speak out.
Meaning machines - Artists should program. Here's why.
Collaborations - What happens when artists and programmers collaborate?
Harold Cohen on artist programmers - The creator of AARON talks about artist programmers
Modes of AI-based art - the modes or genres of AI-based art
Waiting for Spring? - has narrative intelligence research recovered from the AI winter of the 1980's?
Beyond Productivity in the Bay Area - National Academies of Science report: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity
Dead Art - my disappointment that what they mean by art is digital images drawn from commercial games - to be hung on walls
Cognizing Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions - a cognitive approach to literary criticism
Procedural Literacy: An Idea Whose Time has Come (43 years ago) - an early argument for universal procedural literacy, by A. J. Perlis in 1961
Feds can’t tell art from terrorism - bio-artist being brought before a Grand Jury on bioterrorism charges
Storytronics - What happens when you take a writer, who is editor-in-chief for a gaming magazine, and put a Ted Nelson book in her hands?

Studies of Games, et al
(also see Conference Reports)

They called me mad on USENET ... I'll show them! - on the new Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen
Narrative as Virtual Reality - discussion of Marie-Laure Ryan's new book, with the author
Reading Nelson - Where can I read Ted Nelson's writings?
You put your left foot in - on games in virtual environments
20 Questions (Okay, Really Only 5) - which traditional games are played in different cultures?
Aleph-one: Borges and Digital Art - a new site on the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges
Newsflash: Gaming Isn't Solitary - stereotypes of gamers as buttoned-up loners in dimly lit rooms
Irony and situatedness - the suggestion that our computers can work as part of our in-person social environment in novel way
New Media: Theory and Practice - What's theory for, Code, Theory essentialism
Dissertation Unknown, The Rettberg Files - a discussion of Scott Rettberg's dissertation on networked literature
Digital Art - Christiane Paul's new discussion and survey of digital art
Game studies hits the academic mainstream - Are video games a valid academic field of research?
Game studies in the Monitor - representatives of the academy who think game studies is bunk
Critical of Game Criticism - game studies must avoid being perceived as "mental masturbation"
AI and Narrative - draft of an encyclopedia entry about artificial intelligence
A Spectrum of Influence - game morphology project at Georgia Tech
Bibliographic Brouhaha - discussing bibliographic format for electronic resources
So much to read, so little time... - Rules of Play and more
Terms to Game - what the HECK is (er, are) New Media, anyway?
Image & Narrative and Internationality - on "the monolingual, American-centered nature of the NMR"
Aww... or Aaah?! - a first kiss in a virtual world
Ludology vs. Narratology: They Will Fight Eternally - the latest installment of the ludology vs. narratology debate
Twisty Little Passages - Nick’s new book, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction
Close Readings - detailed close readings of 7 e-lit pieces, and Ludologica
More Close Readings - Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature
Model railroads and interactive fiction, please - IF itself "is geared towards the preferences of the autist."
Form Ahead of Content - NYTimes magazine cover story about the interactive entertainment industry
(Dis)Content - Jane Pinckard's Salon article: "I just want what every gamer wants – smarter games. More meaningful games."
History Month on empyre - Nova Media Storia: Histories and Characters, with Nick and Noah
The Ludologist’s Non-Dismal Science - Jesper Juul's abstract of his Ph.D. disseration
Juul Be Pleased To Know… - Jesper has successfully defended "Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds"
"Kill All Video Games!" - People shouldn’t be using their television sets to play video games!
Another Life on the Net … Real Life - some of the ways in which what goes on in virtual worlds is real
Back to the Future at Musée Mécanique - comparing turn-of-the-century machines with contemporary game genres
Where You Going with This, IKEA Boy? - Beside the skeleton is a rusty SKARPT high-quality steel knife with hard plastic handle...
Bullet list Gettysburg - a Powerpoint presentation for Lincoln’s Gettysburgh Address
"This is not a game" - I don’t really care what is a game and what isn’t - I’m interested in things that are playable
Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism - program for a one day conference being held at Princeton, Nick is a speaker
LUDOLOGY (AP) — - the first Associated Press article using the word "ludology"
On Academia - Industry Conversations - Chaim Gingold wrote this month’s IGDA Ivory Tower column
Cheating While Studying - Mia Consalvo essay on is it okay to cheat at a game while researching it?
AI Iago - a convergence between The Sims 2 and DoD agent-based modeling for predicting the actions of terrorists?
Continuous Paper - Nick's talk on the print-based heritage of computer interfaces
Orientalism and E-Fest 2004 - computing and network culture actually is culture, and there are severe limits to what people can learn about it from the outside
History-Enriched criticalartware - like a wiki about interesting tech/art stuff with connections that strengthen and fade through reading
On the Game of Game Studies - it’s possible to imagine game studies as being similar to Combat: whoever destroys their opponent most frequently is the winner
First Person - Noah and Pat Harrigan's new edited collection, with contributions from Nick, Michael and Andrew
New articles to mull over at the water cooler - Ian Bogost's "The Muse of the Video Game," about academia-industry collaboration
The Timewasting Junk That’s Changing Our Culture - The Cultural Gutter: "Is It Possible To Have Too Much Fun?", "Professor Zork", "The Romance of Indie Games"
Whither Game Research - neither industry nor academia will do the non-incremental work necessary to explore hard to reach regions in design space. Who will?
No Worries, It’s Just Processing - if it works, if it’s mainstream, it’s not AI anymore?
STRANGE Games, Game Theory - how game theory (evolutionary or not) relates to game studies
Hollywood or would they not - games as movies, or Hollywood directors interested in games; Facade review
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? - "Playing Games with a Conscience", including quote from Noah
Must Programmers be Depressed Asocial Geeks? - The Bug: a consistently bleak portrayal of the subjective life of the programmer
Cyberdrama @ ebr - the first section of First Person has just made its online debut
What Hypertext Is - this paper serves to provide a relatively-concise answer to this question
An Atari VCS Curriculum - a dozen games for the Atari 2600 extremely useful for modern-day scholars of console games to play and study
Shoot Now, But Ask Questions First - empyre listserv is hosting ‘game to game’, a discussion of game art
Acid-Free Bits - Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature, by Nick and Noah
Ludology @ ebr - the Ludology section of First Person is now online
Critical Simulation @ ebr - the ebr-specific elements of First Person are gaining momentum
Literary Discussion Online, c. 1975 - the first large mailing list on ARPANET was SF-LOVERS
There Are 3 New Critical Updates - the Game Theories section of First Person @ ebr
Neural Print - an Italian magazine about "hacktivism, e-music, and new media art"
The Port from which it Must Start - how authentic a port of an old interactive fiction game should be
Spelunking the British Imagination - mixed feelings about Dibble article about Adventure
Korean First Person - a Korean edition of First Person
Hypersensitivity? - asked to change the content of a politically charged work at ACM Hypertext
opens|observes (inspects? reviews?) $unit BMCH-005 - Nick's "A Bad Machine Made of Words"
Handbook of Computer Game Studies - this nearly 500-page collection includes articles on video game prehistory, psychological research, video games vs. film and literature, and cultural connections
List of Urban Mobile Games - One for location-based buffs, via Howard Rheingold et al

Conference Reports

Hypertext Fiction Never Tried? - notes from ENarrative 2003
Digital Arts and Culture 2003 - Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. May 19 - May 23
Sweden Trip Report (complete with drama management digression) - as an invited opponent on a licentiate thesis in interactive drama
"What Is a Game" Conference - impressions from the LevelUp DiGRA conference
"State of Play" Papers Online - links to papers
ICVS Trip Report - Nicolas Szilas writes up for us the 2nd Int’l Conference on Virtual Storytelling
Notes from Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism - "We are not here to condemn games or to defend them, but to interpret them"
Crawford Down Under - Follow the adventures of Chris Crawford as he journeys through Australia
GDC Pix, GDC 2004 Impressions - a writeup of the 2004 Game Developers Conference and Independent Games Festival
040404 - a "Colloquium on New Media and the Unfolding of New Structures in Old Spaces"
Unknown Trip Report &Now Conference - Gillespie, Rettberg, and Wittig reporting from Notre Dame University
Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling 1/2, 2/2 - reflections were written collaboratively using text editor SubEthaEdit
Computer Games at SSNL’s Narrative Conference - Record-breaking length discussion on the state of game studies!
Untie My Knowledge! Free My Digits! (1/2), (2/2) - Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age
TIDSE 2004 (Part 1) , (part 2) - Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment
Chris Crawford on Phrontisterion V - the goings-on at the fifth Phrontisterion conference on Interactive Storytelling
trAce Incubation Trip Report - a refreshing and energizing gathering of electronic and print writers, performance artists, and teachers who are using the network in a variety of ways
Post AAAI Workshop - Robin Hunicke and Rob Zubek on Challenges in Game AI
AAAI Game AI Workshop Trip Report - Michael's trip report for the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI
HT04 Conference Notes: Day 1, Day 2
ACM Hypertext 2004: the reading - Kendall, Malloy, Rosenberg, Noah
Drivers Cruising - Andrew, Noah, Michael, and Scott raise a toast to Nick while onboard the ISEA Cruise in Mariehamn Harbor, Finland
ISEA 2004: Curating and Preserving New Media Art
ISEA 2004: Histories of the New Keynote
ISEA 2004: Critical Interaction Design Keynote - Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: "Control and Freedom: On Interactivity as a Software Effect"
ISEA Fashion (Wearable Computing) Report - as a culture, we have not yet worked out how (or if) we want computers to function in our clothing
Rickman on SIGGRAPH - as we feared, SIGGRAPH’s appeal has dwindled a bit when compared to previous recent years, particularly the art gallery and panel sessions

Teaching

Putting my money where my mouth is - starting to teach Computation as an Expressive Medium
New Phd Program in Digital Media - Digital Media at Georgia Tech
Teaching Computation as an Expressive Medium - reflect on teaching Computation as an Expressive Medium
iDMAa in Florida - issues relevent for faculty and administrators of digital media and digital arts programs
Experimental Game Lab - the creation of the Experimental Game Lab, a new video game research lab Michael founded at Georgia Tech
Teaching Interactive Narrative - surveying the landscape of interactive narrative, examining the theoretical issues, debates and design issues that arise around different conceptions of interactive narrative
Gettin’ Schooled in Games - New programs at Penn, Champlain College
Teaching with Blogs - organizing the class blogging around a mini-blogsphere
Interactive Fiction Gets Taken to School - Brendan Desilets' long-standing site on interactive fiction and pedagogy, Teaching and Learning with IF
carjacking - a collaborative project to teach middle school girls to program

Works, Shows

Blue My Mind - Nick discusses Scott's new email novel
Prate, Prattle, and Roll - an n-gram text generator in the tradition of the DOS program Babble!
Comic Book Dollhouse - a link to Chaim Gingold's masters thesis
See you There - the launch of There and Second Life
Beyond Beatmaster - unusual interfaces in Tokyo
Play Interfaces - interfaces in the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Japan
Voices of the Neo-Futurists - newly cast voice actors for Facade
Dead Reckoning - discussion of a new Spanish IF
control ALT Digital Media delete - show at the Amercian Museum of the Moving Image
Marker - Nick discusses Immemory, a CD-ROM by Chris Marker
Observation on Mass Observation - a project in mass reportage / mass surveillance
Girlfriends, Keyboards, Literacy - how computers are influencing the way that the current generation of post-toddlers are learning to read and write
Charles Bernstein and PENNsound - a large, free archive of digital recordings of poets reading poetry
Eddo Stern's exhibit GodsEye - show at Postmasters in NYC
Newsgaming.com - Gonzalo Frasca's new political games outfit
Poems that Go: Literary Games - the new issue on literary games
(Art)ificial Life - electronic art projects employing digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms...
Mak ing Sce n e s - Adrienne Eisen's new work
Ex Caverna - Nick discusses Noah et al's Screen
Star Woes? - a few writeups about SWG's many problems, design problems with today's mmorpgs in general
America’s Army - the US Army’s latest recruiting tool
Concerto for Videogames - the world’s first symphony concert to feature videogame music
Home Intelligence - new innovations in artificially intelligent houses
Follow Your Shadow, or Vice-Versa - an interactive installation that projects a disembodied, autonomous, human shadow on the ground
The IF Comp is Over — Long Live IF! - the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition
‘Real Life: The Full Review’ - parody piece
Flying Monkey Spotted Online - AGNI, a literary magazine, now online
Wired on Affective Computing - a virtual, conversational exercise coach character
Malloy and Halpern at TIR Web - a new piece from hyperfiction pioneer Judy Malloy, and an interview with Tal Halpern
G.O.P. A.I., or Being Karl Rove - Play the strategy game "Reelect Bush?" and see if GWB gets reelected, or not
ph33r my 1337 artw0rkz - the Killer Instinct exhibition at the New Museum
ToySight - integrating object and motion control into a variety of videogames and "toys"
If Monks Had Macs - genuine New Media - a multi-dimensional, quirky vision from the mind of an eclectic thinker
Dean Gaming - a new political game commissioned by the Howard Dean for America presidential campaign
And Flights of Monkeys Sing Thee to Thy Rest - Adam Cadre’s new interactive fiction Narcolepsy
Sent - the first major exhibition of phonecam art in the United States
Video Games for Recruiting - Everyone Can Play! - Open Directory category
What Do You Mean - Implementation? - Scott and Nick's sticker novel begins
Implementation 1 Online, Joint Work Coming… - Implementation installment 1 is available, plus a reading of 2002 and The Unknown
It Worked Jointly - the Joint Work reading at the Kelly Writers House went wonderfully
Ken Perlin at Whitney Artport - an extensive collection of the inspiring interactive graphical applets Ken has written over the years
Six Billion Veterans of Foreign Wars - showcasing narrative journalism’s many forms
Unity Update and Musings - pushing beyond representation into a new, extraordinarily imaginative space
East of Fallon - installation at the Nevada Art Museum in Reno
America’s Army Booklet - describing the philosophy, history and implementation of their army recruitment game America’s Army
High Praise for Deus Ex: Invisible War - an unusually positive review of the recently released Deus Ex sequel
Strongbad on classic games - humorously riffing on classic games
Variety o’ Links - the new Tamagotchi Plus; Singles! Flirt Up Your Life!; Agent DINA
Brown E-Fest - a celebration of electronic literary art, including a reading by Noah
The Dublin of Dr. Moreau - a collection of machine-generated poetry produced by poetry composition system Gnoetry
Jabberwacky - a Web chatterbot that took 3rd place in the 2003 Loebner Prize
There is no strange thing - Crimson Room, a Flash adventure game
Second Earth - a detailed model of the entire earth for the US Army
Chaise - a collection of several great projects from digital media workers at Brown and RISD
HyperText at the Hammer - Talan Memmot and Noah reading
Newsgaming’s Madrid - a simple homage to the victims of the recent bombings in Spain
In The Car - Interactive Narrative class project
I built a spaceport for the grid-snapped city - gameLab’s puzzler WorldBuilder, available on the Lego site
Grow - discovering the internal logic that governs the transformations of the initially abstract elements is the primary addictive pull of the game
Digital Paper E-Book - will e-lit finally pass the bathtub test?
robwit.net - Rob Wittig and friends have a new blog
Quake has been ported to text-based interactive fiction - IF Quake
A Day for Soft IF - a new interactive fiction development system with a very small footprint - for instance, one byte long
Listening Post - a great installation that incorporated massive amounts of electronic text
"Hot Bot" Redux - the bot bachelors of Mark Marino and Alan Laser
GDC 2004 Impressions - a writeup of the 2004 Game Developers Conference and Independent Games Festival, including Façade exhibition
The IGJ2 Games - Seventeen experimental games from this year’s Indie Game Jam are now available
Look Familiar? - A beta version of a demo of Return to Dark Castle for OS X
Harry Mathews at Penn - a wonderful reading last night at Penn at the exhibit Composing
HotWired, Suck, and Pathfinder Will Be out of Cryogenic Suspension to Join You in a Moment - the original reality-based Web site, the Web’s first soap opera, is back: The Spot
Artifactual eWriting meets Embodied Agents - Lifeline: you guide a survivor by talking with her over your microphone
Antiwargame - explores the politics of the war on terror via a game simulation
trAce New Media Article Competition - "A Bad Machine Made of Words" by Nick Montfort, and more
Indie Games in NYTimes - article about "small, simple, fast and fun" games
Adventures in Flash - Viridian Room, The Mystery of Time and Space, Quest for the Rest, Burger King’s IF-style online video puppet, Samorost
IF That Doesn’t Go with Your Couch - 2004 IF Art Show is now online
Happy Centennial Bloomsday - Bloom and Daedalus wandered through Dublin 100 years ago today, and Ulysses for Dummies
World’s Longest Palindrome - Norvig claims that his generated text, currently 17,259 words in length, is "the longest palindromic sentence ever created."
Screen online - a collaborative project Noah helped create in Brown’s virtual reality "Cave"
Opinions Coming, Says the NY Times - the Democratic National Convention to creates a game "for the Democratic convention committee"
Font Play - an alphabet of 26 characters illuminated not to start a sentence, but to begin a thought
Terminal Tours - one modest way that authors can use the Web to extend a fictional universe beyond the bound artifact
Language (Video) Games for the Military - a video game being developed for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic
Video Games and the Last Election - getting to the bottom of why those Democrats have delayed Opinions
Bloodsport - all the "Animated Blood" and "Cartoon Violence" that I’ve been missing since The Bilestoad
I Will Allow You to Die … Like a Warrior - Shenmue Online, a MMOG for PC to be set in China in the 1980s
Secrets of ENIAC - extreme close-ups, details of macros, showing a strange industrial landscape within the vacuum tubes of this early computer
Selling SMS, CYOA Comics, and Happenin’ Hypertext - an SMS novel for a pretty penny, and Cartünnel: a comix fluxture
Untitled 5 and More - Camille Utterback's new, interactive, and "completely algorithmic" piece
Dance Voldo Dance - the pure dance performance of this piece of Machinima
Shock, but no Awe, against Bush - "The Anti-Bush Video Game," a.k.a. "Bushgame," by Starvingeyes
In Violation of the First Rule… - Fight Club, the video game
IF Reading in Philadelphia - a reading of three IF works by Emily Short, Nick, Dan Ravipinto, and Star Foster
Media Event - exhibiting Facade at ISEA
game-films - Kaena practically bursts her high tech bodysuits in virtual exuberance crawling around her planet Axis

Interviews and Reviews

Moulthrop Feature at TIR Web - Noah interviews Stuart Moulthrop about instrumental texts
"What did I expect from the man who brought civilization to a screeching halt?" - link to interview with writer-designer Marc Laidlaw
E-lit All the Rage in Alumni Mags - interviews of Bob Coover and Talan Memmott, and Nick
Defrosted, still tastes good - link to a collection of interviews with digital storytelling practitioners
I want a holodeck now! - Chris Crawford interview about his Erasmatron interactive storytelling technology
Everyday Ordinary Strange: An Interview with Jason Nelson - the hyperkinetic wizard behind heliozoa.com and more
Articles Aplenty - Will Wright on the Sims 2; also a series of adventure game articles
This is gonna make Rez look like Qix - interview with Unity's Jeff Minter
Writs of Passages - the first two English reviews of Twisty Little Passages posted online
Emotion in games - an article at MSNBC.com on the future of emotion in games, interviewing Michael and Andrew
The Ivy-Covered Console - a NYTimes article about game studies that interviews several researchers, including Nick
Area Man Found in Onion - Twisty Little Passages reviewed in the Onion
"Magic Words," XYZZY - set of interiews with Short, Granade, Plotkin, Cadre and more
On the ‘Beauty of Emergent Gameplay’ - Molyneux on how do you tell a linear story in a simulated world?
E-Mail Narratives in the NYTimes - article about e-mail fictions, quotes from Noah
/. and > - Twisty Little Passages was slashdotted
Hollywood or would they not - games as movies, or Hollywood directors interested in games; Facade review
Adventure Gamers (P)review - editor-in-chief of Adventure Gamers writes about his experience playing Facade at the Independent Games Festival
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? - "Playing Games with a Conscience", including quote from Noah
Blog Fiction on the BBC - Jill Walker interviewed about Blog Fictions
nwf@TIR - Scott and Jill interview Noah
E-Ennui, Interactive Fiction, and More - email interview of Nick at E-Boredom
Interview at Dichtung Digital - Noah interviewed by Roberto Simanowski

Independent Game Development

Your Own Little World - Flipcode, Reaction Engine
Here, there, middleware - progress in AI middleware
Cat Mother Grab Bag - open source code for a fully playable prototype of a 3rd person action/adventure game
Independent Game Happenings - IGF, GDC, EGW
Jaded Behind the Scenes - that jaded feeling that can set in with art/entertainment when you become a creator of it
Freshmeat - the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software
A Top Ten List of Indie Games - GameTunnel's rankings for 2003
40 Pixels and a Tool - Second Life: in-world building and scripting tools allow game developers and aspiring game developers to build almost anything they want
Adventures Underground - the amateur adventure community spirit is alive and well
GameSpot on the IGF - previewing the upcoming Independent Games Festival at GDC
Newly Available Platform for Interactive Story Research - an "alpha" version including an authoring interface for the development of characters’ roles in an HTN format
IGF Awards Controversy - "A Dark Day in Indie Gaming"
ALT+CTRL @ UCI - a festival of independent and alternative games
The IGJ2 Games - Seventeen experimental games from this year’s Indie Game Jam are now available
Indie Games in NYTimes - article about "small, simple, fast and fun" games
New Indie SIG - a special interest group for indie developers
Views From the Garage - Games are easier to create than in any time in history and they will get easier
90% Perspiration - advice for independent / hobbyist game developers on finishing the games they’ve started
W3 Pl4y J00 - Gaming Hacks: information about building games from scratch, including tips from Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin about how to write text adventures

Net oriented

McCloud's Micropayments are Here - on micropayments, free public access issues
Blog on Blogs - a review of several different types of weblogs
Linky lucre - "linktheft", PageRank, Links and Power
Visiting Your Relatives Online - TouchGraph - look at the pages Google determines to be "related"
Information Retrieval Humor - "prominent" newspapers might intentionally feed the wrong page title/headline to Google News once in a while
Fear of Code - article about viruses and worms, missed the point their interviewee was trying to make
txtkit - a slowly-rotating spirograph-like structure that represents the cluster of search results
Tim Wright article on the blog to become a fertile ground for new forms of digital storytelling - Blog Fiction
E-Mail Narratives in the NYTimes - article about e-mail fictions, quotes from Noah
Reversing the Spam Cannon - we should encourage technical and legal measures that actively counterattack spammers and assailants of blogs
Reading at Risk from Library - um, I mean Internet - How does literature, particularly serious literary work, compete with the Internet, popular entertainment, and other increased demands on leisure time?
Finding Community Online - Nick's "Discovering Communities through Information Structure and Dynamics"
You Got Your IRC in My Newspaper - Bash.org is a fascinating record of IRC

Digital Rights

The Future of Ideas (Belongs to Disney) - Lawrence Lessig's properly alarmist text about the Internet, the law, copyright, etc.
Encouraging the WIPO to Consider Open Source - campaign to encourage the WIPO to reconsider its opposition to open source
License to Blog - how to make the things we write available under a Creative Commons license
Second Life Gives Users IP Rights to their Characters - letting player-characters keep the intellectual property rights they create
Copyright and Missing the Point of the Computer - Nick's paper, "Condemned to Reload It: Forgetting New Media" and essay "Stop Handcuffing My Mind"
Patent Poet - a patent for his AI-based cybernetic poetry software
The Politics of Information - an essay collection in five parts edited by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills
A Trip Through the Thickets of Law and Computer Games - James Grimmelman's article "Free as in Gaming?"
Utopian Gaming? - AgoraXchange, an MMG that poses an "alternative to the present world order"
Utopian MPPW - challenging the violence and inequality of our present political system
Encore 4.0, TraceBack - a great historical overview of the open source movement, LinguaMOO, Encore
The New Obscenity - That’s right, copyright violation is the new obscenity
Open Knowledge Projects Win at Ars Electronica - projects that have helped to make vast amounts of human knowledge available and legally accessible
Untie My Knowledge! Free My Digits! (1/2), (2/2) - Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age

Announcements

Digital Stories in the Desert - the 2003 Digital Storytelling Festival
The saga continues - sagasnet, a network of European professionals interested in creating interactive narrative content
Find a Way to San Jose - preview of GDC 2004
drame interactif a Toulouse - the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling
Storytelling and Games Exhibition and Symposium - preview of Stanford's Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences
Interactive Fiction Competition - the games are out for IF Comp 2003
ICVS Underway - 2nd Int’l Conference on Virtual Storytelling
Darmstadt in June - the second Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment conference
Reflective HCI Workshop - a workshop at CHI2004, Reflective HCI: Towards Critical Technical Practice
Expressive Characters Symposium - a symposium on "Language Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters"
Meetings, Journals, Deadlines - Challenges in Game AI, Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text
New Issue of Game Studies - their second issue for 2003
Phrontisterion 5 - Chris Crawford's annual conference on interactive storytelling
New Issue of SPAC - Sociedad para la Preservación de las Aventuras Conversacionales
Cosign 2004 - the way in which meaning can be created by, encoded in, understood by, or produced through, the computer
narr@tive: Digital Storytelling - UC system graduate conference
Machinista 2004 - Art from the Machine: gleams of the inhuman
Story Engines this Friday - "The Big Picture: Do Games Need Stories?"
Free Game Designer Speaker Series - a new "Legends of the Game Industry" Speaker Series in San Francisco
Hacker Art - the connection between hacking and creative activity in any medium
Robot Talent - the third annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show
Digital Storytelling Festival 2004 - the use of digital technology to create media-rich stories that impart meaning
New IJIGS - articles by Jesper Juul, Magy Seif El Nasr and others
ALT+CTRL @ UCI - a festival of independent and alternative games
War Games and Game Wars - Digital Gaming and Military Culture, Social Realism in Gaming
WWW @ 10 — April 15 deadline - interdisciplinary conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade
Story Representation Workshop - better understanding of storytelling abilities by people and machines is necessary for the development of more compelling and participatory multimedia systems
A June of Interactive Story Gatherings - Phront, TIDSE, Digital Storytelling
ISEA2004 - All GTxA'ers are contributors!
Computational Creativity Workshop - systems that generate novel configurations out of raw material given to the system
Subtle Technologies - blur the boundaries between art and science, presenting symposia, exhibitions and performances that juxtapose cutting-edge artistic endeavours and scientific exploration
Great Blogs of Fire / Todos los blogs el blog - "Relatos Interactivos" (interactive stories) blog
Art Nets Awards - The 2004 Turbulence Competition results have been announced; Nick's a winner
Art, Agents and AI in NYC - Digital Avant-Garde, Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, Autonomous Agents
Art, Agents and AI in the UK - International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education
Electronic Art in Brazil - FILE, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica
Changing Views: Worlds in Play - the second DiGRA conference, in 2005
Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art - evolutionary techniques (genetic algorithms, genetic programming) for generative music and art
Three AI-centric interactive narrative and character conferences - FLAIRS, EUSAI, NILE
Writing and New Media in Rome - a two-day colloquium on writing and new media
Leonardo CFP on New Media Poetics and the Digital Prose - on poetry: reader as active participant in the "ergodic" sense, the use of stochastic methods and chance procedures, and the complex relations between the author, reader, and computer-as-writer/reader which evolve from that interaction
The Nature in (not of) Video Games - cfp for Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology
Word, Image, Computer - Elective Affinities, a conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies
Computer Games, Fiction’s Future - Noah talk at Brown
Spectropolis - artistic uses of mobile media
Networked_Performance, WriteHere, and Intelligent Agent - Turbulence’s new blog, etc.
READ_ME 2004 - this year’s Software Art and Cultures Conference
Launch of Third Place Gallery’s new Game Art gallery - call for works
Species of Spaces and All Your Bases - submit to the beta site of The Museum of Video Game Ontology (moVGO)