Grand Text Auto

As reported earlier this fall by the San Jose Mercury News and others, UC Santa Cruz recently received more than $450,000 from Sony Computer Entertainment America (as part of a class-action settlement) to fund undergraduate scholarships. I’m happy to announce that application information is now online. The first scholarships will be available to students applying [...]

Michael’s here at MIT and just gave a great talk. While he was preparing for it, apropos of conversations I’ve had recently with him and Beth Cardier, I wrote something that I think is a story generator, and which is a self-contained 1K python program. Here it is: story.py Let me know if you think it’s [...]

ISEA 2009 will be held from 23 AUGUST - 01 SEPTEMBER 2009 in Belfast, Colraine, Derry, and Dublin, Ireland. Proposals for papers and art projects are due this Friday, Nov. 21, by midnight. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations [...]

New on Turbulence.org: “Bronx Rhymes” by Claudia Bernett and Maria Ioveva. “Bronx Rhymes” illuminates the history and significance of Hip Hop in the Bronx by tagging important locations for Hip Hop (1520 Sedgwick, for example) with posters. Each poster describes the historical significance of that location in the form of a rhyme, and invites people walking [...]

I wanted to call everyone’s attention to an article by Chris Crawford about whether games are art, published this summer in Notes On Game Dev. The article offers many interesting observations, and I suggest that those interested in the question read it. My purpose in mentioning it, however, is not to repeat it, rephrase it, [...]

Jarel presenta Venenarius Verborum (video): Tras el misterioso fallecimiento del brujo propietario, el año pasado, sus herederos pusieron inmediatamente en venta la torre. No faltan potenciales compradores para la finca, pero existe un grave problema, y es que la torre es indestructible, inquebrantable… o lo será mientras persistan en ella ciertos objetos que el brujo encantó: Los [...]

Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies are the top three games in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition, after a month and a half of play and voting by the public. Congratulations to Jeremy Freese, Eric Eve, Jim Munroe, and the authors of all the entries. You can still download all the games, of course. The full [...]

James Wallis, in his presentation A Thing of Beauty is a Stout Green Toy, explains the relationship between the Oulipo, game books, and RPGs, also explaining why orcs are green and have upward-pointing tusks. (Thanks, Roger.) Jason Rohrer has a new game, Between, which is for two remote players, who interact only indirectly, and is hosted [...]

Next week I’ll be in Siegen, Germany for Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Organizers Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer have put together a program in which I’m honored to participate, including my former Brown colleagues John Cayley and Roberto Simanowski as well as my current UC colleagues Rita Raley [...]

I’m here in México D.F. participating in the UAM Cuajimalpa’s 3rd International Colloquium in Creativity, Cognition and Computers, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first computer installation in México (and Latin America). Today we had short presentations in a roundtable format. To start us off, Rafael Peréz y Peréz (UAM Cuajimalpa) described a project, now underway, [...]

CALC-09 Boulder, Colorado, on June 4 or 5, 2009, in conjunction with NAACL-HLT 2009 Deadline for paper submissions: February 27, 2009. Workshop homepage It is generally agreed upon that “linguistic creativity” is a unique property of human language. Some claim that linguistic creativity is expressed in our ability to combine known words in a new sentence, others refer to [...]

I’m sitting in a conference room in Bulgaria at the 20th annual Computer Space Conference in Sophia Bulgaria, listening to Peter Molyneux’s cousin who is a UK apple rep talk about Apple products (and the retelling of how indie developer Steve Demeter developed the $5 iPod game Trism for 250K profit) — all with the [...]

Thomson Reuters, which vends EndNote, has leveled a $10 million lawsuit at the makers of open-source citation management software Zotero, alleging that the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University violated a license agreement by making their software interoperable. This dispute has some interesting nuances, as MacKenzie Smith describes: An interesting twist to [...]

I’ve been an absentee blogger, and I apologize. The last time I posted, in July, I mentioned I had started a new game studio Stumptown Game Machine here in Portland, that has been consuming my time. I had said we were working on a game for a reality-TV show, and in fact it [...]

It only ran from 2004-2006, but let us remember THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE.

The deadline for submissions for the Digital Humanities 2009 conference at the University of Maryland this June (22-25) has been extended to November 14th. The joint international conference is the oldest established meeting of scholars working at the intersection of advanced information technologies and the humanities, annually attracting a distinguished international community at the forefront [...]

A new installation of Scalable City — created by Sheldon Brown and UCSD’s Experimental Game Lab — just opened at the Calit2 Gallery. While I haven’t seen the new version created for this installation (yet) the event prompts me to share a few thoughts about games, processes, and choice that Scalable City has helped [...]

Zone : Zero Stephanie Strickland Ahsahta Press 2008 But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone— Stephanie Strickland’s Zone is not just a area of restriction; it is one where number and its limits are revealed, where they play. It is one of zero. One and zero [...]

I wish I could make it! The Untitled conference will feature Kenny Goldsmith’s exploding head and much much more.

I’ve been in the process of moving, one of my least favorite activities, so when I had an evening to give myself a break I decided to indulge by downloading “Bring Down the Sky” — the first DLC release for BioWare’s Mass Effect. It was a pleasure to return to the Mass Effect universe — [...]