Aesthetics: June 2008 Archive Page

I'm fairly proud of myself because last week I did something I've been wanting to do for years... I made little tiny icons, and put them in the right place on my two main websites.  Now you should see them in your browser bookmarks and tabs.



Incidentally, I love what Firefox 3 does to the address bar.  Whenever you start typing, the bar fills up with suggestions based on pages you've recently visited. What a wonderful, practical, invisible bit of brilliance.

The "blogs.setonhill.edu" icon is really too small to read, but the colors still brand the content fairly clearly. I'm pretty happy with the stark white J.  But what's the deal with the NBC logo next to my Seton Hill e-mail address? I dunno.

Fantastic narrated slide show on the impact of drugs on a community. Striking black and white images, with an equally powerful interface. (Brenda Ann Kenneally.)

Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis:

I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color. (Interestingly, Wordle came up with the perfect visualizations for each text at random: Pierre white type on a black background shaped into, oh, a chess piece or a tombstone, Reveries a brighter, more casual handwritten style, with a shape like a fish or egg.)

Using these visual representations of the most frequent words in each book enabled me to get a sense of the totality, but then I also drilled down and began comparing the significance of particular words.

Because I'm unfamiliar with the poster paper genre, my own textual bias made me want to read all the text on the poster before I was ready to listen to the presenter's explanation.   A couple times I had to tell the eager presenter to give me a minute to take in all the information before they started talking.

One poster I had no trouble understanding at a glance was Charlie Hargood's poster on his narrative generation project. Themes, motifs, connotation, denotation -- this is familiar language about storytelling, presenting in the context of a model for generating rich narrative.

At yesterday's workshop, Chris Crawford dismissed the idea that an interactive narrative should be judged on anything other than its interactive depth; if you want literary richness, then read a book.   I would have like to hear Chris and Charlie discuss their differing approaches to the same problem. (Charlie says he was attending a different workshop yesterday.)

The core I took away from Charlie's presentation (which is a proposed model, rather than a working demo or a finished product), was his term "natom" for "narrative atom." In the past I have referred to the interactivity of a text-adventure game as a more-finely grained than a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, and "natom" is a wonderfully evocative term for each individual grain.  Charlie's model includes tagging each "natom" according to its "features," using the tagged features to denote "motifs," and presenting "themes" as connoted by these "motifs" (as well as by other themes).

Since my approach to interactive narrative is so thoroughly colored by my knowledge of interactive fiction, I couldn't help but point Charlie to the "recipe book" that's part of the Inform 7 design environment. That recipe book includes about 200 examples, most of which were written by Emily Short, that present the code for such concepts as "a person who can be in love with exactly one other person at a time" or "a telephone that lets people talk to and hear characters in distant rooms."  The IF community has done a lot of tagging and sorting of the corpus of IF works, and I wonder if IF would be a good testing ground for his world-building model. Can his model accurately represent the kinds of stories IF authors have generated?

At any rate, I gave Charlie some pointers for learning about the theoretical and critical output of the IF community.

Literatronica:

Juan: Empower the computer to be part of the literary transaction... mathematical literature.

Mathematical literature -- not the syntatic approach, using mathematical language to describe a story. Not a semantic approach, using theorems to define stories.

Lexicographic Hypertext -- basic HTML with nodes connected via links.  We navigate through the network to get from the beginning to an ending.

Tree fiction -- constructing a narrative through choosing options.

Adaptive Fiction -- the computer delivers chunks based on what the user knows about the story world.   Same lexia, but the links to continue reading is different based on what the reader knows.

Temporal development of the plot. Juan agrees that we should not really find a plot as the authors... the reader will, however, find a plot.  The reader finds a plot that was rendered on the fly during one sitting.   In a printed book, you measure by pages... in electronic text, Juan suggest measuring by time invested.  [Meaningful time invested?]

Story changes to flashback create a greater cognitive gap than a change of scene. 

The computer should keep track of what the user has done. Shortest path algorithm.  System will calculate the links between every pair of lessons.  The author only has to build a limited number of links, let the computer handle the hard work of tracking and managing the connections.

Introduced a twist -- the hypertextural attractor (lexias that attract a lot of traffic, connected from many lexias, could be repeated).  In traditional hypertext, repetition of these key nodes can be a problem -- IBM researcher examined the liklihood that a reader will lose interest during a navigation event; repition increases significantly the probability of losing the reaer's attention.  

Hypertextual Friction - if a narration has too many narrative jumps, or a sequence of lexias that's disruptive, we increase the liklihood of losing the reader's attention.

Author, reader, computer are three actors.  We can create a dynamical system that adjusts the text according to the relationships.

Juan invoked Aarseth's Cybertext, ergodic, noetic... Within a system, when a consciousness outside that of the reader acts this is extranoematic.

We will discover essentially the same narrative space with new tools.  If we all play Oblivion we will eventually visit the same places.  In a book, readers will acquire all the contents of the narrative space. The difference is how they are collected.

Showed graphs of interest versus time (steep drop off, slow increase.)If readers pass a certain number of lexias, they are more likely to keep reading.

Firction increases as the reader experiences the space... as we become familiar with the world, we have fewer options.

Juan says the results will be published in a few months.... maximize interest, minimize friction, recalculate each time the user clicks, which requires a supercomputer.

Implementation -- we start with a lexia, adaptive links displayed based on the probability that the next link ensures narrative continuity. [How are these calculated -- not by keywords, but by the shortest-path algorithm?  What would the applications of a similar tool to keep track of what page a reader clicks off of a walled website like Facebook, or on a given newspaper's website?]

Juan notes that each lexia could include video... number of links per page could change. [I wonder... are inline links possible?] 


Mark Marnio spoke of his experience using Literatronica to write A Show of Hands. 

Says that Literatronica solves several important problems facing writers of hypertext.

Proglems include the sense of aporia when Aarseth is lost in a hypertext... "I'm not sure that Aarseth likes literary hypertext" -- that concern of not knowing when it ends, encountering repitition, etc.  Mark differentiated his characters from Joyce and Jackson's (which he characterized as white and upper-middle-class), saying he hoped to bring in more types of stories from a broader array of stories. 

His work is inspired by Chicano literature from the southwest of the US.   Sees Joyce drawing on "the new novel," and wants to draw from the Telenovella -- soap opera. Noted how Charles Dickens reworked melodrama; has in mind a goal to move towards a more popular form. Open up electronic literature to a wider reading audience; center on families, move away from theoretical and historical and literary texts.

Mark noted that he labeled his threads with the characters that feature in each.   "I got trapped by my own storytelling."  Showed a graph in which different threads converge in a lexia that ends a chapter, moves through a liminal section, then opens back up again.  [Reminds me of The Heist, which describes an event from multiple perspectives, and after the reader has seen a few perspectives,then offers the reader to click on a different level to advance to the next main story event.]

Mark noted his desire to communicate initial conditions, so that the reader can track the changes in that character.  There's a challenge in getting even experienced readers to move beyond about 50 lexias. Mark walked the audience through the process of scripting out the relationships between lexias... you really only need to add one link to each lexia (which suggests a linear relationship... the story depends on chronology, so that makes sense).

Chris Crawford has been working on Storytron for 16 years. The computer gaming industry was not intersted in or able to solve the problem of interactive storytelling. Left the gaming industry to solve that problem on his own. Has been explaining Storytron for 10 years, says that during that time he has "failed miserably." 

About 2-3 months ago, someone said "The problem with your technology is that it's revolutionary," in the sense that it's too much change coming too fast, requiring conceptual leaps that people can't handle.

The major leaps Chris had to go through: "People, not Things!"  Entertainment or art should be about human beings, not about guns or monsters or ammo or food or spatial reasoning or puzzles. 

Chris: "Games are cold and heartless because they don't have any people in them."

Game people all accepted the notion that people are a good idea, but they don't embrace it -- making the same old games with characters that you didn't interact with in a meaningful way.  Games now "don't have any story, any really compelling content to them -- they're just things."

2nd: (Chris says this will be harder for the hypertext audience to grasp.) The primacy of interactivity in the computer medium.  Interactivity is to computers as cinematicness is to movies -- it is the essence of the medium.   You can use a computer as a slide projector, phone, movie making -- but the one strength that computers have is interactivity -- the prime asset of the medium. 

Mark B: Why would this crowd have a hard time grasping that?  What's the anticipated straw man?

Resposnse to Mark M:  Interactivity is a meaningful choice for the player, achived by processing by the computer.

3rd: Forget plot. Plot does not belong in interactive applications.

Plot in interactive media is like talking about color and shadow in poetry.  Plot is a standard that simply doesn't apply in an interactive environment... plot = the player's actions don't matter. Plot -- pre-defined plan for the events that will take place.  (Metaplot is an advance notion of the general themes you intend to explore... that can be done interactively.)

Theoretically, an interactive environment should permit any action that's dramatically consistent with the author's goals.

Crawford's First Law of Software Design: Always ask "What does the user DO?" (Not what he user sees, hears, etc.)  The choices are expressed as verbs.

List "Here are the verbs I want the user to execute."  Demonstrated that with just a few verbs, you can identify the piece of software.  Software is defined by its verbs.

Next Leap: Linguistic User Interface (LUI)

Interacting with a computer is talking to the computer.    [Is "giving orders" really "talking"?  Is it necessary to translate an already metaphor-laden action such as dragging an item to the trash can into words? "Make friends with Betsy" -- an example Chris used - is powerful language, but we communicate through gestures, proximity, eye contact... we communicate subconsciously in many ways that lose quote a bit when we translate it to language.]

Language is the protocol that people use.

Linguist -- Sapir-Wharf hypothesis.  Language and the perceptual reality of the speaker are closely locked together. Language mirrors reality as perceived by the speaker.  Language is hard to put into a computer... you can't put reality in a computer therefore you can't put language inside a computer.

Every artist is creating a tiny universe... storyteller creates a little dramatic universe that contains only the appropriate level of detal. Create a "toy universe" and a "toy language" to go along with it.  The universe and language are a single task -- you can't create one without the other.

Next idea: Inverse Parser

The words they require are hidden.  Only show the user the options that are appropriate to the particular moment. Build a sentence, word by word, setting a goal.  You're not the supplicant any more -- "Please accept my text!"  Instead the computer does the work so that it only shows you the relevant choices.

"The computer does all the work, not the user. That's the way it's supposed to be!" [Hm... well, in certain cases, yes, but that would pretty much kill the whole concept of the riddle. CF the chess example in The Garden of Forking Paths.]

Storytelling is best done by storytellers, not programmers. 

Raises a gigantic problem... storytelling is algorithm-driven.  Interactivity is about thinking how to respond.  The computer is supposed to come up with an interesting reaction to user input.
Gives the example of a refrigerator door -- the light goes on when you open the door.  Keeping a given reader interested requires computation, requires the language of mathematics.  And storytellers are not particularly mathematically, nor are they very technical.  We don't need millions of storytellers to do this, we just need a few dozen to get started.

Make the tool eaiser.

Chris -- getting the storytelling part working was easy... that was 4 out of the 16 years.  The rest of the time has meant making the tool easier for the non-technical person.

Demonstrated the script describing the inclination of the actor to accept a proposed deal.

Last example -- "Bounded Numbers" -- Bounded numbers, between +1 and -1.  You can never get a number outside that range.  All manipulation just push the variable between those ranges.  Gave the scenario of your brother has been bullied... how do you compare your confidence in your strength, and your love for your brother.  Every value gets a bell curve, based on average.  Arithmetic is a lot easier for the non-technical person if all values are based on a scale with 0 as average, 1 the most possible, -1 the least possible.

To do anything with all this you have to embrace all these concepts, which stops many people from using the technology.

The Storytron "Grand Opening" is July 15.  In 20 years, will be paving a parking lot over Electronic Arts.

Why can't programmers tell stories?  Steeped in a style of thinking that is inimical to storytelling... it takes an exceptional programmer to cross the line. and vice-versa.

The conceptual difference is not a personality thing. The games industry has not embraced the humanistic elements of storytelling.  "They do great Potemkin Village characters."

Chris says there has never been a character in a game that you can have a meaningful emotional relationship with. (Emily Short briefly reacted to Chris's dismissal of the death of Floyd in Planetfall.)

When gamers are "in the zone" -- they've cut off the frontal cortex, so that kind of gameplay is "untouched by human neurons" because the cognitive part of their brain is cut out of the cycle.

Dene noted that being "in the zone" happens in sports as well... you block some of the data from the outside, but can still be very physically active.  Being in the zone is more complex than Chris described it.  Dene offers "immersion" as the key between trivial an non-trivial activities.  Dene notes that what counts as trivial and non-trivial for kids is different from adults.

Chris says that your body has a natural correction system that kicks in when you are in the zone.  "There's always death as a feedback mechanism."

Chris feels the gaming culture will be seen as kiddy entertainment like Disney.

Mark M -- can you make the grains of output larger?  Invoked Noah Wardip Fruin's Talespin effect -- the software does robust processing, but the output is harder to appreciate as a completed work of art.

Crawford noted that cinema's first frame of reference was the theater... static camera where the audience would sit.  It took a revolution to realize that cinema does things differently.

I suggested that the granuarity of Storytron would fill the space of a cell phone or IM.

Mark B -- invoked Roger Schank's work on storytelling. Is Crawford reviving Schank? (Chris distanced hisself from Schank, saying he looked at his work long ago then set aside and went off on his own.)

Mark M -- you can make ELIZA interesting by plaing around with ELIZA.  There are "bad examples of ELIZA."   Mark sees the data going in and the data going out.  Once you start playing with the grains coming out, and what they look like, you start addressing its literary flavor.

Chris: "Why do I want more literary flavor?"

Mark M: "That's what I want."

Chris: "Then write a book!"

Chris -- expecting a literary output is dismissing the primacy of ineraction.  The level of interaction is where the richness.  The visual and literary part aren't expected to be rich. The medium has zero literary value, positive intearctive value.

Mark B: Asked Chris -- I've got this character the reader is supposed to love... how do you make the character lovable. 

Chris: Make her lovable in what she does, not what she looks like.  Make her interested in who the protagnist is.  The character should be empathetic, she will inquire, respond to the player's statements.  Chris notes that the core point is on the mark -- we don't know how we'll be able to come up with algorithms to define interactive stories.

Chris -- the best people for the new technology are "young, angry failures."  The established writer has no need to seek an outlet in a new medium.  "That's how I think we'll find our best story builders. Losers."

In responset to my question, Chris said that he spent about a half hour with Emily Short's Galatea and found it "interesting." I noted that in terms of meaningful interaction with a virtural character, the interactive fiction community considers it to be the mark to beat.

Dene joined us remotely from her lab in Vancouver, demonstrating multimedia works that are performed through hyperlinks triggered by a performer's actions in a 3D space.  The demonstration is intended to challenge the notions of a hyperlink as a silent component of a 2D work.

First demonstration -- Virtual DJ.  

Spinning circles of light seem to track the performer as she moves a motion-tracking controller in 3D space.  Four cameras track down on a 9x9x9 space; we saw 8 maps of "Level 1," the music and lights are located in different directions, so one has to remember where each zone is.  She carries a small container that emits an infrared light, picked up by the cameras.  Space divided into a 3D grid, with different media objects programmed into the grid.  A PC reads the performer's location in space, talks to a Mac which runs sound and visual elements. Software: "Reason"


Things of Day and Dream, corporeal poetry.

Software: "Ableton" (it sounded like that... unfamiliar to me)  Recorded a poem, divided it up into chunks... video clips keyed with the text in 13 zones.  Each chunk of spoken word invokes a different chunk of video, with music playing throughout.  Text, video, and music all embedded in 13 different zones.  Very short -- just a minute and 5 seconds.  Grid divided into 2 regions, 10 different phrases on the "dream" side, and 2 with "awake," and in the middle is a liminal zone.  [Question... what does live interaction add to the performance? Watching someone else -- a specialist -- interact with a 3D space is one kind of experience...]


Rhapsody Room. 

Spaces trigger individual words, also keying changes in the sound track and lighting. "Jolt," "sky," "final".   Pronouns high, in the middle were the modifiers, and on the ground were the verbs.  Intersting experience.

[The complexity of navigating through the 3D menus reminds me of the frustrating experience of navigating multiple 90 degree turns through nested Windows menus.  It takes a precision that seems mechanical and robotic... how often does the system poll the location of the controller? How does that affect the nature of the experience?]

The whole studio setup reminds me -- just slightly -- of the "mood room" in Anthony Clarvoe's PICK UP AX.  Lab set up with a collaborator in Canada... very little lag time.  There's too much lag to create classical music.

Question from Mark Marino: how do new users interact with the system?

Dene says it takes people about 20 seconds of moving the controller up and down, but within 30 seconds people start moving around.  People who are comfortable with their bodies and uninhibited are all over the place, but people who are more reserved are more timid with the controller.   Designed to be portable and friendly to new users.

Rather than a mouse running across a desk, the mouse is a tracker, the surface is air, and a hyperlink is an invisible point in 3D space.  [I guess her controller doesn't have a clicker, so it's all activated by "hover".]

Invoked Jeff Parker's "A Poetics of the Link." 

Patterns, repetition, cycles... a physical instantiation of the interaction of cameras, trackers, light, computers, along with the human performer's body, brought to fruition by the hyperlinks.  Disorienting, but not silent gaps.  We tend to think of hypertext disjoined spaces, but Dene sees them as potentially contiguous.

Dene -- "event link" -- multidimensional event space. Invoked Aarseth's notion of time in ergotic works. Time in the tale, time of the telling, and the event time.  DIalectic between aporia (gaps) and epiphany (insight).  Dene sees her work as lacking gaps.

3D perforamce works are about signification and mapping... performer finds her own sense of order. Transition, relay, and movement. Emphasizes the performer inside the system. Human, corporeal contribution to the work of art.  Add, along to the perception of reading along multiple paths, also the mutiple paths of performance, multiple ways of the human performer interacting with the work.

"Corporeal Poetics."

The controller has no "click" function, so all the 3D ineractions is "hover."

Diana Slattery, "Glide" - build a visual language and gesturing, hand gestures.

Kate Pullinger and mouse-over.  "Breathing Wall" -- breathing into an apparatus to move the story along with the breath.

Mark B. asked how this counts as literature -- is it scored?  Virtual DJ isn't written down, Rhapsody Room is open enough that anyone can innovate, but Day and Dream takes practice to perform.

The notion of ephemeral beauty is part of the allure of this kind of work... "Do I really care" whether it's possible to capture it?

The space can handle four different trackers, each triggering different actions in the various spaces.

The demos we saw were all based on the tracker's location in 3D space.

In The Mindful Play Environment, it is possible to use trajectory, speed, proximity of trackers to each other...  Dene's website has a video of that work in progress for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Steve introduced Susan Gibb as a driving force behind the writing and digital media culture in a small town in Connecticut.  (I'm really impressed by what comes from Tuxnis Community College).

Susan presented us with the thinking behind the creation of a 300-node creative hypertext work in StorySpace.

Susan walked the audience through the process of a single "writing space" morphing into a story.  As the writer moves in time, the character reveals her past through vignettes. Reflections (from the present looking back) and memory (more dramatic and lyrical than the present.)

Hypertext welcomes "those neat distracting ideas" that we have to squelch into order to develop an idea in a linear format.

[My question... what does this do to focus? Are 1000 story spaces, of which 300 are really good, better than a story with 300 good story spaces?  Are 300 story spaces, of which 30 are phenomenal, preferable to a story with just 30 spaces?  Moving from brainstorming and world-building to the narration of details can be tricky... Susan is very careful and meticulous about what she does, and while like Alan she's inspired by the openness of the medium, my mind jumps to how I can use this in a class full of students who are taking basic comp, and therefore haven't developed even the basic skills that contribute to a coherent paragraph, much less a coherent webtext.  Susan's experience introducing multimedia to older people can build on the print literacy that a 75-year-old has developed over a lifetime of reading.]

Susan discusses the separation between the writer and character, and referred in passing to "One of the Annes," which I found interesting. 

[I never think of the "you" in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel as having multiple personalities, but of course if the book were a "Develop-Your-Own-Consciousness" novel or "Interpret-Your-Own-Metaphors" book, then perhaps I'd need different language to describe the experience.]

Just after I wrote the above, Susan just mentioned the CYOA format...

Susan notes that a linear form needs a reason to go off on a side-track, but in hypertext you don't need a reason. [Again, does that limit the focus? I don't mean to suggest Susan is encouraging frivolous side-trips, since of course the reader can avoid sidestories.  What implications does this have for "Murder your darlings" -- Quiller-Couch's advice for writers who cling too much to passages that just don't fit. "Marginalize your darlings"?]

Susan says she feels she hasn't mastered the hypertext form... she says she doesn't mind when the reader misses side stories, but she does have a "full" text in mind and she wants to make sure the reader experiences it all.

[Is this why she says she hasn't mastered the form?  Would there be no difference between vital nodes and optional nodes if she had mastered the form, or if she masters the form will she be more confident in her ability to steer the reader, or if she masters the form will she embrace its differences and not worry it?]

Her narrative structure depends upon a loop, leaving the reader with uncertainty... suggests the image of macrame, with the threads forming a "complete story".

Susan noted that short sentences increase the pace in hypertext, but also the number of writing spaces. A short lexia forces the reader to stop and contemplate. [I'm puzzled... I would think that a long lexia would slow the reader down. I wonder how the use of bold keywords and bulleted lists would affect the reader's experience of a literary hypertext.]

Next example -- A Bottle of Beer -- a sample in Hypertextopia. Ended with a quote from Steve, emphasizing the value of even an incomplete sampling of a hypertext space. To "finish" a hypertext (as a reader) is less important than the value of contemplating the nodes one encounters.

In a question, Mark referred to "killing your children"  and a "defense of hoop-de-doodle."  "How do you decide what to cut and what to move to the margins?"

Susan noted that editing with each writing space means it's easier to trim the nodes.

Chris: 100 identical people each take different paths through a text, creating 100 different paths.  To what degree, if you were to estimate the quality of the experience, would there be a few that are really great, some that are horrible, or would they be pretty much the same quality?

[Susan noted that she liked the slide presentation tool Keynote, a couple of times referred to "angry people" who followed a particular path through the text... ]

Marc from USC -- notes that Susan seems to value her work when the ideal reader meets the ideal story... value comes from sympathy between the experiences.  Do we always have to write stories that look more like the new novel, and less like the discursive novel -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders.

How to get away from the concern about ensuring the reader get the "right" or "full" story?

Steve -- notes that we have not yet fully explored the aesthetic of linking.  "It may be that every path in a hypertext is the only way to read it.  Not the right way, or the wrong way."

Juan: If we have a message, the narrative piece created by the author, can be acquired by the reader... how closely does the reader's final perception of the work match the intention of the author?  [Juan's point was about information, but the establishment of the author's intention is subjective, and the value of a work fluctuates in culture, just as the author's intention fluctuates over the life of the author, and our understanding of that intention fluctuates based on what kind of access we have to the author's notes, letters, etc.]

Mark notes that craft is important -- a work that's not communicating its message might have a technical imperfection.
 

Alan Bigelow discusses his art installations featuring the short-form Flash genre. In his introduction, he stated that he doesn't think that he writes hypertext, and spoke with hope of a future in which new media authors know what terms to apply to their work.

The opening screen of his American Ghosts refers to a "webyarn," but he also suggests "net art," calling himself a "mid-career artist" because he's been working in this form for about 8 years.

Bigelow says he tends to give his readers limited choices, because he doesn't want the reader to struggle through the narrative.  Refers to interactive choices in his works, Love Is and MyNovel.org and IPledge.org.  Spoke of the value of securing domain names since they draw traffic.

While American Ghosts played, I laughed out loud at the Paul Revere clip.  After the work ended, Alan discussed the inspiration for the work, with American archetypes from the revolutionary era reimagined in terms of their 20th-century counterparts.  After the five indiidual clips play, we see a final unified clip that punches the final message. (It's a nice effect... descrbing it would be meaningless... just spend 5 or so minues looking at all the American Ghosts clip.) 

Referred to the Steven Kurtz debacle as an inpspiration for his work -- a reason to resond.

Notes that he produces only 3-4 pieces a year... "tortuously slow" -- hard to compete against companies, Hollywood, that sees the revenue potential for the short interactve form.

Mark aks Alan to go back to when he was first producing American Ghosts, and asks... what do you want?  What is the "American Ghosts" you could do if you had unlimited resources?

Alan answered by gesturing at his laptop... he would have produced exactly the same thing he showed us.

Mark notes then.. why, then, worry about what big industry is doing?

Alan notes --- blogs get readers because there's new content every day, but Flash artists don't do that.  Without the constant generation of new content, it's hard to build an audience.

Steve notes that Flash is changing... it's an "empty space." He asks, "what is it about the texture of the Flash enviroment" that draws Alan?

Alan identifies himself as a writer, not a programmer... calls Flash intuitive.  "It doesn't hurt that it's 97% penetration in browsers," so it's "a good bet for longevity."    Trying to design his works to display on an iPhone.

Alan invoked the example of Jason Nelson, as an artist reworking the cultural material of games.

Alan walked the audience briefly through the Flash source file, listing the tools he uses to create his work.

Mark asked Alan to "talk a little bit about why this is the right medium for your politcal message."  Alan called his art work his "private" way to present his opinions... noted his discomfort when server logs indicate that someone from a government organization is viewing his work.  Identifies himself as a writer, says "I got bored with writing on paper."

Mark probed for an external motivation... beyond personal inclination -- what is the general motivation?

Alan responded... "As an artist, I work instinctively. I don't do a lot of self-examination.... The less self-examination, the better."

Susan Gibb turned the question around -- "How does this particular medium inspire you?"

Alan -- excoted by the possibilites of Flash.  "Always a challenge, and it's always intersting."

Steve Ersinghaus started the creative hypertext workshop by playing Changing Key: A "video hyperdrama" by Charles Deemer.

In the introduction, Deemer notes that the audience in a play is passive, and conjures up the idea of a family Thanksgiving in which multiple groups interact in multiple rooms, with the audience inserted into the drama like ghosts who can follow different stories.

[My note: A ghost audience who can follow different characters is not a full participant, like the payng audience who performs dramas with professional 'ractors in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age... Each of Deemer's videos is a separate, linear narrative... we're still watching Bobby Meadows wait for his ride, in a scene that's doubtless providing various hooks into the other scenes in the corpus.  The audience's attempts to put the story together is an active intellectual effort.

There's a trilogy of plays that are designed so that when a character exits in one play, he or she enters in another play. Can't recall the title of that trilogy...]

After watching Bobby's scene, Mark Bernstein asks the question -- is this scene a story?  (We didn't have the chance to discuss his question before Steve started the next clip, but I think that's like asking wether an individual ant is an organism -- an individual worker ant can't reprotude, and the male ants don't even have jaws so they can't eat...)

Now we're watching Kate's story.  Kate speaks directly to the camera (which I'm pretty sure is visible in the reflection of a window at one point). An intersting cinematographic detail -- during a confrontation between Kateand Dennis, both actors deliver their scene in an unbroken shot, with the shot of Dennis overlayed slightly over Kate's image (with the focus therefore on Kate).

After just watching two clips, and noting the ways the hooks in these two stories, begin to intersect, I'm intrigued by the complex authorial process necessary for creating an ensemble drama (like a soap opera or epic TV show, such as Babylon 5 or the last few seasons of Deep Space 9).

Chris Crawford stated that a story with seven choices -- "none of them informed" means the experience is not interactive.

In what manner is this presentation hypertextual?  We see different sections of overlapping stories. Susan notes that the clips don't actually present one event -- some of the characters don't interact with each other.  We spent some time dissecting individual shots, such as Bobby wiping his shoes, and noting the apparent separation between Kate and Bobby.

Mark -- differentiates between story and plot. The sequence we choose seems only to affect plot, but it's possible to affect he story -- it may be that putting the events in different sequence may communicate something different (but he's reserving judgment because we haven't seen enough of it).  "If it's not interactive, it's certainly ergodic." (Good point.)

Marc from USC -- notes the significance of dramatic irony, and its powerful affect on the viewer's perceptioin of events.

We skipped ahead to "Nuts and Bolts," which describes Deemer's use of Storyspace. To produce the video, Deemer has to do a linear storyboard. Notes that live hyperdrama involves improv, since the timeline of the various threads has to line up.  Video hyperdrama is easily manipulated so that timelines sync up. In fact, according to Deemer, for video, the script only appears after the separate filmed modules are assembled.

An interesting sequence defines a theater space for hyperdrama.  (Reminds me of the rebellion against the proscenium arch which freed Expressionist playwrights from followig the conventions of the well-made play.)

Marc from USC challenges Demeer's statement that hyperdrama needs an address; also notes the connection to reality TV (with multiple cameras). 

Somehow I worked a reference to Duck Amuck into a discussion of how instantenous scene changes affects the pace of drama.

Steven notes that he has offered to host Deemer to try to create the space for hyperdrama.

GamePlasma.com broke a story about a new adventure game, Limbo of the Lost, which uses digital assets from the RPG Oblivion. (There are plenty of screenshots in the article.)

Eric was recently assigned a game developed by Majestic Studios titled "Limbo of the Lost." At first glance, this game appears to be your typical point and click adventure again. This time, however, something seemed oddly familiar to him. Eric, being the avid PC gamer that he is, noticed that there were some similiarties between Limbo of the Lost and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

The first example of this can be seen in the screenshots from Oblivion and Limbo of the Lost below. Notice how everything is placed in exactly the same place and almost all of the textures are identical. In fact, the only real difference is the quality of the texture and overall graphical look. Even the portrait that can be seen under the stairs is exactly the same as the one that can be found in Oblivion. Also, take note of the placement of the rug in the middle of the floor and the placement of the stairways. These similarities lead to many questions. How rampant are situations like this in games that fall under the radar of the typical gaming crowd?

Now, it's possible that Limbo of the Lost purchased the rights to re-use the art and 3D models, but Oblivion isn't the only game the creators of Limbo of the Lost have borrowed from.

Wired examines a side-effect of the long-awaited life-creation game Spore:

Role-playing games have trained millions of gamers in highly complex resource and inventory control. Basically, they've made screwing around with databases fun. Or think about conducting a big raid in World of Warcraft, where you need to deploy virtual team-management skills and diplomacy worthy of the Cuban missile crisis. Previously, this was the concern of only very high-level employees at multinational corporations -- but now 13-year-old kids are doing it.

Wright is the undisputed reigning master of creating games that contain subterfuge training. Ever wonder how The Sims became the world's top-selling game of all time? It's not because people actually play it. Most longtime Sims fans quickly tire of creating families.

No, what hard-core fans love is The Sims' elegant "house-design" engine -- which they use to painstakingly craft sprawling, monster homes, customized to the level of individual tile patterns they hand-draw in cracked versions of Photoshop. The Sims isn't a game: It's the world's most popular architectural CAD package.

Now Spore is going to do the same thing to the world of 3-D characters and the sort of work regularly produced by Pixar.

At Hypertextopia. I found an interesting, but incomplete and unsigned (update -- according to some mouseover text, it's by Brian Yearling) hypertext that maps out part of the plot of Death of a Salesman.  I was interested in the subject matter, but I'm not sure about what value this particular hypertext arrangement offers. If it were possible to re-arrange the items so that we can walk chronologically through Willy's life, that might help make some points about Willy's character, but at present this hypertext isn't part of a larger argument that uses the information in its hypertext form, so I'm not sure what the value is. 

Saint EMC² is a more complete example, with text highlighted according to whether the link is an extension, opposition, or illustration of the linked text. That might be useful as a device to get students thinking about why they are linking.

Here's a thoughtful overview of Hypertextopia, from if:book.

The UK Guardian offers this great interview with interactive fiction author and theorist Emily Short.

I think the renaissance happened about 15 years ago, during the mid-90s, when much better design systems for IF were suddenly available and a community coalesced devoted to writing IF seriously, if non-commercially. There's been plenty of development since then: lots of new techniques and new ideas about how to tell a good story, how to write a good puzzle, how to maximize enjoyment and minimize the un-fun kinds of frustration. But from the perspective of people inside the hobby, right now is not the beginning or even a rebirth.

I do see IF getting a little bit more attention from the outside world, from people who haven't been following it this whole time. I think that's largely because growing attention to independent gaming as a whole. The past couple of years have seen a huge growth in the number of websites devoted to following games not produced by a big studio, and that means that there are new ways to get attention for IF. It also means a change in prejudices. There are now more people who are willing to look at and try a new game format even if it doesn't come from a commercial studio.

There's also a growing concern within the gaming industry (as far as I can observe it) about how conventional game design is not producing enough good stories, enough strong characters, enough innovation. So there's more interest in turning to indie and hobbyist communities to see what we've been doing and whether there's any valuable technique here that would be applicable on a larger scale. I like to think that we do, in fact, have something to offer.