Today's e-mail asked: What is it with you all and games?

My answer, slightly expanded, read: I think most human beings need some sort of competition in their lives. It's demonstrably psychologically satisfying. That's part of why I enjoy games: they allow their players to playfully enjoy that satisfaction, safely. I would guess that people who don't play games are more likely to compete with others in ways that are more socially destructive (capitalism, acquisition, elitist oneupmanship, stealing one another's spouses, etc.).

(Possible theory: excellence in the more destructive forms of social competition is often taken as a badge of success. Perhaps the common perception of gamers as "losers" has to do with an avoidance of these forms of competition?)

A second reason is that games are systems, and I'm interested in the way systems work, and have been for a long time, probably about as long as I've been seriously interested in games. Playing a game is an exploration of the way a system works—within the constraints and rules of the game "world", what moves are the ones that will produce the desired outcome? What are effective ways of manipulating this system? Playing Icehouse with Trevor when I was in New Orleans this fall really reminded me of how delightful this exploration can be when shared with another person.

(Making up games deals with the fun of the flipside—conceiving rule-matrices that might be fun to play within.)

A third reason, this one the brainchild of my friend Jon, is that games expose us to situations that we might not experience otherwise, which enables us to test out particular sets of behaviors without serious consequences. (Play in general fulfills this role, games are merely a formal method of doing it.) This testing-out process in turn can influence the way we behave when we leave the gamespace and return to daily life. Traditionally, it is children who need to test out behaviors the most-- since they're learning how the world works --which may be why play and games are generally considered to be childish pursuits. But a person who thinks of learning, growing, and evolving as a lifelong process might find value in continuing to play.

(Role-playing games are particularly unique in this regard; they allow us to test out aspects of whole new identities.)

Labels: game_commentary, play, pleasure

Wednesday, October 30, 2002
8:59 PM
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Having serious ambitions often leads me to a state where I feel like I'm simultaneously doing way too much and not nearly enough.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002
8:57 AM
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I've done a list of 100 favorite things at least once a year now for at least ten years, as a way of periodically taking stock of good things in my life. Recently my buddy Rich posted his, which reminded me that it's been a long time since I've posted one of mine. So here's the most recent one:


1. taking baths
2. my thermos
3. sprial-bound index cards
4. pigma pens
5. new sketchbooks
6. indexes
7. the Web
8. human bodies
9. conversations
10. solitude
11. games
12. mixtapes / mix CDs
13. my CD burner
14. making music
15. writing
16. adobe illustrator & photoshop
17. fonts
18. the photocopier
19. the computer
20. graphic design
21. dada and fluxus
22. john cage
23. brian eno
24. don delillo
25. nicholson baker’s the mezzanine
26. dark chocolate
27. ice cream
28. a celebratory guinness
29. flirting
30. greasy spoons
31. smutty writing
32. cities
33. exploring
34. hidden spaces
35. weathered or overgrown artifacts
36. being deep in the woods
37. public transportation
38. buffy the vampire slayer
39. libraries
40. nonmonogamy
41. independent bookstores
42. record shopping
43. geeks
44. unitarians
45. the spring conference
46. having projects
47. having friends who have projects
48. sitting on the grass in the sun
49. zines
50. weblogs
51. teaching
52. traveling
53. road trips
54. being in other people’s homes
55. shrines
56. the comfort I feel in the presence of the people that I love and trust
57. reading things out loud
58. showing someone something new
59. being shown something new
60. learning
61. the onion
62. richard linklater’s slacker
63. my dinner with andre
64. music from japan
65. stanley kubrick’s 2001
66. keeping a dream journal
67. diaries
68. walking
69. human variety
70. sexuality
71. hooking up with someone new
72. hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time
73. things my friends made for me
74. optimism
75. graffiti
76. drones
77. altered states
78. labyrinths
79. science fiction
80. the wire
81. getting mail
82. working through an idea
83. doonesbury
84. b. kliban
85. jim woodring
86. comics
87. coffee
88. collaboration
89. creative exchange
90. being part of a network
91. word of mouth
92. serialized stories
93. subcultures
94. fall and spring
95. riding my bike
96. paul klee
97. improvisation
98. structure
99. chaos
100. cycles

Labels: lists, personal

Tuesday, October 22, 2002
2:53 PM
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I haven't added to my "forms of electronic literature" list since July. At this rate it'll be a year-long project. Actually maybe not, as I only have one more big category left to deal with after this one.

Command-Line Literature

Command-line literature is a textual system that you navigate by entering prompts at regular intervals. Usually you and the system "take turns," creating a kind of dialogic effect. These sorts of systems were popularized by a series of interactive games produced by companies like Infocom, of which Zork is the best well-known.

Many pieces of command-line literature, including the Infocom works, are essentially hypertextual: that is to say, they are primarily composed of large units of pre-existing text (lexia) that the user navigates their way through. One key difference, however, is the nature of the user interface: most widely-known conceptions of hypertext take the link as the primary means of naviagation, rather than the address-driven mode that characterizes command-line literature.

An additional difference is that most command-line works use at least some generative element. No writer can possibly compose responses to cover every possible user input, and so generally certain computer subroutines are employed to handle statements that the system reads as nonsensical, yielding responses like the familiar "I see no X here."

When the generative element is foregrounded, the hypertextual element is correspondingly reduced, and the experience becomes less like navigating a text (less "literary," one could argue) and more like having a conversation. The key text to think of here is Joseph Weizenbaum's notorious ELIZA, and the generation of chatbots born in her wake.

Forerunners of command-line literature: the Turing Test, early AI research, early command-line-driven computer langauges, Will Crowther's ADVENT.

Labels: electronic_literature, hypertext

Saturday, October 19, 2002
11:43 AM
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Haven't been doing much lately, except dreaming about a guy who plans to eat his own brain.

Oh, yeah, I went to Maine for several days, with my dad, to get my annual dose of foliage. It was fun to spend extended time with my dad.

I'm a soft-on-crime leftist. My dad is a Republican, and a firm believer in problematic policies like the death penalty and even racial profiling. And yet the current U.S. policy on Iraq fills him with a sense of outrage that exactly echoes my own. Bizarre—if even the hard-core Republicans think the demonization of Hussein has reached absurd proportions, who the hell supports this war?

Who indeed.

Off now to do laundry.

Friday, October 18, 2002
2:44 PM
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Sorry I haven't updated in a while; I have been buried in student papers. I have now completed 225, with 375 left to go before semester's end. I have received a pretty good essay which analyzed Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, and another pretty good one which analyzed an Onion editorial authored by a dog. There have also been lots and lots of bad ones, which do not warrant further mention, as I am busy repressing them.

After puzzling about loops last week, I remembered that a good way to solve problems with loops is to set up two (or more) loops that are out of phase with one another. I took a loop of harmonica drone and made two versions of it, one 21 seconds long and the other one 16 seconds long. When I set them both going they don't come into sync for 336 seconds, or five and a half minutes. This makes a nice, rich, unpredictable sonic bed over which Chris and I have been layering more material (bowed guitar, accordion, some processed household sounds). The piece is called "City of Brass."

The MCA reading of my story went well. It was interesting to see how an actor interpreted my character; I felt very satisfied with the results. It was nice to enjoy some minor celebrity for a day, and they mentioned Imaginary Year in the program, including the URL.

I have been listening to the October pieces from the Muted Tones project.

I made a new 100 favorite things list, and will post it here next week sometime.

Our solar system is now more complicated.

Wednesday, October 09, 2002
2:17 PM
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From the Museum of Contemporary Art's e-mail announcements:

WBEZ's Stories on Stage
Now Hear This
Sunday, October 6, 3 and 7:30 pm

See a live performance of the winning entries
from the WBEZ's Stories on Stage competition for unpublished works. Stories on Stage, Chicago's only live dramatic short-story reading series, features distinguished directors and some of Chicago's favorite actors. Selected from over 700 entries, the 2002 winning stories to be brought to life in Now Hear This are: "Harold" by Sara Gmitter (directed by Edward Sobel); "Side One, Track Seven" by Jeremy P. Bushnell (directed by Judy O'Malley); "Grandma and the Elusive Fifth Crucifix" by Edward Kelsey Moore (directed by Michael E. Myers); and "Hindsight" by Joan Corwin (directed by O'Malley).

Tickets $15, MCA and Chicago Public Radio members $12.
For tickets, call the MCA box office at 312.397.4010

My story will be read by Andrew White, who apparently has acted in productions at the Goodman Theatre and Steppenwolf. Pretty cool!

Wednesday, October 02, 2002
9:13 PM
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Sat down last night and goofed around with Cool Edit Pro some more, mostly fruitlessly.

The main process I've been working with lately is taking a recording of an interesting sound—a hissing ventilation shaft, for instance—and then using Cool Edit Pro's timestretching capabilities to elongate it. This is essentially the same m.o. I used when I was doing photocopier experiments—take a piece of input, enlarge it, enlarge it again, and start looking for the interesting bits of emergent noise that begin to appear in the expanded landscape. Crop everything but the interesting bits, and then use them as the source piece for a new set of iterations.

Once I find a segment I really like I usually make it into a loop. But what that means, of course, is that I now have dozens of interesting loops, but no framework to plug them into. Some of the longer loops, the ones that run maybe thirty seconds, might make a nice backdrop for a piece, but the shorter ones are hard to make something out of—a five-second loop all too quickly becomes repetitive.

Reminder here to look into some of that Goem stuff for possible strategies.

Another possibility: give the loops to someone else who could use them. This returns me to my thoughts about setting up a public sample-bank, as I discussed way back when. I'm starting to think that the best way to do it would be through a wiki.

Anyway. I may begin giving up expanding things in favor of condensing things. Crumpling up sounds and treating the resultant wads as hyperdense percussion. I have lots of drones and not enough beats.

Stay tuned.

Labels: music_commentary

Tuesday, October 01, 2002
4:24 PM
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