Category Archives: New Media

Director

Congratulations go to Susan Gibb who’s been promoted to Director of the writing arts at the Fine Arts Connection of Thomaston, Connecticut. In this position she’ll be able to promote her interests in traditional and digital arts from the ground up, where, I believe, swells need to occur and are most valuable.

The technical nature of the digital arts isn’t really the problem or the solution. It’s the promotion of fine work of whatever form and of whatever flavor and by whomever wishes to engage them. In hypertext, for example, we shouldn’t bother so much with the tech but, rather, with simple questions: should storytelling, which serves the needs of the community, take priority over snappy graphics, which can either get in the way or weigh too much in the favor of candy over substance? We always should argue for a balance: excellent telling, excellent art, excellent whatever.

Susan is the perfect pick: her energy, knowledge, and persistence can enflame.

Good luck and congrats.

British Literature II and Facebook

Dan Ruby has created a Facebook group for the British Literature course. A few items have been added to the group. It may be an interesting way of keeping in contact. I even posted a forum item on potential exam questions.

Thanks to Dan for his efforts.

Students may join at will. In the effort to stay connected, students may also created study groups.

This post also appears here.

First Days

The new building and classroom are a breath of fresh air. The little laptop in the room that runs all the equipment is a little disproportionate, though. Nice big screen and D assures us that the macs will jack right in and auto-switch.

Very nice and we also have a little gizmo we can use to plug in the ps2.

Game Dialogue

Grabbed this piece on dialogue in games from Andrew at Grand Text Auto. Matthew Sakey in Talking with Transistors:

Part of it is that we are still roleplaying with circuit boards, and technology means it’s going to be that way for a while. When the day arrives that we’re actually roleplaying with the game AI, and not a pre-scripted database of reactions… well, that day we can just do away with other people altogether and it’ll be great. But right now – and despite the never-lived-up-to claims of some developers, including a couple mentioned here – game AI advancements seem irritatingly focused not on character and world reaction to player behavior, but on combat skills, so it’s going to be a while before The Elder Scrolls MCMLXXV responds in a genuinely dynamic way to our remarks and activities.

Part of this is easy: fiction writers or other writers who know what good dialogue is have to involved in the development of these systems. The person who lives inside the voice of a persona needs to be drawn into the game. Here’s a question: can players write good dialogue? I note that my browser still thinks this word is alien.

Appropriateness in Hypertext

In a note to this post on hypertext and effects Juan writes:

It can be argued that most pieces of electronic literature could be reproduced in paper, thus the question about essential innovation seems valid. What cannot be reproduced on paper is the processing capacity of a computer. Storyspace offers some basic processing. Literatronic offers a sophisticated IA engine for processing.

I’d like to clarify one issue. In my view, Storyspace, to pursue the path of aesthetics, allows for the writing of hypertexts appropriate to its environment. In all honesty, I don’t think enough hypertexts have been written in the software to provide fuller analysis of the possibilities: I’d suggest a thousand (how many books are published every year?) In this sense, appropriateness (a criteria I take from urban design), is a key factor. This is a subtle but important point.

In Brimmer and Death, for example, I’m not worried about links or the relationship between one window and the next. Rather, I’m fussing over regions of the writing space: top and bottom, primarily, for reasons of closure. This will put into motion a new editing stage: given the top of a writing space, how should I fuss over the bottom of its origin. I’ll be looking at this very issue as I experience a show of hands.

Digitizing Reality

Now this is interesting:

earthmine:

Founded in 2006, Berkeley-based earthmine inc is a street-level, 3D mapping company that provides software and data as a service to those that need to relate information to places. The company is focused on indexing reality, creating a robust geospatial data mine of our urban environments that is accessed from the human perspective, and an order of magnitude more detailed and accurate than anything before.

For those who gather, analyze and communicate location-based information from a street-level perspective, earthmine solutions enable better informed and more effective geospatial decision making by delivering a highly accurate and realistic user experience that can be easily viewed, annotated, analyzed, measured and shared.

Why: examining street-level design and comparison.