Twisty Little Passages
Nick Montfort’s book on interactive fiction, Twisty Little Passages, describes itself in two ways. The first description (p. 5) reads:
This book seeks to describe some of the intellectual history of the form and its relationship to other literary and gaming forms, and to computing and other computing programs, while critically examining a representative selection of important works and describing their interrelationships.
The second description (p. 14) reads:
Thus this book considers [interactive fiction] works from the standpoint of the narratives they can generate, the way they function as riddles, and their nature as computer programs.
Thus Montfort has promised to present two equally important perspectives on interactive fiction (IF), the first a critical history of the form’s origins, the second a critical analysis of the form’s operations, or to put it in even simpler terms, where IF operates and how IF operates. Given the meagre attention previously given to interactive fiction by scholars, it is this first perspective, the critical history, that is most needed, and that takes a more dominant role in the book.
SIGGRAPH 2004 recap
Well, SIGGRAPH is done and gone and I should record my thoughts for posterity.
Five days of trekking to the convention center was one day too many, a feeling I get almost every year. I always sense that I’ve missed something, so I end up at the show just one more time to make sure I got it all in.
i. Exhibition
The exhibition was contained in halls H and J of the ginormous [gigantic/enormous] exhibition hall. A big convention, but small for SIGGRAPH. Digging out an old program from SIGGRAPH 2001, also at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the exhibition occupied the entire exhibition hall, halls G, H, J, and K, with registration in a downstairs hall (a carpeted parking garage) and the Electronic Theater held offsite at the Shrine Auditorium.
This year, the exhibition floor, the registration area, and the electronic theater were all contained in the exhibition hall.
There is some serious shrinkage going on with SIGGRAPH. The exhibition is now dominated by 3D tools for the entertainment industry, whereas previously this industry was one of many dominant forces. Kind of like the sole remaining superpower… hey, I think I’ve found my metaphor.
sitting on the floor at SIGGRAPH
So I’m sitting on the floor near the Emerging Technologies booth at SIGGRAPH, wirelessly connected to the web. Getting wireless working takes a little perseverance, there are plenty of hotspots set up but something, perhaps sunspots or people with Intel laptops or cars with loud stereos, tend to send network connections askew. The most amazing thing about wireless tehcnology is that people are willing to put up with such low reliability with these things — rather than admit that wired connections are simply a better way to live.
Ban Comic Sans
I recently installed a Windows operating system on a new machine, and one of my first tasks, along with disabling VBScript and removing all those wretched screen savers, was to delete the Comic Sans font.
I guess I’m not alone: Ban Comic Sans website
I’m not just against Comic Sans because it is an ugly font; I am against its painful and inadequate usurpation of comicbook style lettering. Look at that weak ‘a’, and that meagre ‘g’… wait a minute, who the hell uses lowercase comicbook lettering in the first place?
Siggiraffe
It looks like it is time for my biennial pilgrimage to the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the tigers and zebras of SIGGRAPH 2004 will be frolicking all week. The conference proper started yesterday, the art gallery opens today, and the exhibiiton begins on Tuesday.
Proof that Videogames are Evil
17 year old boy kills 14 year old friend with a claw hammer after playing Manhunt. [The Sun] (link expired) [BBC News]
This story doesn’t seem to be making much news at all. (My unscientific research: a Google News search for “Rockstar Manhunt murder” brings up 5 results.)
the latest in spam technology
For some reason comment spam has dropped to near zero on my site. I don’t know whether to be happy or insulted. Meanwhile, on the email spam side of things, it appears that the popularity of Bayesian filtering has sent some spammers over the edge, to the point where they send out messages like this:
Online Phar?macpy
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With o/u|r online pharmacy you cOan saFve thousands oUf dolla|r8is
eiach Nye14ar on coXstl’y medicationjs.
WDe WsenCl>l almo!st aWXny mie3dica*tio{n yTtou w?o%ug1ld nee(d fDNrom
:Xanax )to Vi%codibqn.
No p*rescriN9ption Gis needed. B1So shop our pharmacy and staq6rt
saviQUng todaEy
This elevates spam filtering into a kind of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) [link], you must somehow read the obfuscated message to determine that it is spam.
Algorithm for constructing locked room puzzles
Just thinking out loud here, with no real context.
The player is confronted by a locked door. How does he open it?
A common construction for this puzzle is the paper-under-the-door skeleton key setup: the key is in the opposite side of the lock, and can be pushed out of the lock with a small pointed object, to land on a sheet of paper which can then be pulled back under the door. This is a slightly sophisticated puzzle, because it requires the interaction of three objects: the door, the small pointed object, and the flat object. (The key is not part of the interaction, it is the reward for solving the puzzle.)
Step 1: operate the flat object on the door
Step 2: operate the pointed object on the door
Step 3 (obvious): retrieve the flat object
Welcome to Recipro City
I must admit that I regularly scour the site logs to see who is linking to this, my blog.
- The Ludonauts collective
- Jurie Horneman’s Intelligent Artifice
- snooze (language unknown)
- William Huber’s zang.org
- Power Up – a blog related to the Power Up symposium from July 2003.
- Terra Nova – a collaborative weblog addressing virtual worlds
Hi, guys!
Not something I recommend
If you are happy with life, if you feel like the US is doing a bang-up job in Iraq, if you wish to remain content and unaware of what war is really all about, then I don’t recommend you spend an hour or two browsing through this extensive collection of photos from Iraq at CBS News.