Yesterday we had our first public showing of Screen (previous posts: 1, 2) as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Folks like Stephanie Strickland, Bill Seaman, Scott Rettberg, and William Gillespie came, and their reactions made me smile. We’ll be doing it again May 3rd (write to me if you want to come and the reservations are full).

Perhaps the biggest piece of news with Screen since my last post is that we have another collaborator for the interaction design and I have a new co-author for the text: Robert Coover. Bob is, of course, well-known as a professor and supporter of electronic writing — now he’s also, officially, a practitioner. The biggest change that’s come from working on the text with this new collaborator is that the project no longer tries to fit a many-layered metastory into five screenfuls of text. Instead, the underlying themes of that story are now the explicit focus — memory as a virtual experience, memory’s instabilities, and our relationship with these — though three “minitales” are still told.

Working with Bob on a piece of electronic writing also brings me a long way from where I began. My first piece of ewriting, in high school, generated text using starting material from (among other places) his story “The Gingerbread House.” Some interesting effects emerged from that borrowed text, but not nearly as good as the ones achieved working with the author directly.

Screen has also been accepted for a sketch presentation at SIGGRAPH 2003. One of my collaborators, Joshua J. Carroll, will be doing the presentation — hopefully joined by Shawn Greenlee and/or Andrew McClain. I’ll be in Europe and won’t make it back for the occasion. I posted an earlier version of the PDF before, but here’s a revised version.

Some people have asked me if Screen is related to the project discussed in Matt Mirapaul’s NYTimes article over the summer. Not only is it related, it’s the very one — he just didn’t mention its name (local mirror of article text). Screen also got a nice mention in Brandon’s blog a little while back.

Last week Jesper Juul — who’s visiting MIT from Copenhagen — gave a talk here called “About the Game.” It was very well received, impressing the audience members from Brown’s Graphics Group as well as those from German Studies.

One of the impressive things about Jesper’s talk was a definition of games he offered that I think is essentially correct — though it creates a typology in which the kind of game I played most while growing up (pen and paper RPGs) is considered borderline. Here are the parts of the definition:

1. Rules
2. Variable & quantifiable outcome
3. Value assigned to outcomes
4. Player effort
5. Outcome associated with player
6. Optional consequences

What makes the RPGs I played border cases, as I understand it, is that there’s a Game Master who does active interpretation of the rules during play — in some sense RPGs lack fixed rules. Of course, the only games I’ve ever played where we didn’t actively interpret rules at some point were computer games, but I didn’t find this a problem with Jesper’s talk because (a) he recognizes that these phenomena are not binary (he calls RPGs border cases, rather than throwing them out of the category of games) and (b) his main goal, as I see it, is to construct a definition useful for computer games.

I don’t think Jesper’s game definition is online anywhere, but he also talked about some of his ideas of game innovation contained in “Just what is it that makes computer games so different, so appealing?”

Matt Kirshenbaum’s review of the NMR (mentioned previously) is now online at EBR. Meanwhile, Matt Webb has written a nice post about the project based on the website, and I’m looking forward to hearing what more he’ll have to say once he’s had a look at the book/CD.

I’m running a piece of software by Rebecca Ross called OkayNews. On a MacOS X machine, it brings up a Finder alert with a NYTimes headline every 20 minutes. You have to click “okay” to keep working with your computer. In a sense you have to approve the news — or at least acknowledge the official version of events — in order to go forward with whatever you’re doing. I like it conceptually, and in addition the currently news-obsessed part of me likes the mid-90s-retro “push media” aspect of the project.

Meanwhile, my electronic writing reading list has been expanding rapidly. Here are a couple things I’ve been meaning to blog for a month:

Michael Mateas’s thesis can now be found on his publications page. Michael’s doing some of the most important work happening in electronic writing (including the Facade collaboration with Andrew Stern that I’ve written about before). I’m looking forward to visiting Michael at Georgia Tech in the Fall and learning more about what he’s up to — and, of course, I’m looking forward to reading his dissertation before then.

How Latitudes Became Forms is a project from the Walker Art Center that includes several things I want to check out. For example, Translation Map by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks is interesting in itself, and may also call out to be used as the platform for an ewriting project. Big [B]Other, on the other hand, is an ewriting project itself — rather than a potential platform for one.