First, on Tuesday the 10th, Matt Webb and I are doing a full-day tutorial on blogging. I’m looking forward to it — we come at the topic with approaches and backgrounds that nicely compliment each other, and we have Mark Bernstein lined up to guest speak (about Tinderbox and his Tips on Writing the Living Web). We’ll talk technology, we’ll talk ideas, and we’ll get hands-on with a few different kinds of software.

Next, on Wednesday the 11th at 2pm, I’ll be presenting Screen as part of a program of Hypertext Readings that includes long-time heavyweights Judy Malloy, Robert Kendall, and Bob Arellano.

Then, on Thursday the 12th I’m on the program twice. At 10:45, in a session called “Foundations,” I’m giving a paper that I imagine will raise a few eyebrows. It’s titled “What Hypertext Is” (final pdf) and it was revised extensively after a productive discussion over at GTxA. Finally, at 3:45 I’m on a plenary panel titled “Scholarly Hypertext: The HT’04 Experiment and Beyond.” The experiment referred to in the title is the move, by this year’s Hypertext committee, to accept submissions of hypertexts to the peer-reviewed program. Two were accepted. I’m deeply honored to be on this panel with Doug Engelbart.

More great stuff will happen on Friday, but I’ll have to sneak out partway through to make my plane to Helsinki for ISEA.

Last summer Thom Swiss invited me to be a featured artist at The Iowa Review Web, I was happy to accept, and we decided to focus on the Screen project. In the dead of winter Jill Walker and my fellow GTxAer Scott Rettberg interviewed me and two of my Screen collaborators — Josh and Bob. Then, over the last few months, Josh worked with Michelle Higa to shoot new footage of Screen, which Michelle edited into what I think is a quite compelling video of the project. Now the interview and the Screen video, along with an explanatory video, are live at The Iowa Review Web.

Acid-Free Bits is aimed at authors of electronic literary works. As its subtitle indicates, it identifies a set of practical steps that authors can take now to make it more likely that their work can be made available to readers in the future, even as the technological environment continues to shift under our feet. The web version is available at the link above, and the ELO is also printing up a paper version — which will be made available for the first time at this summer’s Incubation (the 3rd trAce International Symposium on Writing and the Internet).

Speaking of First Person, since I last posted the FP thread has gone live on ebr.

In other news since my last post, I gave a talk to an interesting group at NYU on May 20th (who mean something else when they say “the Simms”). I’ve been involved in an active thread on GTxA, spawned by a draft of my paper “What Hypertext Is.” Also (as already mentioned at GTxA, Water Cooler Games and ludology.org) Wired News published an article titled “Playing Games with a Conscience” (local archive). Here’s the part I’m most surprised they included:

To Wardrip-Fruin, it’s just as important to look at how a game is built as it is to look at a game’s message.

“It’s important to think about the structure of the game,” he says, “not just from these hate sites, but from mainstream publishers, if we’re going to understand these issues.”

He thinks that hate groups are doing no more than exploiting a style of game — for example, first-person shooters — for their own purposes.

“If you think about what these people are doing on these hate sites, they’re taking a set of well-understood game mechanics that are about hating someone — about hating the Germans during World War II — and finding them and killing them,” Wardrip-Fruin explains. “So it’s very easy to just slap (on) the image of the group you hate. I would argue the message is the same: Find the group you hate and go and kill them.”

[...]

Wardrip-Fruin concurs [with Gonzalo Frasca's statement that "there are countless games that promote neither hate nor violence"], and says open-ended simulation games like The Sims do a very good job of encouraging constructive thought in game players.

“It’s very hard to imagine one that is about hating some ethnic or religious other,” he says. “I’d say that the fundamental thing about a computer game is the structure of what you do as a participant, and the structure of something like SimCity or The Sims is about understanding a system, and trying to make it grow in the way you want it to grow.”

Apparently this touched a few nerves (1, 2). If anyone wants to take up the conversation, come tonight if you can.

Wednesday I drive down to LA in preparation for the N@rrative: Digital Storytelling conference at the UCLA Hammer Museum (April 22-23). Nick and I are giving talks on Thursday evening, and then on Friday there’s a panel that we’ll be on with Kate Hayles and Rita Raley.

Finally, on April 28th I’ll be stopping at one more UC campus — to give a lunchtime talk at the Berkeley law school sponsored by the Boalt.org student group. Earlier this month I gave a talk I neglected to pre-blog at the Film and Digital Media program of UC Santa Cruz. The students had good questions, the atmosphere was friendly, and it made me look forward to visiting the other three campuses on this month’s agenda. The UCs, so far, seem to have it together for digital/new/computational media.

The article even gives a few paragraphs over to yours truly. To whit:

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a 31-year-old traveling scholar at Brown University and visiting researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said texts that take the form of fictional digital artifacts like e-mail or blogs held promise for a generation that grew up with computers. “I read more on the screen than I do on paper,” he said, “and I’m pleased to see people take imaginative writing and put it into the spaces where we do our living.”

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin compared “Intimacies” to an epistolary story by one of his students that consisted of e-mail messages with attached photos and diary entries and that was published through a Yahoo e-mail account. He said that such projects, as well as some narrative and life-simulation video games, qualified as literature worthy of attention.

“These are forms of e-writing as surely as experimental hypertext poetry,” he said. “We just have to understand that like traditional literature, e-literature has a range of styles, including popular ones.”

What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. “Think of the textual analogue to video games,” he said. “You can’t really capture the way a video game works by printing it out; that’s what will have to happen with electronic literature for it to become popular.”

While I was interviewed by the Guardian last year, it’s still novel to see my musings end up in the paper. I remember leaning against the counter, with the redwoods out the window, and saying that the direction for future e-lit that interests me most is work that is so interactive and procedural that it might be considered “the textual analogue to video games.” (I don’t remember tying this to the issue of popularity, but I imagine these quotes are from a recording of our conversation.) Given that I have the opportunity here, I’d like to develop this notion a step further. Just as the images in computer games function with a certain logic of images (think of collision detection) so the e-lit I’m interested in exploring operates with a certain logic of language (think of textual instruments). That’s the type of interaction, those are the types of procedures, that I think hold the most promise for our future experimentation.

Just in case the Times archive is having trouble, I’ve put a copy of the article’s text here. There’s also a thread on GTxA, where people can leave comments.