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Holly Gramazio

Interesting Things for June 2016

A new thing: for the next few months, at least, we’re going to post monthly about some of the neat things going on in physical games and embodied play. Upcoming events, current exhibitions, interesting recent essays, open calls – you know the sort of thing. And there’s a lot of all of those sorts of things this month, so I guess we’d better get started…

(Image: Awkward Arcade by James Medd, launching 2 June.)

OPEN CALLS

The European Innovative Games Showcase at GDC, curated by Lea Schönfelder and Jonatan Van Hove, has submissions open till 6 June: Each selected game is going to showcase what’s unique and special about their in-development or already released game in a series of fascinating mini-talks.

And Come Out And Play New York – the longest-running street games festival! – has submissions open for live games until 24 June (though the sooner the better, from the look of things): Have a great social, physical real-world game you want to share with the world?

Raise Haiku Ratio

At Now Play This last year, we ran a game called Woodlouse (created by Jake Simpson and Pete Morrish). To play Woodlouse, you think of words (like “woodlouse”) that have more vowels than consonants. That’s it. If a word qualifies, it’s “a woodlouse”.

When we ran the game, we had a big piece of paper with some marker pens nearby. We put instructions out, and I wrote up a few sample words (in different coloured pens, with an unconvincing attempt at faking different handwriting styles). Then we invited people to write up any woodlouses they could think of.

The History of Text Generation

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a lot of people write interestingly about computer-generated text – partly as a result of National Novel Generation Month, which ran through November and prompted some really lovely generated texts.

And as I read, I started wondering about the history of text generation. Not the twentieth century stuff, the Dadaists and William Burroughs and all the later work that happened once computers came into the picture. The old stuff, from the nineteenth century and before. “This won’t take long,” I thought. “There can’t have been much going on.”

So hey, I was up till 3 last night reading and guess what: it turns out I was really really wrong. There’s been a ton of text generation going on over the past thousand years, and it’s fascinating stuff. Most of it comes from writers who really feel like they’d be making deeply confusing experimental games if only they hadn’t died back in the 1680s.