[Purple-Blurb] Fall 2012 events! The first one in less than a week...

[Nick Montfort]

Dear Purple Blurb friends,

We have two great events with four great people (or -- let's be modest -- 
three great people and me) set up for this semester at MIT.

We begin on Monday, in less than a week, with a public conversation 
between three computational creativity researchers about their systems for 
literary generation. On November 8, we have another event with an 
experimental game designer who will tell us about her current project to 
embody Thoreau's "Walden" experiment in a game.

Please join us! Here are the details:


Monday
October 1, 5:30pm in 6-120

Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Fox Harrell, and Nick Montfort
In conversation about narrative generation and MEXICA, GRIOT, and 
Curveship

Three creators of poetic and imaginative systems speak about computational 
creativity, narrative generation, and the way systems for this sort of 
work are culturally generated. Rafael Pérez y Pérez is creator of the 
plot-focused MEXICA system for the generation of stories and is 
Profesor/Investigador Titular C in the Departamento de Tecnologías de la 
Información at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, 
México D. F. Fox Harrell is creator of GRIOT and the Alloy algorithm, 
which generates literary and multimedia texts based on conceptual 
structures. Harrell is associate professor of digital media at MIT in 
CMS/WHS, a principal investigator at CSAIL, and head of the Imagination, 
Computation, and Expression Laboratory. Nick Montfort developed Curveship, 
an interactive fiction and text generation systems that allows for 
parametrically controlled narrative variation. Montfort is associate 
professor of digital media at MIT in CMS/WHS and head of the Trope Tank.


Thursday
November 8, 5:30pm in 32-155

Tracy Fullerton
"Finer Fruits: Experiment in Life and Play at Walden"
A joint event with the CMS Colloquium

Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in 
living. The game simulates Henry David Thoreau's experiment in living a 
simplified existence as articulated in his book Walden. It puts Thoreau's 
ideas about the essentials of life into a playable form, in which players 
can take on the role of Thoreau, attending to the "meaner" tasks of life 
at the Pond - providing themselves with food, fuel, shelter and clothing - 
while trying not to lose sight of their relationship to nature, where the 
Thoreau found the true rewards of his experiment, his "finer fruits" of 
life. The game is a work in progress, and this talk will look closely at 
the design of the underlying system and the cycles of thought that have 
gone into developing it. It will also detail the creation of the game 
world, which is based on close readings of Thoreau's work, and the 
projected path forward for the team as we continue our sojourn in 
experimental in play.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and 
director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts 
where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive 
Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that 
has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, 
Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night 
Journey - a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the 
author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating 
Innovative Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.


As always, all events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb 
series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Comparative Media 
Studies / Writing and Humanistic Studies.

  -Nick

--
  Nick Montfort - nickm at nickm.com - http://nickm.com
      MIT - 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233 - Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 - USA

- Associate Professor of Digital Media, MIT
- Associate Head, Comparative Media Studies / Writing & Humanistic Studies
- Director, The Trope Tank - http://trope-tank.mit.edu
- President, The Electronic Literature Organization - http://eliterature.org