computer programming

The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that "Atari" became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games. (Source: The MIT Press)

In September 2008 Jim Andrews shared with me the “Arteroids Development Folder:” a collection of drafts, versions, source files, and other materials that document the work that led to the publication of his “poetic shoot 'em up" Arteroids (http://www.vispo.com/arteroids/index.htm).

Jim Andrews is a programmer, poet, and musician who explores the poetic potential of language in the computer by programming elaborate behaviors to transform linguistic texts. Arteroids creates an interface based on the classic 1970s arcade video game Asteroids, where the player/reader controls the motion of the word “poetry” on the screen and fires at other words floating on the screen. The reader can change or add words to the game, personalizing its lexicon, and modifying the conditions by which they interact with the text. Arteroids is a milestone in Andrews’ artistic development because of its ambition and complexity both as a work of electronic poetry and as a work of programming. More than any of his works to date, Arteroids brings it all together—vispo (visual poetry), vismu (visual music), and interactivity—in a work that references the most native genre in computerized entertainment: the videogame.

Jim Andrews started working on his literary computer game Arteroids in 2001 when his work on Nio helped him receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. The earliest versions were titled "Webarteroids", preparing him to publish Arteroids 1.0 in The Remedi Project in 2002. He published version 2.02 to participate in the Augustart show in New York City (August 24 to September 2, 2002) and published version 2.5 in the Fall of 2003 issue of the electronic poetry magazine Poems that Go. The most recent version (3.11) was published in Vispo.com in August of 2006

The three versions currently available online—1.0, 2.5, and 3.11—are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg for an editorial study, because the Arteroids Development Folder contains over fifty different versions of the work in Director MX2004 files, Shockwave movies, HTML publication pages for these files, at least one commented version of Arteroids 1.0 prepared for submission to the Canada Council, Microsoft Word files with drafts of essays written to accompany the e-poem, the documented source code for Arteroids 1.0, sound files, images, Flash animations, letters, and much more. These materials are a gold mine of information for a scholar interested in studying Arteroids in depth as a work of e-literature, as a first generation electronic object, as a computer game, and as a record of an artist’s work with programmable media.

(Soruce: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

People draw on many diverse sources of real-world knowledge in order to make up stories, including the following: knowledge of the physical world; rules of social behavior and relationships; techniques for solving everyday problems such as transportation, acquisition of objects, and acquisition of information; knowledge about physical needs such as hunger and thirst; knowledge about stories their organization and contents; knowledge about planning behavior and the relationships between kinds of goals; and knowledge about expressing a story in a natural language. This thesis describes a computer program which uses all information to write stories. The areas of knowledge, called problem domains, are defined by a set of representational primitives, a set of problems expressed in terms of those primitives, and a set of procedures for solving those problems. These may vary from one domain to the next. All this specialized knowledge must be integrated in order to accomplish a task such as storytelling. The program, called TALE-SPIN, produces stories in English, interacting with the user, who specifies characters, personality characteristics, and relationships between characters. Operating in a different mode, the program can make those decisions in order to produce Aesop-like fables.

(Source: Author's abstract)