Decker – A HyperCard for the Web

I’m at the CSDH-SCHN conference which is in Montreal. We have relocated to U de Montreal from McGill where Congress is taking place. Jason Boyd gave a paper about the Centre for Digital Humanities at TMU that he directs. He mentioned an authoring environment called Decker that recreates a deck/card based environment similar to what HyperCard was like.

Decker can be used to create visual novels, interactive texts, hypertexts, educational apps, and small games. It has a programming language related to Lua. It has simple graphics tools.

Decker looks really neat and seems to work within a browser as a HTML page. This mean that you can Save As a page and get the development environment locally. All the code and data in a page that can be forked or passed around.

As a lover of HyperCard I am thrilled to see something that replicates its spirit!

Female Experience Simulator

I recently played the Female Experience Simulator after reading about it in the thesis of a student. It is a “text adventure” where you choose your wardrobe and then go somewhere. Inevitably you get harassed. The lesson of the game is,

Did you think that maybe if you changed your clothes or avoided certain places that you could avoid being harassed?

Yeah, it doesn’t work like that.

Welcome to life as a woman.

 

‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40 | Games | The Guardian

The developer of the text-adventure game on how, at 20, she overcame 1980s misogyny to turn a Tolkien book into one of the most groundbreaking titles in the gaming canon

The Guardian has a story on Veronika Megler who developed the innovative text (and image) adventure game The Hobbit (1982), ‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40. She went on to get a PhD and now is principal data scientist at Amazon Web Services!

You can now play The Hobbit on the Internet Archive.

Michael GRODEN Obituary

I just found out that Michael GRODEN (1947 – 2021) passed away a year ago. Groden was a member of CSDH/SCHN when it was called COCH/COSH and gave papers at our conferences. He developed an hypertext version of Ulysses that was never published because of rights issues. He did, however, talk about it. He did, however, publish about his ideas about hypertext editions of complex works like Ulysses. See his online CV for more.

The Lost Digital Poems (and Erotica) of William H. Dickey

In 1987, William H. Dickey, a San Francisco poet who had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award to launch his career and published nearly a dozen well-received books and chapbooks since, was …

Matthew Kirschenbaum has written a great essay on recovering early digital poetry, The Lost Digital Poems (and Erotica) of William H. Dickey ‹ Literary HubDickey wrote some HyperPoems on HyperCard and so now they are hard to access. Kirschenbaum rescued them and worked with people to add them to the Internet Archive that has a HyperCard emulator. Here is what Kirschenbaum says,

Dickey’s HyperPoems are artifacts of another time—made new and fresh again with current technology. Anyone with a web browser can read and explore them in their original format with no special software or setup. (They are organized into Volume 1 and Volume 2 at the Internet Archive, in keeping with their original organizational scheme; Volume 2 contains the erotica—NSFW!) But they are also a reminder that writers have treasures tucked away in digital shoeboxes and drawers. Floppy disks, or for that matter USB sticks and Google Docs, now keep the secrets of the creative process.

This essay comes from his work for his new book Bistreams which documents this and other recovery projects. I’ve just ordered a copy.

AI Dungeon and the Ethics of Text Generation

> You talk to yourself.

Hi I’m Rameau. You probably don’t know me, but since you’re reading this I’m going to assume you do indeed exist.

> You [ask why] i’m wondering what consciousness is.

I have no idea. But it’s fun to think about.Is this a person? No, because it’s conscious. Is it alive? No, because it doesn’t respond to external stimuli.

> You [ask] why does a person have to respond to external stimuli.

Because then we can interact with it!!!!!But isn’t consciousness an internal phenomenon? Then how would the person interact with anything else? Oh wait, that’s right. We’re not limited by our perception of reality.

I’ve been trying Latitude’s text generation game AI Dungeon. The game is built on Open AI’s GPT-3. You can see a bit of conversation I had with it in a cyberpunk world.

Latitude has gotten into trouble with Open AI because it seems that the game was generating erotic content featuring children. A number of people turned to AI Dungeon precisely because it could be used to explore adult themes, and that would seem to be a good thing, but then some may have gone too far. See the Wired story It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker. This raises interesting ethical issues about:

  • Why do so many players use it to generate erotic content?
  • Who is responsible for the erotic content? Open AI, Latitude, or the players?
  • Whether there are ethical reasons to generate erotic content featuring children? Do we forbid people from writing novels like Lolita?
  • How to prevent inappropriate content without crippling the AI? Are filters enough?

The problem of AIs generating toxic language is nicely shown by this web page on Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models. The interactives and graphs on the page let you see how toxic language can be generated by many of the popular language generation AIs. The problem seems to be the data sets used to train the machines like those that include scrapes of Reddit.

This exploratory tool illustrates research reported on in a paper titled RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models. You can see a neat visualization of the connected papers here.

Formality*

Formality* Screen Shot

Formality* is an interactive in browser art work about filling out forms to apply to “The Neighbourhood”. Formality* was developed in HyperCard by Ewan Atkinson and plays with the retro development environment. Having spent a lot of time on HyperCard I loved Atkinson’s use of the environment – he even has agents that can advise you (reminiscent of Brenda Laurel’s work). Formality* is part of a larger work called The Neighbourhood Project – it makes you wonder about how one becomes part of communities and the processes of applying to belong.

Writing with the machine

“…it’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder.”

Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, has been doing some interesting work with recursive neural nets in order to generate text. See Writing with the machine. He trained a machine on science fiction and then hooked it into a text editor so it can complete sentences. The New York Times has a nice story on Sloan’s experiments, Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists.

One wonders what it would be like if you trained it on your own writing. Would it help you be yourself or discourage you from rereading your prose?

 

John Stuart Mill marginalia project

Project to digitise and publish his marginalia online will allow scholars to see his cutting remarks on Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Guardian has a story on an interesting digital humanities project, JS Mill scribbles reveal he was far from a chilly Victorian intellectualThe project, Mill Marginalia Online, is digitizing an estimated 40,000 comments, doodles, and other marks that John Stuart Mill wrote in his collection of 1,700 books, now at Somerville College, Oxford. His collection was donated to Somerville 30 years after his death in 1905 because the women of the college weren’t allowed to access the Oxford libraries at the time.

His comments are not just scholarly notes. For example, above is an image of the title page of Emerson’s Essays that Mill added text to in order to mock it. The new title page with Mill’s penciled in elaboration and the original reads,

Philosophy Bourgeois,
being
Sentimental Essays: in the art of
Intimately blending
Sense and Nonsense:
by
R. W. Emerson,
of Concord, Massachusetts.
A clever + well organised youth brought up
in the old traditions.
Motto
In thought “all’s fish that comes to net.”
With Fog Preface
By Thomas Carlyle.
“Patent Divine-light Self-acting Foggometer”
To the Court of
Her mAJESTy Queen Vic.

A JEST indeed. The Daily Nous has an article on this with the title, Mill’s Myriad Marginalia: Mundane, Mysterious, Mocking.

All this from Humanist.

 

Dan Hett’s game “c ya laterrrr”

c ya laterrrr is text “game” by Dan Hett to document his experience after the Manchester terror attack when he lost his brother. “c ya laterrrr” was the last message he got from his brother. I found the game through an interview with the Guardian that talks about the games he is making. Another games that is less narration and more 8-bit graphics is the Loss Levels made with Pico-8.

As both games deal with the same event they make an interesting comparison of genres. I find the text adventure game much more effective for this subject as you feel the event unfold and the decisions give you a feeling for the experience.