WRT: Writer Response Theory

There are some histories of new media around,?such as Stuart Moulthrop’s?Subjective Chronology of Cybertext, Hypertext and Electronic Writing; and D. DaCosta’s Influences, which juxtaposes some key technological points in time with installation, video and performance art; and how about the long-overdue Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology??But I haven’t seen a timeline that lists […]

11:13 pm: The dark highway rolls out before you. In a few hours you’ll be heading out of town with a sweet young thang. As you drive, all you can think about is — WHOMP-CRERR-FLONK — a body-shaped object smashes the windshield and when you look up the car is in a ditch. All you […]

When a digital artwork, game, or story exists in many forms across many hardware and software systems, what is the ‘real’ work, and do we experience it differently?
Right now I’m thinking about that ur-interactive fiction, Adventure (a.k.a. ADVENT, Colossal Cave Adventure, etc.) - which through its complex history has been both massively cross-platform and massively […]

Bob Norris, administrator of the Bot Central forum, has renewed a monthly competition for producers of chatbots: The World Chatterbot Competition. This is the first monthly competition for conversational agents (that I’m aware of ), but surely not the first competition for chatbots or even other forms of elit.

P.J. Hruschak’s Timeline of notable video game villians (2006-01-18) has a whimsical “evolutionary highlight of evil” angle. The first three entries are

1958-76 The Dot (Pong)
1977 The Word ‘GRUE’ (Zork)
1978 2D Monochromatic Aliens (Space Invaders)

Hruschak uses a 1977 development date for Zork (rather than the mass commercial release, 1980) in order to get a nice evolutionary […]