The big event, interactive fiction’s Oscars, was held Sunday March 20th at 4pm EST (9pm GMT), on ifMUD. Now ifwiki has the list of 2004 XYZZY winners.
Mystery House Taken Over
The MHTO Occupation Force is pleased to announce the launch of Mystery House Taken Over.
The Mystery House Advance Team — including ELO board member Nick Montfort, working with Dan Shiovitz and Emily Short — has reverse engineered Mystery House, the first text-and-graphics adventure game. Members of the Advance Team have reimplemented it in a modern, cross-platform, free language for interactive fiction development, and have fashioned a kit to allow others to easily modify this early game. Read more Mystery House Taken Over
ELit at GDC
A number of events at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference have connections to electronic literature, including the panel discussion Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories and presentations of computer game concepts based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson (by Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux, and Will Wright).
The Institute for the Future of the Book
Bob Stein, the founder of the late 80s/early 90s CD-ROM publisher Voyager, has moved from Nightkitchen (the e-book development platform his team developed from the mid 90s until earlier in this decade) to The Institute for the Future of the Book, which was founded last year. It looks like many aspects of Nightkitchen will be preserved within the Institute, but moved from a for-profit to a not-for-profit framework. The Institute for the Future of Book has secured generous funding from the Mellon Foundation (a $1.3 million grant), the MacArthur Foundation, and its colocated host institutions, The Annnenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. Read more The Institute for the Future of the Book
Digital Arts and Culture 2005
The 6th Digital Arts and Culture Conference will take place at the IT University in Copenhagen on December 1-3, 2005. “Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice” is the tag line for this conference. Deadline: August 8. You can read about the history of DAC and the organization of the current conference; also, see the CFP.
ELO Partnership with University of Iowa
The University of Iowa has announced its partnership with the ELO. The partnership was initiated by Thom Swiss, a professor of English and the Rhetoric of Inquiry at Iowa who is the new president of the organization. The ELO is based at UCLA; this partnership initiates a new form of the organization, where different campuses will be able to participate as “nodes,” helping the ELO reach its goals in different ways.
ELO Elects New Officers
ELO has elected a new slate of officers. Thom Swiss of the University of Iowa Department of English and editor of The Iowa Review Web succedes Margie Luesebrink as president; Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin become co-vice presidents; and Scott Rettberg succedes Celia O’Donnell in the post of treasurer. Rob Swigart continues as secretary for another term. Margie Luesebrink and Celia O’Donnell will continue to serve on the board of directors.
Re: Writing–Writers, Computers, and Networks
“Re: Writing–Writers, Computers, and Networks” will feature readings by ELO board members Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, along with performances by Thalia Field and John Cayley. Co-organized and presented with turbulence.org, and funded by the LEF Foundation and Literary Arts, Brown University, the event will take place during the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival, on April 25 in Providence, and at the Boston Public Library on April 26.
Thom Swiss “Word and Image” Lecture
ELO president and University of Iowa professor of English Thom Swiss will present the annual “Word and Image” lecture at Boston University on May 4, 2005, in conjunction with the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Deadlines Extended for Three (dis)junctions Panels
The deadlines for submission to three panels at the (dis)junctions: theory reloaded graduate conference at UC Riverside have been extended to February 12, 2005: “Chatbots, IF, and Textual Exchange”; “Original Hypermedia, Net.Art, Mods, Flash”‘; and “Eliterature and Cybertext Theory”. For the complete CFPs, visit the global_interface Mellon Workshop website. The conference will take place April 8-9, 2005.