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September 21, 2004
Play the text
R: We are exploring the potential of the Generic Game Engine (GGE) to read any text and to use that text to generate playable maps. This will allow us to do the comically vanguardist turn: to feed Baudrillard's text on simulation and simulacra into a game universe to be traversed by an intrepid player.
The Generic Game Engine (GGE) uses simple ascii files for its game data. Alphabetic characters are loaded into an array, and are referants to image files. The image files are the tiles of a map. Theoretically, any text could be parsed, so long as it is in ascii format, and a map generated. This lead us to wonder what different texts would "play" like. "How would Baudrillard or Foucault or Delueze and Guattari play?" And so we decided to give it a shot.
This post is advanced notice of an exploration. The bulk of this work is being done by Chad Schmidt. The timetable for development is uncertain, but it will be completed. Then we will be able to insert the text of Plato's cave into the engine and see how the shadows of the text play against the surface of the monitor.
Stay tuned...
Posted by SWEAT at September 21, 2004 02:55 PM