Theoretical work suggests that structural properties of naturally occurring networks are important in shaping behavior and dynamics. However, the relationships between structure and behavior are difficult to establish through empirical studies, because the networks in such studies are typically fixed. We studied networks of human subjects attempting to solve the graph or network coloring problem, which models settings in which it is desirable to distinguish one's behavior from that of one's network neighbors. Networks generated by preferential attachment made solving the coloring problem more difficult than did networks based on cyclical structures, and "small worlds" networks were easier still. We also showed that providing more information can have opposite effects on performance, depending on network structure.

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A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS. The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a video game 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 video game 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.

A single line of code offers a way to understand the cultural context of computing. This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.

Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that, for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or moving the narrator in time, the system can determine grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style. Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but extremely inflexible. The development of the system has suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a simple sequence.