Nick Montfort - Concrete Poems
26This talk is from the 2016 Roguelike Celebration: https://roguelike.club/event.html, re-uploaded 2021. The audio for the introduction on the stream was cut off by music; audio begins at 2:21.
Levels of Rogue are virtual spaces, but also typographical grids that relate to a 1st century Latin word square, typewriters from the 19th century, concrete poetry and visual art in the 20th century, and preceding computer games. By considering the history of monospace type, character sets, and the visual arrangement of punctuation and letters, along with the ways language has been inscribed by hand, by machine, and digitally, it's possible to see new genealogies for roguelikes and new contributions these games have made.
Nick Montfort works in creative computing, particularly as it relates to language and text. He develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively. He studies video and computer games, popular and obfuscated programming, digital poetry and other electronic literature, demoscene productions, and aspects of computing that are less easily classified. He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston.