I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Lars
Hm. I would suggest dramatic texts. Quake 3 is, after all, mainly a multiplayer game. Imagine a deathmatch mode for TextQuake. Opponents would have to negotiate the textual playing ground (the context, so to speak) while employing various game objects and mechanics to bring about the demise of other players and ensure their own survival. Around every corner you could stumble upon someone wielding a îdark secret from the pastî or îsudden appearance of an unexpected guestî, while from a nearby tower of intricate backstory a sniper might be homing in on you with his îvengeful betrayed loverî. Time to fire up your îdeus ex machinaeî if youíve got it, or else make a run for cover behind the conveniently placed barrel of comic relief while firing off a volley of mistaken identities to cover your tracks and using a longeur to win time and catch your breath. If you get hit, you could always use a pack of good one-liners to get back in the action. Good fun, no? Now imagine a multiplayer deathmatch on the absurdist or surrealist levels…
nick
First, a pedantic Quake note: It’s the Quake 3 Arena source that was just released. The Quake source code has been available for several years.
As I mentioned on WRT, there are two textual Quake projects, different than the one Jeremy envisions, that were done a while ago: Textmode Quake (can be played in a console window, without graphics) and IF Quake (an interactive fiction “implementation” of Quake). Textmode Quake screenshots … IF Quake screenshots.
A textual Quake 3 Arena could make for a fun and provocative art project, but as far as literature on the computer is concerned, I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in the standard 2D planar arrangement of words. Besides, after all that work, most people would just watch the movie files or look at the screenshots.
Jamie
It sounds interesting, but the AVI files don’t show any text, and the geographical locations are barely recognizable as locations. Jill, did you have any problems viewing the movies?
Jill
Oh, Lars, that’s wonderful! Nick, thanks for the info. Jamie, sorry for the badly constructed paragraph, it looked as though the movies files were of TextQuake, but TextQuake is in fact merely Jeremy’s idea, not an actual game. The videos are of an art game built with the Quake engine. I fixed the paragraph a little bit to make that more clear.
Friday femmes fatales No 20 - Philobiblon
[…] Still on the literary side, but very much at the cutting edge, Jill/txt is musing on the possibilities unleashed by the release of the source code of the early 3d first-person shooter Quake. The idea, as I understand it in my largely “old literature” mind, is to turn it into a three-dimensional narrative. I’m interested in this because it seems to me there must someday pretty soon be a real breakthrough in the nature of popular fiction into a new form exploiting all of the possibilities of the web. But it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. […]
Jeremy Douglass
I’m having a rhizomatic blogging moment – I was just looking for more work
by Jeremy Bushnell, and stumbled upon my own mistaken identity.
I’m actually the Jeremy who blogged about TextQuake – after these posts we met at DAC2005. Jeremy Bushnell is the author of the serialized web narrative Imaginary Year.
Funny, as a J. Douglass in interactive narrative, I normally worry more about getting confused with J. Yellowlees Douglas. Namespaces do strange things….
Jill
Oh god. I hate getting names wrong – I’m so sorry, Jeremy! Fixed it. Thanks!
Jeremy Bushnell
Oddly, years later, I would write about Jeremy Douglass in a critical paper, without ever knowing that he had known who I was.