Nevertheless, I keeping wondering: where are those communities? How do we find and access them?

Certainly we can create our own: small, localized ones, like artists’ collectives, reading groups, and group blogs. We can find bulletin/posting boards online. We can tap into larger communities like Reddit. We can find new ways, and experiment. I see [auto mata] as a good example of an experiment in dissemination via aggregation, as an alternative means of credentialing work, and as something that could have played a role in much larger conversations–instead of impinging upon such conversations, as older modes of production and distribution often can.

It’s a good idea. So why aren’t more people doing it? Where are the journals, the presses, the labels? I sympathize with what MadArchitect was suggesting–that such efforts haven’t done enough to attract artists–but at the same time, it’s clear that [auto mata] was, at least initially, intended as a means of self-publication, and so was not separate from the published artists in the way MadArchitect suggests. So maybe we’re comparing apples and oranges there?

And maybe it suggests that we should be looking for something somewhere in the middle, between self-publication and traditional models of publication?

A. J., first off, I took at close look at AFEELD and enjoyed it – particularly in how it straddles the line between visual poetry and a visual poetry creation kit. M!nesweeper is a nice addition to the category where we can find Jim Andrews’ Arteroids.

Your case parallels our in one important way, at least: You’re doing “crossover” work that has elements of and appeal to those people who are stereotypically called gamers, while it also connects to literary traditions and has literary goals. I think a label (or other intervention) could be particularly useful in a situation like this, when existing categories and portals don’t reflect the new pieces being produced. Going beyond the standard categories was part of the point of [auto mata].

MadArchitect, indeed, [auto mata] didn’t have anything as grandiose as a “funcitonal logic” – but then, Grand Text Auto didn’t, either, and it did pretty well. There were group blogs in which authors had to submit a certain number of articles per week or be dropped from the list; on commercial sites, of course, things were more highly structured and stories could be assigned so that certain topics or subsites would be sure to have material. We just decided to write together, on one blog rather than six, and the conversation, comments, related posts, and even panel discussions and exhibitions developed out of that without much planning. So, perhaps “guilt by association” is enough in the case of a blog, but not enough in the case of a label or other entity that mainly undertakes publication rather than collaborative writing or the co-creation of work.

It’s an interesting thought to have the support of “studio cats” who, instead of being on hand for recording sessions, could code, provide artwork, and so on. I suppose I’ve never felt held back in my own work by a lack of such participants. My own practice is an alternative to the industrial model rather than an attempt to create a miniature version of that model, with coding and art parceled out to employees. (At least, it’s an alternative to today’s industrial model. In terms of how I work, I feel quite a bit of affinity with Infocom author/programmers and Atari’s programmer/designers who worked on the VCS.) And I think everyone in Grand Text Auto, even those who used fabrication expertise to build their joysticks or voice actors for the interactive drama – was pretty much on this side. But perhaps there are some services, such as those typically provided by publicists and agents, that people like us would be interested in passing along to a (somehow funded) label.

josemanuel, I think you’re right that our focus was too narrow – we had only two titles, after all. In part, I think we didn’t want to try to replace the publishers, galleries, etc. that were already working well. We also didn’t have in mind that the label would increase sales as opposed to increasing downloads and access to free work. Setting up a storefront, a merchant account, credit card processing, accounting, and so on would have been a different can of worms. Perhaps it’s one that should be opened, though. Or perhaps small-scale works should have been given a place alongside the large-scale ones we featured. In any case, there should have been a large enough amount of material for guilt by association to do its thing.

That said, my opinion is that [auto mata] could have worked better if it had been conceived not as a revolution but as an evolution, and by this I mean that it could have been used to publish IF, digital art, regular books, ebooks, records or even t-shirts and other merchandise. Using this approach, you can bring together many kinds of authors under the same roof: poets, novelists, IF authors, musicians, visual artists, etc., and take advantage of the synergies among them. It would also have gotten the label a broader market (had that been the intention).

It does seem to me that having some sort of “guilt by association” model of distribution and branding would be good for the IF community, but given how easy it is to simply upload a game to any number of archives and distribute it that way, I don’t think a digital-only label is going to have any sort of lasting hold. It will always have to answer the question, what does it bring to the table that the author wouldn’t have without it. If it were shipping games in a physical medium, that would at least be an argument in favor of having a label, but then you have to answer the related question, does anyone want to buy IF on a physical media? (The answer, presumably, is “sometimes,” but maybe not enough to keep a label solvent.)

One way a label could conceivably justify its own existence is by provided services roughly analogous to those that a record label provides for bands. In-house artists could provide art work. In-house coders could actually write substantial portions of the code. The label could make available proprietary packages that round out the parser. All of which relieves the author of some of the pressures that attend solo game design, and could be used to give games released by the label a common, signature aesthetic.

Of course, the next question would be, how would the label pay for all of that? And for that, I have no handy answer. But the [auto mata] concept does seem to me like a step in the right direction, one that looks for some model other than the mostly defunct Infocom packaged game-and-feelies model while hopefully pushing IF to audiences that the comp-driven model has yet to reach.