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[Morroque]

http://revasser.net/studio/ex/noise/noise_main.php

This is my first game developed entirely with Javascript and HTML5. It was largely tested in Firefox, so I am looking for people who use different browsers to see if it will work with them too.

I am in a writing workshop right now. I'm mostly there because I want to learn how to write stories that people would have fun reading. The professor, to my chagrin, is not a novelist but one of those poets who writes "conceptual poetry" -- or a subtype thereof known only as "flarf". The objective within flarf is to "find language" and "reflect its awfulness" back at us. Techniques in flarf include collaging together Google results, making anagrams of Shakespearean sonnets, and "

" -- popularly known as "Misheard" Youtube videos.

Moskau and the Disneyland Hotel aside, I think the most of it is nonsense -- not just normal nonsense, but poorly written nonsense. If RACTER has taught me anything, human beings are far inferior to computers when it comes to the generation of nonsense. So I made a game which would unite the two fronts. ... but I guess all this is just an effort to get around actually being forced to write a flarf.

In Noise Collector, you must build your poem one letter at a time. Each letter must be in the sequence of the noise. The poem must be grammatically correct. The best poems should aim to use as many letters as possible.

The game will make a maximum of seven laps through the noise. It will no longer add to the poem upon the end of the seventh lap or if there are no requested letters left in the noise.

At the end, you can export your poem and the noise to an HTML file as word art. "Tall" is for printer-friendly for portrait settings. "Wide" is for widescreen display and printer-friendly for landscape settings. Use File → Save Page As within your browser to save the poem to your computer.

As a word game, I've found it both challengingly difficult and simply hilarious. The first semi-complete poem I was able to collect from the noise was:

"Glaucoma mode activated!" said Risotto, eyeing poached eggs in a bread doctor. Neon toots of jade bud into xenotypical uses of Ode to Tampei.
"Toil!" the Archdemon gasped, "Reality on web-platforms rave to my power!"
Risotto bats parade poets seeing noir crocodiles. Ending porn hoes wet nuts next to psychic gain.

The first poem which was able to get me through all seven laps was:

Run louder!

Relics rip Daron up Karl's despotic drive.

My secular mirror does not hunt sermons in ice troves.

I download "Lettuce Halcyon: Plagiarism Stigmatizes Dying Drivers" at liberal_ada.com.

Fans of poultry on helicopters all rule tea girl cottages.

Tics on depot nukes pee out rolls of data on molecular barrier kittens.

Vernacular froggy brothels reach long teepees with frosted organ failure.

Parental mutts pee on liquid ham gramophones - no buds poor enough.

At a regal gig, rugs vilify cream recipes on omniscient realities.

Scratch madly! Yap each death logarithmically!

Steam ruckus gently booms calendars more than Fukuyama damns reel tape points on loam.

Crackle away! Wait for queens to lave open lemons to Greece!

Fie! Bytes free beds as bit cars tilt to cobalt daunts. Shush breezes! Trap stammers!

Since games are partly social phenomenon, I'm sort of wondering how I can make this game competitive or collaborative. One idea is to have a high scores board. Another idea is to curate an archive of poems/word art made within the game. Another idea would be to have a "versus" mode where two players are sent the same block of noise and whoever can make a poem with the highest score in a time limit would win. I'm still new to Javascript and HTML5, so I don't know how much of it would be possible from a code-perspective -- aside from an archive, which would need to be done by hand. I'm curious to know if anyone else have more ideas on this front.

Please post the poems you wrote within the noise collector. I'm sure it'll gain us a few laughs.

[mcc]

When I click at the big graphic up top, I get a 404 page.

[Morroque]

Oh, good catch. Thanks.

[SFBTom]

Are you planning to have a system in place to detect whether the poem is grammatically correct? Or will that be left up to the curator/high score system?

I think that right now, there's a pretty high barrier to entry, in that you actually have to write something from scratch, albeit within these constraints. I can see it being a fun tool/game for actual writers, but it's a big turn off for non-writers myself. 

I'm reminded of the fridge magnet poetry sets, and how popular those are. Perhaps adapting the game to full words would make it more accessible to more people?

[wilbefast]

Brilliant :D I do love ridiculous poetry "Twas brillig and the slithey toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe" - or something like that... 

My poem got as far as:

"Eml is a tree,
Ripe ages dry mob-man Tori,
Tree I am Nell."

Which has a great symmetry to it I think. Is there some way of saving the poem+noise so you can come back to it later? Also it was rather difficult at first to tell the difference between the colours for used and unused letters. I would use too vastly different colours and also crossed out all the intermediate letters so the player knows that the ones they skipped are effectively lost.

All told it's an awesome idea and a lot of fun, but a little tricky at first to figure out what you're supposed to be doing because there isn't much in the way of visual feedback.

I also agree with SFBTom: an integrated spell-checker would be great - maybe you could somehow plug it into Google. Google does everything these day 

[george]

this is a lot of fun! Some feedback:

* are you drawing the letters as images? When I increased the size the glyphs were pretty blurry, it'd be nicer if you could resize and get sharper text.

* It would be cool if the section of text around the cursor was bigger than the surrounding text, to help you focus more, otherwise I found myself just writing whatever assuming the letters would be in there.

* A number indicating what lap you're on would be good.

I think a simultaneous as well as asynchronous versus mode would be awesome. You also could post poems side by side and have users vote on their favorite (I was actually thinking of doing a poetry fight or poetry trainer like that for Versus called poemkata, but my ideas were too vague, this is a great show of what can be done with something along those lines).

Anyway, really cool idea, nice work!

And the noise:

I hive it more than you
could you foot the replication
blasting through natural selection
granular and without truth

drums sussurate http
digital neolithicity
mp complicity
state came and went
without intent

pulmonary axes
allay crusty taxes
rats and saxes
what relaxes

crumbling seems
in om kernel dreams
channel scores rule the floors
beehives are drying
I am not minding

it separated
ur takes time
use stone sonic erasure
burst faces feature elder scullery tasters

make it son

[Morroque]

Are you planning to have a system in place to detect whether the poem is grammatically correct? Or will that be left up to the curator/high score system?

Unfortunately, the grammar rule is self-imposed. Poetry is very flux. Sentences don't need to have periods and sum laynggauge moight bieh purrrpused lee tweisssted to poetic effect.

It will be up to the curator/editor of the archive. This would be no different from the normal "game" poets play called "publication."

I'm reminded of the fridge magnet poetry sets, and how popular those are. Perhaps adapting the game to full words would make it more accessible to more people?

Not half bad of an idea. However, something like that would probably be a game or iPad app of its own. Besides, it wouldn't be "noise" like this is now. Maybe that should be the next project.

Which has a great symmetry to it I think. Is there some way of saving the poem+noise so you can come back to it later?

I could probably do it with cookies, saving and loading only one poem at a time. I'll need to look into it. Though, I wouldn't want to get any antivirus programs mad at my website.

Are you drawing the letters as images? When I increased the size the glyphs were pretty blurry, it'd be nicer if you could resize and get sharper text.

Canvas text is supposed to be a vector format. I don't know why it would blur. Maybe it is something typical of the way Firefox enlarges webpages?

A number indicating what lap you're on would be good.

It's already there, though no obvious. I once had it labeled "LAP: 1 / 7" in the top left, but I thought it was distracting from looking at the text.

I think a simultaneous as well as asynchronous versus mode would be awesome. You also could post poems side by side and have users vote on their favorite.

Yeah, I think this is the route to go. Sadly, I might have to leave Javascript and HTML5 to make a proper stand-alone-executable for a network system to achieve that.

*sigh* Maybe next version...

[Glaiel-Gamer]

doesnt work in safari

[Morroque]

All right. So far I've confirmed this:

WORKS IN	DOES NOT
Firefox Chrome	Internet Explorer Safari

Any Oprea users around?

[Noyb]

I absolutely love this concept of using random noise as inspiration.
I really like how the original set of random letters gets colored as you go through multiple laps.

I see your point about the social aspect. I imagine this having a reddit-style voting system, where users could upvote or downvote poems, hopefully highlighting the more interesting poems within a certain context (time and score? Separate categories for using all "proper" words, profane poems segregated to yet another bracket.)

I would love to see a version which suggests a few words beginning with the next few possible letters. Perhaps as a "hint" button for further inspiration if a user is "stuck." It seems to me that the act of creating art is perhaps more interesting than trying to get a high score without "cheating."