Book (Ph.D. dissertation)

This thesis explores a niche field of Computer Science called Interactive Fiction, a field that utilizes the conventions of a regular story to offer multiple variations on how the story plays out. Our goal is to explore the possibility of developing a game that can generate a story file during game play that not only reads like a short story but reflects the events that transpire during a given game play. During development, we have determined that keeping track of various "states", we can simulate a narrative based on actions that transpire in the game.

We developed the game using a language called Inform 7. Inform 7 is a language developed for Interactive Fiction. It contains classes with functionality similar to real-life objects from a narrative stand-point and provides a system of rules that can be edited to simulate real-life actions and events. The language also bases its syntax on English and is thus easy to read and understand.

This dissertation is part critical essay and part poetry collection. The critical essay, “Flipping the Script: On the Pedagogical Relevance of Teaching Digital Creative Writing,” examines the benefits of digital creative writing, i.e. text-based, literary work that requires digital technology at every stage of existence, by organizing those benefits into five categories, or nodes: poiesis, literacy, identification, authority, and cognition. Then, it argues that digital creative writing, like print creative writing, reinforces and extends the goal of liberal education, i.e. to promote creative, critical, and conscientious citizens. As students read, or interact with, and construct their own digital literary objects, they simultaneously learn to read, interact with, and construct their various selves and knowledge. As for the poems in the collection, they act, in Pound’s words, as “radiant node[s] . . . from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” They enact a broad conception of the literary, one characterized by connectivity, interactivity, multimediality, non-linearity, performativity, and transformability, features that coincide with those of digital literary works. Diverse with regard to style, the poems narrate the mind and body at play amid the world’s charged states. The poems cohere around concepts and associations attendant to the anode, node, and ode. The “anode” poems explore relationships among larger cultural forces (e.g. poetry, art, identity, and politics). The “node” poems explore autobiography through the lens of experimental biopic. And the “ode” poems explore and destabilize the ode and its conventions. Ultimately, the work responds to its environment and strives to contain a world that resists being contained.

Stories in released games are still based largely on static and predetermined structures, despite decades of academic work to make them more dynamic. Making game narratives more playable is an important step in the evolution of games and playable media as culturally relevant art forms. In the same way interactive systems help students learn about complicated subjects like physics in a more intuitive and immediate way than static texts, more dynamic interactive stories open up new ways of understanding people and situations. Such dreams remain mostly unrealized in released and playable games.

In this dissertation I will describe a number of design and technical solutions to the problem of creating more expressive and dynamic storygames, informed by a practice-based approach to game production. I will first define a framework for the analysis of games, including especially the terms storygame (a playable system with units of narrative where the understanding of the interconnectedness between story and system is crucial) and the notion of narrative logics (the set of processes that define how player input affects the next unit of story presented by the system). I will exercise this framework on an existing and well-known storygame genre, the adventure game, and use it to make a number of claims about the mechanics and dynamics of narratives in this genre that are borne out by an analysis of how contemporary games adopting some of its aesthetics succeed and fail. I will then describe three emerging storygame modes that are still in the process of being defined, developing a critical framework for each informed by close readings and historical analysis, and considering what design and technical innovations are required to fully realize the new mode's potential. These three modes I discuss are sculptural fiction (which shifts the focus from navigating to building a structure of narrative nodes), social simulation (games that explore the possibility space created by a set of simulated characters and rules for social interaction), and collaborative storygames (in which the lexia are generated at least in part by the participants during play). Each theoretical chapter is paired with a case study of one or several fully completed and released games I have created or co-created in that mode, to see how these design ideas were realized and technical advancements implemented in practice. I will conclude each section with applied advice for game makers hoping to work in these new spaces, and new technological developments that will help storygames continue to evolve and prosper

The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break. I argue that these poems, by breaking, challenge systems that support institutional racism, violence, economic disparity, and other unjust social phenomena. I then explore poetic breakage in live performance. I look specifically at the Black Took Collective, a group of performance poets who utilize digital media in live performance to subvert expectations that an audience might have regarding race, gender, and poetry’s place in the academy. The final chapter is a demonstration of practice-based research and a discussion of the role of this kind of research in an evolving English department. I offer two examples of practice-based research in literary studies: Poemedia 2.0 and The Denver Poetry Map.

Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.

The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.

As the subject of this study concerns a variety of disciplines, this research has been conducted in an extremely interdisciplinary way in order to develop a thorough understanding of the narrative app. In general, it has consulted scholarship in children’s literature (picturebook studies in particular), narratology, computer science, game studies, social semiotics, film studies, media studies, communication studies, electronic literature and game design.

With this interdisciplinary approach, this study has attempted to define the subject of the study, identify some tendencies in its development, and most importantly, develop an original theory of storytelling and a narrative map that may be able to explain the intrinsic methods used in the narrative app storytelling as well as other digital and non-digital storytelling. The findings of this study seem to suggest that the narrative app does not display any essential differences from the codex and other forms of literature in terms of its narrative strategies, but it appears to have great potential to truly innovate storytelling.

It is suggested that this study may provide an effective theoretical scope and methodology for the study of the field of digital children’s literature, which may offer the potential to strengthen this field of research. The theoretical framework constructed by this study may be applicable to some educational approaches to the narrative app, and may also be useful for teaching new literacies.

Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes. The overarching purpose of this project is to engage the question, “What is electronic literature?” and while readily conceding the force of advancing technologies bring to bear broadly on the production, distribution, and consumption of literature, the thrust of the argument resists conflating “literature” with its medium or delivery technology. Chapter one reorients the question of electronic literature by focusing first on the more anterior question, “What is literature?”—remembering Derrida’s caution in pursuing any ontological delimitation and drawing on the work of Peggy Kamuf among others to assist in parsing a response. Chapter two considers what is essentially new in electronic literature and argues against Hayles’s accounting of media specificity as it underwrites new configurations of literarity. Chapter three attends the question of literarity in the form of ‘monsters’ and reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside The Unknown (Scott Rettberg et al. 1999), asking if and in what ways linguistic practices marking Ulysses a definitive act of “literature” can be found at play in electronic literature as well.

Since the 1980s, experimental poets of Asian descent writing in English around the world have created works informed by both their experiences of being in the Asian diaspora and their subjectivities in the age of advancing computing technologies. Studies of these works have been scarce and few have put them all together in order to make an argument about how to read them in connection with each other. The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for what I call the diasporic reading framework, and to argue that this way of reading fills in crucial gaps in our understandings of experimental Asian poetry.

The diasporic reading framework uses diaspora, in this specific case the Asian diaspora, as a concept that helps us interpret the techniques, forms, and content of digitally-influenced poetry produced since the 1980s. In turn, this reading also allows us to see how the experimentations of these poets enrich the conventional categorizations of Asian diasporic writing. To this end, I gather an archive of literary works that includes the poetry of more renowned and canonically accepted poets (e.g. Leung Ping-kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Wah) as well as less easily categorized genres by lesser known individuals and groups (e.g. multi-media works, blogs, public projects) in order to read them together productively.

The first chapter of my dissertation uses poetry from Hong Kong as a case study to establish my definition of diaspora and build a theoretical basis for using it as a reading framework. The second chapter takes this framework and applies it to works beyond Hong Kong, demonstrating its portability as well as showing how the abstraction of shared land into non-physical spaces is a powerful way to understand works that have previously been considered only post-colonialist, only nationalist, or only feminist. Chapter three applies this reading further to works that experiment with form using digital technology, and the final chapter revisits previous themes in light of new advances in social media. I conclude that the political stakes of diaspora as a reading framework is its function as a tactic against hegemony.

Electronic literature (e-lit) constitutes one of the most innovative and exciting literary forms occurring today; it is the unique child of this new technological age. Scandinavian e-lit is no exception, yet it has frequently been overlooked by literary academics in both the United States and Scandinavia. This dissertation investigates how Scandinavian e-lit engages with printed Scandinavian literature, and how critical analysis of Scandinavian literature can benefit from an understanding of e-lit. In this dissertation I argue that, far from relegation to the outer margins of Scandinavian literary research and studies, Scandinavian e-lit, and scholarship on such works, ought to occupy a central position in the field, alongside print-based counterparts. Such a shift in focus would create a new vantage point from which Scandinavianists could analyze canonical and contemporary works of print-based Scandinavian literature.

Chapter one addresses the effect of the corporeal body on the electronic text and the reading experience, while the second chapter examines Scandinavian works of e-lit to investigate how these resemble and/or distinguish themselves from codex-based literature. Chapter three provides a detailed, close reading of Primärdirektivet/The Prime Directive by Swedish poet-artist Johannes Heldén, as an example of analytical approaches to works with multi-modal capacities. Finally, chapter four discusses the institutional support, and new analytical tools Scandinavian literary scholars are developing to effectively research, evaluate, and teach this form of literature. In short, this dissertation explores what Scandinavian e-lit is, what its relationship to conventional literature is, how it functions, and how we can understand it.

My hope is that future Scandinavian literary scholarship, and academic study will not only incorporate works of Scandinavian e-lit into these activities, but that their inclusion will become routine. Integrating the study of e-lit into established literary practice not only offers opportunities to understand literary movements, themes, styles and relationships among works of Scandinavian literature (as its print-based counterpart does), but it also affords the opportunity to reconsider the nature and potential of literature itself. As such, it is a bright field of potential, as well as an innovative, fascinating form of contemporary literary art.

In searching for literary models for digital writing, current scholarship will often suggest James Joyce, yet pioneering writers working directly indigital forms looked repeatedly instead to British Romantic authors. This dissertation examines the early history of electronic literature, showing the significance of a Romantic tradition with which a selection of digital authors self-consciously identified themselves and their goals. Electronic literature is an emerging genre of literary works which are designed to be read on a computer, and by focusing on the pre-Web 2.0 era, my project looks specifically to the largely text-based sub-genres of interactive fiction and hypertext fiction, non-linear works which respectively enable progression through text inputs from users or clicking hyperlinks. Though many major scholars of digital humanities are Romanticists by training, the critical history of electronic literature focuses heavily on the genre’s modernist and postmodernist contexts. Expanding our set of media histories, my dissertation offers a new genealogy of electronic writing. An early work of interactive fiction, for instance, A Mind Forever Voyaging, draws specifically on William Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic poem The Prelude in its vision of datascapes, the value of the imagination inforesight, and the role of a witnessing subject in recording social changes. A few years later, in developing the first work of hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce is thinking explicitly of Goethe, Keats, Byron, and Mary Shelley in envisioning what this new medium could become. The influence of Mary Shelley in particular on hypertext is established already through Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, one of the most widely analyzed works of hypertext, a story of Shelley piecing back together the female creature from Frankenstein herself. Even here, though, the Romantic influence has not yet been analyzed in-depth, nor has it been shown how this point of influence extends further through all three of Jackson’s hypertext projects. In writing on online interactive fictions, Indra Sinha traced the lineage of online explorers back to Coleridge and De Quincey. These writers saw the Romantic imagination as central to their practice, and by mapping out these influences, I open new possibilities in our understanding of this medium.