creative language

Dietrich Squinkifer’s (aka Squinky) Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames was created for Ruin Jam 2014, a game jam inspired by tensions over the identity of games and gamers and particularly responding to accusations that feminists and advocates for diversity in games had set out to “ruin” the games industry. Quing’s Quest is built in Twine and takes inspiration from old-school adventure games, including Sierra’s King’s Quest series. The game takes place on a craft called the “Social Justice Warrior” (after a commonly-used pejorative term for those who point out misogyny, racism, transphobia and many other forms of discrimination and hatred online and in gaming culture), and features a character exiled from Videogames after the invasion of the “misogynerds.” This work captures the tension of a historical moment in which only some voices, games and critiques are heard and others are silenced and dismissed. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Prom Week is a social simulation game being developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In Prom Week the player shapes the lives of a group of highschool students in the most dramatic week of their highschool career. Using our sophisticated social artificial intelligence system, Comme il Faut, Prom Week is able to combine the dynamic simulation of games like the Sims with the detailed characters and dialog of story driven games. (source: https://promweek.soe.ucsc.edu/)

Concept "The End of the White Subway" is a strange little text-game that bears some resemblance to a text adventure or interactive fiction... more or less the way a toadstool resembles a geranium. Is this a game? If being a game requires consequential decisions, controllable actions, differential outcomes, and quantification (score), then it's a game. If your definition includes fun, well... This project is really more like a time simulator -- though in some ways every game is that. It invites you to think about the passing of time (all those moments you'll never get back), the way things change even as they stay the same, what you think you are doing when you can't do much of anything, and how you know when it's time to leave the train. What You Can Do Ride the train from station to station: either click Continue or simply press any key while you are in Train mode. (You'll need to click once in the text window, or use the Continue link initially, in order to set focus.) Each station of your passage comprises a screenful of text. The text is always different, or perhaps always the same. Look at things: The Earth is full of them. Examinable objects show in red when under the cursor. Click to inspect. Some objects are described in text, some with images. Collect things: You may add objects to your Inventory after you inspect them. Clicking the Inventory link at left shows you what you have. You are only allowed to hold seven things. The system will automatically delete the oldest item if you exceed the limit. Delete or Expend things: Every item in your inventory is preceded by an X. Click here to remove the item. Some items go quietly. Others perform certain actions before they disappear. Read (or not) a story: Occasionally the view will change from Train mode to something more coherently narrative. Read (or not) and then follow the link to return. This story has a beginning and an end, and a beginning and no end. Ask for help: Use the Help link at left. Ask for as much help as you can stand. Exit: Use the Exit link whenever you feel you are ready. Leaving the train ends the game. Technical Notes The game is built entirely in Javascript and plain-vanilla HTML/CSS. This means it is stateless, so remember that leaving the page means wiping out your game. Recommended browser is the current build of Firefox (Mozilla). The game will run in Safari with minor visual glitches. Internet Explorer doesn't recognize keystrokes to advance the game, but seems to handle all other aspects. I haven't even started debugging this thing, so expect trouble. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Redshift & Portalmetal asks: as climate change forces us to travel to the stars and build new homes and families, how do we build on this land, where we are settlers, while working to undo colonization? The story uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color. Redshift & Portalmetal tells the story of Roja, who's planet's environment is failing, so she has to travel to other worlds. The project takes the form of an online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry.

The Taro at the Center of the Earth iPad application is a digitized version of the popular Finnish childrens’ author Timo Parvela’s first book about the character Taro (2010). The story is about a little boy and a bear’s journey to the center of the Earth, and is delightfully illustrated by Jussi Kaakinen. Taro makes use of point-and-click adventure game conventions to create an experience which is still quite close to a print book, but it manages to evoke more of a sense of exploring a fictional space than turning print pages by its unusual use of the spatial screen space. The individual panes follow each other either seamlessly in horizontal or vertical directions, depending on the movements of Taro and his bear friend, so there is no strong division between parts of the work, as is the case with book pages. The scrolling illustrations, which are only partially under the user’s control, help the user to identify with Taro in his exciting adventure, perhaps allowing for a tighter experience of emotion and immersion in the story.

When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.

Analogue: A Hate Story is a visual novel in the style of many Japanese titles in the same genre . It was first published on the author's website and then on the gaming service Steam. The game tells an interactive story of transhumanism, traditional marriage, loneliness, and cosplay. The journey through the final section of the history of a generation spaceship before its failure. The two major characters you interact with in the story are the ships two remaining AI, an archivist AI named *Hyun-ae and a security AI named *Mute, the two ask the player vastly different questions and give entirely different views on the fall of the generation ship. The player is tasked with finding the truth of the tale by listening to both AI as well as building a sort of relationship with them and can end the story at any time by downloading what data they have and leaving the ship to its final fate, however this presents us with the worst of the possible endings. The choices the player makes throughout the story also affect the sequel of the work Hate Plus continuing the interactive work to show another section of the generationships story and gives more insight into the AI themselves. The game also features more traditional gaming segments where the player must solve puzzles in order to continue the story using a console system similar to modern computers the ending of which locks the player into one of the two AIs paths for the rest of the story, though a third alternate path is possible if the player knows specific keywords to unlock specific conversations early though this would require the player to either have researched the game before playing or have played the game before. The story itself keeps the player engaged by asking questions about the themselves and while the story is primarily about the history of this space ship, some might say the true story is the player and their burgeoning relationship with *Hyun-ae and *Mute

Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people.

(Source: Official Website)

Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities. As a step towards conveying richer identity experiences, we introduce our interactive narrative game called Mimesis, which aims to allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. The story of Mimesis takes place in an underwater setting with subtly anthropomorphized sea creatures as characters. The player character is a mimic octopus, which is a species of octopus adept at emulating other creatures. The octopus is on a journey that takes it from the dark depths of the ocean to its home in the tropical shallows. Along her way, the octopus will encounter several sea creatures who inhabit the waters and whose actions serve as examples of particular kinds of covert discrimination. These sea creatures provoke the octopus, leaving the player to must choose between different emotional responses to the creatures in order to guide the octopus through a series of short conversations. In this way, the project maps the experience of discrimination onto gameworld based on an underwater metaphor. (Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/mimesis)

Gabriel Knight is a series of point-and-click adventure games developed and released by Sierra On-Line in the 1990s.

(Source: Wikipedia)