Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg reflect on the cultural values, political debates, power structures and architectures of exploitation underlying much of contemporary digital culture. As digital artists and collaborators, they also identify aesthetic reactions that actually combat what they critique. But for this to happen, we need literary works that are themselves produced, and actively circulating within digital environments.
Covering 600 years of history, from pre-Colombian America to a present in 2121,TimeTraveller™ follows the journey of Hunter, a Montreal Mohawk who wishes tolearn about his ancestors and to seek an alternative to his consumerist world. Inthis science-fiction narrative, combining factual history and hypothetical futures,the main protagonist travels through time by logging on his edutainment system,his TimeTraveller™. His multiple immersions in indigenous history, from theMinnesota Massacre in 1875 to the Oka Crisis in 1990, leads him to meetKarahkwenhawi at the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 with whom he falls inlove. The work comprises a website and nine machinima episodes created inSecond Life.
The market for children apps is growing at a fast pace and already represents a considerable share of the global supply, both in term of downloads and distribution (See figures and reports on appfigures.com). Despite the relative paucity of literature on games and edutainment, the variety of contents available is wide and includes adaptations of classic and contemporary texts, as well as original contents specifically conceived for digital environments. Our contribution aims to consider a sample of this rich production, especially focusing on a corpus of adaptations of classic and contemporary children picturebooks, selected for their large panel of literary-significant multimodal [KRESS 2010 ; LEBRUN – LACELLE – BOUTIN 2012] and hypermedia elements [BOLTER – GRUSIN 2000]. “
(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)
Our paper will address issues related to aesthetic gaming and the way in which concepts of the literary are being reconfigured in a new genre of videogames that we have termed eccentric games. Using games such as Achron (forthcoming 2010), Braid (2008), Cursor*10 (2008), Echochrome (2008), levelHead (2008), Game-Space (2008-09), and Portal (2007), we suggest this genre can be characterized by game mechanics which manipulate space and time in such a way that the player must access a logic indigenous to digital environments. Eccentric games can be further described through their reliance on filmic interface as an apparatus for modeling eccentricity, tutorialized presentations of gameplay, and its common classification within the overextended "puzzle" genre.
Our analysis of eccentric space games borrows heavily from Mark Hansen's reading of Gille Deleuze's cinematic any-space-whatever. We map his concept of the "digital ASW" on to digital eccentric space. Using Robert Lazzarini's skulls (2000) as a metonymy for speaking about the ontological status of new media in general, Hansen emphasizes how the spatial regime of skulls is an impossible space for any human subjectivity to inhabit. While a work like skulls emphasizes the failure of the viewer to grasp these forever skewed and uncanny objects, the eccentric games cited in this paper engineer the reverse response by attempting to make safe the digital ASW and to provide the fantasy of mastery through the successful completion of goal-oriented tasks. The "alien topology of the computer" is no longer figured as the cryptic skull viewed out of the corner of the eye, but rather embodied in these technological prosthetics designed to augment our consciousness. We will problematize this fantasy of mastery over eccentric space and the way in which these objects attempt to colonize a new home in what was once uncanny borderland.