digital fiction

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of unnatural narratology as a medium-specific and transmedial phenomenon. It applies and adapts key concepts of narrative theory and analysis to digital-born fictions ranging from hypertext and interactive fiction to 3D-narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. The book addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction by focusing on multilinearity and narrative contradiction, interactional metalepsis, impossible time and space, “extreme” digital narration, and medium-specific forms of textual “you.” In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by placing the form of these new narratives front and center.

Drawing parallels between the open web platform and the open way a fictional body can be constructed from a text, this paper explores the creative and ethical strategies employed in the creation of a feminist interactive digital fiction for body image narrative therapy, advocacy and plurality. The digital fiction was created with and for young women and gender non-conforming individuals from diverse intersectional backgrounds.If, as Possible Worlds theory posits, the real world serves as a model for the mental construction of textual fictional storyworlds, it follows that our experience and knowledge of real bodies, including our own bodies, serve as a model for the mental construction of textual fictional bodies. Unless a text draws attention to the physical appearance of a fictional character, the reader will tend to assume, according to Ryan's 'principle of minimal departure' (1991), that their body conforms to a familiar or generic norm (two eyes, two arms, two legs, etc.).The main character of the Writing New Bodies project's digital fiction, Jordan, has body image issues relating to her size and shape. This becomes evident from her negative self-talk. Jordan describes herself as fat, flabby and repulsive, but is that true in the textual actual world or is it a distortion of her body image problem? In our interactive text-based fiction, where the reader-player makes choices on Jordan's behalf that can affect her body image, there is no narratorial voice to authoritatively describe her body and none of the characters are ever depicted in mimetic visual form. Therefore Jordan's body is open to interpretation, open to (re)construction. Although normative concepts of the body are insidious, the reader-player has some latitude to give body to her in their own idiosyncratic way, perhaps empathically shaping her in their own self-image. This openness is a deliberate strategy to make the bibliotherapeutic benefits and socio-political commitments of the work as fluid and widely accessible as possible.Similarly, with accessibility in mind, we chose to build the digital fiction on and for the open web platform using a mobile-first, responsive web design approach for the greatest reach. But the affinity between these twin approaches runs deeper. Both the refusal to visually represent a (female-gendered or sexed-coded) body in a digital fiction and the refusal to use proprietary closed platforms represent a form of resistance to the normative forces of cultural hegemony within neoliberalism; not least because the big tech platforms that want to lock us in to proprietary systems are amongst the most prolific purveyors of imagery and messaging that contribute to body dissatisfaction in young people. In this context, choosing the open web platform is a feminist strategy that pragmatically and aesthetically underpins the concerns of our digital fiction, where the body is relatively open to (re)construction rather than defined and limited by the restrictive norms and unattainable ideals commonly found in digital media representations of bodies.

In the past decade a new genre of video games has emerged; with little action or traditional gameplay this new form has been described as audiovisual novels, ‘freeform unstructured narrative’ (Heron & Belford, 2015), ‘narrative avant-garde’ (Koenitz, 2017), ‘walkers’ (Muscat et al., 2016), ‘literary games’ (Ensslin, 2014), or ‘Walking Simulators’ which was added to the Urban Dictionary in April 2014 as a pejorative description of games where the main purpose appears to be walking around. This new genre has its antecedents in text adventure games, Point and Click adventure games, digital fiction, and art games, yet defining the Walking Simulator as ‘simply’ a game is an unproductive argument in itself (Fest, 2016). Aims and research questions: How do we categorise Walking Simulators? How should we analyse them? What can we find out from that analysis? Methodology and analytical framework Taking a broadly representative sample of Walking Simulators published in the past ten years (most have received critical acclaim and also won BAFTA and similar awards) some common features were identified. Sidestepping (but not ignoring) a definition of ludicity based in game coding and mechanics, and instead exploring how this genre offers narrative experiences that are closer to that of reading is a more productive and effective approach to understanding this new genre (Heron & Belford, 2015, Fest, 2016, Ensslin, 2014). Using an empirical cognitive poetic stylistic analysis developed by Bell, Ensslin, van der Bom, and Smith in 2018, this paper will examine Campo Santo’s 2016 BAFTA award winning game, Firewatch, as a case study to show how Walking Simulators offer transportation and immersion more commonly found in fiction texts rather than the flow of a video game. Player forums on the Steam platform have been used as an anecdotal qualitative sample of responses as a testingground for the possibilities of developing an empirical reader-response study in the future. Emerging Results and Conclusions This is an emerging and dynamic field of research which will continue to expand as more Walking Simulators are published. The results point to ongoing analysis and exploration of this new genre to firmly establish the Walking Simulator as a new digital storytelling artefact that is accessible to a wide range of player/readers. It is also hoped that by setting out a clear working definition for this new genre together with suggested analytical frameworks that there will be wider interdisciplinary scholarly interest.

Digital fiction typically puts the reader/player in a cybernetic dialogue with various narrative functions, such as characters, narrative voices, or prompts emanating from the storytelling environment. Readers enact their responses either verbally, through typed keyboard input, or haptically, through various types of physical interactions with the interface (mouseclick; controller moves; touch). The sense of agency evoked through these dialogic interactions has been fully conventionalized as part of digital narrativity. Yet there are instances of enacted dialogicity in digital fiction that merit more in-depth investigation under the broad labels of anti-mimeticism and intrinsic unnaturalness (Richardson, 2016), such as when readers enact pre-scripted narratees without, however, being able to take agency over the (canonical) narrative as a whole (Dave Morris’s Frankenstein), or when they hear or read a “protean,” “disembodied questioning voice” (Richardson, 2006: 79) that oscillates between system feedback, interior character monologue and supernatural interaction (Dreaming Methods’ WALLPAPER). This articles explores various intrinsically unnatural examples of the media-specific interlocutor in print and digital fiction and evaluate the extent to which unconventional interlocutors in digital fiction may have anti-mimetic, or defamiliarizing effects.

This paper re-evaluates existing theories of immersion and related concepts in the medium-specific context of digital-born fiction. In the context of our AHRC-funded ‘Reading Digital Fiction’ project (2014-17) (Ref: AH/K004174/1), we carried out an empirical reader response study of One to One Development Trust’s immersive three-dimensional (3D) digital fiction installation, WALLPAPER (2015). Working with reading groups in the Sheffield area (UK), we used methods of discourse analysis to examine readers’ verbal responses to experiencing the installation, paying particular attention to how participants described experiences pertaining to different types of immersion explicitly and implicitly. We explain our findings by proposing the idea of a switchboard metaphor for immersive experiences, comprising layers and dynamic elements of convergence and divergence. Resulting from our analysis, we describe immersion as a complex, hybrid, and dynamic phenomenon. We flag the need for a more discriminating treatment of specific types of immersion in medium-specific contexts, including a distinction between literary and narrative immersion, and collaborative and social immersion (Thon 2008). We argue that literary immersion is needed as a separate immersive category because it differs from narrative immersion, and is far more linked to the activity of cognitive word processing. Similarly, we introduce collaborative immersion as an additional immersive category to reflect attention shifts towards site-specific, human interactions. Finally, our data shows the importance of site-, situation-, and person-specific constraints influencing reader-players’ ongoing ability to establish and retain immersion in the storyworld.

Astrid Ensslin (University of Alberta), offers a critical examination of concepts relating to canon, preservation, and access. Adopting an essentially critical outlook on canonization as a process of scholarly and social elitization, she argues that material (financial, geographic, and technological) access has always been a discriminating, regulatory factor in canon development, even if we assume a dynamic concept of canon (Ensslin 2007) or a crowdsourcing, emergent approach (Rettberg 2013) that align with contemporary, fast changing technological developments. Ensslin’s paper focuses on the ​Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext ​(​EQRH​), published in two volumes between 1994 and 1995, which has been largely neglected by digital fiction scholarship, mainly because of incompatibility and obsolescence issues. Two of the works contained within this early, e-literary journal are highlighted in Grigar’s presentation. ​EQRH ​offers an interesting case study of a publishing strategy that combined primary material with authors’ own reading notes, thus anticipating the highly accessible preservation efforts made by the ​Pathfinders​ project (Grigar and Moulthrop 2013-2017)

Eastgate’s project did not live up to its own aspirations, arguably due to rapid technological changes and the costly adaptations needed to meet the expectations of today’s digital fiction audiences. Because, currently, a media archaeological approach is required to read and analyze the texts published in ​EQRH​, Ensslin demands a scholarly initiative to collaborate with the publishers on updating the series for web browsers and making it accessible as downloads, to allow for broader scholarly engagement with this important yet inevitably sidelined series of artefacts.

(source: ELO 2018, panel, speech)

Important piece by @MezBreezeDesign on @TheWritPlatform about creating #elit and #digitalfiction in the #VR space.

- Kate Pullinger