The builder of Façade, an “interactive story world,” Michael Mateas offers both a poetics and a neo-Aristotelian project (for interactive drama and games).
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/)
Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.
In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
Such interventions are critical displacements and performances enacted on the game space and community of CS:GO and LOTRO, but also on the literary works themselves – on the agitprop theater text and its claims, and on Beckett’s Endgame. As “existential spamming” (one name for the overall project), the interventions both insist on a political and contextual “reading” of the game space, but also consume the space through absurd and ineffectual performance – a problematic situation that perhaps defines the literariness involved.
This presentation at ELO 2015 situates these works in terms of literary and dramatic tradition, as described above, but also as a corrective supplement to the existing discussion of computer/video games in e-lit scholarship. “Literary games” are an established area of scholarship. Astrid Enslin’s excellent book sets a precedent for analyzing both artistic works making use of game-like aesthetics and affordances (think Jason Nelson’s games), on the one hand, and games that can claim literary merit, on the other (think Journey or Left Behind). The interventionist projects described here offer a very different engagement with games, and in doing so call attention to a need for greater understanding of performance and improvisation in e-lit.
(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.
A hyperdrama produced as a collaboration between Deemer and Espejo, set in a Chilean art gallery. A multilinear comedy of manners.
This paper introduces the novel concept of location-based Mobile Urban Dramas. In a Mobile Urban Drama the user become the main character in a play where actors’ voices appear in the mobile phone headset linked to the physical setting in the city as the stage for the drama. The paper describes the dramaturgical concept and introduces a software framework supporting drama writers in developing such Mobile Urban Dramas. Experiences with use of the framework are discussed with successful examples of real dramas that have been developed and performed by a Danish theatre group, Katapult.
[Editor's note: The paper includes are many interesting references both to locative drama and to critical writing that are not yet entered into the Knowledge Base.]
Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, re-mediated for Web. In this project different parts of the play are appropriated for cyberspace. to examine different themes including: hyperlinked narration in cyberspace, experience of reading mediated by information retrieval tools, collaboratively generated content and conformism, our desires and anxieties in cyberspace and the temporal experience across different media. (source: http://sepans.com/sp/works/waiting-for-gwodo/)
Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s The Nightingale’s Playground is a digital fiction work that was created with Flash in 2010. The main character is Carl Robertson, who tries to figure out what has happened to his lost high-school friend Alex Nightingale. The piece leads the reader/player through a world experienced from Carl’s perspective. It consists of four individual parts, the first section “Consensus”, an interactive point- and click game that can be played online, downloadable “Consensus II” which transports the reader into a dark 3D flat with text snippets , the “Fieldwork book” is a browser based grungy sketchbook with puzzling notes and the last part is a PDF version of the story.
Chapters 1 and 3 require Flash Player 9 or higher. Chapter 2 is a download for Mac or PC requiring a strong graphics card. Chapter 3 is available as PDF, ePub or Mobi and compatible with any eReader device.
English title "Light-Darkness." Description by Hans Kristian Rustad: a remediation of a play with the same title. Moving the work into a digital environment Næss makes use of written and verbal text, pictures, graphics, and animations to create a quite different work than the original. She also explained in an interview that the play not really was meant for the stage, but that she was waiting for its right medium. So she utilises facilities of the medium to make the text appear as she first intended.
The work is interactive in the sense that the reader need to move the mouse courser over the screen to make something happen. The narrative is divided into three different and independent stories, and which of the three stories that appear, depends on where on the screen the reader holds his mouse cursor.
One of the narratives is about a fire in a train coupe. Two persons die in the fire, probably kids, and the narrator is probable the father telling us how he remembers the fire. Another of the narratives is about a group of people going in the mountains, than suddenly one of the group members disappears. And the dead body of the person is not found until the snow starts to melt. And the third narrative is about a father taking his two sons on a fishing trip. And one of his sons discovers what might be a dead body. It is hard to tell actually. In the play which is published in a book, the text tells explicit about a dead body that one of the sons finds in the water. While in the digital version, we can hear the son telling his father: “There is something in the water”. This part of the narrative actually ends with laughter, so it is hard to tell what actually happened.
The work is about losing someone and/or finding someone, and it demonstrates the big semiotic leap that the work takes from the theatre stage to the digital screen, from a play to a kind of digital narrative. It shows how other semiotic systems can be used to tell the same story, and how the technology can be used to make different scenes, different incidents, collide, because they can be combined and read in different sequences and contexts.
