experimental videogame

Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. It offers analyses of digital works that have so far received little or no analytical attention and profiles replicable methodologies which can be used in the analyses of other digital fictions. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Chapters:

1.Introduction: From Theorizing to Analyzing Digital Fiction Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad

Section 1: Narratological Approaches

2. Media-Specific Metalepsis in 10:01 Alice Bell

3.Digital Fiction and Worlds of Perspective David Ciccoricco

4. Seeing into the Worlds of Digital Fiction Daniel Punday

Section 2: Social Media and Ludological Approaches

5. Playing with rather than by the Rules: Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy and Illusory Agency in The Path. Astrid Ensslin

6. 140 Characters in Search of a Story: Twitterfiction as an Emerging Narrative Form Bronwen Thomas

7. Amnesia, the Dark Descent: The Player's Very Own Purgatory Susana Tosca

8. Wreading Together: The Double Plot of Collaborative Digital Fiction Isabell Klaiber

Section 3: Semiotic-Rhetorical Approaches

9. (In-)Between Word, Image and Sound: Cultural Encounter in Flight Paths. Hans Kristian Rustad

10. Figures of Gestural Manipulation in Digital Fictions Serge Bouchardon

11. Hyperfiction as a Medium for Drifting Times: A Close Reading of the German Hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe Alexandra Saemmer

Afterword Roberto Simanowski.

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.