fantasy

"Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled, and said, "We don't love you anymore." So began the Twitter Audio project, with a dazzling first line penned by New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman. What followed was an epic tale of imaginary lands, magical objects, haunting melodies, plucky sidekicks, menacing villains, and much more. From mystical blue roses to enchanted mirrors to pesky puppets, this classic fable was born from the collective creativity of more than one hundred contributors via the social network Twitter.com in a groundbreaking literary experiment. Together, virtual strangers crafted a rollicking story of a young girl's journey with love, forgiveness, and acceptance. (Source: Goodreads)

This project is an app that re-imagines a sea monster who communicates as or via an app. Lusca, is an ancient sea monster, who once thrived upon the telegram messages that were sent using the telegraph cable system. Back in the day, when she first noticed the cable structures being built, they were of no interest. Then, as the system came to life, the various noises aroused her curiosity. Sometime around 1877, after numerous tentative approaches to this unknown creature, she figures out how to latch onto to the structure, and manages to extract a transmission or two. The messages she steals fill her with new feelings. She grows strong. Her consciousness evolves. Sometime around the turn of the 21st century the volume of messaging drops. She sees the disrepair, the rust. She grows hungry. She is dying. She needs those messages. You can help. The app invites users to submit new messages in order to keep Lusca from losing consciousness. She then releases stolen messages of the past in order to absorb those of the present. Lusca might still be monitoring the airwaves.

(Source: http://luscatelegraphs.com/)

This manga-inspired graphic novel app is about thirteen-year-old Tavs, who chooses his name (meaning “silent”) when he writes a declaration to his parents: “From now on I will be silent”. The story is about the loneliness and loss Tavs feels upon the death of his twin and his family’s move to Tokyo. TAVS is a fantasy narrative with gothic, humorous and boy-meets-girl elements and references to haiku and manga. The app mixes text, music, still images, sound effects and animation into an immersive aesthetic experience. For example, as we read of Tavs’ sorrow and frustration the words begin to fall down from the screen and the reader has to take an active part in the reading process by grabbing the sentences. The chapters show great variation, operating between expressive powerful animations and stills and black pages, between strong sound effects and silence and between spoken and written words, right up to the final fight between the twins; between life and death. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

L’Hymne de la Femme et au Hazard was published in the literary journal alire n° 7. In the program, the reader has first access to a matrix. He has the choice to enter these matrixes choosing the order of their apparition. The categories are the following: the woman, randomness, and nothingness. Then, the reader can access the matrix and can read it. Once the reading is complete, the reader accesses a surtext, a variation of the images of the matrix. The surtext functions as a mold, mold conditioned by the reader. When one reads the surtext, a feeling of disengagement arises. Indeed, he/she has to do a nontrivial effort to read. Bootz had previously defined the reading experience as “an effort”, and “a commitment”. The reader reads two different texts, disjointed in time. More precisely, when a verse appears, it quickly disappears to make space for another. Besides, the speed at which the verses pass, make it difficult for the human eye to catch, decipher or memorize these words. Some words and groups of words seem to be repeating themselves, but a feeling of disengagement is largely experienced and the esthetic of frustration appears. The reader then has to be aware that he/she cannot read all and he/she has to select what to read. When making this choice, the reader then submits himself to the surtext’s expressivity. When traversing the text, several characteristics can be observed. L’Hymne de la Femme et au Hazard is an undetermined dynamic text, because it uses randomness. The text also is transitory, as the program generate itself the verses. The access to the text is constrained because the reader has to wait for the next sequence to be displayed on the screen. The linkage is conditional, meaning that the links between the different parts of the surtext are not explicit. At last, the reader has an interpretative function, since he/she is forced to follow a path, path the program has chosen for the reader to take. Esthetically speaking, the images and the theme of the text are in symbiosis. The theme of sexuality and fantasy developed textually are illustrated by the juxtaposition of images on the screen. The multitude of images corresponds to the multitude of fantasies one can have and imagine. Likewise, the woman who appears on the screen represents the masculine fantasy par excellence. Her mysterious, hypnotic and seductive look echoes the verses.

(Source: Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel)

“The Babysitter,” published in Pricksongs and Descants (1969), is a classic of postmodern fiction. The story consists of over one hundred fragments – paragraphs set off from each other by space breaks, that take us through multiple and divergent sequences of what might have or what could have occurred during the course of one evening between a babysitter, a baby, her boyfriend, and the mother and father of the house. Although chronological progression takes place in the story, as we move from 7:40 pm into the late hours of the night, the distinction between objective reality and fantasy falls away as we read the fragments, and every possibility has equal opportunity to be visited. “The Babysitter” is one of the best examples in print of the idea of multilinearity that digital hypertext seemed poised to exploit, a story that is not one progression of events, but many possible progressions of events branching from the same tree.

(Source: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg) 

Enchanter is a 1983 interactive fiction computer game written by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling and published by Infocom. It belongs to the fantasy genre and was the first fantasy game published by Infocom after the Zork trilogy (it was originally intended to be Zork IV). The game had a parser that understood over 700 words, making it the most advanced interactive fiction game of its time. It was Infocom's ninth game. (Wikipedia)

Slouching Towards Bedlam is an interactive fiction game that won the first place in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition. It [..] was finalist for eight 2003 XYZZY Awards, winning four: Best Game, Setting, Story, and Individual NPC (for the protagonist's cybernetic assistant, Triage). The game takes place in a steampunk Victorian era setting. Its title is inspired by a line from "The Second Coming", a poem by W.B. Yeats.(Wikipedia)

The first part of the bestselling Zork trilogy, and a close descendant of Adventure, the first work of interactive fiction or text adventure game as the genre was known at the time. Zork I was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986. Similarly to Adventure, the game unfolds in a maze-like dungeon, where the user (or adventurer) must battle trolls and solve puzzles in order to find twenty trophies to bring back to the house outside which the game begins.