game-like experience

As a new media author, I write the visible, readable text (texte-à-voir *) and the underlying source code, the program (texte-auteur *). As a new media artist, I also design and create the user interface and the multimodal elements - the whole thing.

Since starting to write and create in new media, I have felt compelled, by the digital medium itself, to attempt to fully exploit the affordances of programmable media for expressivity by employing non-linear narrative methods, non-trivial interactivity and random programming in poetically and/or narratively meaningful ways. This has led me to create, what Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls, playable media works.

Writing creatively for algorithmically-driven media, working with others’ code frameworks and writing my own programs has led me to consider the expressivity of game processes and, consequently, my work has taken on more game-like characteristics. I’d like to trace this development by presenting a selection of extracts from key works (listed below) which demonstrate this move towards writing for playability.

The key Electronic Literature works:

Fitting the Pattern ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html )
Underbelly ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/underbelly.html )
Out of Touch, an ongoing series ( http://www.crissxross.net/oot/indexoot.html )
Rememori ( http://www.crissxross.net/elit/rememori.html )

*Philippe Bootz, Towards an ontology of the field of digital poetry

The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain. At different moments, the player can discover other players but cannot communicate with them via either speech or text. The journey on which the player embarks is suggestive of many things but ultimately unsolvable at either a ludic or narrative level. As Ian Bogost observes, “It could be a coming of age, or a metaphor for life, or an allegory of love or friendship or work or overcoming sickness or sloughing off madness. It could mean anything at all.” Rather than determining the “literariness” of Journey, I explore how it uses the affordances of both electronic literature and digital games to produce complex narrative networks. As such, my analysis focuses both on the shared gameplay experience of Journey itself and on the fan-created “Journey Stories” Tumblr space that collects emergent narratives of interactive play. This experience, I contend, helps us think through and across the boundary between electronic literature and videogames, and their once-discrete cultural orientations.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/digital-games-and-el… )