games

In Animal, Vegetable, Digital, Elizabeth Swanstrom makes a confident and spirited argument for the use of digital art in support of ameliorating human engagement with the environment and suggests a four-part framework for analyzing and discussing such applications. Through close readings of a panoply of texts, artworks, and cultural artifacts, Swanstrom demonstrates that the division popular culture has for decades observed between nature and technology is artificial. Not only is digital technology not necessarily a brick in the road to a dystopian future of environmental disaster, but digital art forms can be a revivifying bridge that returns people to a more immediate relationship to nature as well as their own embodied selves. To analyze and understand the intersection of digital art and nature, Animal, Vegetable, Digital explores four aesthetic techniques: coding, collapsing, corresponding, and conserving. “Coding” denotes the way artists use operational computer code to blur distinctions between the reader and text, and, hence, the world. Inviting a fluid conception of the boundary between human and technology, “collapsing” voids simplistic assumptions about the human body’s innate perimeter. The process of translation between natural and human-readable signs that enables communication is described as “corresponding.” “Conserving” is the application of digital art by artists to democratize large- and small-scale preservation efforts. A fascinating synthesis of literary criticism, communications and journalism, science and technology, and rhetoric that draws on such disparate phenomena as simulated environments, video games, and popular culture, Animal, Vegetable, Digital posits that partnerships between digital aesthetics and environmental criticism are possible that reconnect humankind to nature and reaffirm its kinship with other living and nonliving things.

(Source: University of Alabama Press catalog copy)

On April 10th, 2014, game designer Porpentine released a game called Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone with the intention of deleting it at the end of the day: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. You can download it here until then. What you do with it, whether you distribute, share, or cover it, is up to you.” The game has lived on through what Porpentine predicted as “social means,” but it was designed as an ephemeral text, and one which the author deliberately destroyed as part of the act of creation. This idea of a vanishing text is interwoven with the experience of electronic literature, as Marjorie C. Luesebrink notes, as part of a practice of “text erasure” as embracing “self-undermining, undecidability, disdain for commercialization, ambivalence about technology, struggle against the presence of text itself, and response to overwhelming data” but also “the fragility of memory” (2014). Porpentine’s work, built using the hypertext platform Twine, is a reminder both of how easy it is to delete an electronic file but also how difficult, as the ghosts of “Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone echo across the internet. Likewise, it asks us to engage with the aftermath of the “deletion” of a human life in a manner that makes use of the particular affordance of Twine, which Jane Friedhoff has noted as particularly suited to experimental works at the margins (2014).

The poetics of Twine embrace the uneasy boundary between the ephemeral and fixed text, as each traversal of a Twine text marks a path visible only as it is traversed. They question the assumptions of game systems, recalling Espen Aarseth’s question “what player…would actually commit suicide, even virtually?” (2004). That question, posed ten years ago, as part of a discussion of the contradictions and possibilities of “interactive narrativism,” is one Twine games are well on their way to answering by crafting literary contexts in which an apparent choice is no choice at all. In Twine game, there is often no way to win in the conventional sense, and certainly the outcome of Everything you swallow is pre-determined. Such works also recall the structures and mechanisms of hypertext novels and similar choice-driven interactive fiction. I will examine the engagement with suicide and the destruction of self and text through several Twine works: Porpentine’s aforementioned Everything you swallow, collective Tsukerata’s You Were Made For Loneliness (2014), Gaming Pixie’s The Choice (2013), Pierre Chevalier’s Destroy / Wait (2013), and Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013). In each, the reader-player is invited to consider the mechanisms and social pressures surrounding the “choice” of suicide, and in doing so to confront the consequences of the erasure of self and text.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper presents a digital humanities structural approach to branching stories across several media forms and genres over the past six decades – with special attention to patterns of endings in different narrative networks, as well as meta-patterns that mark the beginnings and endings of genres of branching literature.

Studies of hypertext fiction have long been preoccupied with endings in two distinct senses: on the one hand, narrative endings (a multiplicity or absence of ends); on the other hand, the immanent ends of genres (with hypertext fiction either challenging genres that came before or succumbing to genres that came after). It is in this first sense of the shape of stories that J. Yellowlees Douglas asked “How Do I Stop this Thing?” (1994). The title of her “The End of Books--or Books Without End?” (1999) plays on both senses of hypertext as genre-disruptive and unusually structured -- while at the same time riffing on Robert Coover’s 1992 New York Times editorial on hypertext “The End of Books.” However, the same year that Yellowlees was riffing on the genre-ending power of hypertext, Markku Eskelinen stated at Digital Arts and Culture 1999 that it had itself been ended: “Hypertext is dead -- Cybertext killed it”, a proclamation that Montfort took this up in his 2000 review “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star.” And, as we suspected (and new craze for branching path fictional forms in recent years has confirmed), the reports of hypertext fiction's death were greatly exaggerated.

These are not notes on a debate, but rather observations that hypertext fiction (and electronic literature more broadly) has always been ending – ending other genres and forms, and ending in itself. So too it has always held within its structure the immanent promise and threat of too many narrative endings, or too few, or indeed no endings at all.

Indeed, these two senses of an ending for branching stories – narrative structural novelty and genre novelty – are deeply connected. If we wish to think about the genre novelty or ephemerality of hypertext, structure matters. From this observation the paper proceeds into a data driven structural survey of the specific narrative shapes of many individual branching stories across many genres – programmed instruction texts since the 1950s, “Choose Your own Adventure” gamebooks since the 1970s, hypertext fiction since the 1980s, and several more recent genres, including interactive plot-branching comics, Visual Novels, and Twine indie games / e-lit. Using network database representations of the shapes of large collections of interactive stories gives us a unique insight into the many ways that genres of branching narrative do and do not end as the change across electronic (and non-electronic) literary forms. What emerges is not a cybertextual typology, but rather a complex taxonomy of the shapes of stories, shapes which are always ending yet never end. The presentation will briefly address digital humanities techniques for modeling electronic literature, including graph databases such as Neo4j and information visualizations implemented with software tools such as yEd and Gephi. Data sources include the Deena Larsen Collection at MITH and the Demian Katz Gamebook Archive at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

The three papers in this panel seek to move beyond primarily formalistic discussions of electronic literature as well as approaches primarily concerned with drawing definitional boundaries for it. Instead, they propose to explore various works of electronic literature in terms of the potential dialogue they may open with concepts that are often locatable outside or beyond the current critical boundaries of electronic literature.

More specifically, Aquilina’s paper will explore how “literary eventhood” may occur in works which, in different ways, fall under the nomenclature associated to electronic literature. Callus’s paper, on the other hand, will focus on the concept of the “literary absolute” to try to discover whether it could bear any consequentiality to current understandings of electronic literature. While both papers will show an awareness of the potential “category mistake” that this may involve, they argue that such attempts are fundamental in discussions of the “ends” of electronic literature. Calleja’s paper will also seek to extend or trespass definitional restrictions by emphasising on the role of imagination in contemporary indie games, which highlights a continuity between print, electronic texts and cybertexts that we too often take for granted.

The approaches being proposed are not colonising discourses. Rather than simply applying terms from literary studies or from game studies to examples of electronic literature, they start from electronic literature (or some modes in which it functions) to speak about concepts that may potentially have a wider scope than it. Our interventions in electronic literature from peripheral starting positions will operate with both the risks and the potential originality that such approaches may bring.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

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)

Keleti blok blokki (Hungarian for ‘the apartment blocks of the Eastern Bloc’) is a Facebook social game in which players try to guess the geographical location of apartment blocks featured on screens from Google Street View and other street view services submitted by one of the participants. The game counters the popular belief that apartment blocks looked all alike from Eastern Germany all the way to Vladivostok. In the wider context, the game challenges the perception of the countries forming the Eastern Bloc as one monolith, described by the Western rulers as “the East”.

The aim of the game is to guess in which country the sumbmitted block is located. As the name, Keleti blok blokki, suggests the buildings can come from any location within the keleti bloc. The photos are censored by the submitting player for obvious clues that would make guessing the location too easy. The most frequently erased elements include road signs, signs in general, air conditioners, and national symbols. What remains is architecture and details (curtains, elevation colors, sidewalk curbs), and the general visual context.

Keleti blok blokki constitutes a research subject at the intersection of visual anthropology (from the perspective of the semiotics of urban space mediated by the Google Street View camera), sociology [researching stereotypes about the countries of the Eastern Bloc employed (successfully or not) by the participants of the game], and digital literary studies (the explanations the participants write for their guesses often have the form of short, witty literary descriptions). The presentation will be devoted to the analysis of on these three contexts, with special focus on this last aspect of the phenomenon, considering these short forms as non-fiction literary flash.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

The transformation of interface from a merely indicative tool of navigation to a suggestive element infused with metaphorical power in text-based hypertext literature, and the incorporation of hypermedia and modes of play and games into the hypertext scenario--both strains are gradually winning attention in electronic writing. Topics such as the clarification of paidia (play) and ludus (game) constituents, their formal impact on literature, and the comprehension of the aesthetic matrices projected by the symbiotic infusion of literature, play and games, have been posited, creating a new node in the network of literary studies. In order to explore these fertile new fields, this paper first assigns itself to a survey of interface design and a formal observation of play and games in samples of electronic literature. Furthermore, the paper is focused on the interlaced poetics of representation (narrative) and simulation (paidia / ludus) in literary hypertext, play and games (together to be occasionally called, cybertext or ergodic literature, both terms taken from Espen P. Aarseth). It is hoped that the paper can bring more poetical recognition to digital textualities.

Source: Author's abstract

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

(Source: Routledge catalog copy)

1. Introduction: Perspectives on Interactive Digital Narrative Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen Section I: IDN History Section I Introduction: A Concise History of Interactive Digital NarrativeHartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen 2. The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It? Scott Rettberg 3. Interactive Cinema in the Digital Age Chris Hales 4. The Holodeck is all Around Us — Interface Dispositifs in Interactive Digital Storytelling Udi ben Arie and Noam Knoeller Section II: IDN Theory Section II Introduction: The Evolution of Interactive Digital Narrative Theory Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen 5. Narrative Structures in IDN Authoring and Analysis Gabriele Ferri 6. Towards a Specific Theory of Interactive Digital NarrativeHartmut Koenitz 7. Emotional and Strategic Conceptions of Space in Digital Narratives Marie-Laure Ryan 8. A Tale of Two Boyfriends: A Literary Abstraction Strategy for Creating Meaningful Character Variation Janet H. Murray 9. Re-considering the Role of AI in Interactive Digital Narrative Nicolas Szilas Section III: IDN Practice Section III Introduction: Beyond the Holodeck: A Speculative Perspective on Future Practices Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen and Tonguç İbrahim Sezen 10. Interaction Design Principles as Narrative Techniques for Interactive Digital Storytelling Ulrike Spierling11. Post-Hyperfiction: Practices in Digital Textuality Scott Rettberg 12. Emergent Narrative: Past, Present and Future of an Interactive Storytelling Approach Sandy Louchart, John Truesdale, Neil Suttie and Ruth Aylett 13. Learning through Interactive Digital NarrativesAndreea Molnar and Patty Kostkova 14. Everting the Holodeck: Games and Storytelling in Physical Space Mads Haahr 15. Narrative Explorations in Videogame Poetry Diğdem Sezen16. Artistic Explorations: Mobile, Locative and Hybrid Narratives Martin Rieser 17. Remaking as Revision of Narrative Design in Digital Games Tonguç İbrahim Sezen