James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by James Wallis.
"In the ongoing debates about storytelling and narrative in games, the various commentators often overlook a key point: even in the most cutting-edge examples of the state of the art, it is not the players who tell the story, it is the game. Whether computer games with a narrative element, board games, card games, or face-to-face role-playing games, the essential plot and structure of the narrative is predetermined before the game begins, and cannot be altered."
"Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them, but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story."
"the game's mechanics must take into consideration the rules of the genre that it is trying to create: not just the relevant icons and tropes, but the nature of a story from that genre. A fairy tale has a very different structure and set of requirements than a horror story or a soap opera, and a game must work to replicate that. "
"In most games, the structure is simply the way the game is played. In story-making games, it is also the principal way that the narrative shape of the story is formed (...)."
"Structure is not the same thing as rules. (...) That's how the game plays. It's not how the game works."
"The key to a successful story-making game, at least in the ones that have been released so far, is simplicity of design. (...) it does mean that rules have to be integrated with structure and genre to form a coherent package. I am a self-confessed proponent of "elegance through simplicity" in game design, and I realize that this doesn't fit every taste, or every style of game. "
All quotes were directly pulled out of the essay.
The field of Electronic Literature comprises new forms of literary creation that merge writing, computation, interactivity, and design in the creation of writing that is specific to the context of the computer and the global network. While electronic literature is a field of experimental writing with a history that stretches back to the 1950s, it has grown most expansively in the late two decades. Forms of electronic literature such as combinatory poetics, hypertext fiction, kinetic and interactive poetry, and network writing bridge the 20th century avant-garde and practices specific to the 21st century networked society. Yet electronic literature has faced significant hurdles as it has developed as a field of study, related to the comparative instability of complex computational objects, which because of their formal diversity are often not easily accommodated by standardized methods of digital archiving, and are subject to cycles of technological obsolescence. Rettberg's presentation will address efforts to disseminate, document, and archive the field of electronic literature. After providing some examples of genres of electronic literature, Rettberg will discuss projects such as the Electronic Literature Collections, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, and the Electronic Literature Repository that seek to preserve a corpus of work and criticism for the future.
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957) is a book by Canadian literary critic and theorist, Northrop Frye, which attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature. Frye consciously omits all specific and practical criticism, instead offering classically inspired theories of modes, symbols, myths and genres, in what he termed "an interconnected group of suggestions." The literary approach proposed by Frye in Anatomy was highly influential in the decades before deconstructivist criticism and other expressions of postmodernism came to prominence in American academia circa 1980s.
Frye's four essays are sandwiched between a "Polemical Introduction" and a "Tentative Conclusion." The four essays are titled "Historical Criticism: A Theory of Modes", "Ethical Criticism: a Theory of Symbols", "Archetypal Criticism: A Theory of Myths", and "Rhetorical Criticism: A Theory of Genres."
(Source: Wikipedia entry on Anatomy of Criticism)
Literature created in digital media exists in a realm whose borders may be changing, malleable, or nonexistent. In this realm, where anything may happen, traditional theories are insufficient to understand the literary phenomenon in non-print platforms. Electronic literature demands an analysis that matches its nature, which does not necessarily coincide with existing theory, since electronic literature exists to be consumed through technologies which have been available just recently and which, by transforming the ways we read and write, challenge the canon of literary form, and establishing a new paradigm for text creation and reading. According to Roger Chartier, “The electronic text revolution is at once a revolution in the technology of the production and reproduction of texts, a revolution in the medium of writing and a revolution in reading practices.” (“Readers and readings in the Electronic Age”) as a corollary, this revolution implies also a new way of approaching the literary phenomenon from a critical perspective.
This paper proposes that a global analysis is possible to understand electronic literary works and how they function within an ever changing digital materiality. The analysis model sustained by this paper is based in four perspectives: materiality, structure, textuality, and sense. Each of these aspects contains a series of guidelines that will help to describe how is it that each of them is manifested in the work analyzed and will provide a set of ideas to be considered during analysis, thusly helping illuminate other unaccounted aspects.
These four perspectives rise from a minute examination of the intrinsic relation between post-structuralist ideas and new hypertextuality theories, as well as the study of related phenomena. This analysis also takes into consideration the open work concept as proposed by Umberto Eco, which allows this model to be applied to non-traditional (or multilenear) printed texts whose special characteristics do not warrant traditional literary theory analysis. In other words, this method can be applied to texts regardless of the platform they use.
The analysis of open works, be it in print or digital platforms, must happen within an unbound framework. This paper's proposal may be used as a starting point to address this kind of work. However, during the application of the theory other new aspects will emerge, since open works are precisely characterized by being prone to constant mutation and by their impossibility to fit in a specific and established genre or theory. Traditional narration methods may describe many aspects related to time, narrator, characters, and other components. Still, as a consequence of the use of ergodic elements, they need to be modified and complemented (Gunder 28) for the study of open literary works. Consideration of electronic text theories allows for this new focus. This paper defines a format/model proposed to analyze open literary works, taking into consideration that it is only a proposal and that it does not disregard the use of other analysis theories, but complements them.
(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site)
Scott Rettberg presents his forthcoming monograph Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018), Joseph Tabbi introduces the collection The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018). Eric Rasmussen moderates a discussion of the two books and the field of electronic literature. Part of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base symposium at the University of Bergen, April 27, 2018.
Electronic Literature considers new forms and genres of writing that exploit the capabilities of computers and networks – literature that would not be possible without the contemporary digital context.In this book, Rettberg places the most significant genres of electronic literature in historical, technological, and cultural contexts. These include hypertext fiction, combinatory poetics, interactive fiction (and other game-based digital literary work), kinetic and interactive poetry, and networked writing based on our collective experience of the Internet. He argues that electronic literature demands to be read both through the lens of experimental literary practices dating back to the early twentieth century and through the specificities of the technology and software used to produce the work. Considering electronic literature as a subject in totality, this book provides a vital introduction to a dynamic field that both reacts to avant-garde literary and art traditions and generates new forms of narrative and poetic work particular to the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for students and researchers in disciplines including literary studies, media and communications, art, film, and creative writing.
(Source: Polity catalog copy)
Electronic Literature is the winner of the 2019 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.
Newscomic recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it.
It takes live news feeds (RSS feeds) from major news sources, chops them up at random and puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a comic. The comic illustrations reflect the current latest news, and are regularly updated to keep up with the news. The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don't quite fit but make their own story.
Often the story is quite surreal, but can by chance make sense, and even be quite revealing.
To make the story more fun, you can contribute by adding your own words and sentences (up to a hundred characters long). These replace the word 'the' and other characters in the speech text. You can use this to perhaps get your own views across, or to manipulate the story so it makes more sense to you. Your word or sentence is stored and seen by the world until the next person comes along, and adds their words, replacing yours.
The result is a unique combination of a disjointed news reader, and a live comic story builder. It enables you to get the gist of the latest news, and at the same time enjoy a surreal comic, one that you have contributed to.
The RSS feeds currently used are as follows:
Showbiz --> Daily Mail (TV/ Showbiz)
News --> Guardian (UK latest)
Politics --> BBC (UK Politics)
Football --> BBC (UK Football)
Arts --> Guardian (Arts)
(Source: http://davemiller.org/projects/newscomic/learn_more.php)
There are numerous essays and reviews on German-language electronic literature, which run from the mid nineties to the present day. Most of these texts, however, are written in German – a language that is no longer accepted and common as an universal language for science.
In order to present the overview of German language electronic literature, we filtered out some historical lines that may explain better how the development of individual genres came about. A good starting point may be the very first experiments of authors with computers to generate electronic poetry, a subject the international community mostly agrees upon.
The following model of historical lines of development is suggested:
A historical analysis shows that these five lines of net literature are based upon two prior German strands going back to philosophical, poetical and artistic experiments in the 1960s: On the one hand, the Stuttgart School by Max Bense with exponents Reinhard Döhl and Theo Lutz, the latter producing a first example of digital poetry in 1959. On the other hand, the computer graphics experiments of 1960 and the punched-card linker projects by artists Kurd Alsleben and Antje Eske in Hamburg.
The presentation for ELO Paris 2013 introduces this model of lineage for the development of German-language electronic literature. Taking time- and textspace constraints in consideration, the foucus is set on the strand „I Stuttgart School“ and the line „1. Concrete Experiments“. For all other lines the sympathetic reader finds descriptions and historical examples in the essay „From Theo Lutz to Netzliteratur“ in Cybertext Yearbook 2012.
The presenter has been part of the net literature community that spans Germany, Austria and Switzerland as a researcher, publisher and artist for twenty years.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2013 ELO Conference: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/lineages-german-lang…)
An extensive online project surveying the history and concepts of digital literature, with an emphasis on French traditions particularly in digital poetry.
Ce Basiques se propose d'explorer les contrées de la littérature numérique. Ses approches sont diverses et relèvent de conceptions parfois antagonistes. Elle forme un continent ancré dans des cultures variées qui dialoguent entre elles en son sein parce qu'elle les mixe et les questionne. La littérature numérique s'insère ainsi pour partie dans la continuité de démarches littéraires parfois anciennes, mais présente par ailleurs des points de rupture d'avec elles. C'est pourquoi son rapport avec les littératures issues des traditions classiques demeure conflictuel, souvent à son corps défendant, et ce, sans doute, pour longtemps encore. Que cela ne t'empêche pas, ami lecteur, de l'explorer. Elle te réservera bien des surprises, enflammera ton imaginaire comme il sied à toute littérature et saura te procurer toute une alchimie d'émotions, tant affectives qu'intellectuelles, sur des modes inattendus et vierges de toute rengaine.
(Source: Bootz's introduction to the project)
The first of two special issues of Dichtung Digital emerging from the 2010 ELMCIP seminar on electronic literature communities (Bergen). Articles explore electronic literature from a variety of perspectives, including regional or language-based communities, communities of practice that form around particular genres or technologies, and communities that develop around insitutionalization efforts.