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In the late 1990s, a unique piece of software was released for the Sony PlayStation by ASCII. Simply called RPG Maker, it was the English-language localization of the third entry in Japan’s RPG Tsukuru series. RPG Maker wasn’t a game so much as a platform for the creation of other games, specifically those in the vein of early 1990’s Japanese-style role-playing games. Due to the platform’s technical issues, mainly the lack of direct internet access and the storage limits of Sony’s proprietary memory cards, RPG Maker presented the amateur game developer with many hurdles to overcome in the creation of anything interesting and unique. Not long after its release, small communities of RPG Maker users sprung up around online forums such as GameFAQs or RPG Maker Pavilion. These communities gave budding developers an opportunity to share their work with each other. Using a third-party peripheral for the PlayStation called a “DexDrive,” creators could image their memory cards and share these files online, files that users (usually fellow creators) could download and flash onto memory cards of their own to play. Due to the limitations set by the PlayStation’s memory card format, games made with RPG Maker had to use the common elements: 68 character sprites each with four color palettes, 99 enemy battle sprites, 127 map objects, et cetera, were stored on the CD-ROM. Although custom graphics could be made using an included editor, only nine new character sprites could be imported per game. Likewise, interactivity was nearly identical among RPG Maker games. Because the battle system could not be customized, most games created on the platform played similarly to one another. The main thing that distinguished each creation was narrative: While RPG Maker games tended to look and play the same, each told a unique story, and some of them did this in surprising ways. This paper is intended to represent the preliminary steps towards a study of RPG Maker as a historical platform for amateur electronic literature. The platform’s technical affordances and limitations will be discussed, focusing on Sony’s memory card format and its odd method of data storage. The DexDrive, an unlicensed peripheral that allowed users to create and share images of these memory cards, will also be examined, as will a few of the communities that this technology helped foster. Several examples of works created with RPG Maker will be examined in detail: "SILENT VOICES" by David Vincent, an example of a work made entirely with default game elements; "Man Getting Hit in the Groin By a Football RPG featuring Ernest Borgnine" by MisledJeff, a short comedy piece that doesn’t feature any direct interactivity (but, as the name suggests, does feature Ernest Borgnine taking a football to the groin); and the presenter’s own RPG Maker e-lit piece, "The Days at Florbelle", a recreation of a lost work by the Marquis de Sade.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Illustrations play a pivotal role in the culture of the book, which is shifting with the mass digitization of images and entire books in our digital age. For those who study and teach with book illustrations from the Renaissance to the early twenty-century, browsing for this type of visual primary source presents contextual difficulties. Problems range from the misattribution of illustrations to the inability to use the images altogether. 

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1234/Minding+the+Gap+for+Online+Book+Illustrations)However widely used by humanities scholars, Google Images may not be the optimal system for contextual image browsing. A Google search for images by a particular illustrator of English literature, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) for example, indicates how his illustrations have transformed from their material context in books to their online de-contextualization. A variety of contextual details tend to disappear, namely: the pictures’ places within the codex, the literary narrative and the pictorial sequence of images, as well as bibliographic data and the item’s physical location. Scholarship addressing humanities scholars’ image-based primary source needs has yet to narrow in on book illustrations. This gap in scholarship is surprising given the ongoing effort for libraries to digitize books, to generate online exhibitions, and to highlight illustrations from their collections. The way that illustrations from books continue to proliferate from their sources in libraries to their transformation on social media and on Google Images has made the phenomenon of de-contextualization worthy of inquiry. If Google-Image style browsing is less than ideal then: what are the optimal ways of presenting the illustrated book in context for humanities scholars––specifically for the sub-group of illustration searchers—in their online browsing? This information studies research minds the gap between the de-contextualized illustration à la Google and contextualized alternatives from the perspective of select humanities scholars. The data collected to fill in the understanding of the contextual gap comes from twelve interviews with scholars from art history. Interviewees responded to a series of image browsing scenarios, which centered around six main themes, involving: the illustration in relation to the form of the book, related images to a selected page, collection highlights, essential metadata, and bibliographic descriptions. Interviewees were then asked to respond to these scenarios by explaining what they found familiar and why, what they preferred and why, and what drawbacks they saw and why. This presentation showcases research highlights (research was conducted as part of the presenter’s information studies masters). Participants preferred the scenario that offered the illustrations in their two-page layouts to their cropped form. They also tended agree that the name and role of the illustrator is integral to the bare-bones bibliographic data for image use. More than subject and genre classification, the book’s two-page spread and artist’s name facilitates searchability and further research for art historians. However, rare books and special collections libraries in Canada are largely inconsistent with how they provide online access to book illustrations. The illustrator’s name and the form of the book are not a given in an online world that has separated textual literature from its visual sibling.

Our linear expectations of digital presentations (and the scorn associated with “Death by PowerPoint) have been transformed by the availability of tools such as Prezi, an editor that allows for the juxtaposition of images, text, and other media on a telescoping canvas that relies on linear paths for exploring nonlinear content. Prezi acts an infinite canvas, recalling Scott McCloud’s model for a future of sequential art on the web defined not by pages but by the screen as portal to an expanding and linked storyspace, allowing for continual layering of meaning and data using the methods of what Henry Jenkins describes as environmental storytelling. Alexandra Saemmer's use of Prezi as a space for experimenting with electronic literature breaks our expectations of a tool originally designed for presentations. The adaptation of tools of this kind towards the development of literary experiences reveals the fundamental transformations of procedural expectations and linked structures in online spaces: the co-location and linking of ideas to create meaning is now a matter of course. A similar limited model of the expanding canvas is used in Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, a work whose digital iPad form more clearly conveys the extent of its connected and intertwined threads than the pages of its corresponding codex can contain. In considering the evolution of text within electronic literature, the nonlinear and interactive natures of a work often make even the most textual of electronic literature defy easy translation to printed codex. I’ll examine the juxtaposition of linear and nonlinear in these works, and suggest how we can see the impact of evolving conceptions of meaning in web spaces on electronic literature (and vice versa) through probing at the construction of text through rejection of the page.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/spirals-meaning-expl… )