interactivity

Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.

The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.

As the subject of this study concerns a variety of disciplines, this research has been conducted in an extremely interdisciplinary way in order to develop a thorough understanding of the narrative app. In general, it has consulted scholarship in children’s literature (picturebook studies in particular), narratology, computer science, game studies, social semiotics, film studies, media studies, communication studies, electronic literature and game design.

With this interdisciplinary approach, this study has attempted to define the subject of the study, identify some tendencies in its development, and most importantly, develop an original theory of storytelling and a narrative map that may be able to explain the intrinsic methods used in the narrative app storytelling as well as other digital and non-digital storytelling. The findings of this study seem to suggest that the narrative app does not display any essential differences from the codex and other forms of literature in terms of its narrative strategies, but it appears to have great potential to truly innovate storytelling.

It is suggested that this study may provide an effective theoretical scope and methodology for the study of the field of digital children’s literature, which may offer the potential to strengthen this field of research. The theoretical framework constructed by this study may be applicable to some educational approaches to the narrative app, and may also be useful for teaching new literacies.

Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Chris Crawford

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.

This paper looks at two interactive digital works where female-centred/lesbian desire provides an implicit logic and motivation to the works’ interactivity, which focusses on the control and transgression of language. This wordplay is aimed at resisting dominant regimes of phobic categorization and erasure that pathologize queer desire. In Lucky Special Games’ visual novel Locked-In, the interactor experiences the story through the perspective of Jacqueline Brown, who, as the result of a car crash, has locked-in syndrome, which is characterized by consciousness paired with the complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Each of the women who visit Jacqueline's hospital room has a motive for wanting Jacqueline incapacitated or dead, so when Jacqueline discovers that she can slightly move the little finger on one hand, she must decide to which of these women she should reveal that she is conscious. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Locked-In is its casual indication of Jacqueline’s lesbianism (inferred via her relationship with her spouse Delilah). This lack of explicit labelling suggestively contrasts with the governing structural conceit of LockedIn: the dictionary entry, which plays on the hoary “if you look up [term] in the dictionary, you’ll find [person]’s name” joke. The cumulative effect of the wordplay results in lesbianism in Locked-In eventually escaping the fatalistic homophobic imaginary of dominant definitional regimes and causal logics while simultaneously eschewing a (hetero)normative “happy ending.” The second work, Neven Mrgan and James Moore's Blackbar, requires the interactor to unredact an archive of communications to a young woman, Vi Channi, from her friend Kentery Jo Loaz and others conducted under an Orwellian regime of expressive surveillance geared towards conformance, ‘sanitization’ and ‘propriety.’ The process of unredaction enables a queer reading of the relationship between Vi and Kentery and the Resistance they join. Unlike the blackbar redactions of the callous Listener #19445 and their grotesque attempts to make their redactions humorous, 'Lorraine,' as I will call the Resistance agent, engages in clever and pleasurable open box word play that exposes the slipperiness and queerness of language. Both works show how close reading and textual and formal analysis can be applied to interactive or ergodic works to reveal the same kinds of subtextual and subversive richness that characterize conventional literature, problematizing beliefs that eLit’s home is at periphery of the literary.

This paper examines Minna Sundberg’s ongoing and award winning digital web comic Stand Still. Stay Silent as a type of e-literature increasingly found in the “gap” between digitized comics and graphic novels on the one hand and born digital e-lit on the other. While the Sunberg’s process of production will be briefly noted, the main focus explores how the comic thematizes modes of interactivity that Sundberg also encourages in her readers/followers via forms of social media. Set in a post-apocalyptic world , the comic is an ongoing tale of exploration and discovery, where a group young explorers have left the havens of plague-free safe zones in order to see what is left of the rest of the world. The supernatural elements associated with the plague, or “the illness,” are also associated with a past that somehow went wrong. Writing of “Beasts, Trolls, and Giants,” the narrator explains, “They are a shadow of our past, a distorted echo of what once there was.” Avoiding the shadow of the past and the monstrosities it has produced is a powerful theme, carrying an implied social critique that deserves examination. In an environment divided into safe areas and the Silent World, the first rule beyond safe zones is avoidance of beasts, trolls and giants: “do not run or call for help but stand still and stay silent. It might go away” (Sundberg, 2013: 68). While Christensen insists that Stand Still Stay Silent’s themes of isolation and fear of contagion fit formulaic plague narrative perfectly, my paper argues that this is only in the exposition of the story world. The governing principle of the comic, both structural and thematic, is transgression. 

While the characters often go where they are not supposed to go, a central feature of the social interaction of those on the mission is debate about what to do and how to interpret their experiences. Lingustic, cultural, and interpretive gaps are evinced throughout the comic by the language difficulties of the characters: some only speak Finnish and others only Norwegian or Swedish (this is indicated by a drawing of each country’s flag); a few are multi-lingual; in order to communicate, they must cooperate as a group. These moments in the plot invite readers to also engage in debate in the comments feature available through the comic’s platform, to offer solutions and plot suggestions in between postings of the new panel(s), a feature Sundberg herself wrote about in her undergraduate thesis. A key means of building a readership, she writes, is to create, via a comments section, a means for readers to build a personal connection with the world of the narrative and the author; social media is another (2013: 17). The capacity for, and the necessity of, interaction is emphasized by both the plot and the digital affordances of the comic, and is set against expectations that the characters (and readers )might bring concerning the safety of isolation and fear of others.

(Source: ELO 2018 Conference: Gaps in the Gavas: Digital Comics: Opening up the Silent World: Narrating Interaction in a Digital Comic)

I investigate digital horror comics as a case study in anxieties about the boundaries between fiction and reality provoked by the remediation of print media forms, such as text or comics, as digital media forms. Because the horror genre often deals with questions of transgression and boundaries, and because the frightening fictions depicted in horror media raise the stakes on questions of the boundaries between media and reality, horror it is a fruitful site for exploring assumptions and anxieties about the boundaries of media. This paper uses Noel Carroll's framework of “art horror” to examine digital horror comics by three authors: Studio Horang's Bong-Cheon-Dong Ghost (2011), Ok-su Station Ghost (2011) and Ghost in Masung Tunnel (2013), Emily Carroll's Prince And The Sea (2011), When The Darkness Presses (2012) and Margot's Room (2011), and Kazerad's Prequel (ongoing). These comics all make use of uniquely digital elements, such as “infinite canvas” pages of different sizes, animation, and sometimes sound, to subvert the reader's expectations and create horrific effects. These comics are effective because they take advantage of expectations about the boundaries of the comics medium which readers carry over from print comics, subverting these expectations by using elements which are possible in the digital comics but not in print comics. Reader's expectations based on what is and is not possible in print comics, make these exclusively digital elements in the comics seem unsettling, as if the digital comics have broken a law of reality and the boundaries between our own world and storyworlds are breaking down; the digital horror elements in these comics make many readers feel as though a monster may literally climb out of their computer screen. Using Janet Murray's framework of immersivity and interactivity for understanding digital media, discussed in Hamlet On The Holodeck, and Bolter and Grusin's theory of remediation and hypermediacy, I argue that when a new, more immersive media form with expanded affordances that allow it to appear “closer” to reality, such as digital media, is first adopted, older media forms are remediated into it and assumptions about the boundaries of those older media forms are at first carried over and taken for granted as laws of reality. However, at some point, the expanded capabilities of the new medium become apparent, upsetting expectations and provoking a period of anxiety as the vestigial boundaries of the old medium are dismantled and the broader boundaries of the new medium are encountered. These digital horror comics discussed in this paper play on the anxieties that breaking these vestigial boundaries provoke, and provide a clear illustration of the process of remediation and renegotiation of boundaries that the medium of digital comics, as well as many other digital mediums are also undergoing.

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1209/Broken+Windows+and+Slashed+Canvases%3A+Digital+Comics+and+Transgressive+Horror)

Moving from the holodeck to the game board, Janet Murray explains why we make dramas of digital simulations.

The central objective of this paper is to provide a new conceptual theoretical framework starting from the role of new new media in shaping a new kind of literature, which I call Cosmo-Literature. Towards this, I start working from Levinson’s differentiation among old media, new media, and new new media to arrive at the difference among the variable types of media. Next, I address the role of new new media in establishing world democracies and changing the social, cultural, and political world map. After that, I investigate the terms of “global village” and “cosmopolitanism” in relation to literature. To clarify what I mean by Cosmo Literature, I will investigate two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel by the Moroccan novelist Abdel-Wahid Stitu, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel by Neil Gaiman, to infer the characteristics of Cosmo literature in general and Cosmo narration in particular.
What I mean by Cosmo-literature is all forms of literature produced by the capabilities provided by new new media. These include digital works but also examples where the digital artifact is printed or presented in other media.
Cosmo literature is derived from the political, social, and cultural context that the whole world lives in nowadays. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism as “universality plus difference” is the most significant term to refer to the pluralistic and universal society of today. Respecting diversity, caring about each other, and kindness are the moral principle of the cosmopolitan society according to Appiah. My project builds on Appiah to argue that digital media facilitate the cultural co-existence of the peoples of the cosmopolitan society. As long as such a society has its own morals and identity, it is logical to have its own literature, which I believe to be Cosmo-Literature.
The investigation of two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel, has shown many features of Cosmo-Literature in its relation to cosmopolitanism. At the heart of these features are interactivity, multilingualism, multimediality, suspense, new literariness, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional, and creating new dimensions of time. Those features also play as the characteristic features of the group identity of the universal society of today.