ludology

My paper explores the genre of visual novels, a form of digital interactive fiction popularized in Japan. As very little academic work has been undertaken on visual novels thus far, I explore several different methods for analyzing them, and consider what other scholars may find useful and interesting about them in the future. One of the few detailed English-language essays on visual novels is Patrick W. Galbraith’s “Bishōjo Games: ‘Techno-Intimacy’ and the Virtually Human in Japan.” While Galbraith does make some insightful points about visual novels’ representations of romance and sexuality, he also misrepresents the medium as primarily a form of romance simulation for lonely heterosexual men. I challenge Galbraith’s assumptions through my first method of analysis: using a java program to distant-read the data aggregated by the website The Visual Novel Database. The results of my study demonstrate not only that visual novels encompass a variety of genres, but also that trends in recent releases point toward an increase in stories featuring female protagonists. Scholars interested in positive representation of women in digital interactive fiction may therefore find visual novels relevant to their work. I also consider the debate between narratology and ludology regarding analysis of video games, and explore how both approaches could be useful in the study of visual novels. I first close-read some scenes from the short visual novel Once on a Windswept Night, applying the narratological theories of interactive fiction scholars Daniel Punday, Veli-Matti Karhulahti, and Espen Aarseth. I argue that through unique strategies such as taking a minimalist approach to orienting spaces, using metanarrative to situate itself within a long history of interactive literature, and taking advantage of the medium’s conventions to subvert readers’ expectations, Once on a Windswept Night demonstrates the potential for visual novels to be narratologically complex and interesting. Finally, while the core component of visual novels is similar to hypertext stories and choose-your-own-adventure books, many also include elements of other video game genres. Visual novels which engage in this blurring of genres, such as Aviary Attorney, lend themselves to analysis from ludological perspectives as well. I compare Aviary Attorney’s gameplay elements to those that Noah Wardrip-Fruin analyzes in the role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic, considering how they can make the narrative more immersive, yet also open the door to flaws and inconsistencies in the story. I argue that games like Aviary Attorney, which integrate simulation elements into detailed and branching stories, could pave the way for new and exciting forms of game fiction in the future. I hope that my paper can provide a good introduction to some of the merits and values of visual novels as a subject of academic study. Exploring visual novels may expand the viewpoints of scholars of interactive fiction and video games, and in bringing more recognition to the medium, these scholars have the potential to help provide visual novel developers with the opportunities to try even more new and experimental methods of expressing their stories.

(Source: Author's description from ELO 2018 site: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1224/Ludo…)

Christine Wilks is an awarded digital writer, artist and developer of playable stories who participated in different projects in the field of electronic literature. In this interview, she talks about her interest in electronic literature, her activism in the different projects as well as the use of different media tools and of ludic elements in her works.

An interview with Stuart Moulthrop, a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (USA) and an early author of works of electronic literature.

Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. In so doing, transgression of linearity and the attempt to reduce the authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining characteristics of this literary form. Works of digital fiction were first described as fragmented objects comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of choice and a participatory role in the construction of the text. These texts were read by selecting several links and by assembling lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new types of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several media could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons.
In electronic literature, the emergence of new software and new devices is often followed by the creation of new texts. Head-mounted displays and tracking devices are being used to produce new textual responses. Bodily movement is often treated as the catalyser of these textual responses and the reader is often considered as the creator of a narrative written in real-time. This means that the attempt to offer the reader a participatory role continues to be fostered by electronic literature. In this thesis, digital fiction is described as part of an introspection and self-generating process catalysed by literature. Consequently, these new kind of texts will be defined as part of the ever-evolving field of literature.
While interactivity was often described as a set of physical activities that can interfere with attention, immersion was frequently seen as an uncritical and passive response to the text. Interactivity was used to offer freedom of choice to the reader and to give the reader the opportunity of co-authoring the text. Immersion was, by contrast, considered as the result of a reading experience constrained by authorial intention. In so doing, interactivity was mostly regarded as an antidote of reader’s immersion in the text. However, in this thesis, I will focus on a cooperation rather than a conflict between both. By describing interactivity as a set of cognitive and physical actions on the part of the reader and by defining immersion as a result and origin of these actions, I will demonstrate that immersion and interactivity cannot survive separately. This thesis aims at addressing the relation between immersion and interactivity by taking into account the text’s multimodality and transiency, as well as the ergodic and cognitive work done by the reader.

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be "texts," and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games' generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.

The great stake-claiming race is on, and academics from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping "the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure" (to quote from the ad in Blade Runner). As with any land rush, the respect for local culture and history is minimal, while the belief in one's own tradition, tools, and competence is unfailing. Computer game studies is virgin soil, ready to be plotted and plowed by the machineries of cultural and textual studies. What better way to map the territory than by using the trusty, dominant paradigm of stories and storytelling? The story perspective has many benefits: it is safe, trendy, and flexible. In a (Western) world troubled by addiction, attention deficiency, and random violence, stories are morally and aesthetically acceptable. In stories, meaning can be controlled (despite what those deconstructionists may have claimed). Storytelling is a valuable skill, the main mode of successful communication. And theories of storytelling are (seemingly) universal: they can be applied to and explain any medium, phenomenon, or culture. So why should not games also be a type of story?

(Source: Author's introduction

Today, we not only see video games and online role-playing games interpreted, in print-based scholarly journals, by way of classical literary and narrative theory (to the dismay of the radical ludologist), but we also see the inverse: classical novels interpreted by way of role-playing games staged in computerized, simulated environments (as in Jerome McGann's IVANHOE Game). The use of classical theory for the study of contemporary video games and video games for the study of classical literature, however, does not necessarily mean that we now inhabit a mixed up muddled up shook up literary-critical world. In fact, these examples might mark opposite sides of a continuum of critical practice, and underscore the logic of analyzing a text in a given medium with the tools of a different – and complementary – medium.

The notion recalls McGann's own assertion that problems in textual scholarship inevitably arise when we "deploy a book form to study another book form," thereby creating an undesirable "symmetry between the tool and its subject" (2001, 56). If the assertion holds true across media, it would appear that we have arrived at a rather tidy formulation: scholars should utilize the tools of a dynamic medium in order to study a text in a fixed one and, conversely, they should make recourse to a more stable medium in order to study dynamic works of (digital) literature. The formulation is, of course, too tidy, and breaks down as soon as we consider texts that would fall anywhere in the middle of this continuum. What sort of critical tools and critical perspectives would best suit works of digital literature that rely on a fusion of discursive and material complexity / movement?

Most theorists and critics invested in language-driven digital literature at least tend to agree on a pronounced need for more "close readings." At the same time, it is still not entirely clear what is meant by "close reading" and how (or even if) the very notion of close reading applies to digital literature. This paper suggests that digital literature prompts a revisitation, re-articulation, and reanimation of the concept of close reading, one that attends to the material context of its process and product. It will first consider the historical and genealogical development of close reading alongside the material and technological developments of 20th century literary production – the very context that was consciously elided by its earliest practitioners as they sought to insulate literature from the vulgarities of industrial and technological culture. Then it will perform a series of short close readings of a recent work of digital literature, TOC: a new media novel by Steve Tomasula (et. al.) (2009). The first will disregard medium and materiality, the second will "read" only the medium and its materiality, and a third will read both elements in concert. The experiment aims to demonstrate how understanding textual materiality as something distinct from a work of digital literature is at once impossible and absolutely necessary.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

Amidst the various forms of electronic literature stands a class of interactive programs that simulates human conversation. A chatbot, or chatterbot, is a program with which users can “speak,” typically by exchanging text through an instant-messaging style interface. Chatbots have been therapists, Web site hosts, language instructors, and even performers in interactive narratives. Over the past ten years, they have proliferated across the Internet, despite being based on a technology that predates the Web by thirty years. In my readings, these chatbots are synedochic of the process by which networked identities form on the Internet within the power dynamics of hegemonic masculinity. Chatbots, in this light, model the collaborative performance humans enact on electronically-mediated networks.

These computer programs stand as the nexus of various roads of inquiry and present a useful model for gender construction and racial formation enacted over electronically-mediated networks. Chatbots are actor-networks, bringing together programmers, artists, and machines to develop interactive entities. To match their interdisciplinarity, this dissertation brings together humanities, scientific, and sociological approaches to analyze chatbots in their broader historical and cultural context. Particularly, I blend textual analysis, cultural studies, and survey research. Central to the work is a survey of the makers and users of chatbots. Once a sense of the makeup of the community has been determined, subsequent chapters apply race, gender, and labor theories to the interpretation of specific chatbots in action. These interpretations are preceded by a look at Alan Turing, whose provocations about imitating humanity and performing gender set the tone for the debates that surround chatbots.

The chatbots in this dissertation are used for websites, interactive fiction, interactive drama, adult entertainment, and educational contexts. From ELIZA to A.L.I.C.E., these chatbots span the history of chatbots, ending contemporary applications, such as Tactical Iraqi, Façade, and my ownBarthes’ Bachelorette. In this context, this dissertation enters debates about narratology and ludology, offering directed poetics and systemic exploration in its place. The dissertation also considers other relevant cultural objects, such as the Chess-Playing Turk and cinematic cyborgs appearing in Simone , Thomas est Amoureux ( Thomas in Love), and Blade Runner.

(Source: Author's abstract)

The dissertation’s main point of departure is the clash between explicit and implicit presuppositions, conceptualisations and generalisations in print-oriented literary theoretical paradigms and a plenitude of empirically verifiable anomalies and counter-examples to them found in digital and ergodic works of literature. The behaviour of these counter-examples is explained by cybertext theory that addresses the often neglected issue of the variety of literary media. Both the empirical counter-examples and the empirically verifiable differences in the behaviour of literary media allow us to expand and modify literary theories to suit not just one traditionally privileged media position but all of them. Therefore, in the first half of the dissertation, literary theory and narratology are viewed and modified from the perspective of slightly revised cybertext theory. In this process theories of ergodic and non-ergodic literature are integrated more closely and several so far non-theorized ways of manipulating narrative time, regulating narrative information, and generating narrative instances are located and theorized. In the second half of the dissertation, the role of cybertext theory and the position of ergodic literature are reversed as they are viewed from the perspectives provided by ludology and game ontology. This is necessary to better situate ergodic literature in the continuum of other ergodic phenomena and between interpretative and dominantly configurative practices. To this end a provisional and formal paradigm of ludology is first constructed and synthesized from previous ludological research and then applied to newer forms and genres of ergodic literature such as textual instruments.

(Source: University of Jyväskylä)