Minecraft

My proposal for ELO’s gathering consists of both a paper and a demonstration to be presented simultaneously. My paper will first review the relationship between VR, performance, and language manipulation. After this summary, I will then propose the next iteration of this embrace, an environment that, like the CAVE project, provides the user with a textually creative and interactive experience. I will then provide an exploratory first stage of ongoing research in the modification of an existing gamespace, Mojang’s sandbox world generator Minecraft, which will render the Text(ured) environment into a viable compositional space. Through the creation and manipulation capabilities provided with Minecraft, I will then illustrate the numerous potentials for text creation and manipulation in the virtual landscape.

Finally, my paper will posit several subsequent projects that depart from Minecraft mods to renegotiate the user’s relationship to the textual environment within virtual and augmented realities. These include the development of a VR Processing compiler that allows users to manipulate the code structures and modules through sensory input, the potential benefit for accessibility, as well as the possible opportunities provided by augmented reality (AR) devices

(Source Author Abstract)

This essay is a synopsis of my fourth chapter from my dissertation. My research consists of game-poems and how they fundamentally alter the experience of “reading” poetry. Ultimately, my argument is that poetic experience is no longer initiated by text, but by the kinetic, audible, visual, and tactile functions in the digital environment that I label as trans-medial space; in effect, these functions sustain the poetry experience, and, thus, require the reader/user of the poem to play, rather than read, as a new form of “reading” the digital game-poem in order experience and interpret a poem’s meaning.

As a result, this essay explicates my theory and purpose for constructing and presenting an online, multiplayer game experience of a digital poem ironically titled “How to Read a Digital Poem”. Set in Markus Persson’s Minecraft platform, I demonstrate how this trans-medial space functions as an expression of poetry, mediating our interaction with digital poems. As a result, my Minecraft Poem challenges the level of immediacy and ephemeral notions of space that has been associated with technological advancement in digital poetry advocated by N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Mirona Magearu. The environment is a space oscillating between constraint and unconstraint methods to produce a poem, but results in a stable trans-medial space for the digital poem to perform and be experienced by the user/player.