platform studies

Blaseball, a fantasy baseball simulator developed by The Game Band, took 2020 by storm, quickly developing from a niche web game to an legitimate cultural phenomenon, including a whole catalogue of fan-created merchandise, more than a dozen albums of music, including a musical, and a dedicated following of players from around the world. Much of the attraction of the game comes from the passionate involvement of the fans and the openness The Game Band have shown to players making the game their own.In this paper, I demonstrate how The Game Band and players make use of the affordances of web browsers as a platform to create an inclusive space for play where each player can enjoy the game in their own way without precluding or diminishing other ways of playing Blaseball. The specific examples I examine are the use of a minimalist, text-forward approach to the game in a way that gives players licence to imagine a diverse, inclusive league of Blaseball characters; the development of "forbidden knowledge" as a way to include players with an interest in spoilers without alienating those who wish to avoid this information; and the player-led creation of a wiki that supports simultaneous-yet-mutually-exclusive descriptions of characters and events in the game, which allows the community of fans to enjoy a variety of interpretations of the minimalist events of the game without excluding any other faction of the fanbase.In using a minimalist, text-forward approach to game development, The Game Band not only created a low-cost, quick-to-iterate game by excluding the time- and labour intensive components of visual art, video, and audio elements; they also created an opportunity for fans to develop their own visions of the in-game characters and events without being limited by canonical race, gender, or sexual orientation. This seemingly-practical choice for a project from a small team is in fact pivotal to the game’s inclusiveness.Given the easy access to the game's code that web browsers offer, it was inevitable that players would explore and try to divine how the game works. While such behaviour could be seen as cheating, in Blaseball the interaction with the game’s code and data is part of the experience. In response to the grey area such interactions exist in, The Game Band and players developed the idea of "forbidden knowledge"— knowledge players had back-door access to but hadn't been made public by the game itself. I examine the concept of forbidden knowledge within the context of traditional methods of cheating, as studied by Mia Consalvo, and demonstrate how forbidden knowledge, as a social practice, is an inclusive response.Finally, I demonstrate how players make use of the mutability of web content to allow multiple visions of the same game to coexist in the form of the Blaseball wiki. This wiki loads random fan-generated player backstories every time the page refreshes so that no single vision of the game dominates all others.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

We describe six common misconceptions about platform studies, a family of approaches to digital media focused on the underlying computer systems that support creative work. We respond to these and clarify the platform studies concept.

(Source: Authors' abstract)

This project aims to investigate Nordic creative works in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base and see which platforms the Nordic works have been created for. Several differences between Nordic creative works were observed, and it was found that some languages were over-represented in the database, while others were under-represented. The most popular language was Norwegian (Bokmål), while Finnish and Swedish were under-represented. 

(Source: Author's Abstract)

An overview of the use of platform in creative works in Elmcip.

The demoscene is a European subculture that gathers computer programmers, who generate computer art in real time, the origins of which date back to the 80s. The most important genre created by the scene are demos – programs of which the sole aim is to impress the audience and demonstrate the abilities of the computer and the programmer. The demos are created in real time during demoparties, their effects are generated by a processor processing input data according to the created algorithm. The demoscene and its works are examples of pioneer creative computing in the field of digital media, at the intersection of computer science, media art and underground subculture. The aim of this paper is to attempt a description of the literary esthetic of the demoscene in scene genres such as demos, real-time texts, interactive fiction or zines. Special attention will devoted to the analysis of these genres in from the perspective of camp, pastiche, trash, bad taste. The point of departure will be the activity of the group Hooy-Program, and one of its members, the demoscener Yerzmyey, the author of various works, including the work of interactive fiction The Road to Assland. The group is treated as characteristic of the general phenomenon. Demoscene creators, programmers, and computer geeks are both artists and programmers, who can appreciate the aesthetics of the programs written for demos and who are aware of the possibilities and limitations of the platforms they use. Platform studies methodology shall be applied to the study of the achievements of Yerzmyey, a scener working with the ZX Spectrum 48 and 128 from 1989, in order to enable focus on the material, formal and historical aspects of programming and language. Media archeology focusing on the textual aspect of the demoscene may be an important discovery for researchers of the beginnings of digital literature and genres of digital-born texts.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This presentation asks what we can learn about a foundational work of electronic literature – Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – by porting it to a new platform. More than this, it asks what we can learn about the source and target platforms of such a porting exercise.

Thanks to a great deal of path breaking work, much scholarship on electronic literature now makes use of what Katherine Hayles calls media-specific analysis (MSA). The field has followed the lead of scholars such as Hayles, Nick Montfort, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Terry Harpold, and many others in assuming that the materialities at play in a digital artifact actively shape expression and interpretation. We no longer treat the screen as another page. Work adjacent to electronic literature has asked these same questions, attending to the role of software and hardware in digital expression. Platform studies offers one version of this line of inquiry, and it asks how a given computational platform shapes and constrains creative processes and products. Much like the tenets of MSA, platform studies insists that the various computational machines at work in a given piece of digital media act as more than a conduit or background to expression. Scholarship on electronic literature has already begun to engage with platform studies, most recently by way of Anastasia Salter and John Murray’s study of Flash. In their book-length study of this platform, Salter and Murray take up a number of works of electronic literature by authors such as Jason Nelson and Stuart Moulthrop.

This presentation will continue that work by porting Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to the Twine platform. When Chris Klimas released Twine, it immediately drew comparisons to Storyspace, the platform used to create Patchwork Girl and many other works of electronic literature. Where Storyspace has guard fields that set up conditions by which text can be hidden from or revealed to the interactor, Twine implements an “if” Macro. Where Storyspace allows authors to group together lexia with “paths,” Twine offers a similar function called “tags.” Further, both platforms offer the writer a kind of “node-and-edge” view of the writing space. However, the very fact that these pieces of software were created two decades apart, by different developers, and in different media ecologies suggests that there are important differences between the two. In order to shed light on the differences and similarities of these platforms and also in the interest of returning to Patchwork Girl, this presentation will walk through what we learn from a Twine version of Jackson's work.

Hayles describes MSA as a kind of game: “Using the characteristics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a literary medium?” In this presentation, I propose a different version of Hayles’s game: What do we learn about a work of electronic literature, its native platform, and the target platform when we port it to a new platform?

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

As the technical affordances that shaped early electronic literature’s frontiers have become commonplace, hypertextual structures abound in our experiences of online texts. Many tools make it easier than ever to generate these types of works, but one of the most interesting for its demonstrated literary potential is Twine: a platform for building choice-driven stories easily publishable on the web without relying heavily on code. In software studies, a platform is defined by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort as a hardware or software system that provides the “foundation of computational expression.” This definition can encompass any of the tools we use to develop procedural content, as Bogost noted on his blog: “a platform…is something that supports programming and programs, the creation and execution of computational media.” Examining Twine as a case-study among current open, non-coder friendly platforms probes the future of interactive narrative on the web—a future that, outside the traditional scope of the electronic literature community, is highly determined by the affordances of platforms and the desires of their user-developers. Twine is an open source platform with an interface that resembles a network of index cards, “tied” together by threads of meaning as defined by the writer and embedded in text. Works built in Twine hearken back to early electronic literature, evoking Hypercard and Eastgate hypertext novels, but their relationship with these established digital forms is not straightforward. The reception and definition of Twine as a platform recalls the many debates of definition surrounding electronic literature: works in Twine have been included in interactive fiction competitions, displayed at independent games festivals, and built as part of interactive story jams. However, despite Twine’s link to the hypertext novel, it has not been as visible in the electronic literature community. In an interview in The Guardian, designer and writer Anna Anthropy has called attention to the works in Twine as part of a “revolution,” noting that they offer a solution to some of the dehumanizing aspects of mainstream games: “I think that what I want to see more of in games is the personal – games that speak to me as a human being, that are relatable, which is the opposite of the big publisher games that I see. People who are creating personal games aren't hundred-person teams, they are people working at home, making games with free software of their own experiences.” Key Twine works evoking this personal literary construct include Nora Last's "Here's Your Rape", Finny's "At the Bonfire", Anna Anthropy's "Escape from the lesbian gaze,” and Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, & Isaac Schankler's "Depression Quest." I will examine the structures of Twine and its role in shaping a new genre of hypertextual literature, and the potential implications of Twine for the broader future and definition of electronic literature itself.

(Source: Authors introduction)