politics

Video games and their associated forms stand as the most lucrative entertainment sector on the planet, dominating other forms of visual media in dollars generated annually. In the proposed paper, adapted from a dissertation chapter, I will draw upon my experience as a game designer to illuminate the increasingly dire ways that various actors in the political sphere – from online trolls all the way to world leaders – have combined the language and techniques borne from the industrial practices of game design with the power of social media and other online communication platforms to produce new forms of disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theory. In this paper, I will trace the history of a specific form of game – the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), from its early literary history in 1903 to its modern incarnations. Subsequently, by harnessing lessons from my own work developing ARGs for the 2016 video game Frog Fractions 2 and the 2020 film Dared My Best Friend, I will examine how closely the principles employed during ARG marketing campaign have been in similar use in American politics since the 2016 American presidential campaign, culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capital. I will discuss how modern totalitarian systems will almost certainly continue to refine and deploy these strategies in the future as a new, dangerous form of propaganda: one that lives primarily in online discussion platforms and, much like the narrative of an ARG, is constructed both unwittingly and collaboratively by the targets of the propaganda themselves. Finally, I utilize my experience both as a designer and online community manager to address how, especially during COVID-19 quarantine, these emerging risks can be combated as the daily intersection of digital and analogue worlds continue to merge ever closer.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Video games are mirrors to our contemporary reality that reflect our society's philosophies, rhetoric, and more. Published in 2013, BioShock: Infinite offered a glimpse into the reality of a Utopian America ruled by conservative far-right identity politics. In 2016, Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States brought to the forefront of America what is often ignored. In this essay, I argue what Utopia is to the far-right by analyzing the society of Columbia, the use of media in the state, and more. Overall, I argue that politics and ideas of Utopia can be simulated into video games to understand far-right narratives of Trumpian politics better.

The focus of my paper is to bring forward some information regarding the development of the electronic literature in an ex-communist country, Romania, at a certain, representative moment: after four decades of communism and almost thirty years of democracy and free book market. In the first part, the main purpose is to explain how the Romanian writers’ literature was affected over the last decade of communism: on the one hand, the technological deficiency, which made difficult, almost impossible for the Romanian writers to investigate new digital creative writing formulas, and, on the other hand – and the most important one – the excessive political control of Ceaușescu’s regime that cut off absolutely the contact with the international literature. In my thesis I will try to lay out how the literary scene has been working during the last thirty years: the recovery of the freedom and the reconnection of the Romanian writers to the international literary world, with an emphasis on the process of linking of the Romanian writers to the experimental-technological sphere of fiction in the universal field. I focus on the beginning of the ’90s, when, in the post-communist Romania, the political censorship has been abolished, being replaced, first of all, with the „financial censorship” and with the publishers’ attempts to the financial struggle. In order to publish literature with a promising success and an aura of a bestseller, the publishers had to follow a specific „recipe”: potential financial successes instead of literary creations opened to innovation. Moreover, this happens in a context in which, after almost a half of a century of censorship, the readers wanted to recover the most important forbidden or censured books, being less interested in reading experimental literature. I plan to pay a special attention to the last decade, a period when, along with the tremendous spreading of the Internet connection, the first Romanian electronic literary experiments have appeared slowly, in the marginal fields, especially in the Science-Fiction genre. Afterward, the change continued to spread in the sphere of literature. Overall, this study regarding the level of development of electronic literature in post-communist Romania – restrained by technological barriers and excessive political control during the Communist era, followed by a complicated period of free book market – reveals a lot of similarities in most of the Iron Curtain countries.

(Source: Author's abstract from ELO 2018 site)

Steve Shaviro reviews Tomorrow Now by Bruce Sterling, a book that (for an eminent cyberpunk novelist) is perhaps too sane and sensible.

(Source: EBR)

A discussion of net.activism, net.tactics, and strategy featuring Bruce Simon, Geert Lovink, Chris Carter, and Ricardo Dominguez.

(Source: EBR)

Bennett Voyles’ retrospective on the apolitical Nineties, and the fate of democratic electronic activism without content.

(Source: EBR)

Excerpted from Water Writing - an essay; presented as part of the ebr Critical Ecologies thread; concurrent with a literary Festschrift in honor of Joseph McElroy’s lifework