El jardín de los relatos inacabados (The Garden of Unfinished Stories) by Félix Remírez is a digital work in which the reader explores a simulation of the scenery of a garden to discover ten beginnings of stories that, eventually give him/her an idea to continue a longer narrative. The fragments of stories are like creative seeds. The texts are not obvious to find and they oblige the reader to surround the whole garden.
El jardín de los relatos inacabados de Félix Remírez es una obra digital en la que el lector debe explorar un escenario que simula un jardín para descubrir varias decenas de inicios de relatos que, eventualmente, pueden darle ideas para continuar con una narración más extensa. Como si de semillas creativas se tratara. Los textos no son evidentes de descubrir y obligan al lector a recorrer las imágenes del jardín.
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
Sydney's Siberia is a zoomable poem.
It is not technology making our wires, nodes and swimming data streams, our ever growing networks, beautiful. Instead it is the stories/poetics, the forever coalescing narratives that form the inter/intranet into a vitally compelling mosaic To explore, simply mouse-over/navigate to an appealing square, click and click, read, contemplate connections and repeat. Sydney’s Siberia recreates how networks build exploratory story-scapes through an interactive zooming, clicking interface. Using 121 poetic/story image tiles, the artwork dynamically generates mosaics, infinitely recombining to build new connections/collections based on the users movements.
