virtual world

This paper shares the story of the rise and fall of The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), a Pascal-based design system written in 1987 by David Malmberg, based on Mark J. Welch's 1985 Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). It was the leading platform for parser-based interactive fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Text Adventure Development System (TADS) as its upstart competitor. The use of these early (pre-Graham Nelson’s Inform 6) parser-based interactive fiction platforms was supported by an annual AGT contest, and a design community that stayed in touch through BBS-communities, the largest of which was Compuserve’s Gamer’s Forum. Malmberg ceased to support AGT in 1992, (the final release was AGT 1.7) but the contest continued until 1994. The competition was rebranded under new management, and with an expanded community and continued on as the Interactive Fiction Competition, (which has been run since 2016 by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation). A game that I wrote for the AGT contest in 1992, CosmoServe, featured a simulated DOS environment, featuring the frustrating use of dial-up software and the aesthetic of CompuServe screens from that era, as well as the more visceral experience of BBS communication -- wailing modems, paying by the minute, long download times and corrupt files, hard-drive destroying viruses etc…). Ironically, this game is now all that appears to be left of CompuServe's rich gamers’ and game designers’ lifeworld. A collaboratively written work of IF that I organized, Shades of Gray: an adventure in Black and White, written in AGT, was designed and coordinated in a CompuServe Gamer’s Forum private room, and represents the heyday of bulletin board IF collaboration. When CompuServe died in the mid-1990s, after having been assimilated in a borg-like way by its longstanding and hated rival, AOL, nothing of CompuServe remained to be archived digitally, except what individual users might have downloaded to their own computers and backed up on floppy disks. I will soon be launching, through IFTF, a crowdsourced “Digital Archeology” project asking old users of CompuServe Forums (chiefly Gamers and Science Fiction forums, the two places that gamers and game designers hung out), to go into their own basements and see what they can find of media they might have downloaded from CompuServe in its final years. This includes transcripts of conferences, listings and files from libraries, public postings and private email. I will share the history of AGT as a e-lit platform, its code, games, contest, and disappearance from the scene and describe the CompuServe Gamer’s Forum Digital Archeology project, particularly as our finds shed light on the life and times of writers of e-literature and interactive fiction who used early platforms, like GAGS, AGT, and TADS to write and share their work, uploading and downloading it to and from BBS-services. It is a world that has vanished from the digital record – in this paper, and the project it describes, I'm hoping to bring some of it back.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Mind the gap between digital journalism and eletronic literature. In the digital age, how to write about the search for love? Using fiction or non fiction? The question is that a new epistolary literature is being written in cell phones, e-mails, apps and dating sites. How different is it in comparison with the old love letters people used to write to their soulmates? In a mix of netnography, journalism and digital storytelling, me and other 25 brazilian researchers infiltrated ourselves into this universe for the last five years. The idea was not to publish a tradicional print work for newspapers or a linear story. We created avatars, made hiperlinked articles describing each site or app we visited and also wrote field journals about our experience. It is an experience of multimedia storytelling whose original question, the search of a soulmate using the internet to extend our chances in the virtual world, work as a metaphor for the journalism chances to find unprecedented paths exploring new narrative strategies in digital media. It also highlingts a change in the reader's position, who doesn't want to wait anymore to watch the development of the stories by the authors and want to find his own path, make new relationships or join new social groups. And, with this, construct new stories.

This panel will examine the textual (verbal and non-verbal) construction of characters as the key to representation and identity in cyberspace. The concept of “character” is not established a priori, but comes into being as participants in the digital world or text render words, images and movements into a perceived identity.

The panellists will address questions of representation, fiction and reality as well as discussing techniques, patterns and codes used in creating and interpreting digital characters. Is it possible to represent oneself realistically in cyberspace? What is the relationship between realistically intended projections of ourselves and make-believe or fantastic characters? What are the relationships between the construction of characters in narrative and dramatic fiction and in computer games and online communities?

In four complementary and interlinked perspectives on characters in digital environments, we will discuss how real and fictional people are represented and/or represent themselves in the varied contexts of online communities, computer games, hypertext fiction and artificial intelligence.

Lisbeth Klastrup´s paper examines how in some digital fictions and/or worlds, the programme is brought to the centre of the stage of action as a “character.” Represented as a perceptible subjective consciousness or “implicit narrator,” this character is made explicit through the way it manipulates the interface, comments on the ongoing action, etc. In these instances, the programme is “perceiving” us at the same time as we as characters/readers perceive “it.” Can these examples point toward an alternative way of thinking about character representations and their mediation in digital environments?

Susana Tosca´s paper discusses different sorts of computer games to see what kind of characters they propose the user to identify herself with. It considers the range of actions that users are asked/allowed to perform as well as the prior narrative construction of the "user-character." These two factors will give an idea of the nature and degree of the users activity, raising questions of narrative and psychological identification, representation, involvement, catharsis and ultimately the cultural importance of games. Who are we when we play digital games?

Jill Walker´s paper explores the concept of “character” in a MOO, examining the relationship between traditional notions of character, as we are familiar with them from literature, drama and cinema, and players' presentation of themselves as make-believe or realistic characters in a MOO. In analysing specific examples of characters and “bots” in MOOs, this paper examines how we can use existing and emerging theory to understand digital characters.

Elin Sjursen´s paper investigates how the creation of identity/character is flavored by the user’s implementation of textual and visual codes in "interactive" environments like MOOs and cybertexts. Without help from facial expressions, body language and tone of voice, how does the reader interpret the writer while they chat together, how does the writer reveal herself to the reader? Can any of these codes help create better and more believable bots?

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:

SUSANA PAJARES TOSCA is writing a PhD thesis on Literature and Hypertext in the Complutense University of Madrid. She has published articles and given talks on humanities computing and cyberculture in general both in Spain and abroad.

LISBETH KLASTRUP is writing a PhD thesis on MOOs and other on-line Communities as Fictional Worlds. As the first PhD at the recently established IT-University in Copenhagen (Denmark), she is much engaged in the founding of the interdisciplinary ITU Research School. She has written articles on on-line fictions, film and cyberspace.

JILL WALKER is currently researching a PhD at the University of Bergen (Norway), where she will compare hypertext fiction and MUDs. She has published several articles on hypertext fiction, both in print and as hypertexts, and has extensive experience with building and living in MOOs.

ELIN JOHANNE SJURSEN is writing her graduate thesis on the merging of text/image/sound in cybertext poetry at the University of Bergen (Norway). As a multimedia artist she has presented her work at several conferences.