English

Though not an ideal solution, lyric reflection can be a significant method of preserving electronic literature. Having lost Flash, one solution is mimetic: a technical project resulting in a faithful copy of the original work, allowing the work to be experienced in all its particularity and interactivity. Failing that, footage, screenshots, and thorough, plainly descriptive writing can make a long-term accessible record so that at least that space in the genre’s history can be seen and understood by future generations. What happens, however, when a work a work features elements of ephemerality? On a computational level, this can happen to a far greater degree than with a traditional print book. Outside of rare tragedies, we can retrieve an old text from the archives, but we cannot retrieve the experience of, for instance, Multi-User Dungeons in the late 1990s. Lyric recollection, however, provides a literary model for securing something very close to the experience of the work.Two particularly notable sources here are William Wordsworth for an early example and Indra Sinha for a specifically elit example. In his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility … the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” The poem, therefore, is not located in the original experience nor is it trying to be a mimetic copy of it. In the tranquil reflection, however, the poet is able, ideally, to capture the process of remembering so clearly that a new instance of the original type of emotion is actively produced by this new virtual encounter. In a similar way, Sinha records 1990s MUDs in his 1999 memoir The Cybergypsies, carefully shifting between forms to recreate the imaginative depth of the experience. We might also imagine a lighter form of this in the wild success of Façade – which parallels something of the social, writing-based experience of MUDS – on YouTube.Pavel Curtis suggests in 1997 that “it is difficult to properly convey the sense of the experience in words. Readers desiring more detailed information are advised to try mudding themselves” (124-5). Writing such as Sinha’s presents a model for how we might preserve important elements of generational and platform-specific electronic literature for future personal, authorial, and scholarly consideration. Such writing about personal online experience was popular around that time. In 2020, Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley and Joanne McNeil’s Lurking indicate a return to this more broadly. Among more formal archival efforts, in imagining a long literature history of elit for the future, lyric narratives – particularly in incorporating instances of the computer text as in Sinha – will inevitably play a significant role in how future generations ephemeral and social elit works.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.In order to reduce these limitations, to stimulate the reading practices and, at the same time, to develop young readers’ competencies in digital literacy, a website dedicated to children’s digital literature has been conceived, in partnership with the Littérature Québecoise Mobile group, directed by Bertrand Gervais: Lab-yrinthe.The website is intended as a virtual laboratory on contemporary children’s digital literary phenomena and aims at providing information based on scientific observations, as well as conceptual and didactic tools to educators, publishers and researchers.More particularly, Lab-yrinthe presents a catalog of heterogeneous digital literary works produced or distributed in Quebec, including enriched books, mobile apps, narrative video games, geolocated narrations, augmented reality creations, interactive theater performances, virtual installations and podcasts. Each creation is analyzed from a set of descriptive parameters conceived by the research team (Acerra, Lacelle et al., 2021) with the purpose to illustrate the semiotic, multimodal and technological materials of the text, as well as the poetic or rhetoric effects of their combinations. From this basis, some educational and didactic suggestions are depicted: teachers can refer to this section to find a reading key of the digital work and, at the same time, to have clear examples of the possible exploitations of a digital writing process in the school context.Finally, a dedicated section of the Lab-yrinthe website presents the main co-creation and co-production projects, carried out with partners from the cultural industry (ranging from the National television, to the Montréal Poetry Festival and Bookfair, from digital and analog publishers to National libraries and archives). In this case, both the actors, the contents and the distribution conditions are presented as indicators of the current orientations of the digital publishing field.BibliographyAcerra, E., Lacelle, N., et al. (2021, in press). « Décrire les œuvres littéraires numériques pour la jeunesse », Lire, comprendre, interpréter et apprécier des supports composites, La Lettre de l’AIRDF, n° 68.Lacelle, N., et al. (2017-2020). Soutien au développement de démarches d’édition numérique jeunesse au Québec à partir de pratiques favorables de production, diffusion et réception. Research project financed by the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture (Québec).

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

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)

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)

This paper will focus on “ambient literature” (Abba, Dovey, Pullinger 2020) as a kind of tradition-inspired literature of the future. Thus I will propose to look critically at traditional theoretical concepts and devices and analyse how apply them to characterise and realise such reading experiences. My starting point will be enhancing the concept of interactional metalepsis (Bell 2016 or Bell, Ensslin and Rustad 2014), then I will go for proposing the concept of “embedded dramatic monologue”, a form of narration built upon tradition and useful in creating immersive ambient reading experiences.I will focus on texts that declare: ‘Dear Reader, borrow me your body, and then I will show You my story’, thus, I will analyse works for which the corporeal “readiness” (Gadd 2020) is conditio sine qua non of reading, due to the fact that the reader’s body is conceptualised as an essential element of the author-reader contract. Such reading experiences frequently lead to mashing of ontological boundaries, to entering extradiegetic elements into diegetic world or the other way round, the phenomenon known as a metalepsis. Although theoretical approach to metalepsis had just been amplified in the digital fiction context (because the interactivity has opened new fields for artistic exploration of this device), ambient literature encourages deepening that critical reflection. The concept of interactional metalepsis yet proposed still underlies the metaphorical and symbolic dimension of the reader entering into the storyworld, while examples of ambient literature permit talk about literal overlapping of fictional and real world.However, such crossing of ontological borders results in a clear need of creating a space for a reader in the narration, narrative and storyworld.I will focus on the ways and devices used to achieve that, being extremely interested in the form of narration that creates such space for a reader, inviting him to cross the ontological borders. I will propose to look back at the traditional form of “dramatic monologue” (used for the first time by A. Camus in The Fall). In context of ambient literature we frequently can and should enhance the dramatic monologue’s theory (successfully built by i.e. M. Głowiński (Głowiński 1963)) and talk about “embedded dramatic monologue”; The latter - build upon the interactional metalepsis and a bleed of the storyworld into the real world of the reader (and vice versa) - does not simply simulate that in a storyworld there is a space for the reader, who is listening to the protagonist’s monologue. It really invites the reader to be and act in the storyworld, the storyworld that overlaps the reader’s reality. Ambient literature often takes the form of narration that does not pretend to permit the reader to listen to the story protagonists “as if” he was standing close to them, but “demands” that the reader really stand there.Classical locative narratives, even GPS-less ones (as Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair) and examples from works created on creative writing courses held at the University of Lodz will be case studies used to illustrate characterised form.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

This paper reflects on Electronic Literature projects I created between 2017 and 2020 through interrogating how each project collaborates with an increasingly complex non-human component. Riffing off of Donna Haraway's concept of "significant otherness" and making kin, I speculate on the differences in the significance of the otherness that is engaged with in projects using methods based on combinatorics/chance, statistical models, and vector semantics (contemporary neural-network based language models like GPT-2). While recognizing that each approach involves a reduction in human agency, this reflective paper focuses on the increasing complexity to which this agency is relinquished and how to deal with presenting this relationship between human and non-human actors. Culminating in a series of projects using OpenAI's GPT-2, the need for a self-reflexive "transformative reading interface" is introduced as a concrete instantiation of Katherine Hayles' concept of a "technotext." A transformative reading interface links a corpus of text to text generated by a language model based on that corpus. Such an interface serves to provide a source of noisy creativity for writing and a way to explore the materiality of contemporary language models for reading, while interrogating and respecting the posthuman nature of these artifacts.

We sometimes hear it said that our relationship with time has been altered. In companies and administrations, the adoption of New Management strategies means that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. The “FOMO Syndrome,” the anxiety generated by our fear of missing out on something in a world in which we are exposed to a constant flow of information and access to other people’s narratives (or at least to their stories), is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay increasingly connected (particularly to social media and video conferencing platforms), and to immediately respond to digital notifications and sollicitations on a 24/7 basis.

According to Paul Ricoeur, “narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence”[1] (Ricoeur, 1984). From this perspective, narrative is our principal tool for situating ourselves in time ― and for experiencing time within ourselves. Moreover, the Digital may be characterized as “a tool for the phenomenal deconstruction of temporality” (Bachimont 2010). This is reflected in its two main tendencies: that of real time calculation, conveying the impression of immediacy, and that of universality of access, conveying the impression of availability. The digital, thanks to its availability and its immediacy, thus leads to constant present, without any impression of the passage of time (Bachimont, 2014).

What happens then when the digital and narrative come together, when digital technology and narrative discourse, between which obvious tension exists, are combined? What happens when we exploit the particularities of “programmable media,” to use the term coined by John Cayley (2018), which for Bruno Bachimont are essentially detemporalizing, to tell a story, which we traditionally consider as being structured by an internal temporality and linked to an external temporality? From such a perspective, the term digital narrative would appear almost oxymoronic.

Digital narratives do nevertheless exist and are proliferating in multiple forms and thanks to varied approaches. What kind of temporal experiences are constructed by these new forms of digital narrative, and how are they constructed? Reciprocally, what new narrative forms, or even new concepts of narrative do these new temporal experiences provided by digital technology offer to us? The challenges lie in the manner in which narratives, revisited for and by digital tools and the digital environment can on one hand stand up to the deconstruction of time provoked by the said tools and environment, and on the other hand make us reflect on our relationship with time, and on the place of narrative as a discursive mode in our culture and our ways of interpreting the world.

In this article we will focus on three very different types of digital stories, in order to analyse the diverging potentialities of the relationship between the digital, temporality, and narrative. We will study two artistic creations on the one hand, and the widely used social media feature of stories on the other.

We will first examine a fictional work written for the smartphone[2] (downloadable from an app store), which is based on notifications, i.e. in which a fictional character regularly sends notifications to the user. This type of narrative plays on notions of temporality, with the intrusion of the reader’s real time.

We will also study a narrative based on a real time data flow[3]. The constraints imposed on the narrative by this type of apparatus imply that the causality of events is replaced by the sequentiality of real events. Yet this technical specificity, the linking of the narrative to a real time data flow, can mean that life’s contingencies enter into the narrative and result in a “pure time experience” (Chambefort, 2020).

Finally, with a change of field and direction, we will examine the phenomenon of the stories made possible notably by platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, which allow users to display a short video clip, an animated or static picture, a text or even a mini-survey for a default duration of twenty-four hours, which in turn is temporalized and presented to users with an associated duration of fifteen seconds, after which the feature automatically displays the next story available in the user’s newsfeed.

These three examples each explore the notion of temporality and the use of time in the digital “narrative” from a different angle: first, the interaction between the real time of the reader and his/her reading with narrative time, and so with the fictional work, then that of the diegetic time determined by the data flow, which thus becomes the temporal axis of the work in question, and finally the temporality imposed by the story features on various platforms, presented as a constitutive aspect of the story, and which the content provided by the user adopts and integrates.

[1] “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” (Ricoeur, 1985).« Le temps devient temps humain dans la mesure où il est articulé de manière narrative ; en retour le récit est significatif dans la mesure où il dessine les traits de l’expérience temporelle. »

[2] Enterre-moi, mon amour (Bury me, my love), The Pixel Hunt and ARTE France, 2017: https://enterremoimonamour.arte.tv/.

[3] Lucette, gare de Clichy, Françoise Chambefort, 2017: http://fchambef.fr/lucette/.

The formal patterns of the codex book remain evident in literary forms no longer bound by the material efficiencies of the paper platform. For some works, like Judd Nelson's "The Jew's Daughter" or Jason Nelson's "Evidence of Everything Exploding," the printed page becomes a platform for the mutability of the screen, while others like Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's _Between Page and Screen_ or Steve Tomosula's _VAS: An Opera in Flatland_ explore the tension between the printed and the projected word.Still other electronic works embrace the physical material of a bound, published book as their final form,, and in this paper, I propose a framework for considering the differences among computer-generated books relative to their characteristics and apparent purposes. By articulating three broad genres, I attempt to draw in more diverse networks of influence that bear on the present moment.Works that are metonymic are sculptural in their appeal to bookishness (after Jessica Pressman's) through the fact of their material existence. These works include Luigi Amato and Roberto Arista's _Volume_, which includes as its contents its literal self-description (in terms of weight, width, height, indexicality) and Jean Keller's 2012 _The Black Book_, which maximizes the value of a self-printed book by printing each page in solid black. The role of computation in the creation of these works is at least implied, and their status as metonyms for the concrete visibility of books draws in other works with different origins.

Computer-generated books may follow or invent many different literary genres, although poetry is a more forgiving milieu than prose. The books that I propose to call "generic" are those whose function is contingent upon a specific work or style. The methods programmers use may be stochastic, deterministic, or statistical, but they each begin with a specific work or works and rely for their significance on readers recognize the work being satirized. This includes the many methods following the tradition of Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke's "Travesty Generator."

Finally, works that I consider "operationalist" follow Neil Harris's identification of P.T. Barnum's method of showmanship as demonstrating an "operational aesthetic." For these books, the audience is to some extent left with some doubt as to the origin of the book, and this may include books where readers have some reason to doubt whether it was really generated by a computer program and books that have attempted to "pass" as human-authored. In either case, the operations of authorship are among the principle signifying characteristics of these works.

The typology I have proposed and will develop in this paper is broad, and many computer-generated books may have features consistent with two or more of the types I have specified here. But given the wide range and long history of books co-authored by computational processes, this attempt at a framework for describing their purposes and audiences helps connect these works of electronic literature to adjacent fields such as conceptual writing, literary hoaxes, and artist's books.

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.

Toward the end of 2020, one of the most culturally impactful web games of all time shut down—at least, the original, Flash-based version did. FarmVille, by social game studio Zynga, was not outstanding for its gameplay mechanics nor for its imaginative qualities. In fact, social games like Farmville are defined by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost as “games you don’t have to play.” Rather, FarmVille was special because it tapped into 2009-era Facebook’s lax user-generated notification system, and its developers succeeded in creating a user-operated spam cannon disguised as a game. What made FarmVille a cultural phenomenon is best represented by the metanarrative about how it manufactured and sold compulsive behavior to a new audience. By targeting ludic luddites with its folksy facade and “freemium” business model, FarmVille ushered in a new era of games that encouraged users to exchange money for in-game effects. Farmville is just one example of plethora experiences made possible by digital platforms that everyday people inhabit—and increasingly rely on for work and social connection during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—that demand constant attention. While it may not be a matter of your digital crops dying or your digital cows going unmilked, the gamification of real life has other, more tangible consequences. With questions circulating for years now on the extent of digital surveillance and abusive, intrusive advertisements disguised as entertainment, contemporary artforms must engage. To what degree can electronic literature exist in the same spaces (platforms) as applications that profit from artificial as well as human limits? And if new social platforms are needed to improve access to electronic literature, to what extent can they or should they resemble the status quo? Germane to this line of questioning is the advancements in computing power that have made imagining virtually limitless, uncompletable digital experiences possible. When a work is untethered from meaningful material limitations, new possibilities arise and—as is the case with impositions on an audience like FarmVillian microtransactions that reveal a naked pecuniary interest—certain possibilities are foreclosed upon; in other words, what form does a genre take when it can be “bottomless”? Asynchronicity is another element that must be better grappled with as individuals and institutions become more adapted to remote work and play. In what ways future platforms can address the breakneck kairos of art, either by accommodating or deviating from recent mass cultural reprogramming and the by-now prosaic ever-splintering, ever-accelerating pace of media consumption will be explored.