English

were forced into situations somewhere between Brazil and The Matrix, in which workspaces become the world. Also this evinced Paul Virilio’s notion of technological acceleration while confining to one spot (ZOOM!) undifferentiates the technologically enabled person without disabilities and the technologically au and the technologically augmented paraplegic (The Third interval).These existential effects led to my creation of a visualyl narratological immersive experience entitled Confinement Spaces, which consisted of 3D scans and renders of the UAE quotidian landscape, first of places immediately around me. But as I was able to expand my tr avels, more spaces were scanned in, creating a form of “narrative molecule” based on experience in the 1990’s with designer Roy Stringer’s Navihedron interface regime.In Confinement Spaces, six months of expanding explorations into iconic spaces of the United Arab Emirates as an allegory of confinement in space and the fracturing of reality as depicted by the glitches in the 3D scans.All of these elements (technological collapse of space and time, the freezing of existence into a timeless space, and all of these spaces collapsed in to a form of momentary narrative are consistent with my studies of spatial narratology and form as proposed by Joseph Frank. In this paper, I wish to discuss the spatiality of pandemic time, the similarities of Covid time to Joyce and Proust, and the modes in which Confinement spaces develop these ideas.

This paper outlines public archives of electronic literature authoring tools and technologies via git version control as a platform for decentralized organization, with a specific focus on current and proposed future uses of the GitHub platforms. How are the source code and tooling for creating electronic literature maintained currently preserved through public open source, and how might ELO initiatives and community best practices engage with them in the future?Throughout its history electronic literature has been been widely varied and proliferated in many ways: varied in forms or artifacts that are experimental or avant-garde in themselves, varied in modes of distribution across various platforms (including popular and experimental forms), and varied in the authoring tools and techniques used to create it. This proliferation and continual engagement with the *now* of rapid technological change is by its nature usually attached to relatively ephemeral software and hardware forms, whether StorySpace, Flash, the Nintendo DS, et cetera. As most electronic literary works are therefor by default ephemera, a long-held core mission of electronic literature communities of practice has been the preservation, archiving, and dissemination of electronic literature works. A survey briefly considers the context of many existing initiatives to catalog and archive such works -- in particular, the examples of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (https://elmcip.net/), the CELL Search Engine (https://cellproject.net/), and IFDB: the Interactive Fiction Database (https://ifdb.tads.org/). As the CELL project describes it: "To the degree that inclusion in a database is now the publishing event and the life of a literary work is defined through a trail of linked commentaries and active responses, the gathering and identification of works becomes itself a creative and scholarly activity." Currently these database catalogs tend to be primarily artifact-centric -- focused primarily on preserving a "work" -- rather than tool-centric or platform-centric, focused on preserving a practice, craft, or creative mode.By contrast, several electronic literature authoring communities of practice are organized around particular genres or platforms -- for example, hypertext authors using Twine, IF authors using Inform, or bot authors using Tracery -- make extensive use of open source repositories and hosts such as GitHub in order to develop and disseminate authoring tools, platforms, libraries, and plugins et cetera for electronic literature authoring. These tend to be decentralized, supported by small numbers of self-hosting developers who are addressing to specific active communities of practice in their own terms. One practical consequence of this is tagging: umbrella terms such as "electronic literature" or "elit" are almost unknown in GitHub repository tags.The paper concludes by putting forward a model for a public open source archive for electronic literature tool and platform source code, based on cataloging and mirroring a collection of forks of existing code bases drawn from across multiple electronic literature authoring communities. It is modeled on a related project in the area of creative computing, the Archive for Processing initiative (https://github.com/archive-for-processing/archive-for-processing).

Larps are a form of analog game in which participants co-create and collectively inhabit diegeses (Montola 2012, cf. Gennette 1980). Larp may also be thought of as a medium, and codic larps are a type of larp platform that use diegetic code (Steele 2016) to represent parts of the story, allowing conflicts about what happens next to be resolved through contests in which diegetic material has been congealed into code and rendered deployable. Codic larps offer a unique opportunity to teach and study code, and the analog nature of codic larp allows advanced engagements like platform modding to happen with fewer layers of technology to navigate than digital code platforms, ostensibly lowering the barrier of entry to coding, while allowing diegetic code to serve as a "boundary object" (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star 2010) through which scholars and professionals from many backgrounds may develop common language to engage in cross-codic critique.Recently, embodied gaming activities including codic larps have come under scrutiny by those who question the power relations inherent in physically embodying one’s own avatar, as well as in rituals surrounding the embodied deployment of diegetic code. In the wake of developing and touring their digital Shakespeare game, Play the Knave, Gina Bloom, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell have explored the argument that having players physically embody their characters is troubled by the degree to which out-of-game asymmetrical power relations like racisms and sexisms attach themselves to bodies (Bloom et al. 2021), an issue that is part of a phenomenon that I call creep, which is when unwanted out-of-game assemptical power relations creep into the fantasy world you are trying to make with your game. 

Additionally, sociologist Steven Dashiell has criticized meta-coding rituals that often surround algorythmic analog gameplay for reinforcing the power relations that underpine structural forms of sexism and other inequalities (Dashiell 2017, 2018), fueling arguments within larp communities that diegetic code deployment should be removed from games altogether (cf. Fatland et al. 1999).

Pushing back against these anti-embodyment and anti-codic sentiments is the work of other gamemaker-scholars who have engaged larp's embodiment and rituals of code deployment to ostensibly develop interventions into pervasive forms of systemic inequality. Jonaya Kemper's work on emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2017, 2020), Diana J. Leonard's efforts to develop anti-racist scaffolding for codic larp (cf. Leonard 2013, 2018), as well as the work I have done on anti-code (Steele 2016, 2018), and the efforts to develop larp consent mechanics by Johanna Koljonen (Koljonen 2020), Sarah Lynne Bowman (Bowman 2017), and Maury Brown (Brown 2017), demonstrate efforts to not only salvage different facets of the larp medium, but to "fork the code": using the larp medium's unique embodimemt and of code-based play to offer game mechanics and scaffolding as interventions into the creep of systemic racisms and sexisms.

References:

• Bloom, Gina, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell. (2021): "Playful Pedagogy and Social Justice: Digital Embodiment in the Shakespeare Classroom." Shakespeare Survey 74, special issue on Shakespeare and Education (forthcoming). Accessed April 9, 2021.

• Bowman, Sarah Lynn. (2017): "A Matter of Trust - Larp and Consent Culture." Nordiclarp.org, Feburary 3, 2017.

• Brown, Maury (2016): “Creating a Culture of Trust through Safety and Calibration Larp Mechanics,” Nordiclarp.org, September 9, 2016.

• Dashiell, Steven. (2018): "Rules as Written: Game Algorithms as Game Capital." Analog Game Studies 5(3). Accessed April 9, 2021. 

• Dashiell, Steven. (2017): “Rules Lawyering as Symbolic and Linguistic Capital,” Analog Game Studies 4(5). Accessed April 10, 2021. 

• Genette, Gerard. (1980): Narrative discourse: An essay in method. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

• Haraway, Donna J. (1991): “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge), 149-181.

• Fatland et. al. (1999): Dogma 99: A programme for the Liberation of Larp. Also see: https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Dogma_99

• Koljonen, Johanna. (2020). “Larp Safety Design Fundamentals.” RPG学研究 | Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies 1: 3e-19e.

• Kemper, Jonaya. (2017): "The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity Documentation." NordicLarp.org June 21, 2017. Accessed April 9, 2021. 

• Kemper, Jonaya. (2020): Wyrding the Self. In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Helsinki; Solmukohta 2020. Accessed April 9, 2021. 

• Leonard, Diana. (2013): “The Dynamic Life Cycle of Live Action Role-playing Communities,” in Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek (Los Angeles, CA: WyrdCon, 2013).

• Leonard, Diana. (2018): “Conflict and Change: Testing a Life-Cycle-Derived Model of Larp Group Dynamics,” International Journal of Role-playing 6:15-22.

• Montola, Markus. (2003): "Role-Playing as Interactive Construction of Subjective Diegeses." In Gade, Morten, Thorup, Line & Sander, Mikkel (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up. Theory and Methods in Larp 82-89. Copenhagen, Projektgruppen KP03. The book for Knudepunkt 2003.

• Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. (1986): "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39." Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3: 387-420. Accessed April 9, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/285080.

• Star, Susan Leigh. (2010): “This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 5: 601–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910377624.

• Steele, Samara Hayley. (2018): "Code Critique: Port of Secrets/Snippet of Anti-Code from the Irvine-Based GM-Less Larp Community." Critical Code Studies Working Group 2018, January 29, 2018. 

• Steele, Samara Hayley. (2016): “The Reality Code: Interprepating Aggregate Larp Rules as Code that Runs on Humans." International Journal of Role-playing 7: 30-35.

• Steele, Samara Hayley. (2016): “Code as Diegetic Language in LARP.” Presented as part of the “Critical Code Studies and Creativity Panel” at the 30th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), Atlanta, Ga. 3-6 November 2016.

Steele's talk begins at 12:50: