Book (monograph)

CREATING INTERACTIVE FICTION WITH INFORM 7 is a jargon-free, step-by-step guide to mastering the basics of creating dynamic, text-based story worlds. Inform 7 is a free multiplatform interactive fiction authoring environment that uses an intuitive natural language syntax. A tool focused on writers, not programmers, Inform allows users construct complex, rich storytelling worlds by writing sentences as simple as "Tom is a person," or as complicated as "Instead of attacking Tom when something lethal is held, now every nearby watchdog owned by Tom hates the player." No prior programming experience is required. Throughout the book, readers develop a full-length, release-quality example game, exploring the real-world issues involved in authoring participatory narratives and gaining skills that can be applied to the creation of future games and stories.

(Publisher's copy)

What happens to literature, the literary, and the cultural value of both when text moves from page to screen? What can these shifts teach us about the traditions, practices, and discourses that shape the ways in which we read, study, and engage with print and electronic literature? Digital Modernism reads digital literature within a modernist tradition of making it new, a history that is both experimental and canonical. Across literary genres and programming platforms, I examine a shared strategy in some of the most innovative works of electronic literature online. These works adopt, adapt, and allude to the seminal aesthetic practices, principles, and texts of literary modernism. Digital Modernism analyzes these consciously crafted ties to modernism as part of a larger strategy and cultural situation. These works challenge common assumptions about digital literature, such as associations with hypertext and expectations of reader-controlled interactivity. They use modernism to construct immanent critiques about a culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The results are works of web-based literature that are text-based, aesthetically difficult, and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital Modernism examines how and why contemporary works of online literature employ this modernist modus operandi and what this trend exposes about the role of the "literary" in our digital culture and reading practices. Reading electronic literature through modernism also provides an opportunity to reread modernism through perspectives made visible and vital because of contemporary media and culture. Digital Modernism thus pursues a dual perspective: it illuminates the role of modernism in contemporary literature and, in so doing, reflects back on modernist literature. Addressing the question "What is new about new media?," Digital Modernism reads works of electronic literature that follow Ezra Pound's mantra and "MAKE IT NEW" by renovating a literary past.

(Source: Author's abstract)

It is a tenet of postmodern writing that the subject—the self—is unstable, fragmented, and decentered. One useful way to examine this principle is to look at how the subject has been treated in various media in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. Silvio Gaggi pursues this strategy in From Text to Hypertext, analyzing the issue of subject construction and deconstruction in selected examples of visual art, literature, film, and electronic media. Gaggi concentrates on a few paradigmatic works in each chapter; he contrasts van Eyck's Wedding of Arnolfini with the photography of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger; examines fiction that centers on an elusive subject in works by Conrad, Faulkner, and Calvino; and explores the ability of such films as Coppola's One from the Heart and Altman's The Player to emancipate the subject through cinematography and editing.In considering electronic media, Gaggi takes his argument to an entirely new level. He focuses on computer-controlled media, specifically examples of hypertextual fiction by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop. Besides recognizing how the computer has enabled artists to create works of fiction in which readers themselves become decentered, Gaggi also observes the impact of literature created on computer networks, where even the limitations of CD-ROM are lifted and the notion of individual authorship may for all practical purposes be lost.

(Source: Publisher's blurb)

Paperback ed.: 1998 E-book ed.: 2015

"The Engagement Aesthetic" details the first comprehensive overview of art practices that have, in recent years, been subjected to forms of mediation characterized as digital, electronic, new. Francisco J. Ricardo proposes an 'engagement aesthetic' as revealing certain commonalities in the practices of new media art and thus as providing a crucial critical framework. By examining specific works or instances of creation in multiple categories (performance + digital projection; kinetic sculpture + video; projection + text messaging, etc), Ricardo implements the use of phenomenology in order to understand the processes necessary to complete these emerging types of works. He first examines specific works through structural description, moving to analysis of individual viewer perspectives, and ends with critical questions about the place of this perceptual experience in current ideological and institutional contexts. Previous attempts at a comprehensive critical media aesthetics have been based on analyses that are unable to cope with art in which 'artist, viewer and process' are necessarily and actively engaged.