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Art games require your attention, require your brain to be consumed by the screen. I imagine that is why I get such dramatic responses. I am asking the audience to inhabit my creations, asking them to play/exist inside a bizarre, messy and at times highly illogical and abstract artscape.

With little or no funding small teams of indie producers are creating brilliant experiences that make corporate productions look like embarrassing advertisements for video cards. Some future historian will write about the games currently being built by these creators and label them as THE important art movement of the 21st century.

If the abstract artist Basquiat, Mario Brother's creator Miyamoto, and writer James Joyce had a child that grew up in an amusement park and was raised by Steampunk robots, that child would be my art-games.

[T]he often-noted "obsolescence" of works published in perpetually "new" media is an institutional and cognitive problem as much as a technological challenge.

Whatever transformations the Humanities undergo in new media, a condition for the field's possibility has to be the ability to re-read, and the freedom to cite, the work of peers and precursors.

An evolving glossary of electronic literary terms... has to be applied to works consistently and with an awareness of tag clouds forming throughout the Internet... Moreover, the terms will have to change as the kind of work produced in electronic environments change, and these changes can be tracked.

What scholars can then construct is not so much a universal set of categories defining 'electronic literature,' 'net literature,' or 'digital or online literature,' but rather a practice capable of producing a poetics.

What I'm reading, for the most part, doesn't often differentiate between between 'critical' and 'creative' writing; the most prolific e-lit authors are also programmers and designers who seem to be as comfortable conversing with scientists and technologists as with other writers.

My contention that e-literature has been gradually sidelined by the rise of the internet as a mass medium proves controversial. A straw poll of some of the movers and shakers on the digital writing scene indicates that a huge majority believes e-lit has a higher profile today than it did 10 years ago.

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so

Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel.

The usefulness of these simples is that I can use one or two of them to describe relatively simple works of digital literature — the word-movies of YHCHI I link to above — or use a bunch of them to describe something more technologically complex, such as the magisterial work by David Clark called “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the left hand),” which has moments of text animation like in YHCHI along with other features that require a different simple to describe

Ironically, more theory about hypertext was produced in the days before the web, when one had to work one’s way back to the one computer in the computer science department reserved for creative efforts... than now, when hypertext is a way of life.