Published on the Web (online gallery)

anna anthropy’s The Hunt for the Gay Planet is a text-based Twine game that uses the medium of Twine to comment more broadly and bitingly on the status of queer representation in videogames. The work takes its premise from a mainstream online roleplaying game, Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which in 2013 announced they were expanding their romance options in-game to include homosexual options, but only on a single planet in the galaxy. anthropy satirizes this decision with this beautifully retro piece, in which the player is invited to gradually explore the galaxy (looking under rocks and in caves) in search of a lesbian romance. The game serves as a powerful example of Twine’s potential as a platform for commenting on and engaging with AAA gaming, as Twine builds on the traditions of hypertext to allow for complex decision management and choice-driven experience design. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive is a Twine game that invites the reader to become physically involved through marking up their own body with symbols throughout play.
As a Twine game, the work relies primarily on text and audio along with backgrounds of shifting colors to draw the player into a disturbing science fiction landscape. The game opens with a level of customization that invites the player to become connected and even embedded into the game, choosing their month of birth, element, and eye color.
As the player becomes a servant to a monstrous larval queen, the stage is set for a dystopia of dream-like and vivid yet mundane violence. After playing, the reader has a tangible record of their own choices and identity beliefs in the drawings on one’s skin.
It's inspired by mob violence, trash struggle, C-PTSD, and child abuse. It's also inspired by friendship between trash girls. In most media there’s an unspoken belief that feminine lifeforms can't survive on their own, can't have spaces of their own, can’t have relationships of their own. The author try to go against this with basically everything she make.

(Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=with-those-we-love-a…)

This work creates an interactive drag-and-drop interface to perform keyword searches in Twitter and produce a manipulable visual mapping of the results. The hashtag/keywords used by Villegas are related to poetry, music, and suffering, which when selected produce a snapshot of recent tweets on the subject. Combining keywords narrows the search, offering more thematically focused results. Part of the fun of this work is in how it arranges the results into moveable lines, so readers can experience them in different sequences, placing the tweets in conversation as they form a kind of line constellation. The limits placed on the search, along with the juxtaposition of lines, and a design that responds to the reader’s clicking and dragging motions, results in a focused authorial poetic experience, though drawn from the endlessly vast and ever-changing Twitter stream. (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=poetuiteame)

Emily Short’s First Draft of the Revolution, designed and coded by Liza Daly, is an experiment with advancing the form of interactive fiction while pushing forward its cross platform accessibility (the work is built in HTML5 and has been ported to EPUB3, an open ebook format). The work invites the reader to engage in the act of writing, creating a metafiction that invites us to contemplate the very act of letter-writing and correspondence, and what the process of editing reveals and conceals. The work is essentially an interactive epistolary novel, drawing on an era when letter-writing was an act of contemplation rather than haste. We learn about the two characters (Juliette and Henry) as we get inside their heads and dictate the seemingly mundane details of their correspondence. (Source: ELC 3)

Loss, Undersea is an interactive narrative/multimedia semantics project by Fox Harrell in which a character moving through a standard workday encounters a world submerging into the depths -- a double-scope story of banal life blended with a fantastic Atlantean metaphor. As a user selects emotion-driven actions for the character to perform, the character transforms -- sea creature extensions protrude and calcify around him -- and poetic text narrating his loss of humanity and the human world undersea ensues. (Source: MIT Icelab)

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s Icarus Needs is part of a series of works in which Goodbrey draws on the dual aesthetics of comics and classic video games. Built in Flash, the piece is strongly visual and provides a world of panels to explore. The player moves Icarus through the panels using standard keyboard controls, encountering dream-like objects (such as an oversized telephone) and hitting many dead ends and simple item-based puzzles that block progression out of the dream. The game as dream metaphor is explored fully (as one fragment of text warns, “Don’t fall asleep playing video games”) and creates a compelling world of flat 2D visuals in different monochromatic palettes. Icarus Needs is a hypercomic adventure game staring everyone's favourite mentally unhinged cartoonist, Icarus Creeps. (Source: ELC 3)

The goal of the game is to find his girlfriend, save her and escape the game. He need's to complete different tasks to do so. The tasks are puzzles that Icarus needs to solve, and when a mission is given is either by Icarus himself or another character. He communicates trough talking bubbles. 

This multimedia work uses HTML5 and the JQuery library to produce a simple yet effective interface for it to unfold. The physical space between the sliding words GAFFE and STUTTER echo the Deleuzian dualities between the physicality of the mouth and its ability to break down and ingest food and produce language and meaning. Trettien uses this interface to establish other dualities in her poem: code and displayed language, signal and noise, drawing and writing, and more. (ELC 3)

Dwarf Fortress is a complex, text-based computer game that has been in development by Tarn and Zach Adams since 2002. The game begins by first procedurally generating an expansive, dynamic world in which players attempt to guide an exponentially increasing colony of temperamental dwarves to build and manage within an ever expanding fortress. The task is made difficult by both the unpredictable and emergent behaviors of the simulation as well as by the anachronistic and arduous interface: a screen full of ASCII characters recalling the personal computers of the early 1980s. Inspired by games like Rogue (1980) and Sim City (1989), the stark textual interface contrasts with the game's complexity as Dwarf Fortress can easily consume all available processing power of a contemporary computer. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux have suggested that "[i]n rejecting the conventions of standard game design and traditional narrative storytelling, Dwarf Fortress produces textual inscriptions that not only mark one horizon of human experience but recall forms of historical writing that depart from human-centered and teleological modes of history." The way in which Dwarf Fortress generates a flattened narrative landscape in which no moment is prioritized over another is reminiscent of medieval literary forms of writing such as the annal, chronicle, and calendar. While the game's textual output may or may not aggregate into narrative coherence, a dedicated community of players have delighted in not only playing the game to observe its effects, but they have also translated these nonhuman narratives into legible (if absurd) stories as a means of inscribing a history of play that is notoriously difficult and governed by the game's tagline "Losing is Fun."

(Source: ELC 3)

Everyone at this party is Dead/Cardamom of the Dead is one of the first lyric literary works for Oculus Rift. It is a complete but expanding work (Cardamom of the Dead is the larger suite of stories) containing about 30 small narrative worlds, explored in a sandbox. You enter the piece standing at the edge of a island and in the middle of a soundscape of a party taking place, with guests being named: these were the guests of my 21st birthday and they are now all dead. What follows is a fictionalized narrative, at times semi-autobiographical, at other times entirely made-up. You are urged to explore houses and stones and artefacts spread across the terrain of the island at skewed scales - like a dreamscape. Addressable objects are signalled by tear-shaped signposting and will propel you into a different environments in order to access and bring to light three longer narratives of the dead woven through the work: 1) a story of a sudden illness and a meditation on euthanasia and family stories on this theme; 2) a coming-of-age story of sex relating to a murder; and 3) a meta-theme of collecting - objects, memories, digital artefacts - as a consoling practice: most of the images and soundscapes here are from my family archives. (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=everyone-at-this-par…)

In Eugenio Tisselli's own words, "[t]he global financial dictatorship presents us with a paradox: while the economic transactions capable of shifting the destinies of entire countries are the result of performative language, it is language itself that, in turn, is transformed and subjected to the flows of financial markets." In 1917, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution declared all land to be property of the people. This law protecting indigenous territories and communal modes of living was altered in 1992 as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into existence. El 27 || The 27th procedurally allegorizes the slow encroachment of finance capitalism and linguistic colonialism in to Mexican political life. Ever day that the New York Stock Exchange closes with a positive percent, a section of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution is translated from Spanish into a highly distorted computer-generated English. The work is a simply yet scathing expression of the loss of Mexican culture and political autonomy in the wake of NAFTA under the excesses of computational capitalism. The erosion of Mexican soil and culture at the hands of ultrafast algorithmic trading and linguistic robots will eventually terminate in a nonhuman textual landscape of speculative nonsense. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)