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The British Library Simulator is a short browser-based game created by Giulia Carla Rossi during the 2020 lockdown using Bitsy, a free game engine developed by Adam Ledoux. It was published online in June 2020, while the Library buildings were closed. The British Library Simulator was created as a fun way to engage with our audience during the pandemic, giving them a chance to visit a different version of the Library, while learning interesting facts about the physical building and the Library as a whole. It was also a way to make the public aware of the services we continued to provide even during lockdown, by highlighting ongoing projects and the digital content that could be accessed from home (such as the Sound Archive and the UK Web Archive). Finally, it provided an example of the digital interactive narratives we are collecting as part of our work on emerging formats and new digital media.

In the game, players wander around the St Pancras building in London, encountering different characters (other visitors and members of staff) on their way to the Reading Room. The game takes less than 10 minutes to complete and the gameplay is deliberately limited (the only obstacle players need to overcome is leaving their belongings at the Cloakroom before entering the Reading Room). This choice was made in an effort to make the game appealing and accessible to a wider audience, including people that don’t necessarily identify as gamers, and to keep the main focus on the information relative to the British Library and its services. Links to the projects and resources mentioned in the game were provided on the game page - including the Emerging Formats Project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/emerging-formats), the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk) and British Library Sounds (https://sounds.bl.uk). 

The British Library Simulator aimed to present libraries under a different light: not just as keepers of knowledge, but also as creators of content willing to engage with new technologies, even during a time of crisis. The British Library Simulator won joint first prize at the 2020 British Library Lab Staff Awards.

The British Library Simulator was created by Giulia Carla Rossi, the British Library’s Curator for Digital Publications. She is responsible for supporting the Library in developing capacity to manage collections of complex digital objects as part of the Emerging Formats Project. Currently, the project is focusing on publications produced for mobile devices (apps) and interactive narratives, covering requirements across the collection management lifecycle. She’s in the process of curating an online collection of all shortlisted and winning entries to the New Media Writing Prize, to be hosted on the UK Web Archive. She is interested in interactive storytelling, net art and how new technologies and forms of creating and consuming content are challenging existing practices in collecting institutions.

(Source: Author's abstract)

As interactive writing and digital art are relatively emerging fields there remains considerable research areas to explore. One of the most pressing is the examination of how to re-think, translate and remake older creative works into new cultural and language contexts. This work was create for BleuOrange in Canada. And is an entirely new work loosely based Jason Nelson's This is How You Will Die generative fiction,  rethinking all aspects of the work in a French context.

Working with translators, Ariane Savoieand Lisa Tronca at BleuOrange in Quebec, the work developed new methods for rethinking and translating everything about a digital writing artwork. Specifically examining how the images, the motion, the interface, the animation, the sounds, and the interactivity, as well as the words, have to be re-created.  So once those models and methods were developed, an entirely new work was created, based loosely on This is How You Will Die, which comprised of re-combining 15 different stories through an interactive game engine, as well as numerous additional sections, graphic and audio work.

Alice is nineteen in Episode six. She's at college and working at the gas station on the outskirts of the city, striving to make ends meet. Late in submitting her college work, Alice stumbles from one crisis to another...

Beneath Floes is a short work of interactive fiction written by Kevin Snow, the creator of Bravemule, with artwork from Patrick Bonaduce and sound from Priscilla White.

Qikiqtaaluk, 1962. The sun falls below the horizon and won't return for months. You wander the broken shoreline, wary of your mother's stories about the qalupalik. Fish woman, stealer of wayward children: she dwells beneath the ice.

(Source: http://bravemule.itch.io/beneathfloes)

Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people.

(Source: Official Website)

Ice-bound is an interactive novel that combines a printed art book with an iPad app. Our goal was to create an experience with both high-quality surface text and significant player agency. The story concerns an encounter with a fictional artificial intelligence, a simulation of a long-dead author who enlists the player's help to finish his original's final novel. Inspired by the dense, labyrinthical texture of works like Nabokov's Pale Fire and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, the novel is a unique collaboration between two artists, both of whom are writers, coders, and graphic designers. Each story is built around a dynamically chosen set of symbols representing possible elements of the story. These might be traits a character could have, or plots that could be included in the story. When a story is first visited, the symbols are assigned to an author-defined group of sockets which can be turned on or off by the player. However, the player can only turn a limited number of sockets on at one time. As different combinations of sockets are activated, a version of the story is displayed, projecting what might happen if the symbols associated with those sockets were part of the story. While players explore possible stories, they also carry on an ongoing conversation with the AI character, who comments on the reader's activity, engages in philosophical discussions, and ultimately demands physical proof that a reader's selected ending for the story is appropriate. The reader provides this by finding a page from the companion printed book that contains an overlapping theme with the selected ending. Using markerless tracking augmented reality (AR), we can identify which page of the print book the player is pointing the iPad's camera at, and display additional layers of story content overlaid on the physical book. Once a story is resolved, the themes associated with it are strengthened. In this way the next story has thematic connections with the way the reader resolved prior stories, and as play progresses subsequent stories become more and more similar to the reader's own aesthetic. (Source: authors abstract)

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is a web audio adventure about the meaning of death. It draws audio drama, audio tours and alternate reality gaming. The use of audio is an attempt to create a sense of unity in a highly fragmented experience. I see the techniques and experience of audio tours as a way to bring disparate elements together. Just as an audio tour involves guiding a listener to different places, this audio experience guides players to different websites. I include both custom and existing sites, and so this project continues my interest in pervasive design: where the players’ world is part of the fictional world. The story is born out of the pain of suddenly losing my mother, and facing the meaninglessness of my life. I got past heaviness of the subject matter by drawing on my early days in sketch comedy theatre, unifying the disparate times of my life.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

You're a teenage girl, connected, clued-in, but what lurks in the deepest, darkest regions beyond the screen? A first-person coming-of-age story-game. ( Source: Andy Campbell ) A first-person playable coming-of-age story, in 2D and 3D, that centres on a teenage girl, immersed in contemporary digital culture. With creeping awareness, she / the player struggles with the insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that literally threatens to drain her of life. ( Source: Patricia Tomaszek ) Inkubus is a first-person playable coming-of-age story, in media-rich 3D, about a contemporary teenage girl, who’s connected and clued in. But what lurks in the deepest darkest regions beyond the screen? The story-game progresses via skewed and leading questions, designed to distort the girl's behaviour, before being drawn into a visceral labyrinth where a malevolent force peddles a destructive artificial feminine ideal. With creeping awareness, the girl/the player struggles with the insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that threatens to drain her of life. ( Source: ELO 2014 conference )

Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise is an art/ poetry/ adventuring game, a playland for exploring our ever-present desire for constant and over-blown rewards. Our worlds (digital and breathing) are filled with needless and unearned praise, we are built to love exploding trophies for fifth place. This art/poetry game satisfies your compliment addiction by celebrating your walking/ jumping/ falling through strange and wondrous anatomical lands.Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise is a 2013 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

(Source: Turbulence)