An interactive fiction written in Google Docs. The story starts in a dream, then you wake up in your bedroom and must begin to make choices. The work was made during the COVID-19 lockdown, and online team playing was encouraged as a way to counteract physical social distancing.
Redshift & Portalmetal asks: as climate change forces us to travel to the stars and build new homes and families, how do we build on this land, where we are settlers, while working to undo colonization? The story uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color. Redshift & Portalmetal tells the story of Roja, who's planet's environment is failing, so she has to travel to other worlds. The project takes the form of an online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry.
Sound by Bobby Bray.
Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.
Fabrizio Venerandi è autore di due romanzi pubblicati in forma di ebook ipertestuali ed è anche cofondatore della casa editrice Quintadicopertina. In questa intervista parla della collana delle Polistorie e delle idee di fondo che hanno ispirato questo progetto. Ricordando l’esperienza legata al lavoro pioneristico al primo MUD italiano del 1990, Venerandi descrive la relazione tra letteratura e i video giochi. Da un paragone tra la tradizione della letteratura a stampa e i nuovi media, infine, affronta il problema della creazione e della preservazione delle opere digitali.
Initiated during the 2014 Erasmus intensive program in Digital Literatures, The Tower of Jezik is a hyperfiction intended for teenagers that primarily questions language and its possible inefficiency. Set in an imaginary world which calls medieval times to mind, the reader follows a young boy chasing his cat over the rooftops of his small village. Through a window, the boy sees an old man brewing something in a cauldron and believes he is in fact a wizard about to cast a spell. The old man sees him spying and the boy falls from the window, hits his head and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he can no longer understand what people are saying and, convinced that the villagers were indeed cursed by a powerful sorcerer, he sets out to find the mythical Tower of Jezik and bring language back to his people. The prototype for Tower of Jezik was originally developed in HTML to be read in web browsers. However, it is currently being remediated in ePub 3 by Émilie Barbier, as part of the Textualités Augmentées workshop at Paris 8 University. We were interested in this particular format because of its apparent similarities with HTML, but also - and mostly - because of the differences between them. Indeed, some of the strategies used in the prototype to thwart the reader's progression cannot be implemented in an ePub version. It is the case, for instance, with the invisible links scattered in the narrative which can only be seen when hovering over them. Such a process cannot work on a tablet or a smartphone because there is no cursor to move around. By remediating Tower of Jezik, we particularly wish to explore the constraints the ePub 3 format imposes on a work of digital literature. The project plays with the concepts of gamebooks and “choose your own adventure” books, where one has to make choices and find one's way through the story by solving riddles and performing actions. We wished to create a work that could fit in the standards of current publishing, all the while playing with various media and rhetorical devices specific to electronic literature, such as patterns of hyperlinks and text animation. More importantly, we tried to build a hyperfiction that still followed a storyline, yet resorted to other strategies to resist the reader.
Assignment where students read a choose your own adventure book, map it out in detail, identify which of Marie-Laure Ryan’s “Structures of Interactive Narrativity” fits the book best, and write about 500 words discussing the particular choose your own adventure as cybertext.