community

Tabletop Role-Playing Games (ttrpgs) are games of communal storytelling. These gameworlds exist in the minds of players who collectively populate them with people, events, and histories. Traditionally played in-person, groups found themselves hard hit when social-distancing rules came into effect. While some went on hiatus, others took to the web to continue their sagas. For some, this was an uphill battle of new technology and social norms. For others, the move was trivial as ttrpgs in fact existed online even before the pandemic. 

For this panel, we take for granted that playing ttrpgs is an act of oral literary production. We talk about the ways this storytelling – once done cooperatively but semi-privately – has grown beyond the table through various internet platforms to include a much larger production base. We will also cover the ways platforms have enhanced the building aspects of ttrpgs – the building of community, worlds, and narratives. Our panelists are as follows. 

We often hide the learning process, not wanting anyone to see our vulnerability. In an attempt at normalizing learning and imperfection, Krista-Lee Malone decided to live-stream her process of learning to be a dungeon master (DM) on twitch.tv/gameranthro. Additionally, she hoped that by live-streaming this she would be able to tap into the shared knowledge and experience of her audience. Although she has been a player for over 20 years, she had never before been a DM. She began live-streaming her preparation in January with many questions. 

Casey James O’Ceallaigh was live-streaming as a DM on twitch.tv/serious_play before the pandemic. At that time the players used a campus lab to play and stream. When the pandemic shut down campus, the group was forced to negotiate not only how to continue the game, but also how to continue sharing the lab channel. Previously, all streaming was done at the lab which was set up specifically for this purpose. Suddenly, the group had to set-up across multiple computers and locations. Casey will be discussing these negotiations and the struggles of DMing virtually while streaming. 

Edword Flabberjackson is the personality behind twitch.tv/pokeyoureyesoutgames and founder of the GCGG (Good Community, Good Games) stream team. Noticing the hard time some were having with the current state of the world and guided by the truth that we are the stories we tell ourselves, Edword decided to change those stories through a ttrpg stream. By having the players play both characters and themselves, he hoped to slowly get the players to start changing the stories they tell about themselves and therefore change how they feel. He will be talking about how those stories progressed. 

Andrew C. Fudge runs a ttrpg dedicated Discord server for the LGBTQ+ community. He is also preparing a Twitch stream dedicated to diversity in D&D. He will be discussing the process of content-making and building spaces dedicated to marginalized identities and how these spaces often become places for players’ first “coming out” moments, an integral step for LGBTQ+ people.

First proposed by Annie Abrahams and Deena Larsen at the 2019 ELO Conference in Cork, the ELO Salons initially comprised 10 online sessions on the second Tuesday of every month from February to November 2020. The sessions encompassed close readings and ensuing discussions, collaborative writing experiments, ontological examination of elit, and approaches to increasing elit accessibility and archivability. Each session has been led by a different attendee, recorded, and archived. Conceived by Deena Larsen as "almost like an extended family, which has a core group of people that participated and could function online”, the Salons have been a point of brightness in an extremely difficult year for many. 

For this proposed Virtual Engagement Event, we would like to look back on the fascinating discussions and discoveries of the last year of salons, and look forward to the next. Hosting panelists will include Salon creators Deena Larsen, Johannah Rodgers, and Caitlin Fisher, as well as various session leaders. A Salon organizer will moderate, posing questions to the hosts and attendees alike, and supplement the discussion with images and documents arising from the last year’s engagement. 

Most importantly, the current Salon participants will open the floor to future participants, seeking to build upon its first year in terms of activities and members. What more can we do with these Salons? Who else can we reach? What doors can we open, and how can we enrich our community? We have already engaged in projects increasing accessibility to elit work, exploring marginalized voices, revisiting the foundations of elit, and developing new avenues for creation and discovery of elit. We welcome discussions as to how we can evolve these interactions further, and invite all ELO members and conference attendants to join us. 

The ELO Salons have been a fun thing to look forward to, rather than another dreary required zoom meeting. We started a bit before the pandemic, promising a chance to examine issues and works, and even collaborative tools that lie at the heart of our mutual obsessions: electronic literature. This virtual engagement session will be an open working session to allow participants to reflect on the highlights of the ELO Salons and to help shape its future.

This innovative reader addresses the social, cultural, political, and educational implications of today’s burgeoning information and communication technologies in substantial critical depth. Using three broad human themes—Constructing Identity, Building Community, and Seeking Knowledge—this brief freshman reader engages students in exciting rhetorical issues, including "Gender Online," "The Global Village," and "Information Overload and New Media." In each case, hopeful and optimistic views are balanced with incisive technology criticism, helping to make cutting-edge social issues intellectually coherent and accessible to your students.

Source: www.amazon.de

This text explores the material implications of electronic reading and writing in the Anthropocene. It does so by briefly examining the consequences that the production and usage of electronic devices has on ecosystems and social contexts. Different perspectives on how a reader or writer may deal with the negative effects of sociotechnical systems are offered: restraint, pharmacological awareness and togetherness. Such perspectives can be transformed into reading and writing tools for the Anthropocene that may allow readers and writers of electronic literature to integrate the notion of an extended community, that is, an intimate and paradoxical complicity with nearby and remote humans and non-humans, and invite them into the digital text

Source:(1) (PDF) The Heaviness of Light. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332523774_The_Heaviness_of_Light [accessed Oct 01 2019].

A session from the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base symposium at the University of Bergen, April 27, 2018, focused on results of a user survey.

“E-literature”, as defined by the ELO, is a fairly sweeping term. Any sort of “born digital” text can potentially be claimed as “e-lit”: video games, works of interactive fiction, fan fiction, et cetera. As a scholar, it is tempting to dragoon a favorite text, to bring it into an e-lit context. But to do this is to ignore the differences in the communities that supported these texts’ creation. Similarly, it is tempting to declare the “end of e-lit,” since so much e-lit can also be framed as fan fiction, video art, games, etc., but to do this is to ignore the impact of the e-lit community and its structure.

This paper explores how online fandom is a global community that supports the creation of “born-digital” texts just as the e-lit community does, but has very different strengths and weaknesses. Three texts focalize this exploration. The first two are Machine Libertine’s Whoever You Are and Imaginary Circus’s Please Let Me Get What I Want. Each could be considered either as works of e-literature or as fanvid, but they were created in very different contexts. The third is The Care and Feeding of Stiles Stilinski (or how Stiles goes on four accidental dates and still gets no make-outs), by Lunarwolfik. This work of fan fiction initially seems like a simple e-book presentation of a short story, potentially not classifiable as “e-literature”, but deeper examination of the context of its creation shows that it takes great advantage of the affordances of networked computing – not in its format, but with regard to the community and tools that helped shape it.

The contexts of these three works are not limited to the aesthetic concerns of their intended audiences. The fandom community excels at lobbying for expansion of legal protections around fair use and at creating informal discussion spaces; the e-literature community provides excellent education resources and databases of works of various types. Both communities hold large and regular meet-ups, though in fandom the focus is on celebratory conventions (sometimes featuring an academic track), whereas the e-literature community focuses on academic conferences (often featuring festivals or shows). This paper will offer recommendations about what each community can learn from the other.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

In Fall 2014 I taught a “special” version of my “Writing Electronic Literature” course. Throughout this class my students received an overview of established and emerging forms of Electronic Literature including hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive works, and digital poetry. Students read, analyzed, and composed a variety of emerging genres of Electronic Literature. Yet what was unique to this particular iteration of my E-Lit class was that my students contributed to a transmodal generative novel to be published in late 2015 by the academic journal Hybrid Pedagogy. The idea of a generative novel is one that can be traced to the OuliPo group (Ouvroir delittérature potentielle) in France. According to the OuliPo website, the generative writer is “un rat qui construit lui-même le labyrinthe dont il se propose de sortir” (trans. “a rat who builds the maze he wishes to escape”). In this understanding of art and literature, the idea of creation, especially literary creation, is one of wordplay and gameplay. Therefore, the generative novel is, in itself, a game – one of interplay between people, cultures, and institutions. It is an open-ended enterprise that in many ways ensures new and unexpected results. In order to create a work of generative literature, there must be a creative constraint (limitation), which forces the writer to direct writing toward a particular purpose.

The Generative Literature Project is a crowdsourced gamefied digital novel about a murder. Nine writing professors and their students – from the US, The Marshall Islands, and Puerto Rico – completed a series of digitized artifacts about nine “distinguished alumni” of the fictional “Theopolis College”, a highly competitive Liberal Arts College that exists in the leafy suburb of the fictional town of Theopolis. In the artifacts created by my students can be found the clues and red-herrings, motives and alibis of the suspects in the murder of the Theopolis College president.

This paper/presentation will highlight our experimentation with this crowdsourced project as I consider some of the pedagogic affordances of digital writing within a networked and computational environment. As my students developed their fictional work for The Generative Literature Project, I watched how their evolving new sense of reading and writing (in a 21st century digitized context) shaped their own discovery of new ways to learn. What role might Electronic Literature play in transforming pedagogic practices for both reading and writing? In what ways does a networked learning context transform reading and writing methodology?

My discussion will highlight the work of my class’s contribution, offering a birds-eye view of the open ended electronic literary experiment. My presentation will include a further description of the project, including phases of development and forms of collaboration (i.e. the mechanics) and a schema of the digital writing spaces generated thus far (i.e. the infrastructure). Analysis of the project will include reflection on the element of creative play as an inherent entry point in the generative literature undertaking. It will also account for the ways in which community develops around a collaborative fictional enterprise. Other topics addressed include networked character development, social media as a space of fictional creation, pedagogical approaches & challenges, and examples of student generated character “artifacts”.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This dissertation is just one portal into the cyberspace-based virtual world called the "Xenaverse," so named because of its association with the world-wide syndicated television program, "Xena: Warrior Princess." The Xenaverse cannot be contained by this dissertation, but this project seeks to link and merge with the webbed Xenaverse culture in cyberspace. To learn about the Xenaverse you must step through a portal, become immersed and explore, both within and beyond the blurred boundaries of this dissertation, and into the Xenaverse itself.

When you are ready to leave, you will have to find your way out, for just as this hypertextual dissertation has an entry portal, it also has an exit portal, a space for you to debrief and share your thoughts on your way out, to contribute to the ongoing dialogue that is this dissertation web on the Internet.

The Xenaverse will stretch your imagination and disbelief in many ways: in constantly shifting voices and perspectives, through bastardized and parallel timelines, with flawed classical Greek deities, by darkly troubled heroines and their numerous bards, and most of all by the Xenites themselves, who have collectively created this virtual landscape in cyberspace. This dissertation aims to be one sort of tour guide, both describing and analyzing in an effort to understand this space. The journey begins with a single link.

Source: from the opening page to the hypertext-only doctoral dissertation