gaming

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the first confinement measures in most countries, COVID-19 has been a defining factor of our lives through 2020 into 2021. Due to the pandemic, all our lives were drastically changed; not simply by the losses and inevitable pain that comes with the disease, but also by the way in which it completely shifted the way in which our lives were organized. Where activities were once separated between the “inside” and the “outside” there is now only the “offline” and the “online,” both confined within our own household. Work and education are done remotely when possible, and socializing has abruptly become a virtual experience. Even attempts at socializing “in real life” must always be monitored by strict rules of social distancing and the wearing of a mask, which are marked by an absence of physicality. As a way to cope with such a situation, people have found ways to transfer their social lives online. How many Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving or the Winter Holidays on Zoom with their families in 2020? As we moved into an online social space, I found it interesting to look around me and see the reaction of my fellow students, teachers, or friends. Some of them could hardly adapt to the sudden need for technology, which they had never been comfortable using. Others lamented the lack of genuine human interaction that came with meeting people by pure chance; in the Zoom era, all is scheduled, after all. These reactions struck me in different ways, as all I could see was my acquaintances suddenly walking into a lifestyle that I recognized as my own and describing it as a living hell.

In this paper I want to engage with the ways in which online interactions can provide an alternative to social contact, especially in terms of physicality. Specifically, I want to focus on how video games offer ways to circumvent the frustration of distance and virtuality in order to offer new approaches to thinking about physical interactions. This paper will be based in great part on my own experiences as an online gamer, interacting with friends living across the world, and having to find ways through gaming in which one could find intimacy, physical contact, and at times eroticism. My argument is that while all media can offer some form of erotic or intimate interaction with its content, gaming, and especially online gaming, can push those boundaries further through a process of incarnation and transposition of the self into an avatar. This paper starts with the ways in which a player can interact with non-player characters and find solace in the virtual intimacy provided by said characters. This paper will address how an online interface allows for a different physicality through the control of an avatar. Finally, I want to discuss the specificities of VR socializing when it comes to experiences of virtual physical interactions.

Erik Loyer is an awarded author of digital works based in California (USA). In this interview, he talks about digital writing tools, the use of visuals and gaming features in his works as well as important issues like preservation of digital works and the restrictions of digital rights management (DRM).

An essay by Tara McPherson (and a conversation with Anne-Marie Schleiner) concerning patch mutations, opensorcery, and other explainable gaming offshoots.

(Source: EBR)

Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.

In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

Such interventions are critical displacements and performances enacted on the game space and community of CS:GO and LOTRO, but also on the literary works themselves – on the agitprop theater text and its claims, and on Beckett’s Endgame. As “existential spamming” (one name for the overall project), the interventions both insist on a political and contextual “reading” of the game space, but also consume the space through absurd and ineffectual performance – a problematic situation that perhaps defines the literariness involved.

This presentation at ELO 2015 situates these works in terms of literary and dramatic tradition, as described above, but also as a corrective supplement to the existing discussion of computer/video games in e-lit scholarship. “Literary games” are an established area of scholarship. Astrid Enslin’s excellent book sets a precedent for analyzing both artistic works making use of game-like aesthetics and affordances (think Jason Nelson’s games), on the one hand, and games that can claim literary merit, on the other (think Journey or Left Behind). The interventionist projects described here offer a very different engagement with games, and in doing so call attention to a need for greater understanding of performance and improvisation in e-lit.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

The exceptional quality of digital fictions lies in their inherently dynamic nature, how they may be flexibly programmed to generate new content and alter the already existing contents. This adds a new temporal level, compared to traditional fictions. Already the history of digital fictions (both digital literature and games) presents us with a variety of temporal practices which challenge the conventional ways of understanding fictional time.
We have at least the following four temporal levels for digital fictions with narrative content:

1. user time (the time the user spends using the work)
2. discourse time (the time of the narrative discourse)
-pseudo time
-true time
3. story time (the time of the fictional events)
4. system time (the time of the digital system states)

A specific point I want to make is, that, referring to Fernand Braudel’s conceptualisation of time with its three temporal layers, a fourth level is needed, that is, the micro-time of physical events, taking place below or behind the human perception. Much of what happens within the microprosessor takes place on this level. Hansen (2006), for example, has attempted at theorizing this digital time.
Digital fictions offer us tools to render both micro and macro levels of time to the human event-scale through simulation technologies. It is this practical aspect of flexible and precise adjusting of the temporal variable which makes simulations so efficient tools for all sorts of practices.
Games incorporate, in various degrees, aspects of simulation and narration in their structure. As interactive and dynamic media form, games are specifically temporal in nature. One aspect which I will look in detail is the constant balancing and tension between chaos and order, movement towards order or entropy, which forms the backbone of many games. The game Max Payne introduced the notion of bullet-time to provide multiple time frames within a game. In the Civilization games there are the levels two and three from Braudel’s categories present, and the dynamics of the engagement with the game is grounded on this tension between the temporal levels.
Spore is a simulation of long-term processes of evolution within the game world. It is worth examining more in detail, how the evolutionary processes develop within this simulated world as artificial, designed factors need to be introduced in the game world, to facilitate faster evolution.
All this means that games offer us the flexibility and preciseness of digital simulations, with the potential of psychologically engaging narrative qualities, which together open up a whole new field of experimenting with temporally dynamic media. It is not only a question of fictional time, but our understanding of time and temporality altogether, opened up from a new perspective through digital media.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Disccuses some practical issues involved in teaching new media in literature classroom, focusing on the necessity of teaching literatuer students to consider the language of gaming in the study of new media forms, on teaching collaborative media for the electronic media as a form of writing game, and on considering contemporary computer games in a cultural studies context.

CREATING INTERACTIVE FICTION WITH INFORM 7 is a jargon-free, step-by-step guide to mastering the basics of creating dynamic, text-based story worlds. Inform 7 is a free multiplatform interactive fiction authoring environment that uses an intuitive natural language syntax. A tool focused on writers, not programmers, Inform allows users construct complex, rich storytelling worlds by writing sentences as simple as "Tom is a person," or as complicated as "Instead of attacking Tom when something lethal is held, now every nearby watchdog owned by Tom hates the player." No prior programming experience is required. Throughout the book, readers develop a full-length, release-quality example game, exploring the real-world issues involved in authoring participatory narratives and gaining skills that can be applied to the creation of future games and stories.

(Publisher's copy)