interactive experiences

“Making PIE: Closing the gap between story and experience” elaborates and expands on existing relationships between story and experience, using e-lit and game examples to demonstrate the importance of PIE environments for creative and scholarly communication.

Story is a way of rendering, essentializing, curating, crystallizing and communicating experience. Like the way that food preserves process the bounty of harvest moments into forms that extend the benefits of that harvest through longer durations and broader spaces, story is a method of processing, preserving and extending experience beyond the moment of actual or imagined events. However, given that “contemporary media is experiential,” (Arbuckle and Stewart) multimedia e-lit and digital game experiences are ways of reconstituting such story preserves into participatory interactive experiences (PIE). PIE comes from Dene Grigar’s extension of Vince Dziekan’s ideas on multimedia museum curation. Dzeikan proposes a “movement away from what might be termed as a broadcast model of distribution (entailing a one-way communication approach) by introducing degrees of openness (access, participation) and feedback (exchanges, transactions). This shift entails ideological choices that challenge the museum’s ability to respond to a changing mandate, from one founded on its presentation role to that of providing an infrastructure for aesthetic experience” (70). While Grigar migrates Dzeikan’s idea of curating participatory, interactive experiences to the practice of curating e-lit, she also asserts that e-lit is already a multimedial PIE. Story becomes lived experience in these environments and such experiences are more communicatively and rhetorically impactive than traditional written and oral forms of storytelling.

Literary gaming (Ensslin 2014) is situated at the interface between literary computer games and ludic digital literature. The conjunction of literary close-reading and gaming is inherently paradoxical because literature and computer games are two entirely different receptive, productive, aesthetic, phenomenological, social and discursive phenomena. Reading, according to Hayles (2007), requires deep attention, which allows subjects to focus on an artefact such as a print novel or digital fiction for an extended period of time without, however, losing a sense of the actual world surrounding them. Gameplay, on the other hand, typically involves hyperattention, which literally glues players to the screen, thereby creating "artificial" basic needs, such as the urge to finish a level or quest before being able to focus on any other activity. (Literary) art games tend to "détourn" commercial game aesthetics (Dragona 2010, Vaneigem 1967) to evoke a critical meta-stance in players towards the ludic and textual expectations created by mainstream game culture. This meta-stance may relate to the ways in which players willingly succumb to teleological trajectories such as functional killing and saving damsels-in-distress (Ensslin and Bell 2012). By the same token, literary game designers and digital writers explore creatively the question of whether hyper and deep attention are indeed compatible, thereby producing a variety of artefacts that inhabit various loci on the spectrum between ludic digital literature and literary computer game (Ensslin 2012). Focusing on the ludic, fictional, medial and linguistic metazones (Jaworski et al. 2004), this chapter offers a close "playing" of Jason Nelson's poetic platform game, Evidence of Everything Exploding (2009). Nelson's work sits near the middle of the ludic-literary spectrum. It literally 'toys' with the explosive potential inherent in the fusion of reading and playing, specifically in the highly polysemic and metalinguistic realm of poetry. Methodologically, an extended notion of functional ludo-narrativism (Ryan 2006: 203) will be employed to the analysis, with a view to examining how elements of game design, gameplay, textuality and poetic style concur to evoke distinctive receptive and interactive experiences. (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)