Anthology of Belén Gache's net-poems produced between 1996 and 2006 and one of her most widely known pieces. Here she proposes the exercise of reading as a decoding task as well as a ludic activity. The fourteen net-poems in this anthology are rooted in the historical avant-gardes, using strategies as randomness, tautology, appropriations, and are influenced by concrete and conceptual writing.
In short, the ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format for archived chess games) and outputs a poem. The poems are based on 12 source poems I wrote, 6 poems for the white pieces, 6 poems for the black pieces: there is a 64 word poem for each colour’s pawns, knights, rooks, bishop, queen and king. When a piece lands on a square it triggers a word from the source poems and the translator compiles them together and outputs a poem. For more, see http://chesspoetry.com/about/about/. The site itself includes a translator capable of inputting any chess game in .pgn format as well as a playable version that combines the translator with a chess-playing AI. In my performance I play a game versus the ChessBard on chesspoetry.com and project it and the subsequent poems that are translated in real-time. I imagine the performance being similar to demonstrations of The Turk, a chess-playing automaton from the 17th and 18th centuries: I would play at physical board with a chess clock, sitting down and ideally on a raised stage, and move actual pieces; I would then enter my moves (and see theChessBard’s in response) in a monitor-CPU next to me that would be projected behind me. The performance would last as long as it took me to finish the game, though I would set a time limit with the chess clock.
(source: ELO 2015 catalog)
In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology.
After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work’s relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur" game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.
(Source: MIT Press catalog copy)
Since the demise of the 'Golden Age' of literary hypertext (Coover 1999) and the theoretical debates surrounding online and offline electronic literature that followed in its wake, the study of digital fiction in particular has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a 'first-wave' of pure theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of close stylistic and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (e.g. Ciccoricco 2007, Ensslin 2007, Ensslin and Bell 2007, Bell 2010 forthcoming), the discipline and practice of close-reading digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by previous scholarship. With this in mind, the Digital Fiction International Network ('DFIN', funded by The Leverhulme Trust since January 2009) has been exploring new avenues of defining and implementing approaches to close-reading, with the tripartite trajectory of developing a range of tools and associated terminology for digital fiction analysis; of providing a body of analyses based on the close-reading of texts, which are substantiated by robust theoretical and terminological conclusions; and of fostering a collaborative network of academics working on inter-related projects.
In following this agenda, this paper offers a comparative approach to second person narration in two exemplary digital fictions: geniwate and Deena Larsen’s satirical flash fiction, The Princess Murderer (2003), and Jon Ingold's interactive fiction mystery, All Roads (2006 [2001]). We aim to explore the extent to which print-oriented narratological approaches to the textual 'You' (e.g. Herman 1994) apply to the texts under investigation and suggest theoretical tenets arising from their distinct (inter-)medial and ludic qualities (cf. Ryan 1999). Of particular interest will be the ways in which the reader and his/her role in the cybernetic feedback loop are constructed textually and interactionally.
(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI)