ludic writing

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

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.

This paper will discuss the work of Los Angeles-based writer and digital artist William Poundstone. Poundstone, who makes his living writing books for a popular audience on subjects such as cryptography, philosophical and mathematical conundrums, economics and even a biography of Carl Sagan, has a growing, but still quite small, reputation as one of the most intellectually challenging, playful, and artistically distinctive web artists. His ““New Digital Emblems”” is probably his most ambitious work, and operates somewhere between a documentary about the history of visual and ludic writing——ranging across centuries and focusing most profoundly on the Renaissance emblem books——and an original artistic creation, as it includes several of his own ““digital emblems.”” Other works, such as ““Project for Tachistoscope,”” challenge our ways of reading as this narrative is presented as a mix of basic ““Wing Dings””-style iconography and text, presented in synch one image/word combination at a time. Smaller works, such as ““3 Proposals for Bottle Imps,”” suggest most strongly Poundstone’’s relationship to the Los Angeles text artist community——he’’s had a few modest showings of his provocative digital photography in the city——Ed Rusche and Barbara Kruger most specifically. My paper will attempt to describe Poundstone as he exists at the nexus of these various communities, citing his work as both a profound extension and critique of digital writing aesthetics and digital culture in general (his provocative dealings with sexuality and public image in our age of Photoshopped realities, for example), and an important bridge between digital art and the Los Angeles visual arts community.

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)