narrative games

Even before worldwide quarantines added impetus, material gaming had already become increasingly enacted in virtual spaces. Rather than virtual play replacing the material, as some speculated in the early days of videogames, material play has become increasingly entangled with virtuality. These increasingly complementary modes of play offer a rich space for exploring the multifaceted embodied and conceptual activity of play, the blending of material and virtual that in many ways defines games.The three panelists encompass a wide range of perspectives, including the perspective of a game maker translating material play into the digital realm, that of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar who researched how players interact differently with the Catan boardgame and its digital implementations, and that of a theorist reflecting on how virtual spaces remediate material affects. Together, these diverse perspectives aim to explore the paradoxical yet generative spaces where materiality and virtuality intersect in gaming.The theoretical approach looks at analog games as capable of producing the specific circumstances that foreground the affective relationships between the players and the other pieces of the assemblage. Because of the procedural nature that necessitates specific types of interactions between parts of the play assemblage, analog games amplify the social interactions between players and differently produce affective orientations as a consequence of their systems. Then examines the ways that these games are remediated and adapted to digital platforms highlighting the things that are lost or changed in the move to digital, uncovering the types of experiences that are important for each type of adaptation.

The HCI approach presents Association Mapping (AM) in HCI; called so because the formation of a network is due to objects making associations in context. By recording the associations that form a network, it is possible to understand what objects are most central within that network. . This research contributes to the next paradigm of HCI by providing a new tool to understand use that is fragmented, distributed, and invisible. AM incorporates association as its measurement. This results in passive measures of attention, hybridity, and influence in network formation of any kind. It does this by making the systemic nature of use visible and capable of evaluation at any level.And finally the design approach applies design strategies for incorporating three main types of play: Screenplay, Gameplay, and Roleplay, seeking to answer questions about how to bridge the narrative and performance aspects of digital and analog play. This is particularly applicable to classic games that are associated with transmedia narratives and characters, such as the Clue board game, where there are established cinematic traditions and character roles.During the COVID-19 pandemic, board games have become a useful medium for examining our changing relationship with physical and digital interaction. In addition to presenting our own findings, this panel also offers several methodologies for furthering research into the intersections of the analog, digital, physical, and virtual.

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.

Literary Art in Digital Performance examines electronic works of literary art, a category integrating the visual+textual including interactive poetry, narrative computer games, filmic sculpture, projective art, and other works specific to digital media. In recent decades, electronic art's aesthetic has been driven by new algorithmic, randomized, and emergent processes. Although this new art differs from material art or print literature, the rise of popular fascination with new media has neglected signifcant discussion of how technical mediation impacts contemporary art and literature. Presented as a collection of case studies by leading scholars, the book provides a contemporary optic on this art's forms, problems, and possibilities. Each case study is followed by a post-chapter dialogue where the editor engages authors on the foundational aesthetics of new media art and literature.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Juncture and Form in New Media Criticism, Francisco J. Ricardo

2. What is and Toward What End do We Read Digital Literature?, Roberto Simanowski Post-Chapter Dialogue, Simanowski and Ricardo

3. List(en)ing Post, Rita Raley Post-Chapter Dialogue, Raley and Ricardo

4. Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo’s Slippingglimpse: Distributed Cognition at/in Work, N. Katharine Hayles Post-Chapter Dialogue, Hayles and Ricardo

5. Reading Discursive Spaces of Text Rain, Transmodally, Francisco J. Ricardo

6. Kissing the Steak: The poetry of text generators, Christopher T. Funkhouser Post-Chapter Dialogue, Funkhouser and Ricardo

7. Geopoetics: Aesthetic Experience in the Works of Stefan Schemat and Teri Rueb, Katja Kwastek Post-Chapter Dialogue, Kwastek and Ricardo

8. Self, Setting, and Situation in Second Life, Maria Bäcke Post-Chapter Dialogue, Bäcke and Ricardo

9. Looking Behind the Façade: Playing and Performing an Interactive Drama, Jorgen Schäfer Post-Chapter Dialogue, Schäfer and Ricardo

10. Artificial Poetry: On Aesthetic Perception in Computer-Aided Literature, Peter Gendolla Post-Chapter Dialogue, Gendolla and Ricardo

11. Screen Writing: A Practice-based, EuroRelative Introduction to Digital Literature and Poetics, John Cayley Post-Chapter Dialogue, Cayley and Ricardo

The paper discusses several problems that seem to define and determine the field of electronic literature in theory and practice and suggests several strategies to remedy the situation in the spirit that is both analytical and polemical.

Electronic literature has been around at least for 50 years and many of its typical ergodic ingredients share a cultural (pre)history that reaches back to classical antiquity and beyond (I Ching). Still, the cultural, economical, educational and even literary status and visibility of electronic literature is low and obscure at best despite occasional canonisations of hypertext fiction and poetry (the works of Michael Joyce and Jim Rosenberg), literary groups such as the OuLiPo that from very early on extended their orientation beyond print literature, and the efforts of an international or semi-international organisation (ELO) to promote and preserve electronic literature - not to mention multiple and more or less influential and comprehensive theories of electronic and ergodic literature.

The days of hype and claims of novelty are or at least seem to be things of the past and there are no great expectations anymore for whatever happens to emerge from the ghetto or cloister of electronic literature. Compared to many other cultural niches there are neither crossover successes attracting wider audiences nor popular forms and genres of electronic literature. This condition situates electronic literature in the position similar to various avant-garde movements although without the latter’s cultural impact and influence. The paper argues for the acceptance of the elitist-experimentalist-marginal status of electronic literature with the twist of choosing its academic, institutional and post-industrial allies and enemies accordingly.

The paper has three condensed parts: cultural, theoretical and practical. The first charts the socio-cultural infrastructure of the field and the three main circuits of distribution and dissemination of electronic literature: commercial publishers, the free market of the Internet, and the museum/art scene each with its own cultural and commercial logic. The position of electronic literature is further triangulated in relation to digital games (and their ergodic strength), journalism (a neighbouring field of writing) and electronic civil disobedience (for values’ sake).

The second part calls for the integration of theories of electronic literature to the continuously hegemonic theories of print literature. In the academic context electronic and ergodic literature could provide fresh theoretical challenges to literary scholarship rotting away under the dominance of cultural studies and a wealth of counter-examples to the presuppositions and false generalisations of implicitly or explicitly print-oriented and print-based theories. Integrative and isolationist approaches are compared and two forms of the former are isolated for further study. The preferred deep integration (made possible through modified cybertext theory) works at the level of theoretical and paradigmatic foundations of literature whereas cheap integration (cf. Murray and Ryan) sets conservative constraints derived from mainstream print literature as norms and values supposedly assisting the birth of more user-friendly electronic literature.

The third and more speculative part of the paper divides the field of electronic literature into four dimensions: poetry/prose, fiction/non-fiction, ergodic/non-ergodic and drama/simulation and then locates a set of theoretical and practical blind spots arresting the development and further expansion of the field.