play

In this panel moderated by Lai-Tze Fan, we examine Twine at ten, exploring the ongoing influence of this hypertext platform on pedagogy, play, and literature: 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Twine (Moulthrop) - Creating digital stories and games involves many cultural registers. Just as important is the unmapped, semi-formal culture that underlies communal, open-source software. In the case of Twine, this can involve distinctions among versions of the core software, associated scripting languages, and "story formats." Learning this buried lore can reveal a technologized "artworld," in Howard Becker's term, and raises questions of hierarchy, value, and the nature of creative work in what is essentially a gift economy – questions that may ultimately apply to any form of art. 

Twine at 10: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling (Salter) - Hypertext and games platform Twine recently marked its ten year anniversary, complete with a celebratory game jam. Twine’s affordances as a web-driven, open source tool drive its renewed significance as a platform for rapid response storytelling, enabling users to build playful, poignant responses to the many challenges of 2020 as exemplified by Mark Sample’s 10 Lost Boys; Cait Kirby’s September 7, 2020; and Adi Robbertson’s You Have to Ban the President. 

Twine, The EpistoLab (Laiola) - A frustrating element of teaching with Twine is the platform’s limitations with real-time collaboration across devices. Before COVID, when the classroom could operate as a lab, this limitation could be solved by students gathering around a single machine. But when shared machinery and gathering becomes impossible, Twine offers another model--“the epistolab.” The epistolab follows an epistolary model of collaborative work, dispersing colLABoration across times and spaces, and prompting a reevaluation of the roles that simultaneity and liveness play in collaboratory, pedagogical work. 

Twine as Literature, Not Literacy, in the Program(ming) Era (Milligan) - In the 21st century digital humanities, “digital literacy” has seemingly become the humanistic endgame for how we conceptualize, rationalize, and advertise the skillsets we impart; In e-lit, Twine as well is often presented to students in these terms. As the potential shortcomings of literacy as sole pedagogical outcome, however, become increasingly clearer (for instance -- as we reckon with its limitations to prevent insurgency-through-misinformation in the US), I propose another way to teach Twine and its promise of digital storytelling differently: through a model, based on the creative writing workshop, that highlights the literature and literary possibilities of Twine. 

The panel will conclude with an open discussion of Twine’s future as a platform

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.

During a recent flight, I sat beside an engineer who works for a major toy company. During our conversation, she casually mentioned toys’ intended “play patterns” and how important these are to innovative design practices. “Play pattern” is a term that describes the ways that users interact with a toy, and—while there is little corporate information available to verify the specifics of such guiding paradigms, the toy industry seems to be basing this approach on the psychological theories of Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Mildred Parten. Andy Russell writes: “While there are hundreds of new toys and games released each year, every one of them is rooted in core play patterns derived from basic human behaviors. The not-so-great toys (Pet Rocks) are inherently limited to one or two play patterns (collecting and… well, collecting), but the best toys, like LEGOs, appeal to a variety of play patterns (modeling, collecting, storytelling, invention) over a range of ages and developmental stages. These are called “grow-with-me” toys because kids’ play with the toys adapts over time with their cognitive development…” Toys are thus designed to encourage a variety of intended patterns of play and use, similar to ways that stories are mediated and engineered to evoke diverse interpretations and reactions. Language, like LEGO, can modularly appeal to a broad range of age ranges and flexible play patterns if it is used as a creative instrument, and--as Umberto Eco recognizes in The Open Work—certain employments of language in storytelling situations can maintain such flexible interpretative potential. However, traditional print-language-based forms of storytelling permit a much more particular and limited range of interpretative patterns. While this curational approach is the key to powerful communication (similar to the ways that toys are designed to specifically enable particular patterns of engagement), it is also limited and limiting in that such prefabrications of material and meaning potential are primarily dictated by authoritative prescriptions. Addressing this shortcoming, Russell continues: “there is a gap between what the child imagines and what his or her tools (toys) currently afford. As a designer, this insight is invaluable. What can we create to help kids bridge this gap and realize their imaginations in a format that is more easily shared with friends and family? (Note: The goal here shouldn’t be to replace the child’s imagination, but to spark it with creative tools.)” Multi-media and multi-modal forms of representation can be designed to extend more limited engagement ranges, potentially defamiliarizing and destabilizing familiar habits of interpretative perception, and creating increased opportunities for playful and creative forms of interaction. If e-lit is a kind of literary toy or game, how can the idea of play patterns illuminate the ways that e-lit is designed or experienced? Theoretically, it might be useful to understand e-lit not as exclusively literature, game, or toy, but as a mode of participatory interactive experience that bridges the gaps between all three, pluralizes interpretative patterns, and provokes unconventional play patterns.

Viewed next to print literature, e-lit appears as a poor copy, a replica(nt) lacking both the genius agency of modernism and the abject subjectivity of postmodernism. In this talk, I will use the concepts of re-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari) and “the open” (Giorgio Agamben) to show how, like Hoffman’s automaton, the “born digital” is powerful precisely because it fails to deceive. Neither preserving nor directly opposing the conventions of print-lit, e-lit functions as a reflecting apparatus that unmasks language and meaning-making as machines through the revelation of its own machine-works. Using multifarious examples from the work of Alan Bigelow, Mez Breeze, Emily Short, Jason Nelson, and others, I will show how these re-inscribe obstruction, glitch, error, randomness and obsolescence as potentiality. In doing so, they repurpose the productive and reproductive functions of writing not for some finite end or product, but for play.

(Source: author's abstract)

ABSTRACT: We consider a specific character, Princess Charlotte, in the 1999 interactive fiction work Varicella by Adam Cadre. To appreciate and solve this work, the interactor must both interpret the texts that result (as a literary reader does) and also operate the cybertextual machine of the program, acting as a game player and trying to understand the system of Varicella’s simulated world. We offer a close reading focusing on Charlotte, examining the functions she performs in the potential narratives and in the game. Through this example, we find that in interactive fiction — and we believe in other new media forms with similar goals — works must succeed as literature and as game at once to be effective. We argue that a fruitful critical perspective must consider both of these aspects in a way that goes beyond simple dichotomies or hierarchies.

The subject of the thesis is to introduce and contextualise the possibilities of writing in the interactive media as well as to study the literary art of interactive media in the Anglophone area. One of the attributes of the contemporary art pieces of interactive media is their intermedial character; the authors often link text, image and sound to introduce the fictional world. The aim of the thesis is on one hand to refer to the questions that are not new but have appeared in new circumstances due to the digital format and internet and on the other hand to refer to the questions typical for the digital fiction research. The research concentrates on the digital fiction – a digital piece written in a computer programme, in which the author offers a fictional world. The thesis addresses several aspects of digital fiction, whose combination indicates its characteristic status within the group of digital art – fragmentarity of narrative, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality and the principles of game and play. The current phenomena that influence also the creation of the analysed art pieces and their popularity among readers are the aesthetic attraction, in this context brought mainly by the use of media diversity, and the effort to evoke the most intensive experience in the shortest time span. The thesis consists apart from the introduction, conclusion and interludium (dealing with the materiality of digital fiction) of four chapters. The scientific approaches to the problematics of writing in the interactive media are in the second parts of these chapters used in the process of analysis-interpretation of particular digital fiction pieces.

This essay is a synopsis of my fourth chapter from my dissertation. My research consists of game-poems and how they fundamentally alter the experience of “reading” poetry. Ultimately, my argument is that poetic experience is no longer initiated by text, but by the kinetic, audible, visual, and tactile functions in the digital environment that I label as trans-medial space; in effect, these functions sustain the poetry experience, and, thus, require the reader/user of the poem to play, rather than read, as a new form of “reading” the digital game-poem in order experience and interpret a poem’s meaning.

As a result, this essay explicates my theory and purpose for constructing and presenting an online, multiplayer game experience of a digital poem ironically titled “How to Read a Digital Poem”. Set in Markus Persson’s Minecraft platform, I demonstrate how this trans-medial space functions as an expression of poetry, mediating our interaction with digital poems. As a result, my Minecraft Poem challenges the level of immediacy and ephemeral notions of space that has been associated with technological advancement in digital poetry advocated by N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Mirona Magearu. The environment is a space oscillating between constraint and unconstraint methods to produce a poem, but results in a stable trans-medial space for the digital poem to perform and be experienced by the user/player.