James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by James Wallis.
"In the ongoing debates about storytelling and narrative in games, the various commentators often overlook a key point: even in the most cutting-edge examples of the state of the art, it is not the players who tell the story, it is the game. Whether computer games with a narrative element, board games, card games, or face-to-face role-playing games, the essential plot and structure of the narrative is predetermined before the game begins, and cannot be altered."
"Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them, but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story."
"the game's mechanics must take into consideration the rules of the genre that it is trying to create: not just the relevant icons and tropes, but the nature of a story from that genre. A fairy tale has a very different structure and set of requirements than a horror story or a soap opera, and a game must work to replicate that. "
"In most games, the structure is simply the way the game is played. In story-making games, it is also the principal way that the narrative shape of the story is formed (...)."
"Structure is not the same thing as rules. (...) That's how the game plays. It's not how the game works."
"The key to a successful story-making game, at least in the ones that have been released so far, is simplicity of design. (...) it does mean that rules have to be integrated with structure and genre to form a coherent package. I am a self-confessed proponent of "elegance through simplicity" in game design, and I realize that this doesn't fit every taste, or every style of game. "
All quotes were directly pulled out of the essay.
Paul Czege explains that he aimed for My Life with Master to be an engine for story creation rather than just another variation on the traditional role-playing game system.
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Paul Czege.
"Telling stories about your experiences is a process of selecting, organizing, and presenting a relevant subset of the superset of all possible information you could include in the story."
"I began to play, widely, regularly, and experimentally, mostly free and self-published games. And from this I began to understand how powerful role-playing experiences that produce story with less noise could be delivered by game rules that consciously mediate play as an endeavor of collaborative authorship."
All quotes were directly pulled out of the essay.
From a theoretical framework of cognitive semiotics, emotion history, and image science, Schiller’s scholarship focuses on the media genealogies of physiognomy, the science of facial expression, and digital biometrics. He analyzes how artists and scientists use media to interpret from the outside physiological behavior of the face the psychological phenomena inside an individual; the visual rhetoric of these methodologies; and how face images can inform display rules, social scripting, and truth claims for emotion in society. Schiller is also an internationally exhibited artist. Across the media genealogies of physiognomic science in the German-speaking countries, artists researching at the intersection of art, science, and technology have from the “form” [Greek physis] of the face “interpreted” [gnṓmōn] characteristics such as temperament and emotion. To historicize how media is the method for this grammatical view of the facial language–long called an art and today known as a science–I problematize the connections and conflictions between ‘face-reading’ in the tetradic humoural ‘theory of everything’ of the Northern Renaissance, and automatic facial expression analysis in the digital information society of the Cognitive Revolution. Using a new online Media Art Research Thesaurus, I probe the intermedial prestige of Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Apostles (1526) and its references to physiognomic ‘books on the face,’ by comparatively analyzing the semantic bridges that link the transposition of this artwork in Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s master study (1815), and combination into Julius von Bismarck’s Public Face (2008).
(Source: Author's Abstract ICDMT 2016)
JanusNode is a user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface. It can create original texts using a rule-based system or can morph your texts using Markov chaining and various other techniques. It has been described (albeit generously) as 'Photoshop for text'.
JanusNode is the direct descendent of an old program called 'McPoet' that I started writing in the mid-80s. The program has been in sporadic but continuous development since that time. I do not intend to definitively stop working on it in my lifetime.
(Source: http://janusnode.com/)
Primary Text: Marko Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a demo of which would run during the presentation.
The paper opens with a brief discussion of the inherently conservative nature of the ELO’s definition of electronic-literature and the critical tendencies which this encourages. It has a strong focus on those critics who identify the forms which electronic literature has taken as an extension of modernist experimentation in the Twentieth Century, while disregarding the new possibilities which programmable media furnishes the poet with.
These possibilities are manifest in Niemi’s Stud Poetry, a text which has been consistently overlooked since its publication, perhaps because it presents a challenge to the dominant critical trends. Stud Poetry cannot fully be understood in terms of print-based modernist experimentation, Dada or Burroughs, because it would be impossible to achieve without a computer program. Niemi wrote the code which ‘writes’ each poem/game.
‘The text’ is thus suspended somewhere in between each iteration as it appears to the user, and the overarching structure provided by the code. Niemi selects the program’s vocabulary, the rules which it must adhere to, the inputs which a user can make, and the probabilities which determine the text’s production, but remains one step removed from the text as it appears on screen. Some control, in the shape of the buttons at the bottom of the screen, is given over to the user- who plays the role of glamorous assistant to Niemi’s conjurer and follows his prompts as the poem/game progresses.
The only serious attempt to critique this relationship as it exists within Stud Poetry is available on C. T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Poetry website after it was omitted from the print version. Funkhouser’s reading is fundamentally flawed as he misreads the code and believes it impossible to learn from each hand. The value of the words is calculated only once, at the beginning of the game and not at the beginning of each hand as Funkhouser has it. Through experience of the text, the user gains increasing control of it as they understand the value of each word, and can predict with increasing accuracy the way the poem/game will proceed, while recognizing that an element of uncertainty is involved. The element of competition quickly creates a narrative.
With its random-generation and interactivity, Stud Poetry is authored by Niemi without being controlled by him. He uses internet poker as a form, as a print poet might use a sonnet, but his is the more radical utilisation as it challenges what can be conceived of as literature, and where ‘the text’ may be in a work of this kind. His poem/game embodies the challenge which electronic literature poses to print literature, and should be recognised with discussion at a major conference rather than becoming an anomaly or outlier of the Electronic Literature Collection.
(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013)