Search

The search found 89 results in 0.01 seconds.

Search results

1. Distributed Memories: CompuServe’s Gamer’s Forum and the Halcyon Days of the Adventure Game Toolkit

   This paper shares the story of the rise and fall of The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), a Pascal-based design system written in 1987 by David Malmberg, based on Mark J. Welch's 1985 Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). It was the leading platform for parser-based interactive fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Text Adventure Development System (TADS) as its upstart competitor. The use of these early (pre-Graham Nelson’s Inform 6) parser-based interactive fiction platforms was supported by an annual AGT contest, and a design community that stayed in touch through BBS-communities, the largest of which was Compuserve’s Gamer’s Forum. Malmberg ceased to support AGT in 1992, (the final release was AGT 1.7) but the contest continued until 1994. The competition was rebranded under new management, and with an expanded community and continued on as the Interactive Fiction Competition, (which has been run since 2016 by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation).

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:22

2. Platforming Inclusivity: Blaseball and an inclusive vision of browser games

   Blaseball, a fantasy baseball simulator developed by The Game Band, took 2020 by storm, quickly developing from a niche web game to an legitimate cultural phenomenon, including a whole catalogue of fan-created merchandise, more than a dozen albums of music, including a musical, and a dedicated following of players from around the world. Much of the attraction of the game comes from the passionate involvement of the fans and the openness The Game Band have shown to players making the game their own.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:36

3. Lab-yrinthe: an online laboratory to observe children’s e-lit and support digital literacy

   Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:
   - a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;
   - a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;
   - a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:46

4. Lyric Recollection and the Preservation of Ephemeral and Social Elit

   Though not an ideal solution, lyric reflection can be a significant method of preserving electronic literature. Having lost Flash, one solution is mimetic: a technical project resulting in a faithful copy of the original work, allowing the work to be experienced in all its particularity and interactivity. Failing that, footage, screenshots, and thorough, plainly descriptive writing can make a long-term accessible record so that at least that space in the genre’s history can be seen and understood by future generations. What happens, however, when a work a work features elements of ephemerality? On a computational level, this can happen to a far greater degree than with a traditional print book. Outside of rare tragedies, we can retrieve an old text from the archives, but we cannot retrieve the experience of, for instance, Multi-User Dungeons in the late 1990s. Lyric recollection, however, provides a literary model for securing something very close to the experience of the work.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:56

5. The Fugue * book: when platforms don’t let us escape literature

   Anton Ferret, author of the E-Lit work The Fugue* book, will present a reflection on the technological and creative part of it, all that can be done well working with platforms and taking advantage of their own intrusion into the data and all that it means to lose it by the cultural and technological change that has meant the greater awareness for privacy. Oreto Doménech, a researcher in digital literature, will focus on the reception: on how this literary work reconfigures the platforms through which it’s expressed and on how fiction itself uses the platforms to build a metadiscursive reflection on the literature inserted in the historical and social fact.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 17:09

6. On Reading and Being Read in the Pandemic: Software, Interface, and The Endless Doomscroller

   A primary interface pattern of contemporary software platforms is the infinite scroll. Often used to deliver algorithmically-selected personalized content, infinitely scrolling feeds are one of many design decisions seen as responsible for compulsive use of social media platforms and other information-rich sites and apps. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a time marked by a substantive increase in time spent online, the infinitely scrolling feed has been implicated in a new negative pattern: “doomscrolling.” Doomscrolling refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly--and in some cases, almost involuntarily--scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. While the realities of the pandemic have necessitated a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety, doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 17:21

7. "Swipe Night is Fun, but Useless” An Analysis of Tinder’s Swipe Night, an Interactive Foray in Online Dating

   Electronic literature and computer games share a common history beginning from the earliest adventure games (Rettberg 87). As both the “technological platforms” that host electronic literature and games, and the “social contexts” that inform them evolve, so does the content, gameplay, and types of interactions they facilitate (Rettberg). The development of the Tinder platform and other mediated dating applications has precipitated the incorporation of interactive fiction games into the dating experience.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 17:46

8. Dangerous Games: ARGs, Social Media Platforms and Participatory Propaganda

   Video games and their associated forms stand as the most lucrative entertainment sector on the planet, dominating other forms of visual media in dollars generated annually. In the proposed paper, adapted from a dissertation chapter, I will draw upon my experience as a game designer to illuminate the increasingly dire ways that various actors in the political sphere – from online trolls all the way to world leaders – have combined the language and techniques borne from the industrial practices of game design with the power of social media and other online communication platforms to produce new forms of disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theory. In this paper, I will trace the history of a specific form of game – the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), from its early literary history in 1903 to its modern incarnations.

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 18:05

9. Interacting with Empathy: Migrant narrative in the context of mobile apps

   This paper explores two main mobile app narratives that deal with the issue of perilous irregular migration, 'Survival' (2017, Omnium Lab) and 'Bury me, my love' (2017, The Pixel Hunt, Figs, ARTE France). This paper explores the way in which the mobile app form lends itself to elevation of migrant narratives and explores the capacity of such works to generate empathy.
   The paper will analyse the way in which migration and its subjects are treated and placed into relation with the notion of the game. The paper will also address the comparison between game-style apps and other online modes whereby migrant experience is being represented, such as that of humanitarian photojournalism and portraiture as it arises in social media apps, such as Instagram.

   (Source: Author's own abstract)

   Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 18:21

10. Appropriationist practices and subjectivation / desubjectivation processes: some productions of Argentine digital literature in times of algorithmic governance

    In this work, we propose to study a series of Argentine digital literature productions that problematize the idea of property in language. We refer to practices of appropriation and expropriation that –through copy-paste, plagiarism, remix, collage and work with “ready made”, among other operations that the digital medium facilitates - question the triad author-authority-property. We consider that, in this questioning of the traditional conception of authorship, these productions also allow us to read an “epochal slippage” within the category of subject (Bürger 2001), as they propose alternative forms of subjectivity.

    Daniel Johannes Flaten Rosnes - 25.05.2021 - 19:36

Pages