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Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games
This study investigates the effects of digitization on literature and literary culture with focus on works of literary fiction and other kinds of works inspired by such works. The concept of "hyperworks" refers to works intended to be navigated multisequentially, i.e. the users create their own paths through the work by making choices. The three articles that make up the dissertation include analyses of individual works as well as discussions of theoretical models and concepts. The study combines perspectives from several theoretical traditions: narratology, hypertext theory, ludology (i.e. game studies), sociology of literature, textual criticism, media theory, and new media studies. This study investigates the effects of digitization on literature and literary culture with focus on works of literary fiction and other kinds of works inspired by such works. The concept of “hyperworks” refers to works intended to be navigated multisequentially, i.e. the users create their own paths through the work by making choices. The three articles that make up the dissertation include analyses of individual works as well as discussions of theoretical models and concepts.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.02.2011 - 14:38
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Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies
What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.
Wardrip-Fruin suggests that it is the authors and artists with knowledge of these processes who will use the expressive potential of computation to define the future of fiction and games. He also explores how computational processes themselves express meanings through distinctive designs, histories, and intellectual kinships that may not be visible to audiences.
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 11:26
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Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media
The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser's gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor's mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences.
Patricia Tomaszek - 27.05.2011 - 15:41
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Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory
Equally interested in what is and what could be, Cybertext Poetics combines ludology and cybertext theory to solve persistent problems and introduce paradigm changes in the fields of literary theory, narratology, game studies, and digital media. The book first integrates theories of print and digital literature within a more comprehensive theory capable of coming to terms with the ever-widening media varieties of literary expression, and then expands narratology far beyond its current confines resulting in multiple new possibilities for both interactive and non-interactive narratives. By focusing on a cultural mode of expression that is formally, cognitively, affectively, socially, aesthetically, ethically and rhetorically different from narratives and stories, Cybertext Poetics constructs a ludological basis for comparative game studies, shows the importance of game studies to the understanding of digital media, and argues for a plurality of transmedial ecologies.
(Source: Continuum online catalog.)
Jörgen Schäfer - 16.03.2012 - 14:52
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Human Pratice - How the Problem of Ergodicity Demands a Reactivation of Anthropological Perspectives in Game Studies
This article presents a critical review (not a rejection) of the concept of “ergodic literature”
when applied to computer and video games. Therefore it goes back to some of
the sources Espen Aarseth triggered when he appropriated the term from physics in
1997 for the subject of cybertext and explains the necessary consequences of the term
“ergodicity” for literature and games when it is not merely used metaphorically. A more
cautious use of terms and concepts from other disciplines is suggested, especially as the
term “ergodic” in physics has a different but relevant meaning in the context of these
games. The article tries to mediate between some of the general anthropological claims
of cybertext theory/game studies and the understanding of “ergodic systems” in thermodynamics and statistical physics. The problems that result from this mediation can be
seen as symptomatic for the challenges of game studies in the more general mediation
between different perspectives on games.(Source: Author's abstract)
Stig Andreassen - 02.09.2012 - 21:13
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Travels in Cybertextuality. The Challenge of Ergodic Literature and Ludology to Literary Theory
The dissertation’s main point of departure is the clash between explicit and implicit presuppositions, conceptualisations and generalisations in print-oriented literary theoretical paradigms and a plenitude of empirically verifiable anomalies and counter-examples to them found in digital and ergodic works of literature. The behaviour of these counter-examples is explained by cybertext theory that addresses the often neglected issue of the variety of literary media. Both the empirical counter-examples and the empirically verifiable differences in the behaviour of literary media allow us to expand and modify literary theories to suit not just one traditionally privileged media position but all of them. Therefore, in the first half of the dissertation, literary theory and narratology are viewed and modified from the perspective of slightly revised cybertext theory. In this process theories of ergodic and non-ergodic literature are integrated more closely and several so far non-theorized ways of manipulating narrative time, regulating narrative information, and generating narrative instances are located and theorized.
Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 21:45
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The materialities of close reading: 1942, 2009
Today, we not only see video games and online role-playing games interpreted, in print-based scholarly journals, by way of classical literary and narrative theory (to the dismay of the radical ludologist), but we also see the inverse: classical novels interpreted by way of role-playing games staged in computerized, simulated environments (as in Jerome McGann's IVANHOE Game). The use of classical theory for the study of contemporary video games and video games for the study of classical literature, however, does not necessarily mean that we now inhabit a mixed up muddled up shook up literary-critical world. In fact, these examples might mark opposite sides of a continuum of critical practice, and underscore the logic of analyzing a text in a given medium with the tools of a different – and complementary – medium.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:54
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The Tribulations of Adventure Games: Integrating Story into Simulation Through Performance
This dissertation aims at positioning adventure games in game studies, by describing their formal aspects and how they have integrated game design with stories. The adventure game genre includes text adventures (also known as interactive fiction), graphical text adventures, and graphic adventures, also referred to as point-and-click adventure games. Adventure games have been the first videogames to evidence the difficulty of reconciling games and stories, an already controversial topic in game studies. An adventure game is a simulation, the intersection between the rule system of the game and its fictional world. The simulation becomes a performance space for the player. The simulation establishes how the player can interact with the world of the game. The simulated world integrates a series of concatenated puzzles, which structure the performance of the player. Solving the puzzles thus means advancing in the story of the game. The integration of the story with the simulation is done through the performance of the player.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.04.2014 - 05:16
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Imersão e Interactividade na Ficção Digital
A presente tese de doutoramento é dedicada a uma forma de contar histórias com cerca de três décadas de existência. Recém-chegada ao horizonte literário, a ficção digital começou por definir-se através de uma contraposição face ao livro impresso. A transgressão da linearidade e a tentativa de reduzir a presença autoral no texto, foram tornadas em características fundamentais desta forma literária. As primeiras obras de ficção digital eram descritas como objectos fragmentados que continham lexias interligadas através de hiperligações. Esta estrutura tinha como objectivo oferecer liberdade de escolha ao leitor e uma maior participação na construção do texto. No entanto, a expansão da World Wide Web e a emergência de novo software e de novos dispositivos permitiram a criação de experiências adicionais de leitura e de escrita. A tecnologia possibilitava a introdução de novas formas de contar histórias, mas também novos paradigmas. A hiperligação acabaria por ser substituída por novas ferramentas de navegação e a divisão em lexias acabaria por dar lugar a novos tipos de organização textual.
Daniela Côrtes Maduro - 20.09.2016 - 14:29
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Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader
World of Warcraft is the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), with (as of March 2007) more than eight million active subscribers across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, who play the game an astonishing average of twenty hours a week. This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players (leading guilds and raids, exploring moneymaking possibilities in the in-game auction house, playing different factions, races, and classes), conducting interviews, and studying the game design—as created by Blizzard Entertainment, the game's developer, and as modified by player-created user interfaces. The analyses they offer are based on both the firsthand experience of being a resident of Azeroth and the data they have gathered and interpreted.
Ana Castello - 09.10.2018 - 13:11
