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Galatea
Galatea is a work of interactive fiction set in an art gallery an undetermined amount of time in the future. The player takes on the role of an unnamed art critic examining works of personality referred to in the story as “animates.” Galatea is the name of one such animate however, unlike the other exhibits at the museum (which are forays into rudimentary artificial intelligence,) Galatea was a sculpted women who simply willed herself to life. The player must interact with Galatea through text commands until they get one of several endings.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 14.01.2011 - 12:57
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The Doll Games
The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context.
Scott Rettberg - 26.02.2011 - 16:24
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Labyrinth: the Rulebook without Game
An ergodic Flash text exploring video game culture through the lens of playable manuals.
How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.
Mark Marino - 28.03.2011 - 16:12
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Reconstructing Mayakovsky
Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38
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Silent Conversation
A casual game in the platform style based on simple reading of texts.
Scott Rettberg - 06.10.2011 - 16:23
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Clues
Clues explores the nature of communication, knowledge, and identity through the language and postures of mystery fiction. It's a metaphysical whodunit that invites you to solve the mystery by uncovering clues linked to images throughout the work. The search becomes a game that leads you down wooded trails, back alleys, and empty hallways. Which characters should you pursue? Which objects should you investigate? To win the game, you must separate all the clues from the red herrings. Your final score determines the outcome of the text. But is the mystery really soluble? Is winning actually better than losing? Are the answers or the questions more revealing?
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 16.06.2012 - 11:45
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The Dead Tower
Explore a dark, mountainous landscape dominated by a gigantic tower.
Set in a dark and abstract dream world that revolves around a crashed bus, the atmospheric literary game environment The Dead Tower can be freely explored at full-screen with the mouse and keyboard. Leonardo Flores says about the project: “This narrative poem is arranged on a darkly atmospheric virtual world designed to both creep you out and pull you in…“. Like the proverbial moth, the reader’s attention is drawn towards the brightest things around: white words float in the air, static or rotating. And the lines of mezangelle verse both heighten the dread by telling fragments of a ghostly narrative prefigured by the bus crash site the reader finds herself in and soften the tone with hints about the interface that nudge the fourth wall. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)
Andy Campbell - 15.07.2012 - 19:03
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Hors Catégorie
Hors Catégorie is an interactive fiction by Chris Calabro and David Benin developed in 2007.
It is possible to play it on almost every system, even on Smartphone.
The used Software is a z-machine Interpreter, which is a game’s requirement as the player needs it in order to emulate an Infocom machine.
It takes place entirely in a single hotel room, with several subrooms. Unlike many adventure-like interactive fictions, location, possessions, and strength are not the main obstacles of this game, but rather player knowledge and moral choices. The point is to explore the inner conflict of the protagonist and shape his character. This is why the typical presence of interactive fictions’ obstacles makes Hors Catégorie innovative and different because here they are the player moral choices.
The title of the game comes from the 'out of category' classification of difficult climbs in the Tour de France, where the game is set. The protagonist is a rider in the Tour, just waking, getting ready to take on the day's current stage.
How to play:
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:24
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The Madeleine Effect
"The Madeleine Effect" is a digital story project, an artistic look at ways to incorporate a creative text based story in the linear format and language styling of a novel into the game world.
I believe that when a primarily text-based fiction story is created in a visual narrative medium, it can be utilized to prompt the user to act as a character. The user therefore may be guided to perform through a narrative. I am interested in looking at interactive fiction from the perspective of a writer aiming to invite meaningful interaction leading towards playful behaviors, or acting, on the part of the player.
"The Madeleine Effect" is a fiction story that is experienced through both digital and print media. The story interface aims to be interactive through the player's performance, which is demonstrated by inputting text into the story while playing a defined role. The interactivity in this project is focused at this time so as to more easily observe the ideas I am exploring. My hope is that this project will spur thought and conversation about ideas for increased interactivity and a more intelligent technical structure.
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:16
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Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House
Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House is the story of a poor suburban family told interactively through text.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
A three-chapter game (with an epilogue) in which you're a different character in each chapter. The twist is that each chapter covers roughly the same space of time, and you interact with the other two characters, to varying degrees, when you're in each pair of shoes. The gameplay is a bit restrictive--the game doesn't allow for a lot of variation--but the characters themselves are well developed and the interactions feel reasonably realistic. The game even does a passable job of recording the actions you take when you're one character and playing them back when you're a different character, observing the antics of the first. Very short--20-30 minutes to play through at most--but worth playing; it largely eschews puzzles in favor of character interaction in a way that little IF attempts.
(Source: Review by Duncan Stevens, BAF's guide to the IF Archive)
Scott Rettberg - 17.01.2013 - 13:26
