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Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
Cybertext explores the aesthetics and the textual dynamics of digital literature and its many diverse genres such as hypertext fiction, computer games, computer generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. However, instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of "electronic writing" or "interactive fiction" (phrases which mean very little) the author situates these new literary forms within the larger and much older field of "ergodic" literature, from the ancient Chinese I Ching to the literary experiments of the OuLiPo. These are open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading. Aarseth constructs a theoretical model that describes how these literary forms are different from each other, and demonstrates how the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts breaks down under careful analysis.
Patricia Tomaszek - 21.09.2010 - 10:59
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Avatars of Story
Traces the transformation of storytelling in the digital age. Since its inception, narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with language-supported stories. In Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond literary works to examine other media, especially electronic narrative forms. By grappling with semiotic media other than language and technology other than print, she reveals how story, a form of meaning that transcends cultures and media, achieves diversity by presenting itself under multiple avatars.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 24.02.2011 - 09:00
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Looking Behind the Façade: Playing and Performing an Interactive Drama
Looking Behind the Façade: Playing and Performing an Interactive Drama
Jörgen Schäfer - 28.06.2011 - 14:33
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The History of Hypertext Authoring and Beyond: Interview with Stuart Moulthrop
Malloy's interview with Moulthrop focuses on his early work, his entrée into writing hypertext and his hypertext novel Victory Garden, the "mostly mythical" artists' collective TINAC, and one of his later works, Under Language. The interview appears on the Authoring Software project.
Scott Rettberg - 20.10.2011 - 09:42
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Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Scott Rettberg - 25.06.2013 - 14:44
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Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds. Multiuser Textuality and the Emergence of Story
Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds. Multiuser Textuality and the Emergence of Story
Scott Rettberg - 26.06.2013 - 11:26
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Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic literature
The influential book that introduced the terms cybertext and ergodic literature was first written as a PhD dissertation. See the entry for the book for details and references.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 21:35
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Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation
Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be "texts," and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games' generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.
Scott Rettberg - 09.07.2013 - 00:24
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Limbo and the Edge of the Literary
Limbo, released in 2010, is a puzzle platformer that features a player character who awakes in Limbo, on the edge of hell. He must traverse a world of bear traps, giant killer spiders, and spinning gears. As with any game, the player of Limbo will necessarily fail while solving the game’s puzzles; however, this game makes those failures especially painful. The player character is decapitated, impaled, and dismembered as the player attempts to solve each puzzle. The game’s monochromatic artwork, its vague storyline, and these gruesome deaths meant that Limbo, predictably, found its way into various “games as art” conversations. However, this presentation asks whether Limbo can serve as a different kind of boundary object. Given its complete lack of text and its minimalist approach to storytelling, what is the status of Limbo as a literary object?
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:31
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Literary Gaming
In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology.
Astrid Ensslin - 08.06.2014 - 16:57
