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1. Hors-Categorie: An Embodied, Affective Approach to Interactive Fiction

   The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race. 

   In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect. 

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:21

2. Blending the Crossword with the Narrative: An Examination of the Storygame

   Interactive narrative cannot be understood as only literature or as only game, nor even as a combative relationship between the two. Narrative-oriented "games" are neither novel nor movie, but they are likewise significantly different beasts than conventional, competitive games. They rather draw elements from both. We will come to terms with the concept of the storygame by examining the historical role of games in stories and stories in games to come to understand how the two forms combined into the modern storygame, focusing on the key traits of interactivity and immersion.

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:47

3. Original Chat: Exploring the Origins of the Turing Test

   The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 10:45

4. Creating: Adventure in Style and The Marble Index in Curveship

   I describe the process of writing and programming the first two full-scale interactive fiction pieces in the new system I have been developing, Curveship. These two pieces, Adventure in Style and The Marble Index, are meant, in part, to serve as examples for authors using this system. More importantly, though, they are initial explorations of the potential of Curveship and of the automation of narrative variation. They were also undertaken to help provide concrete system-building guidance as development of Curveship progressed toward a release. Adventure in Style is a port of the first interactive fiction, the 1976 Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods, which adds parametric variations in style that are inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. The Marble Index simulates the experiences of a woman who, strangely disjointed in time and reality, finds herself visiting ordinary moments in the late twentieth century; the narration accentuates this character's disorientation and contributes to the literary effect of incidents.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 15:56