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Lessons Learned from Designing Children’s Interactive Narratives
Abstract Designing interactive narrative for children requires awareness of the cognitive abilities of young readers. In this paper, we present the lessons learned from two example interactive narrative systems, Baby Duck Takes a Bath and A Little Quiz for the Little Hare. Baby Duck is a multi-sequential narrative where the user can explore how a duckling can become dirty or clean by interacting with its habitat. The agency of the characters (including a mother duck and duck friends) result from manipulating elements within the small story world. The narrative changes according to the user's interactions, allowing for change in perspective, agency and attitude in real-time. The Little Quiz system aims to teach young children the concepts of measurement and comparison through the conversation between two characters. It explores the design space of enhancing interactive narrative using a commonsense knowledge database to understand players' intention and generate relevant narration. Both works target children from 1st to 3rd grade in the early stage of learning story construction.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:41
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Internet Literature in China: A New Literary Revolution?
During the past 10 years, the success of Internet literature has become the most attractive phenomenon in contemporary Chinese literature. Internet literature has not only attracted millions of readers, it has also gained commercial success. How can we understand the combination of computer and Internet as a kind of global technology, and the literature, as the local and the national representation, in China? In order to answer this important question, my paper will begin with a discussion of the rising young and famous Internet literature writers. The Internet not only provides a new world of cyberspace to young people to express their feelings and lives in a new age, it has also created new possibilities for the refashioning of literature in contemporary China. By following the successful stories of Internet literature writers, we will find that Internet literature, as a kind of new folk disourse, creates a new discursive space and constructs a kind of virtual identity. Such an attempt, generally called "the spirit of new folk literature" in the cyberspace, counters the elite discourse of Chinese traditional literature.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:47
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Narrative choice-making, literary trajectories and interactive environments: on the structure and writing of the Unknown Territories
This artist paper examines in detail and poetic dimensions both the content and construction of the Unknown Territories project. This project incorporates two literary histories constructed along paths dissecting imagined landscapes of the western Canyonlands. The first paths follow an exploration narrative and in the second, imagined 100 years later, users take on a landscape facing development and destruction. The presentation is based on forthcoming papers in the books Switching Codes (Chicago, 2010) and Picture This (Minnesota, 2011).
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:56
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From capacity to truncation: What can happens in 30 seconds of digital poetry
This paper makes observations about digital poetry through thematic connections derived from a 1969 short story by Robert Coover (“The Elevator”) and a poetics statement written forty years later by critic Janez Strehovec (“The Poetics of Elevator Pitch”). Strehovec’s essay addresses poetry in the age of short attention spans, and in which compositional designs are mosaics, hybrid. Contemporary works are unstable, precarious, and relations between textual components have evolved. Digital poetry is a textual, meta-textual, linguistic, and sometimes non-linguistic practice requiring new forms of perception. Because our observational skills have changed, Strehovec proclaims the importance of first impressions, getting viewers excited and immediately involved with language. He promotes the notion of an “elevator pitch” as a temporal ideal for digital poetry—the idea that the poem, “can be delivered in the time of an elevator ride (e.g., thirty seconds or 100-150 words)”, “which hooks the reader/user within a very short temporal unit”—an idea perhaps more relevant to authors of projected works than those who invite their audience to participate.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:00
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Mobile Tagging as Tools to create Mixed Reality in eLit
The objective of this paper is to describe the potentialities of Mobile Tagging as a tool for increasing and spreading the effects of Mixed Realities in Electronic Literature. In this sense, we will start introducing the main concepts and some examples of Mixed Realities followed by the concepts and examples of Mobile Tagging, showing that they are connected and benefit each other and can benefit eLit as well. Mixed Reality (or MR) refers to the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-‐exist and interact in real time. On the other hand, mobile tagging is the process of reading a 2D barcode using a mobile device camera. Allowing the encryption of URLs in the barcodes, the mobile tagging can add a digital and/or online layer to any physical object, providing so several levels of mixed realities related to that object. Although Mixed Realities technologies have already existed for decades, in the past they were very expensive. Recently, mobile devices have also become tools for mixed realities.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:07
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Archiving Electronic Literature and Poetry: Problems, Tendencies, Perspectives
Electronic literature and E-Poetry is updated, interactive, subjective and well networked. But how durable is it? How long do texts published on web pages remain readable? It seems ironic that the transient character of the internet is attached to a medium that seems to be very suitable for documentation and archiving. All information is automatically digitally recorded and processed. This enables digital storage and retrieval as well as mirroring on different servers. There already exist a number of (often private) archive platforms that should be systematically supplemented by extensive archiving by national libraries. And still each website only remains available on the internet at its original address for less than 100 days on average. Afterwards it moves or is erased completely. This is of course also the case for Net literature. Projects can furthermore no longer be playable because their contents required plugins that are outdated; or they are only optimized for certain, old browser versions and no longer work on newer browsers.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:28
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Writing Digital Media
There has been quite a bit of debate about the relationship between games and fiction, with important discussions in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan's First Person, Jesper Juul's Half-Real, Marie-Laure Ryan's Avatars of Story, and others. In parallel with this, a number of electronic literature authors have been creating games -- or at least playable experiences -- that have as their focus and reward for play an experience of story, such as Mateas and Stern's Facade, Emily Shorts Galatea, and Stuart Moulthrop's Pax.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 15:32
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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
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Urbanalities: Modernism, Postmodernism and Digital Literature
Urbanalities, by babel and escha, is described as a ‘short story-poem-comic strip-musical, with randomly generated text’ (ELC, Author Description). It is a relatively accessible, visually and aurally appealing digital work, with strong elements of humour and a dark undertone. Although its technical underpinnings and some of its formal influences (such as the ‘VJ stylings’ mentioned in the ELC introductory note) are contemporary, its themes and expressive use of form are strongly reminiscent of high modernism, notably that of T.S. Eliot, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922). These are the themes of urban alienation, ennui, neurotic constraint or paranoiac anxiety, sexual degeneration or sterility; and a fragmentary form which mimics an vision of a fragmented social realm. The authors themselves signal strong connections to another aspect of modernism, that of Dada, in their description of Urbanalities as ‘A mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings,’ and in their association with Dada-inspired websites such as www.391.org.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:38
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Analysis of Fitting the Pattern
The objective of this communication is the application of ideas and tools encountered in the field of study of narratology and its consideration as a narrative genre so that the chosen work, Fitting the Pattern, may be analysed and differences seen that may arise when approached from a different frame of the print. It is hoped to show with this approach, how in order to be studied, digital narrative works require new concepts and how more investigation is needed into how the reader receives the work. For example, after analyzing the work of Christine Wilks it was seen to be necessary to deepen the skills required by the reader in order to enter into the work, to establish functional guidelines for the reader, so as to remain within the orientation of the text, etc. It is not just a question concerning only in how the work is received, but also how space and the other approaches to the work need concepts and approaches which are more adequate for the reality presented by the digital narrative. As has been shown in the analysis of Fitting the Pattern, it has not been possible to capture all that is contained in the text using the type of analysis used up to now.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:42
