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New Word Order: Basra
New Word Order: Basra [NWO] is a mod for the game Half-Life, consisting of a playable map and custom textures. Gaming is the largest demographic of new media usage, and Half-Life stands out for its combination of first-person shooter action and compelling story. It remains the most popular online multiplayer game. Every object in Half-Life is either shootable or background. What if the objects are words? How does language play into your interactions in the violent world of the game? The text in NWO is composed of phrases from "Introduction to Poetry," a short poem from former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The thematic violence in Collins' poem resonated through the creation of NWO in early 2003, during the second invasion of Iraq. When you enter the map you see words hanging in the air. You can jump and climb on them, you can run along the tops, you can keep playing and wandering in the space. You soon attack the words. You use the broken words as a reduced and processed writing. Break the words, destroy the letters. NWO, along with every game and every image, is about the re-circulation of bodies and interpretive agendas.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 10:13
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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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Book and Volume
An interactive fiction written in Inform and running on the Z-Machine, Book and Volumes simulates an eventful day in a near-present factory town. The interactor is not offered adventure, monsters to defeat, or treasures to find, but a chance to perform the routine tasks of an information-technology worker. As Brian Kerr wrote, "It's about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. ('Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.') What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it: 'Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.
(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 14:45
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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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Screen
Screen is an alternative literary game created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins with reading and listening. Texts, presenting moments of memory as a virtual experience, appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that does not settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster; struck words don't always return to where they came from; and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. (Source: authors' description.)
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:56
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This is how you will die
A recombinatory digital fiction/poem for predicting death. It uses the stripped down the code of an online slot machine game, replacing the cards with 15 five-line death fictions/poeticals. The artwork recombines the scenarios randomly every time you spin. The writing divides the scenarios into location, method, result and post-result of each death possibility. Additionally, you can win death videos/poetry visuals and free spins. Some are rather scared of this creature's forecasting tone, while others exalt in the absurdist joy of the way all stories are interchangeable, interrelated and happily random.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Scott Rettberg - 20.04.2011 - 13:23
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Jean-Pierre Balpe ou les Lettres Dérangées
Jean-Pierre Balpe ou les Lettres Dérangées was created as a homage to the poet and software developer Jean-Pierre Balpe. The title of the piece can be understood in a number of ways. In French, the word "letters" refers to the alphabet, mail correspondence, and also to the art of writing itself. The piece consists of a number of letters which are not all visible to the reader until the very end. The word "dérangé" has a number of meanings as well. One meaning is physical disturbance. The letters themselves are distorted, just as the meaning of letters and words became distorted when Balpe introduced the literary world to text generation. The word also means mental disturbance. Disturbed by the mouse passing over them, the letters unpredictably go in all directions without reason. The underlying algorithm brings the letters to madness. The actions of the reader turn the poem into a kind of game. The purpose of the game is to get to the end of the poem by playing with the letters without falling into any traps.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.11.2011 - 14:56
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Oulipoems
Oulipoems is a series of six interactive poetry Flash works, ranging from electronic poems, to games, to a tool for generating and writing poetry using the vocabulary of a variety of poets. The pieces are loosely based on the Oulipo movement in French literature, which focused on texts based on constraints (for instance, Perec's famous novel A Void, a lipogram in which the letter e does not appear) and also on mixtures of literature and mathematics.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.11.2011 - 16:25
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Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire
The first part of the bestselling Zork trilogy, and a close descendant of Adventure, the first work of interactive fiction or text adventure game as the genre was known at the time. Zork I was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986. Similarly to Adventure, the game unfolds in a maze-like dungeon, where the user (or adventurer) must battle trolls and solve puzzles in order to find twenty trophies to bring back to the house outside which the game begins.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 26.03.2012 - 10:09
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The Reading Glove
The Reading Glove is the first component of a research program called the TUNE Project (Tangible, Ubiquitous, Narrative Environment). Karen and Josh Tanenbaum describe TUNE as a story, a space, a game, and a research instrument that investigates questions of interactive narrative, player modeling, adaptivity, and tangible embodied interaction.
The Reading Glove itself has gone through several iterations. Version 1.0 consisted of a wearable RFID-enabled glove and tagged objects that allowed readers to experience an interactive narrative by picking up objects that have been augmented with story fragments. There is a video of Reading Glove 1.0 and details of the design process on our blog.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.04.2012 - 14:22
