Search

The search found 5 results in 0.008 seconds.

Search results

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen

   Exploring connections between surveillance and interference in the lives of artists, "The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen" is a hyperlibretto where the experience of a wedding celebration is created with words, graphic icons, and glockenspiel intermezzi. 

   Artist Statement

   "The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen" is informed by a strategy of following signs and signifiers that point to ancient systems of control of people's lives. It is a device used by Dan Brown in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, although actually it was through the performance artist's strategy of looking at hypertextual connections in my own eventful life that "Celebration" took on this aspect. 

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 16:29