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1. Golden Days, Silver Nights: Locating Utopia through Diminished Reality

   This talk introduces Golden Days, Silver Nights, a new steampunk-themed, alternate-history locative adventure game designed to provoke critical thinking about political history and social progress. The game is designed around the life and writings of William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), celebrated orator, infamous crusader against commercial monopolies, and the alleged inspiration for L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Bryan first ran for U.S. President in 1896 as the candidate for the fused Democratic and Populist parties, inspired in part by the socialist vision of Edward Bellamy's fabulously popular utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888). But if Bryan began his career a progressive, he ended it a militant reactionary and notorious anti-Darwinian. By some accounts, his campaign permanently derailed the American progressive movement, and with it, the hopes and dreams of utopian socialists. Taking its cue from alternate histories by Robert Heinlein and others, Golden Days, Silver Nights begins with the counter-factual premise that Bryan won the 1896 election and went on to reshape America's destiny, though not in the image of Bellamy's technologically utopian socialist future.

   Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:23

2. Echo Chambers: The Colossal Cave within House of Leaves

   Inspired by Mark Z. Danielewki’s z House of Leaves (2000) and Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), It is Pitch Black renders a mysterious, non-visual environment in the form of a text-based videogame. Although Danielewski’s novel participates in the lusory logic of digital games, functions as a paradigmatic post-digital text, and includes a diverse range of media, the book contains no mention of videogames within its pages. It is Pitch Black imagines a missing appendix or additional chapter (like the four pages of hexadecimal code only included in the original hardcover publication) which takes the form of a text-based adventure game that the Navidson children may have played throughout their ordeal. Inspired by Crowther’s inaugural adventure game yet operating according to the idiom of a 3D navigable space, It is Pitch Black foregrounds the tension between the human experience of play and the microtemporal processes of a computer.

   Daniela Ørvik - 19.02.2015 - 15:11

3. An Atlas of Hypertext: Gaps in the Maps

   This paper reports on an the initial stages of compiling a comprehensive, historically deep "atlas" of the structures of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and Twine games. In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io. What do we find when we consider these forms of electronic literature (and their crucial precurors) as one comprehensive atlas of a vast transmedia territory of interactive storytelling? Which methods may be adapted between print and digital works, and which demand new approaches?

   Akvile Sinkeviciute - 03.10.2018 - 15:16

4. Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu

   Kenneth Hite argues that the long-running, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu franchise differs from traditional tabletop role-playing in its focus on suspense rather than character growth. Hite's analysis suggests that in its origins and emphasis on narrative structure Cthulhu is a highly literary game.

   The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Kenneth Hite.

   Kristina Igliukaite - 11.05.2020 - 22:08