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1. Keleti Blokk Blokki Facebook Game as an Example of Non-fiction Literary Flash

   Keleti blok blokki (Hungarian for ‘the apartment blocks of the Eastern Bloc’) is a Facebook social game in which players try to guess the geographical location of apartment blocks featured on screens from Google Street View and other street view services submitted by one of the participants. The game counters the popular belief that apartment blocks looked all alike from Eastern Germany all the way to Vladivostok. In the wider context, the game challenges the perception of the countries forming the Eastern Bloc as one monolith, described by the Western rulers as “the East”.

   The aim of the game is to guess in which country the sumbmitted block is located. As the name, Keleti blok blokki, suggests the buildings can come from any location within the keleti bloc. The photos are censored by the submitting player for obvious clues that would make guessing the location too easy. The most frequently erased elements include road signs, signs in general, air conditioners, and national symbols. What remains is architecture and details (curtains, elevation colors, sidewalk curbs), and the general visual context.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.11.2015 - 10:05

2. Literary Spamming in Games: Cold Dust in Lord of the Rings Online and Endgame in Counter-Strike

   Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.

   In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:31

3. Imagination, Eventhood, and the Literary Absolute

   The three papers in this panel seek to move beyond primarily formalistic discussions of electronic literature as well as approaches primarily concerned with drawing definitional boundaries for it. Instead, they propose to explore various works of electronic literature in terms of the potential dialogue they may open with concepts that are often locatable outside or beyond the current critical boundaries of electronic literature.

   Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:53

4. The Many Ends of Network Fictions: Gamebooks, Hypertexts, Visual Novels, Games and Beyond

   This paper presents a digital humanities structural approach to branching stories across several media forms and genres over the past six decades – with special attention to patterns of endings in different narrative networks, as well as meta-patterns that mark the beginnings and endings of genres of branching literature.

   Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:58

5. Ephemeral Words, Ephemeral People: Suicide and Choice in Twine Games

   On April 10th, 2014, game designer Porpentine released a game called Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone with the intention of deleting it at the end of the day: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. You can download it here until then. What you do with it, whether you distribute, share, or cover it, is up to you.” The game has lived on through what Porpentine predicted as “social means,” but it was designed as an ephemeral text, and one which the author deliberately destroyed as part of the act of creation. This idea of a vanishing text is interwoven with the experience of electronic literature, as Marjorie C. Luesebrink notes, as part of a practice of “text erasure” as embracing “self-undermining, undecidability, disdain for commercialization, ambivalence about technology, struggle against the presence of text itself, and response to overwhelming data” but also “the fragility of memory” (2014).

   Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 14:52