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1. Authorship and Autership in the Collaborative Development Process of Text-Based Games

   The collaborative development of text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) has afforded writers an electronic medium for the discussion, production, and publication of e-literature. A MUD is designed to provide an immersive and interactive experience, and is achieved by the creation of a code-based structure that supports a literary text. However, when multiple contributors are involved there is a tension between the inherently fixed nature of literature and the more fluid versioning of software. In many software development environments, ownership over a work is considered to be counter-productive, whereas authorship of literature is assumed more freely and, as a means of contextual explication, is actively encouraged. MUDs must therefore function under colliding principles of authorship and ownership. The production of a large MUD’s literary text is conceived similar to the cinematic production of a film, with the lead designer of a MUD assuming the role of a ‘director’. The production and proliferation of electronic literature presents new and unique challenges to both the longitudinal administration of a MUD and to the coherence of the literary text.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 23.08.2013 - 12:04

2. Approaching the Real: Materiality in Digital Literature

   Digital literature foregrounds its own medium, and it foregrounds the graphic, material aspects of language. Experiments with the new medium and with the form of language are generally presented and interpreted within a framework of the historical avant-garde or the neo-avantgarde. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the emerging digital materiality of language.
   The analysis of the work of work that use digitalized handwriting or graffiti-like drawing (for example in Jason Nelson, the digital artist of hybrid works between games, literature and video) leads to the conclusion that the effect of this materiality is an ambivalent relation to affect, reality and the body.
   In other words: an ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded. The paradoxical and spectral merging of presence and absence makes these forms of digital literature an expression of a specifically late postmodernist stance towards representation of the ‘real’. Complicity with the media-culture goes hand in hand with an ironic approach of the mediatedness of the world and the body.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.09.2013 - 13:07