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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. The Absence and Potential of Electronic Literature

   There is no understanding of electronic literature. No theory exists to analyze literary texts and signs on the computer and the network. How does the digital inscription become literary? Don’t get me wrong: there are admirable descriptive formalisms and historical genealogies of electronic literature. All these function as criticism should, but offer nothing of electronic literature as such. Existing criticism begins from the presumption that “there is” electronic literature and proceeds to describe the various works in existence (for example, in Electronic Literature Hayles explicitly refuses to theorize the subject of her book). The results are productive for maintaining the existing distribution of texts and readings in a field of literary and non-literary texts. My paper is part of a project refusing the given-ness of these forms and histories. The theory of “electronic literature” is a failure, and I insist on the achievement of this failure. The larger project is a technical and philosophical argument for the absence and potential of electronic literature. For purposes of this paper, I draw my examples from the ELC Volume 2.

   Alvaro Seica - 04.10.2013 - 12:08