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Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
Cybertext explores the aesthetics and the textual dynamics of digital literature and its many diverse genres such as hypertext fiction, computer games, computer generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. However, instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of "electronic writing" or "interactive fiction" (phrases which mean very little) the author situates these new literary forms within the larger and much older field of "ergodic" literature, from the ancient Chinese I Ching to the literary experiments of the OuLiPo. These are open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading. Aarseth constructs a theoretical model that describes how these literary forms are different from each other, and demonstrates how the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts breaks down under careful analysis.
Patricia Tomaszek - 21.09.2010 - 10:59
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Digital Arts and Literature – Is it Just a Game?
“Games are not serious; digital art and literature are playful; therefore they are not serious”. Formulations such as these are sometimes used when discussing the playfulness of digital art and literature. The origin of this argument is based on the traditional opposition between “serious” and “playful”. Because of their interactive nature, digital art and literature have often been considered as particularly close to play - and to “mass culture”. Depending on the approaches, this proximity is interpreted as an opportunity, or as a risk, as I will show in this article.
On the one hand, art and play are so closely related that it has become commonplace to assert: “art is play”, “play is art”. On the other hand, it seems equally impossible to deny the existence of playfulness in art and literature. Indeed, is it not one of their fundamental privileges to allow free, unselfish play with the materials, codes and conventions, while science, craft industry, and industrial design are "condemned" to produce and capitalise?
Patricia Tomaszek - 12.01.2011 - 16:44
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Inanimate Alice, Episode 4: Hometown
Author description: Episode 4 of Inanimate Alice finds Alice going to school at last. She and her parents have ended up in a multicultural city in the middle of England. For the first time ever, Alice has friends her own age, and they do all the things that 14 year olds everywhere do. "And now I am going to die!" Attempting to impress her friends one afternoon, Alice climbs a rickety staircase outside an abandoned factory. When it collapses beneath her, she hangs on by her fingernails, then hauls herself up onto a ledge. But now she is stuck - she can't get down, she can't go up. The only way out is through the scary factory, half-demolished and very dangerous. Can you help Alice? Can you find the way out? Catch up with her in Inanimate Alice, Episode 4: Hometown. Episode 4 is the largest and most complex episode in the series to date. The "teachers only" version of this episode provides a 'skip intro' option and opens up all of the navigation icons from the beginning so that educators can focus on the sections of the narrative appropriate to their needs.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 10:01
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New Word Order: Basra
New Word Order: Basra [NWO] is a mod for the game Half-Life, consisting of a playable map and custom textures. Gaming is the largest demographic of new media usage, and Half-Life stands out for its combination of first-person shooter action and compelling story. It remains the most popular online multiplayer game. Every object in Half-Life is either shootable or background. What if the objects are words? How does language play into your interactions in the violent world of the game? The text in NWO is composed of phrases from "Introduction to Poetry," a short poem from former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The thematic violence in Collins' poem resonated through the creation of NWO in early 2003, during the second invasion of Iraq. When you enter the map you see words hanging in the air. You can jump and climb on them, you can run along the tops, you can keep playing and wandering in the space. You soon attack the words. You use the broken words as a reduced and processed writing. Break the words, destroy the letters. NWO, along with every game and every image, is about the re-circulation of bodies and interpretive agendas.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 10:13
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Basho's Frogger and JABBER
Matsuo Basho, the inventor of Haiku, penned the following poem (translation R. H. Blyth): "The old pond / A frog jumps in / The sound of water." A few hundred years later, the concrete poet dom silvester houédard offered his rendition: "pond / frog / plop." Fifty years after that, a Zen video game appearerd celebrating one of the most famous haiku. Basho's Frogger was produced as a response to derek beaulieu and Gary Barwin's Frogments from the Frag Pool, a book of Basho translations. JABBER produces nonsense words that sound like English words, in the way that the portmanteau words from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" sound like English words. When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator. JABBER realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.02.2011 - 08:07
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Avatars of Story
Traces the transformation of storytelling in the digital age. Since its inception, narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with language-supported stories. In Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond literary works to examine other media, especially electronic narrative forms. By grappling with semiotic media other than language and technology other than print, she reveals how story, a form of meaning that transcends cultures and media, achieves diversity by presenting itself under multiple avatars.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 24.02.2011 - 09:00
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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
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Mindwheel
Mindwheel
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 07.03.2011 - 13:02
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Workplace is Mediaspace is Cityscape: Nick Montfort on Book and Volume
Workplace is Mediaspace is Cityscape: Nick Montfort on Book and Volume
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 14:54
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Gamely Interstitial: Narrative, Excess, and Artifactual Interstanding
Moulthrop's 1999 Cybermountain keynote, delivered in a MOO online, addresses connections between games, comics, visual narratives, and contemporary web-based and hypertext fictions, emerging from postmodernist media and literary landscape.
Scott Rettberg - 26.03.2011 - 10:49
