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1. Urbanalities: Modernism, Postmodernism and Digital Literature

   Urbanalities, by babel and escha, is described as a ‘short story-poem-comic strip-musical, with randomly generated text’ (ELC, Author Description). It is a relatively accessible, visually and aurally appealing digital work, with strong elements of humour and a dark undertone. Although its technical underpinnings and some of its formal influences (such as the ‘VJ stylings’ mentioned in the ELC introductory note) are contemporary, its themes and expressive use of form are strongly reminiscent of high modernism, notably that of T.S. Eliot, in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922). These are the themes of urban alienation, ennui, neurotic constraint or paranoiac anxiety, sexual degeneration or sterility; and a fragmentary form which mimics an vision of a fragmented social realm. The authors themselves signal strong connections to another aspect of modernism, that of Dada, in their description of Urbanalities as ‘A mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings,’ and in their association with Dada-inspired websites such as www.391.org.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:38

2. Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction

   There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project.

 At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09

3. nextgame

   The piece is the short story of a digital chess game, a constellation which may be read conventionally from left to right, top to bottom - or in any other combination. Each of the 16 squares encodes an eight letter (byte) word, originally a file name from a computer chess game.

   Scott Rettberg - 11.04.2013 - 13:18