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Labyrinth: the Rulebook without Game
An ergodic Flash text exploring video game culture through the lens of playable manuals.
How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.
Mark Marino - 28.03.2011 - 16:12
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Game, game, game, and again game
Game, game, game and again game is a digital poem, retro-game, an anti-design statement and a personal exploration of the artist's changing worldview lens. Much of the western world's cultural surroundings, belief systems, and design-scapes, create the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and encapsulated philosophy. Within net/new media art the techno-filter extends these straight lines into exacting geometries and smooth bit rates, the personal as WYSIWYG buttons. This game/artwork, while forever attached to these belief/design systems, attempts to re-introduce the hand-drawn, the messy and illogical, the human and personal creation into the digital, via a retro-game style interface, Hovering above and attached to the poorly drawn aesthetic is a personal examination of how we/I continually switch and un-switch our dominate belief systems. Moving from levels themed for faith or real estate, for chemistry or capitalism, the user triggers corrected poetry, jittering creatures and death and deathless noises.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 14:43
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Golpe de Gracia
Golpe de gracia is an interactive multimedia piece that combines text, illustration, audio, modeling, and animation and tells the story of a character who undergoes a "near death" experience; this particular situation also functions as a metaphor for the cultural transitions of the present moment. The text is comprised of three "narrative worlds": Cadáver exquisito, L'nea mortal and Muerte digital (Exquisite Corpse, Mortal Line, and Digital Death, respectively) and four "deepening rooms" (games, reading texts, study, and construction). The work offers several different degrees of interaction that range from taking decisions in order to follow the routes, all the way up to the collective construction of the text, along the way participating in several interactive games. Golpe de gracia also has an educative and communicative purpose, which is to make us aware of, and to contribute to, the development of collective knowledge.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 14:53
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Reconstructing Mayakovsky
Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38
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Screen
Screen is an alternative literary game created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins with reading and listening. Texts, presenting moments of memory as a virtual experience, appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that does not settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster; struck words don't always return to where they came from; and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. (Source: authors' description.)
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:56
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This is how you will die
A recombinatory digital fiction/poem for predicting death. It uses the stripped down the code of an online slot machine game, replacing the cards with 15 five-line death fictions/poeticals. The artwork recombines the scenarios randomly every time you spin. The writing divides the scenarios into location, method, result and post-result of each death possibility. Additionally, you can win death videos/poetry visuals and free spins. Some are rather scared of this creature's forecasting tone, while others exalt in the absurdist joy of the way all stories are interchangeable, interrelated and happily random.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Scott Rettberg - 20.04.2011 - 13:23
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Rememori
Rememori is a degenerative memory game created in Flash. It’s poetics play out some of the affects and effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters. Juggling with point-of-view and the process of identification, the Rememori player becomes entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, orientation, attention and the search for meaning. In such situations, where does empathy lie and how does the player cope? Inevitably, it’s a contrary game - there can be no winners.
According to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, 42% of the UK population (25 million people) know a family member or close friend with dementia, and worldwide, there is a new case of dementia every seven seconds.* In the light of these facts Rememori is a challenging game in more ways than one.
*Alzheimer's Disease International (2009), World Alzheimer's Report
Christine Wilks - 30.09.2011 - 17:39
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Jean-Pierre Balpe ou les Lettres Dérangées
Jean-Pierre Balpe ou les Lettres Dérangées was created as a homage to the poet and software developer Jean-Pierre Balpe. The title of the piece can be understood in a number of ways. In French, the word "letters" refers to the alphabet, mail correspondence, and also to the art of writing itself. The piece consists of a number of letters which are not all visible to the reader until the very end. The word "dérangé" has a number of meanings as well. One meaning is physical disturbance. The letters themselves are distorted, just as the meaning of letters and words became distorted when Balpe introduced the literary world to text generation. The word also means mental disturbance. Disturbed by the mouse passing over them, the letters unpredictably go in all directions without reason. The underlying algorithm brings the letters to madness. The actions of the reader turn the poem into a kind of game. The purpose of the game is to get to the end of the poem by playing with the letters without falling into any traps.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.11.2011 - 14:56
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Oulipoems
Oulipoems is a series of six interactive poetry Flash works, ranging from electronic poems, to games, to a tool for generating and writing poetry using the vocabulary of a variety of poets. The pieces are loosely based on the Oulipo movement in French literature, which focused on texts based on constraints (for instance, Perec's famous novel A Void, a lipogram in which the letter e does not appear) and also on mixtures of literature and mathematics.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.11.2011 - 16:25
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Ruben and Lullaby
Ruben And Lullaby is an interactive iPhone app/game that engages the user in a relationship between two lovers. Loyer labels this and similar projects as 'opertoons', stories that you can play. Ruben And Lullaby allows the user to shift focus between people, changing a characters mood by shaking or stroking. While the work is presented in black and white, the screen changes color based on the mood of the characters while also playing a responsive jazz soundtrack in the background. Annotated by Mike Scoggins.
(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)
Meri Alexandra Raita - 05.02.2012 - 16:31
