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Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7
CREATING INTERACTIVE FICTION WITH INFORM 7 is a jargon-free, step-by-step guide to mastering the basics of creating dynamic, text-based story worlds. Inform 7 is a free multiplatform interactive fiction authoring environment that uses an intuitive natural language syntax. A tool focused on writers, not programmers, Inform allows users construct complex, rich storytelling worlds by writing sentences as simple as "Tom is a person," or as complicated as "Instead of attacking Tom when something lethal is held, now every nearby watchdog owned by Tom hates the player." No prior programming experience is required. Throughout the book, readers develop a full-length, release-quality example game, exploring the real-world issues involved in authoring participatory narratives and gaining skills that can be applied to the creation of future games and stories.
(Publisher's copy)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 00:14
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(R)Evolutionary Communication: Defining and Refining Digital Literature, Art and Storytelling
As an educator as well as Director of Digital Media Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, my pedagogical and personal interests lie in how to use media to incorporate inter-disciplinary studies; to use sound, images as well as visual and narrative compositions to communicate multi-dimensional ideas, passions and concepts. In relation to this inter-disciplinary approach, I incorporate the concept of "mixing" to weave together space, design, technology, story-telling and critical discourse. One of the concepts I try to reinforce is that 'space' includes the psychological as well as the physical. In addition, I teach digital media students that "design" is the intentional approach to choreograph the experiential and that digital technology is a tool for exploring these ideas. Accepting this, I challenge the students to consider: how does the user/viewer experience and process the interaction between digital media and the "narrative" of the everyday?
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:35
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The Machinimatic Moment
"The Machinimatic Moment" discusses a type of filmmaking that uses videogame engines (commonly referred to as machinima). I contend machinima exists within a liminal space between a number of diapoles including: production/consumption, play/cognition, and synthesis/critique. While much of machinima can be considered self-referential in that it consistently remarks upon the game itself and, in many ways, its limitations, other productions reveal sophisticated, compelling stories that are neither game nor traditional filmic narrative. I conclude by arguing that its liminality gives machinima distinctive and interesting qualities.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:41
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Pieces
Pieces is a puzzle story. To read the work, you assemble the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, each piece yielding a portion of narrative. Under your hands, several lives take shape in earnest if sometimes wobbly and unprepossessing assemblages. The manner in which you put the pieces together affects the course of the characters’ lives, different configurations resulting in different outcomes.
(Source: Author's description at Wordcircuits)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 15:41
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Pyxis Byzantium
Pyxis Byzantium is a hypermedia narrative investigation into the fall of Byzantium in 1453. Surrounded by enemy forces for decades, the final invasion of the city was widely anticipated by some of the populace, denied by others, and a focus of wonder and prayer. This piece imagines several different residents of the city, their fears and hopes, and their beliefs about the sources of destiny. The navigation includes maps of the city, sacred holidays, and the chronology of the destruction. Because of its extensive use of Flash, it is not currently playable in original form.
Artist's Statement:
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 16:24
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Narrative Units
Narrative Units" is a networked visualization based on the gutenberg.org archive, information theory, and video.
Artist Statement
The Narrative Units project addresses a number of questions by interconnecting several systems of interest. Information Theory, which strictly concerns itself with the encoding and transmission of data, is displaced into the context of a literary narrative. This framing serves to evoke question surrounding the dispersion of Information Theory and other paradigms of first-wave cybernetics into contemporary culture.
The source text, narratives from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), are treated as a message source. In terms of the Narrative Units system, the text displayed in white is noise. The system matches a particular string of symbols which correspond to a set of definitions from an introductory text on Information Theory. Matching words are displayed in red, and placed in one of the lower panels of the visualization.
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 16:52
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Who is Flora?
I partially uncovered Flora's story through a well-worn stack of postcards at a dusty Midwestern estate sale in the summer of 1999. She had spent many months during the 1940s traveling alone across the United States and had consistently sent postcards back home to her mother in Peoria, Illinois. When I happened across her hand-written cards at the dissolution of her own estate, I was taken with the stories her cards revealed. I felt as though Flora and I had similar worldviews, and I easily felt a connection to her themes of freedom, loneliness, youth, death, memory and love. "Who Is Flora" is a dialog between Flora's travels and my interpretations. The story itself is presented on-line through a series of interactive screens. In addition to Flora's screens, my own screens share my reflections and thoughts, which are laid out visually to the right of Flora's stories. Graphic design, sound, motion, and text help further the sense of time and place to draw the reader more fully into the experience. Since this story is also a website it is constantly growing and changing; pieces are added as others are changed and deleted as the story grows.
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 19:17
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Trilogy
My work with visual narrative has included installation form, book works, diptychs and billboard presentations. Using the web has allowed me to continue to expand my preoccupations with constructing rules for reading, methods of pacing and continue to explore image/text relationships. I am interested in the space between language and image.
Trilogy is comprised of 3 image/text narratives whose themes are concerned with survival. Locale and characters are suggested by cropped fragments from mass media imagery as well as map fragments. While the images may allude to time period by photographic style or content, their function (protagonist, action, location) is directed by the text.
Trilogy is a collaboration with Los Angeles fiction writers Rod Moore and Katherine Haake, both of whom have allowed me to reconfigure their texts.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 21:10
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Bare Bones
Fairy tales have been hijacked throughout history for various uses. Emigrating from one distribution method to another, they have been duplicated, mistranslated, and subverted. It could be that Cinderella is the world's most-told tale. There are thousands of versions, each one colored by the details of local culture, the needs of its audience and the desires of its teller. Buried among the world's heap of Cinder tales, is the Russian version, in its multiple incarnations. Bare Bones is a retelling of this story about a girl and her encounter with the fearsome hag, Baba Yaga.
We identify with this tale through our own experiences of loss, humiliation and enslavement. By reshaping its text, imagery and format, I try to build a bridge for the fairy tale audience between traditional media and digital media. Bare Bones is just one piece of The Vas(i)lisa Project which is more visually and texually complex.
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 14.01.2013 - 00:24
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hektor
hektor is one of the main characters in the non-aggressive narrative - a mode of Benjaminian storytelling. The NAN proposes the "continuation of a story which is just unfolding." I use digital and traditional media to create encounters between an ambiguous 'I' and potential 'You.' By embracing memory as a collage in motion through multiple characters, the NAN implies an origin story that may or may not have occurred. You are invited to co-invent this unfolding 'past,' and its openness suggests possibility and multiplicity. In a 1965 interview with Michael Kirby, John Cage said that theatre is not done to its viewers; they do it to themselves.
Scott Rettberg - 15.01.2013 - 21:08
