Search
The search found 1574 results in 0.043 seconds.
Search results
-
"Literature," Progress, and Monsters: What is Electronic Literature?
Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 16.09.2020 - 11:07
-
The story, the touchscreen and the child: how narrative apps tell stories
Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.
The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.
Iben Andreas Christensen - 16.09.2020 - 11:22
-
The broken poem: Ephemerality, glitch and de-performance in digital (and non-digital) poetry
The Broken Poem: Ephemerality, Glitch, and De-Performance in Digital (and Non-Digital) Poetry explores a few ways in which digital poetry, poetry that is written in programmable media and is intended to be read on computers or other digital devices, is acting to tactically resist various forms of oppression through what I am calling “breakage.” Breakage is, in this sense, an error or disruption in a perceived continuity. For example, I look at digital poems that take advantage of the fact that, because of software or hardware upgrades, they have a limited functional life. The poets’ embrace of their poems’ ephemerality actively resists market forces, cultural or professional demands on the poet to participate in processes of canonization, and the like. I also explore the idea of “glitching poetic language,” in which existing texts are digitally manipulated, digitally “broken” through a process in which the poet provokes errors. This is a remix strategy with aleatoric results that shifts the reader’s focus from the referential elements of the text, or the fragments of text, to an error, a break.
Åse Marie Våge Beheim - 16.09.2020 - 11:23
-
Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches Toward More Expressive Storygames
Stories in released games are still based largely on static and predetermined structures, despite decades of academic work to make them more dynamic. Making game narratives more playable is an important step in the evolution of games and playable media as culturally relevant art forms. In the same way interactive systems help students learn about complicated subjects like physics in a more intuitive and immediate way than static texts, more dynamic interactive stories open up new ways of understanding people and situations. Such dreams remain mostly unrealized in released and playable games.
Mads Bratten Myking - 16.09.2020 - 11:37
-
/anode a/node an/ode: Poems and an Essay on Teaching Digital Creative Writing
This dissertation is part critical essay and part poetry collection. The critical essay, “Flipping the Script: On the Pedagogical Relevance of Teaching Digital Creative Writing,” examines the benefits of digital creative writing, i.e. text-based, literary work that requires digital technology at every stage of existence, by organizing those benefits into five categories, or nodes: poiesis, literacy, identification, authority, and cognition. Then, it argues that digital creative writing, like print creative writing, reinforces and extends the goal of liberal education, i.e. to promote creative, critical, and conscientious citizens. As students read, or interact with, and construct their own digital literary objects, they simultaneously learn to read, interact with, and construct their various selves and knowledge. As for the poems in the collection, they act, in Pound’s words, as “radiant node[s] . . .
Sebastian Soleng Borge - 16.09.2020 - 11:48
-
Generating Narrative in an Interactive Fiction Game
This thesis explores a niche field of Computer Science called Interactive Fiction, a field that utilizes the conventions of a regular story to offer multiple variations on how the story plays out. Our goal is to explore the possibility of developing a game that can generate a story file during game play that not only reads like a short story but reflects the events that transpire during a given game play. During development, we have determined that keeping track of various "states", we can simulate a narrative based on actions that transpire in the game.
We developed the game using a language called Inform 7. Inform 7 is a language developed for Interactive Fiction. It contains classes with functionality similar to real-life objects from a narrative stand-point and provides a system of rules that can be edited to simulate real-life actions and events. The language also bases its syntax on English and is thus easy to read and understand.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:14
-
Curating Simulated Storyworlds
There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called emergent narrative: instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (The Sims, Dwarf Fortress), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, Tale-Spin). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction—emergent stories actually happen—and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:43
-
Towards a digital poetics
This thesis extrapolates electronic literature’s différance, proposing an ontology of the form through critical inspection of its traits and peculiarities. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this thesis takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration. In essence, my approach is anti-essentialist, in that I dismiss the view that electronic literature has a specific set of attributes. As will be explored throughout, there are aesthetic properties which frequently emerge, but the implication of their presence remains transient, to the point where electronic literature cannot be one thing, for to be so, it could not be literary. Computational aesthetics resist stable definition, so if we are to achieve an understanding of what separates electronic literature – if it is indeed, separate – from its non-digital counterparts, then we must do so through an articulation of those differences which may, at first, be less apparent. It is an impossibility to state what electronic literature is, as in doing so, one is oblivious to what it might become.
Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 15:07
-
Digital Storytelling in Spanish: Narrative Techniques and Approaches
This thesis looks at a sample of twelve stories of electronic literature written in Spanish and focuses on the different narrative techniques that these works implement. The techniques range from simple hyperlinks to highly complex functions as in videogames. These works draw from the traditions of print literature as well as from the digital culture that has shaped this era: hypertext, algorithms, text reordering, text fragmentation, multimedia creations, and almost anything else the computer is capable of. As each work discussed here is unique, a different theoretical approach is used for each.
Steffen Egeland - 17.09.2020 - 11:54
-
A Brief History of Interactive Fiction Games... Choose Your Own Adventure and Visual Novels
Interactive fiction is a game genre that has been around for quite some time now and has a rather in-depth history to it. We’ve already taken a look at part of the genre, primarily text and graphical adventures. But today I’m going to talk about some other things that are important to interactive fiction!
So, I’m sure that many of us as kids read Choose Your Own Adventure books (or CYOA); novels where at the end of each page you were asked to make a choice as to what to do and then would be directed to a different page depending on your actions. Sometimes you’d make it to the end, sometimes not.
And if you’re wondering just what these books have to do with video games, the answer is a surprising amount! So let’s take a look at these types of books.
Martin Li - 17.09.2020 - 16:17
