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1. Interactive Drama: Narrativity in a Highly Interactive Environment

   The most talked-about, and potentially the most significant consequence of recent advances in electronic technology for the practive and theory of literature is the promise of interactivity. The idea of interactivity is traditionally associated with hypertext. But compared to Interactive Drama, a genre existing mainly in the conceptual stage, hypertext involves a relatively low grade of interactivity: the freedom to select an itinerary on a network of author-defined pathways. In Interactive Drama, ideally, "the interactor is choosing what to do, say, and think at all times" (Kelso, Bates and Weyhrauch); "the users of such a system are like audience members who can march up onto the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and do in their roles" (Laurel). This essay investigates the basic dilemma encountered by Interactive Drama, a dilemma reminiscent of a familiar theological problem: how can the system grant users some freedom of action, and yet enact an aesthetically satisfying narrative scheme ?

   Scott Rettberg - 19.05.2011 - 17:14

2. Riddles of the Interface: Hieroglyphic Consciousness and New Experimental Multimedia

   A discussion of Reginald Woolery's CDROM World Wide Web/Million Man March (1997) and other experimental CDROMs in the context of modernist ideas of the hieroglyph, interface aesthetics, and afrofuturism.

   Joe Milutis - 21.01.2012 - 17:04

3. Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media

   The concept of narrative has been widely invoked by theorists of digital textuality, but the promotion of what is described as the storytelling power of the computer has often relied on shallow metaphors, loose conceptions of narrative, and literary models that ignore the distinctive properties of the digital medium. Two myths have dominated this theorization. The myth of the Aleph (as I call it) presents the digital text as a finite text that contains an infinite number of stories. The myth of the Holodeck envisions digital narrative as a virtual environment in which the user becomes a character in a plot similar to those of Victorian novels or Shakespearean tragedies. Both of these myths rely on questionable assumptions: that any permutation of a collection of lexias results in a coherent story; that it is aesthetically desirable to be the hero of a story; and that digital narrativity should cover the same range of emotional experiences as literary narrative. Here I argue that digital narrative should emancipate itself from literary models. But I also view narrative as a universal structure that transcends media.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 15.05.2012 - 14:07

4. Interactive Technology and the Remediation of the Subject of Writing

   Interactive Technology and the Remediation of the Subject of Writing

   Scott Rettberg - 25.06.2013 - 13:59