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1. Ergodic Characters

   While much of the attention towards ergodic fiction has been focusing on plot (either dynamic or multiple-path), its characters still lack complexity and expressiveness. In this paper we will explore two different techniques to face this problem.

   One major issue in videogames is the lack of personality in user-controlled characters. In other words, the author of a videogame cannot give a deep personality to her character, because the user will be the one who will control it. For example, you cannot design a melancholic, non-violent character, if there is a knife available in the environment. Many users would just take the knife and start a Doom-like game, turning the originally pacifist character into a serial killer. The designer can obviously prevent the user from manipulating harmful objects. However, through this arbitrary rule, users will see their freedom limited. This would also diminish the environment's coherence: why some objects can be manipulated and other cannot?

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:24

2. Hypermedia, Eternal Life, and The Impermanence Agent

   The story of hypermedia, in which the Web is a recent chapter, begins with a vision of transforming the brain's associative connections into media - media that can be infinitely duplicated and easily shared - creating pathways of thought in a form that will not fade with memory. In recent years, hypermedia has begun to permeate our lives. But it is not as we dreamed: constantly growing, with nothing lost, only showing what we wish to see. Instead we find 'Not Found' a nearly daily message.

   The story of software agents begins with the idea of a 'soft robot' - capable of carrying out tasks toward a goal, while requesting and receiving advice in human terms. In recent years, a much narrower marketing fantasy of the agent has emerged (with a relationship to actual agent technologies as tenuous as Robbie the Robot's relationship to factory robots) and it grows despite failures such as Microsoft Bob. Now we often see agents as anthropomorphized, self-customizing virtual servants designed for a single task: to be a pleasing interface to a world of information that does not please us.

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 15:14

3. The trAce Experience

   trAce, an online organization located at Nottingham Trent University, UK, offers educational and cultural opportunities for writers. We will be presenting and discussing some of the products related to that process.

   Janet Holmes, Boise State University (USA)
   "The trAce Experience: 'The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot'"

   Marjorie C. Luesebrink, Irvine Valley College (USA)
   "The trAce Experience: Collaborative Aspects of Fibonacci's Daughter"

   Christy Sheffield Sanford, trAce (USA)
   "The trAce Experience: Virtual Writer-in-Residence - Creating a New Profession"

   Sue Thomas, Nottingham Trent University (UK)
   "The trAce Experience: Connecting Writers in Real and Virtual Space"

   Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 16:29