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Interactive Fiction? I prefer Adventure
Interview with Don Woods about how he built upon Will Crowthers Colossal Cave Adventure in 1976, making it more game-like.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.02.2011 - 15:03
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Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky
Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. "Adventure" was the first in a series of text-based games ("interactive fiction") that emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late 1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been examined as an occasion for narrative encounters [Buckles 1985] and as an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility [Knuth 1998]; however, previous attempts to assess the significance of "Adventure" remain incomplete without access to Crowther's original source code and Crowther's original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.02.2011 - 15:39
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Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star
Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 01.09.2011 - 14:14
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Because It's Not There: Ekphrasis and the Threat of Graphics in Interactive Fiction
Existing scholarship on interactive fiction (IF, also known as the text adventure) tends to treat it as a video game genre and/or as a category of electronic literature. In this essay I argue that IF can be understood as participating in traditions of visual prose and ekphrastic textuality, insofar as IF consists of room and object descriptions which direct the player to visualize the things they describe. Unlike traditional ekphrastic literature, however, IF also asks the player to take practical actions in response to the images he or she visualizes. During the commercial era of IF, ekphrasis was the most effective means available of providing players with immersive visual experiences. However, graphical video games have now surpassed IF in this area. Therefore, in order to justify the continued existence of IF, contemporary IF authors have been forced to conceive of the visuality of IF otherwise than in terms of the logic of transparency. One strategy for doing this, exemplified by Nick Montfort's game, Ad Verbum, is to abandon visuality almost entirely and emphasize IF's linguistic and textual qualities.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 13.09.2011 - 12:20
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Collaborations in E-lit
This essay, a discussion between two esteemed e-poets for whom collaboration is an integral part of their creative practice, appeared in the "The Collaborative Turn" special issue of American Book Review, guest-edited by Davis Schneiderman. In their discussion, Montfort and Strickland survey several common types of e-lit collaboration and provide links to representative examples. Strickland explicitly links the material aesthetics of code poetics to literary theorist Timothy Morton's call for critical thinking that engages the universe's enmeshed interconnectedness, which he dubs "the ecological thought."
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 29.12.2011 - 11:45
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Interactive Fiction Communities: From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond
The interactive fiction (IF) community has for decades been involved with the authorship, sharing, reading, and discussion of one type of electronic literature and computer game. Creating interactive fiction is a game-making and world-building activity, one that involves programming as well as writing. Playing interactive fiction typically involves typing input and receiving a textual response explaining the current situation. From the first canonical interactive fiction, the minicomputer game Adventure, the form has lived through a very successful commercial phase and is now being actively developed by individuals, worldwide, who usually share their work for free online.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.03.2012 - 07:24
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Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation
Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be "texts," and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games' generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.
Scott Rettberg - 09.07.2013 - 00:24
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Galatea’s Riposte: The Reception and Receptacle of Interactive Fiction
Type enough questions, Lisa Swanstrom suggests, and "Galatea" answers Socrates' ancient call for a poetry that talks back. Using Emily Short's interactive fiction as a model, Swanstrom argues that the khora - the strange Platonic intermediary between form and copy - might serve as a guide for understanding the peculiar nature of literary interactivity itself.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.08.2013 - 11:18
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Affordances of an App - A reading of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
In a relatively short time, apps have become highly popular as a platform for children’s fiction. The majority of media attention to these apps has focused on their technical features. There has been less focus on their aesthetic aspects, such as how interactive elements, visual-verbal arrangements and narration are interrelated. This article investigates how a reading of a «picturebook app» may differ from readings of the narratives found in printed books and movies. The discussion will be anchored in an analysis of the iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. This app, which is an adaptation of an animated short film, relates the story of a book lover who becomes the proprietor of a magical library.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.04.2014 - 06:26
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A Book Itself Is a Little Machine: Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction.
A Book Itself Is a Little Machine: Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction.
Ana Castello - 09.10.2018 - 12:02
