Search

The search found 12 results in 0.01 seconds.

Search results

1. 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

2. 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

3. DAC 2000: A Choose-Your-Own-Trip-Report!

   You are sitting in front of a computer, ready to read about Digital Arts and Culture 2000, a conference held in Bergen, Norway on 2-4 August 2000. If you click, you'll see some comments on that conference from interactive fiction and hypertext author Nick Montfort.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 09.10.2012 - 22:58

4. Generating Narrative Variation in Interactiv Fiction

   A general method for the generation of natural language narrative is described. It allows the expression, or narrative discourse, to vary independently of the underlying events and existents that are the narrative’s content. Specifically, this variation is accomplished in an interactive fiction (IF) system which replies to typed input by narrating what has happened in a simulated world. IF works have existed for about 30 years as forms of text-based computer simulation, instances of dialog systems, and examples of literary art. Theorists of narrative have carefully distinguished between the level of underlying content (corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer arnd user) since the mid-1960s, when the field of narratology began to develop, but IF systems have not yet made use of this distinction. The current project contributes new techniques for automatic narration by building on work done in computational linguistics, specifically natural language generation, and in narratology.

   Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 20:01

5. Hors-Categorie: An Embodied, Affective Approach to Interactive Fiction

   The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race. 

   In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect. 

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:21

6. Blending the Crossword with the Narrative: An Examination of the Storygame

   Interactive narrative cannot be understood as only literature or as only game, nor even as a combative relationship between the two. Narrative-oriented "games" are neither novel nor movie, but they are likewise significantly different beasts than conventional, competitive games. They rather draw elements from both. We will come to terms with the concept of the storygame by examining the historical role of games in stories and stories in games to come to understand how the two forms combined into the modern storygame, focusing on the key traits of interactivity and immersion.

   Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:47

7. Original Chat: Exploring the Origins of the Turing Test

   The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 10:45

8. Creating: Adventure in Style and The Marble Index in Curveship

   I describe the process of writing and programming the first two full-scale interactive fiction pieces in the new system I have been developing, Curveship. These two pieces, Adventure in Style and The Marble Index, are meant, in part, to serve as examples for authors using this system. More importantly, though, they are initial explorations of the potential of Curveship and of the automation of narrative variation. They were also undertaken to help provide concrete system-building guidance as development of Curveship progressed toward a release. Adventure in Style is a port of the first interactive fiction, the 1976 Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods, which adds parametric variations in style that are inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. The Marble Index simulates the experiences of a woman who, strangely disjointed in time and reality, finds herself visiting ordinary moments in the late twentieth century; the narration accentuates this character's disorientation and contributes to the literary effect of incidents.

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 15:56

9. Towards a Theory of Narrative in Interactive Fiction

   The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current
   paradigm to include classes of worlds such as these. To achieve this, we survey cinema technique and develop a theory of narrative and roughly sketch a system architecture to support enriched interactive fiction based on analogy with film techniques. This work is significant because it brings us closer to our goal of making interactivefictioninto a rich, high
   quality artistic medium.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 22:31

10. 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

Pages