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1. Slow Games, Slow Poems: The Act of Deliberation in "Slow Year"

   “Video games are actions,” declared Alexander Galloway in a manifesto that stakes out the
   essential differences between videogames and other forms of expressive culture, such as
   literature, photography, and cinema. But what about videogames in which action looks like
   inaction? What about videogames in which action means sitting still? What about a videogame
   that purports to be less a game and more a meditation—a work of literature? In this paper
   I explore a prominent yet remarkably understudied example of a slow game—a game that
   questions what counts as “action” in videogames. This game is A Slow Year (2010), designed
   for the classic Atari 2600 console by Ian Bogost. Comprised of four separate movements
   matching the four seasons, A Slow Year challenges the dominant mode of action in videogames,
   encouraging what I call “acts of deliberation.” These acts of deliberation transform the core
   mechanic of games from “action” (as Galloway would put it) into “experience”—and not just
   any experience, but the kind of experience that Walter Benjamin identifies as Erfahrung, an
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 12:55

2. Minecrafted Meaning: The Rhetoric of Poetry in Game Environments

   This essay is a synopsis of my fourth chapter from my dissertation. My research consists of game-poems and how they fundamentally alter the experience of “reading” poetry. Ultimately, my argument is that poetic experience is no longer initiated by text, but by the kinetic, audible, visual, and tactile functions in the digital environment that I label as trans-medial space; in effect, these functions sustain the poetry experience, and, thus, require the reader/user of the poem to play, rather than read, as a new form of “reading” the digital game-poem in order experience and interpret a poem’s meaning.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 28.06.2013 - 09:05

3. Read Fast, Die Young? – Interpreting Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Flash Poem Dakota

   In this paper I discuss Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ digital poem Dakota. I discuss how the poem controls the reader’s experience and how this control affects its possible interpretations. The control is mostly executed by limiting the reader’s freedom over reading. Reading time, direction and duration are determined by the poem. It is only possible to start the poem, but not rewind, stop or fast-forward it. Furthermore, the manipulation of speed affects reading in many ways. In the fast extreme the effect is illegibility, but more subtly used speed creates varieties of emphasis and de-emphasis. The effect of emphasis of this kind, I argue, creates different layers of readings and invites re-reading. These different readings require different cognitive modes, which mirror our contemporary reading habits. Not being in control of the reading process also leads to a scattered sense of unity, one of postmodernism’s essential traits. While reading the poem I also question why I read as I do, and by doing so I hope to present more general traits of how to approach digital literature.

   Arngeir Enåsen - 14.10.2013 - 15:20

4. "'Till Algebra is Easier —': Elements of Computation in the Poems of Emily Dickinson

   In this paper, I present close readings of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems that I propose might be best explained through an understanding of her awareness of the current scientific topics of the time. These include, for example, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Faraday’s and Maxwell’s numerous investigations into electromagnetism in the early to mid 1800s, and the production of Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1847. Specifically, in regards to Babbage’s computing machine, I demonstrate a connection between some of the innovations first formulated by the mathematician and proto-programmer Ada Lovelace in 1842 and 1843, including concepts of looping, modeling, and isomorphism, and Dickinson’s poems, written more than one decade later, which include references to cycles, recursion, and branching. Additionally, I show that there are clear stylistic similarities between Lovelace’s philosophical inquiries into the nascent discipline of computation and some of Dickinson’s poems that might be said to contain algorithmic structures or images.

   Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 16:02