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1. Playable Media and Textual Instruments

   The statement that "this is not a game" has been employed in many ways — for example, to distinguish between high and low culture electronic texts, to market an immersive game meant to break the "magic circle" that separates games from the rest of life, to demarcate play experiences (digital or otherwise) that fall outside formal game definitions, and to distinguish between computer games and other forms of digital entertainment. This essay does not seek to praise some uses of this maneuver and condemn others. Rather, it simply points out that we are attempting to discuss a number of things that we play (and create for play) but that are arguably not games. Calling our experiences "interactive" would perhaps be accurate, but overly broad. An alternative — "playable" — is proposed, considered less as a category than as a quality that manifests in different ways. "Playable media" may be an appropriate way to discuss both games and the "not games" mentioned earlier.

   Jörgen Schäfer - 05.07.2011 - 13:35

2. Basquiat meets Mario Brothers? Digital poet Jason Nelson on the meaning of art games

   An interview with the self-described digital poet Jason Nelson on the semiotic pleasures of playing and creating "art-games," indie works produced outside corporate game studios, which, Nelson predicts, will eventually be recognized as the most significant art movement of the 21st century. While explaining how he came to be a digital author, Nelson addresses topics such as his continued love of Flash as a production tool, despite its likely obsolesence, his appreciation for gamescapes that allow for aimless wandering, and the intense reactions his art-games provoke in players. Alluding to the fact that Digital Poet is not the most lucrative of professions, Nelson signals his desire to design "big budget console games," provided he could do so on his terms. 

   (Source: Eric Dean Rasmussen)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.09.2011 - 12:44

3. 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

4. Mimesis: An Integrated Social Networking Application and Computer Game for Exploring Social Discrimination

   Game characters and social networking profiles potentially can be used to help people better
   understand others’ experiences. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text
   fields is insufficient to convey actual identity experiences. As a step toward conveying richer
   identity experiences, we implemented an interactive narrative game for iOS called Mimesis to
   allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. Mimesis is an
   outcome of the NSF-supported Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project (Harrell,
   Principal Investigator) to develop new computational identity technologies informed by theories
   of cognitive categorization and social classification. An ICE Lab interactive narrative platform
   called GeNIE is used to implement the game. We propose to present and discuss Mimesis.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 20.06.2012 - 15:10

5. Techno-historical Limits of the Interface: The Performance of Interactive Narrative Experiences

   This thesis takes the position that current analyses of digitally mediated interactive experiences that include narrative elements often lack adequate consideration of the technical and historical contexts of their production.

   From this position, this thesis asks the question: how is the reader/player/user's participation in interactive narrative experiences (such as hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, computer games, and electronic art) influenced by the technical and historical limitations of the interface?

   In order to investigate this question, this thesis develops a single methodology from relevant media and narrative theory, in order to facilitate a comparative analysis of well known exemplars from distinct categories of digitally mediated experiences. These exemplars are the interactive fiction Adventure, the interactive art work Osmose, the hypertext fiction Afternoon, a story, and the computer/video games Myst, Doom, Half Life and Everquest.

   Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 22:42

6. Digging For The Roots Of Interactive Storytelling

   This paper is a writer's reflections on the pre-computer origins of interactive narrative. It seeks out forms of human expression dating back to prehistory that can viewed as the precursors of contemporary interactive storytelling and contemplates what can be learned from these forms that can be applied to contemporary works of interactive storytelling. The examined forms include the participatory myth-based dramas of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks; coming of age rituals in traditional societies; games that blend spiritual beliefs and athleticism; and various Judeo-Christian and pagan religious practices.

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 11:46

7. Avatars Sharing Agency: Metaphor in Interactive Narrative Environments

   This paper considers how the avatar focuses the metaphor of interactivity in video games and interactive narrative environments. It argues that, despite serving as the on-screen representation of user input, the avatar has some independent agency (whether through design or representational practice) that influences its behavior. Thus, rather than merely relying upon it as her transparent stand-in, the player must negotiate with the avatar to achieve her goals. The negotiation serves to dramatize interactivity as an imperfect conduit between the textual and extra-textual worlds. While not so evident in video games, this imperfection sustains the metaphor of interactivity, deepening expressivity in interactive narrative environments.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

   Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 16:32

8. The Machinimatic Moment

   "The Machinimatic Moment" discusses a type of filmmaking that uses videogame engines (commonly referred to as machinima). I contend machinima exists within a liminal space between a number of diapoles including: production/consumption, play/cognition, and synthesis/critique. While much of machinima can be considered self-referential in that it consistently remarks upon the game itself and, in many ways, its limitations, other productions reveal sophisticated, compelling stories that are neither game nor traditional filmic narrative. I conclude by arguing that its liminality gives machinima distinctive and interesting qualities.

   (Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

   Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 14:41

9. 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

10. Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction

    Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story.

    Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:24

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