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1. 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

2. Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction

   There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project.

 At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09

3. Textopia: Experiments with Locative Literature

   textopia is a design experiment situated in humanist media studies, and based on a simple idea: Making it possible for someone who is walking through the city with a mobile phone to listen to literary texts which talk about whichever place she is walking by. The aim of this exercise has been to explore the relationship between places and literary texts – not just what the relationship is and has been, but what it can be in the new medium. Inspired by the ideas embedded in hermeneutics, open source philosophy and agile software development, I have outlined a methodological approach that I call "agile media design". In the course of the practical process I have ialso dentified three key principles for locative media design, summed up in the "G-P-S" model: Granularity, Particiation and Serendipity. Together they describe the unique characteristics of designs like textopia – a category I call "annotative, locative media".

   Scott Rettberg - 26.06.2013 - 13:19

4. maintenant #40: sergej timofejev

   I want to share simple truths with you” – an interview with Sergej Timofejev by SJ Fowler.

   One of the most adventurous and groundbreaking poets in the Baltic, Latvia’s Sergej Timofejev is a fundamental part of the radical reconfiguration of his nation’s poetic culture and landscape in the last few decades. A urbane, grounded, naturalistic stylist, the power of his poetry has allowed him to implement numerous innovations in a region associated with formalism. Experiments with poetry and music / art installations / performance / video & even computer games, have seen his popularity soar in Latvia, though he remains a poet writing in Russian. In the 40th edition of Maintenant, Sergej Timofejev discusses the influence of Western culture, the healthy state of Latvian poetry and the reward of poetic collaborative innovation.

   Natalia Fedorova - 04.09.2013 - 21:38