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  1. The Doll Games

    The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context.

    Scott Rettberg - 26.02.2011 - 16:24

  2. Labyrinth: the Rulebook without Game

    An ergodic Flash text exploring video game culture through the lens of playable manuals.

    How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.

    Mark Marino - 28.03.2011 - 16:12

  3. War Games

    War Games

    Scott Rettberg - 16.10.2012 - 15:45

  4. The Glide Project

    Glide is a dynamic visual language that originated in the context of Slattery's novel, The Maze Game. The materials available on the website use a strategy of multimodal means of self-presentation: narration, animation, translation, divination, game design, and appropriation of theoretical ideas that suit its purposes. Glide, at play on mutable media, modestly conceals the extravagance of its evolutionary intentions behind thin veils of noetic license.

    There are several interactive sections of the website:
    1) a full lexicon;
    2) The Glide oracle, called The Wine of the Lilies, contains a suite of auxiliary Glide language tools: two libraries of interpretations of combinations of glyphs, one static and one dynamic, (over 2000 entries); and a rich library of graphics and music compositions;
    3) the Collabyrinth, a full Glide language glyph editor. The Collabyrinth invites the user to experiment with the language by arranging glyphs, seeing how they can be linked and nested, changing their properties such as size, color, orientation, and creating animated glyphs by morphing between one glyph and another.

    (Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

    Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 16:30

  5. Default Lives

    This satirical game poem creates a small deterministic universe— a system into which a player is faced with choices, real and illusory, as they shape their “life.” Conceptually patterned after the Hasbro “Game of Life,” this hypertext version presents similar choices to its players but using an interface that lays out the general structure yet retains the element of surprise. Coverley uses this to drive home a critique of gender roles, career choices laying bare how they determine and limit one’s choices in a supposedly free and open American society. Her tongue-in-cheek tone, hokey music, prosy lines of verse, and a humorously generous ending soften the biting commentary enacted in this game, inviting readers to play, explore, and reflect.

    (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

    Scott Rettberg - 18.01.2013 - 23:04

  6. Beyond Manzanar

    Within an enclosed darkened room, the image of Beyond Manzanar's 3-dimensional space is projected onto a large, wall-sized screen. The life-sized image fills your field of view and gives you a feeling of immersion within the virtual space. A joystick mounted on a pedestal in the middle of the room allows you to move your viewpoint at will through the virtual space. Speakers mounted on either side of the screen provide stereo sound. Although only one person at a time can control movement in the space, others can watch and share the experience. We have combined techniques of computer games and theater design to create a highly symbolic, often surreal environment with a poetic reality stronger than photorealism. The mountain panorama that defines the Manzanar site forms a constant backdrop for shifting layers of superimposed context. Open doors lead viewers through spaces that react to their presence, shifting between home and prison, between paradise and wasteland, to investigate Manzanar as a layering of contradictory and complementary images and emotions for two groups of immigrants.

    Anders Fagerjord - 20.08.2013 - 11:19

  7. Falling Angels

    We know that angels start to fall from the heavens once they realize it is not heaven any more. The first person poetry shooter by the active participant of the pioneering cyberature community alludes to many resentments of the 90s and are also fun to shoot. (ELO 2015 catalog)

    Hannah Ackermans - 12.09.2015 - 11:00