Search

Search content of the knowledge base.

The search found 24 results in 0.012 seconds.

Search results

  1. Deep Surface

    Deep Surface is the monstrous progeny of a strange romance between a reading machine and a free-diving simulator. Literature at crush depth. Hypertext gets wet. Generically, it is yet another instrument: one of those things you can play (or play with), without playing a game. There are rules here, and procedures, and (as in Real Life) a more or less invisible scoring system; so astute players may be able to invent clever and even elegant strategies. But if you're not feeling astute, you can plunge in and have a dip, immersing yourself in what signs and symptoms may present themselves as you pass by, dreaming perhaps of meaning... till robot voices wake you, and you drown.

    (Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

    Eric Dean Rasmussen - 20.02.2011 - 14:26

  2. Golpe de Gracia

    Golpe de gracia is an interactive multimedia piece that combines text, illustration, audio, modeling, and animation and tells the story of a character who undergoes a "near death" experience; this particular situation also functions as a metaphor for the cultural transitions of the present moment. The text is comprised of three "narrative worlds": Cadáver exquisito, L'nea mortal and Muerte digital (Exquisite Corpse, Mortal Line, and Digital Death, respectively) and four "deepening rooms" (games, reading texts, study, and construction). The work offers several different degrees of interaction that range from taking decisions in order to follow the routes, all the way up to the collective construction of the text, along the way participating in several interactive games. Golpe de gracia also has an educative and communicative purpose, which is to make us aware of, and to contribute to, the development of collective knowledge.

    Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 14:53

  3. Reconstructing Mayakovsky

    Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.

    Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38

  4. This Is Not A Poem

    This work takes the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and, transcribing it onto a "scratchable" disk, makes it into a toy, a game, and a language engine.

    (Source: Author's description)

    Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 12:35

  5. Passage

    Passage is a very short art game about life and death and the passage of time. It is intended to be played before you read anything about it, so it is recomended to play it before you read more about it.

    (source: necessarygames.com)

    Meri Alexandra Raita - 03.03.2012 - 19:10

  6. The Reading Glove

    The Reading Glove is the first component of a research program called the TUNE Project (Tangible, Ubiquitous, Narrative Environment). Karen and Josh Tanenbaum describe TUNE as a story, a space, a game, and a research instrument that investigates questions of interactive narrative, player modeling, adaptivity, and tangible embodied interaction.

    The Reading Glove itself has gone through several iterations. Version 1.0 consisted of a wearable RFID-enabled glove and tagged objects that allowed readers to experience an interactive narrative by picking up objects that have been augmented with story fragments.  There is a video of Reading Glove 1.0 and details of the design process on our blog.

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.04.2012 - 14:22

  7. Zombies, Run!

    This is a narrative running app, activated when you take your smart phone for a run. Players take on the person of ‘Runner 5,’ a scavenger in the app’s post-apocalyptic setting; their running playlist is sporadically interrupted by voice-recorded messages from other survivors, leading them to nearby supplies or warning them of approaching zombie hoards – so that half-hearted runners know that it’s time to pick up the pace. Narrative fragments are embedded between songs, and timed so that a story arc of 4-5 episodes will complete every twenty minutes, and that each subsquent fragment ends with a hook so the runner-reader will want to return for more. The narrative is locative but works anywhere, providing a fictional layer on top of an actual map of your surroundings where you can collect supplies and medicines, and where you must avoid zombies. The first season consists of 24 twenty minute episodes and there are plans for a second season. 

    Jill Walker Rettberg - 24.04.2012 - 22:40

  8. Croatian Tales of Long Ago

    Croatian Tales of Long Ago

    Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 21:21

  9. 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

  10. 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

Pages