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1. Process-Intensive Fiction

   Unlike digital poetry, which has pursued process-intensive directions throughout its history, the dominant directions of digital fiction make relatively light use of computational processes. Whether one looks at the traditions of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, or video games, the primary model is a set of connections (traveled in different manners) between largely static chunks of language. This panel explores a set of alternatives to this model. The suggested potential panelists include the author of the first book on this topic, published in 2009 (Wardrip-Fruin); one of the authors of Facade, the first fully realized interactive drama (Mateas); the creator of Curveship, a new interactive fiction tool that introduces discourse-level variation as a first-class parameter (Montfort); a prominent author, commentator, and tool builder (Short); the author of Blue Lacunae, a vast, highly variable interactive fiction (Reed); the creator of new algorithms for literary variability based on conceptual blending (Harrell); and the author of the mainstream game industry's most ambitious project in this space, Far Cry 2 (Redding).

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:39

2. Digital Games and Electronic Literature: Toward an Intersectional Analysis

   The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain.

   Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:46

3. Blind Spots: The Phantom Pain, The Helen Keller Simulator, and Disability in Games

   For the past thirty years, and especially since the popularization of real time 3D graphics processing in the mid-nineties, the computer and videogame industry has been caught up in a graphical arms race: a relentless and blind pursuit of ocularcentric spectacle culminating in the hypertrophy of the visual economy in games like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear 5: The Phantom Pain. Alongside this cinematic hypertrophy, a generation of players and designers have internalized the logic and codes of videogames to produce games and game practices which engage the non-visual conditions of the medium. These games have made use of atrophy and the attenuation of visual gameplay as a form of critical game design resulting in games like The Helen Keller Simulator, an unpopular internet meme that consists of a black (or blank) image with no audio, promoted as a first person videogame. While The Phantom Pain terminates in unplayable cutscenes, The Helen Keller Simulator deploys the restriction of vision to uncannily similar effect.

   Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:58

4. Hey Siri, Tell Me a Story: AI, Procedural Generation, and Digital Narratives

   This paper examines a selection of examples of AI storytelling from film, games, and interactive fiction to imagine the future of AI authorship and to question the impetus behind this trend of replacing human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. Increasingly, we’re becoming familiarized with AI agents as they are integrated into our daily lives in the form of personified virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Recently, director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter, who named himself Benjamin. Both Sunspring (2016) and It’s No Game (2017) were created by Goodwin’s long short-term memory (LSTM) AI that was trained on media content that included science fiction scripts and dialogue delivered by actor David Hasselhoff. It’s No Game offers an especially apt metacommentary on AI storytelling as it addresses the possibility of a writers strike and imagines that entertainment corporations opt out of union negotiations and instead replace their writers with AI authors.

   Jane Lausten - 05.09.2018 - 14:57

5. Virtualizing Material Games

   Even before worldwide quarantines added impetus, material gaming had already become increasingly enacted in virtual spaces. Rather than virtual play replacing the material, as some speculated in the early days of videogames, material play has become increasingly entangled with virtuality. These increasingly complementary modes of play offer a rich space for exploring the multifaceted embodied and conceptual activity of play, the blending of material and virtual that in many ways defines games.
   The three panelists encompass a wide range of perspectives, including the perspective of a game maker translating material play into the digital realm, that of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar who researched how players interact differently with the Catan boardgame and its digital implementations, and that of a theorist reflecting on how virtual spaces remediate material affects. Together, these diverse perspectives aim to explore the paradoxical yet generative spaces where materiality and virtuality intersect in gaming.

   Milosz Waskiewicz - 27.05.2021 - 16:00